“My neighbor was a mortician. He told me one night he had a body he was preparing for a very early morning wake or service (whatever was going on, it was unusual, and it required him to work into the wee hours of the morning on this particular corpse).
As he was working on it, he turned his back to grab some tools, and the angle he was standing at left the corpse visible just out of the corner of his eye. As he was looking down at whatever tools he was getting, in the corner of his eye he saw the body slowly start to sit up. His fight/flight instinct immediately kicked in, and he ran to the stairs as fast as he could, but he was so clumsy trying to get up the stairs that he tripped and was pretty much crawling and clawing his way to the top. He was just near the top before his senses finally came back, and he knew it was rigor mortis. He collected himself and started to laugh at how absurd it all was. He had been doing this for 15-20 years, and he had never had a freak out like that before where instinct overtook knowledge and experience. He actually sheepishly admitted he had to go clean himself because he had sh*t his pants in the panic.”
