Episodes
The Man Who Asked for the Prep Room Door Unlocked
November in the town of Millbrook, New York. A call comes in from a man named Aldridge, wanting the prep room door left unlocked at exactly 3:14 AM. Luna agrees, thinking it's a harmless request. She watches from the office as the door opens to an empty hallway. The room stays still; the only sign of disturbance is a back door left ajar. The next morning, a handwritten note appears on her desk: 'Thank you. I found it.' The number he left is disconnected. Months later, Luna still sometimes…
The Man Who Buried a Secret
In the funeral home in Green Hollow, Vermont, the clock always reads 3:14. One late October night, a man named Mr. Aldrich came through the door with an unusual request—a casket with a hidden compartment. He brought a small wooden box and asked me to install a false bottom. I did it without questions, the way you do when something feels private. At the viewing, his wife lay in that casket, and I heard it. A faint scratching from inside. Not from the body—from the space beneath. I didn't open…
The Woman Who Wanted Silence
In November 1994, Margaret Harlow's family brought a handwritten note to the funeral home in Lambert's Corner. No music. No eulogy. No sound at all. Luna prepared the prep room for a silent funeral, expecting only the weight of grief. But when the service began and the room fell still, something else filled the silence — a whisper from where no whisper should come. Set during the cold, leaf-blown autumn in a small town, this is a story about the sounds we refuse to hear and the requests we…
The Man Who Asked for the Prep Room Vent
Luna recalls a funeral prep in the fall of 1993, in the small town of Millbrook, Ohio. A man named Harlan Cross had specified in his will that the prep room's ceiling vent be left open during his service. No one thought much of it — until the service began, and the air in the room changed. This episode is about a draft that shouldn't have been there, a sound that came from above, and the quiet understanding that some requests are not about comfort, but about keeping a door open just a little…
The Man Who Asked for the Prep Room Sink
In October of 2021, a man named Elias Voss died alone in a rented room above a laundromat in Red Hook, New York. His funeral was held at a small funeral home on Route 9G, and he left one unusual request: he wanted the prep room sink left running overnight before his service. Luna recounts what happened when she fulfilled that request—the sound of water filling the room, the way the drain seemed to swallow something else, and the discovery she made in the morning. A quiet, unsettling story about…
The Man Who Asked for the Prep Room Mirror
November 2023, two a.m., on a dead-end road outside the town of Barlow. A man arrives at the funeral home in a dust-covered sedan and asks Luna for something she has never been asked for before: to have his body laid out in the prep room with a full-length mirror facing the table. He calls it 'the last clear look.' He is not sick, not old, not injured—just certain that he will be dead by dawn. Luna agrees, against every instinct, and the man sits with her through the small hours, telling her…
The Woman Who Asked for the Prep Room Floor Washed
In the summer of 1997, a woman named Eleanor Croft came to the funeral home on Route 9 in Millbrook, New York, and made a request Luna had never heard before. She wanted her mother's body prepared in a specific way—but more than that, she wanted the prep room floor washed, the gurneys wiped down, the sink scrubbed. She came back every night for a week, always after midnight, always in the same dress, always with a bucket and rags. Luna let her in because she looked like she needed to do…
The Man Who Chose the Funeral Home on Route 9
A cold November night in 1997. A man named Silas pulls a hearse into the gravel lot of a small funeral home on Route 9, just outside of Oakwood, New York. He isn't there for a service. He's there to pay for his own funeral in advance—cash, in an envelope. But he refuses to leave a name. Luna takes his payment, logs it in the register, and watches him drive the hearse back into the fog. That's the last she sees of him. But the hearse's plates trace back to a town that doesn't exist anymore, and…
The Woman Who Left Her Shoes at the Church Door
In the summer of 2002, a woman named Ellen Pearce walked into St. Mark's Episcopal Church in rural Rushing, Ohio, removed her shoes at the narthex door, and never came back for them. The shoes sat there for six weeks, untouched, until the priest called the funeral home to collect them along with a note tucked inside the left heel. Luna drives out to the church on a hot August afternoon, expecting a simple errand. Instead, she finds a pair of loafers that still hold the warmth of a body, a door…
The Woman Who Left a Letter in the Register
In October of 1999, a woman named Eleanor Vance walked into the Fenton Funeral Home prep room at 2:14 AM, carrying a single sheet of paper. She did not look at the gurneys, the embalming table, or the clock. She placed the letter inside the old leather-bound register on the desk, then sat in the chair and waited until dawn. Luna was there. She tells what Eleanor wrote, and what the letter asked for: a funeral without a body, a service with no casket, and a final request that could not be…
The Man Who Asked for the Prep Room Clock
In the spring of 1992, a retired watchmaker named Arthur Pendelton came to the funeral home with a peculiar request: he wanted the antique clock on the prep room wall to be stopped at the exact moment of his death. Luna thought it was a sentimental gesture until she learned why — the clock had been stopped for his wife thirty years ago, and the silence it left behind had never been filled. Set in the small town of Millbrook, Nebraska, one April evening, this episode follows Luna as she grapples…
The Man Who Asked for the Prep Room Light Left On
In the autumn of 2021, a widower named Everett Page requested something simple for his own funeral: that the light in the embalming-prep room stay on overnight. Luna, working late at the funeral home in Meridian, Mississippi, agreed. But when she returned the next morning, the light was off, the door was ajar, and the clipboard on the desk had been flipped to a page with a single word written in blue ink: 'Again.' Luna doesn't believe in ghosts. But she can't explain why the clock on the wall…
The Man Who Asked for the Cemetery Map
It was late November in a town called Stillwater, the kind of place where the funeral home doubles as the historical society. Luna was filing death certificates when a man walked in off the street at 11:47 PM. He didn't want a service. He wanted to see the old burial register—bound in cracked leather, entries dating back to 1887. He said his name was Elias, that his grandmother was buried here in 1931. But when Luna opened the register to the right page, the ink was still wet. The year written…
The Woman Who Asked for a Funeral Without a Body
In October of 1987, a woman named Iris Voss walked into the Barlow & Sons Funeral Home in Cottonwood, Ohio, and requested something I had never heard before: a funeral with no body. No casket, no urn, no remains at all. Just an empty room, a single chair, and a window left open to the October night. She paid in full with twenties from a folded envelope, gave no next of kin, and left instructions she had typed herself on a Smith Corona. The service was held on a Tuesday at dusk. I sat in the…
The Man Who Took a Room at the Sip-and-Spin Motel
A dead man checks into the Sip-and-Spin Motel on Route 17, just outside of Hargrove, Ohio. It's late September, a Tuesday, the kind of place with flickering neon and thin walls. The night clerk, a kid named Mickey, says the man paid cash, asked for a room with a view of the parking lot, and never came back out. Luna gets the call at 4 AM, drives out with her kit. The room is cold. The television is on, static. The man is on the bed, fully dressed, receipts in his pocket for a funeral he already…
The Woman Who Left Her Wedding Dress in the Casket
In the early autumn of 2018, a young woman named Cora was brought to the Tri-County Funeral Home in Millbrook, Illinois. She had died in a car accident on Route 9, just past the old grain silo. Her fiancé, a quiet man named Owen, came to the prep room the night before the service with a small cardboard box. He asked if he could place something inside the casket. I told him he could, as long as it was small enough to fit beside her hands. He opened the box and took out a wedding dress—still in…
The Woman Who Left a Photograph in the Register
In the embalming-prep room of a small-town funeral home in Tilden, Nebraska, Luna discovers a photograph tucked into the pages of the old funeral register—a woman in a white dress, standing alone on a gravel road at dusk. The photograph is dated August 12, 1967, and the woman is not listed in any service records. Luna asks around town, learns about a woman named Eleanor who vanished that summer, and finds herself drawn into a decades-old mystery that feels less like a cold case and more like a…
The Woman Who Left a Message on the Prep Room Answering Machine
In the summer of 1998, the funeral home's prep room answering machine was used only for business—until a message came through from a woman named Grace saying she'd be late for her own arrangement. Luna listened to it three times before realizing the date stamp was three days after she'd already been embalmed. The recording kept coming, each message more urgent, more intimate, until Luna had to decide whether to erase it or let the dead speak. Set in the humid July heat of Harristown, Ohio, at a…
The Woman Who Forgot Her Own Funeral
Late October 2022, a Tuesday night. The kind of cold that settles into the bone before you feel it. Luna is alone in the prep room when a woman walks in off the street—no appointment, no paperwork, just a name she can't quite remember. The woman sits in the chair by the desk and talks about a funeral she's supposed to attend tomorrow, but she can't find the church. She doesn't know who died. She doesn't know why she's here. The conversation is quiet, polite, and wrong in ways Luna can't name…
The Man Who Asked for His Own Obituary
A cold November night in Mercer, Ohio, just past midnight. Luna is alone in the prep room when the back doorbell rings—a man in a long coat with a folded newspaper in his hand. He isn't here to arrange a funeral. He wants her to read what he wrote about himself, and then to tell him if it's true. The obituary is detailed, specific, and ends with a date: today's date. His name is not on the register. His hands are cold. The clock reads 3:14. What do you say to a man who has already written his…
The Woman Who Requested the Antique Pharmacy Register
A woman in her late seventies arrives at the funeral home in a 1972 Plymouth Valiant, insisting her service be held not at the church but at the defunct Kress Drug Company on Main Street in Millford, Ohio. She pays in cash from a leather coin purse and leaves no next of kin. Luna drives out to the pharmacy that night to find it frozen in time—a brass register on the counter, apothecary bottles still dusty on the shelves, and a bell over the door that rings when the wind blows. The woman's name…
The Woman Who Lit the Funeral Pyre
June 1978. A funeral home in Bakersfield, California. Luna meets the daughter of a woman who left instructions for a funeral that cannot legally happen—a pyre at dawn in the Mojave Desert. The family fights over it, the county says no. But the daughter insists her mother knew something. She asks Luna to drive out to the site just once, to see. What they find there—footprints in the sand, a circle of stones, the smell of smoke three weeks before the service—makes Luna wonder if some dead don't…
The Man Who Requested the Funeral at the Drive-In
Luna recounts the night she prepared a man named Frank for his final goodbye at the Oasis Drive-In, a faded relic on the edge of Ridgely, Illinois. It was 1989, a sticky August night, and Frank had left a note asking for his service to be held there, with the projector running a single reel of a film he'd never finished. Luna and the funeral director, Palmer, set up the casket in the empty lot, the screen flickering with a grainy black-and-white movie. But as the film wound down, Luna noticed…
The Man Who Requested the Pony Ride
It was the summer of 2002 when a widower named Clifford Dearing walked into my prep room with a request I thought was a prank: he wanted a pony at his funeral. Not a photograph, not a carving — a live Shetland pony, led up the aisle of the First Methodist Church in Sparta, Illinois. He had papers to prove it was paid for, a signed letter from the stable, and a story about his late wife that I could not refuse. But I should have asked why he insisted on that particular animal. I should have…
The Woman Who Brought Her Own Casket
It was a Tuesday in late October, just past 3 AM, when the doorbell of the funeral home rang. I was alone in the prep room, logging the evening's paperwork, when I found a woman standing on the front step — elderly, composed, dressed in a blue coat that smelled like mothballs and cedar. She introduced herself as Margaret Colby, and she told me she had brought something for me. In the bed of her pickup truck, under a canvas tarp, was a casket. Her casket. She had built it herself, over the past…
The Woman Who Wanted the Tape Rewound
A funeral home in Elbert County, Colorado, 2008. A woman named Beatrice leaves a single instruction for her memorial: she wants the tape rewound. Luna describes the box of cassette tapes found in Beatrice's closet, each labeled with a date and a single name. The last tape, dated the day of her death, is labeled 'For the one who reads this.' Luna plays it in the prep room at 3:14 AM. The voice on the tape is not Beatrice's. It's a woman who says she's been waiting in the dark for someone to…
The Man Who Requested the Evening Service
It was late October in Misenheimer, North Carolina, and the funeral home had a new request: a man who wanted his viewing at dusk, with the lights off, and a single candle on the table. Luna had handled unusual services before, but this one came with a condition that made her pause—the family had to stay outside until the candle went out. She tells the story of that evening: the quiet hum of the heater, the way the flame bent toward the closed door, and what she saw in the reflection of the…
The Man Who Arranged His Own Flowers
Luna recounts a prep-room encounter in Red Bluff, Montana, during a September thunderstorm. A widower named Harlan Phelps showed up at the funeral home with a bucket of fresh-cut dahlias from his wife's garden, insisting on arranging them himself for her service. As Luna helped him, she noticed his movements were impossibly precise—as if he'd done this before. Hours later, she found his obituary in the local paper, dated two years prior. The flowers stayed fresh for weeks. #TheLastService…
The Man Who Wanted His Funeral at the Drive-In
Luna remembers a Thursday in early November, when a call came in from a woman whose brother had passed—a man named Arthur Stroud, who had spent forty years running the projector at the Starlight Drive-In outside of Bellflower, Illinois. The drive-in had been closed for a decade, its screen a cracked white rectangle in a weedy lot, but Arthur's will was clear: his funeral was to be held there, at midnight, with one movie playing. Luna tells the story of arranging a funeral in a place that was…
The Woman Whose Funeral Was on the Wrong Day
In the summer of 1998, in a funeral home in Larkspur, Nebraska, Luna prepared for a service scheduled for a Thursday. The family had arranged everything: the flowers, the hymns, the obituary. But the deceased had other plans. A woman named Edna Mayhew, who had been dead for three days, seemed to have her own sense of time. It started with the autopsy report—the time of death was wrong, by hours, maybe days. Then the funeral director found a note in her pocket, dated the day after her death. And…
The Man Who Wanted His Funeral at the Diner
December 2023, just outside of Ely, Nevada. A man named Harlan Birch walked into the Silver Sage Diner at 3 AM and asked to arrange his own funeral. No relatives, no church—just a booth by the window, coffee, and a cassette tape he'd recorded twenty years earlier. Luna's funeral home took the call, and she spent the next three days unraveling a request that seemed simple until she heard what was on the tape. This is a story about the things we prepare for the living, and the one message that…
The Woman Who Knew Her Own Funeral Date
In the summer of 2007, a woman named Eleanor Crane walked into the Silver Creek Funeral Home and pre-arranged every detail of her own service: the hymns, the flowers, the dress, the exact date. Luna was there when she signed the contract. Twelve years later, on that date, Eleanor died. But what Luna found in the prep room that night—the note folded inside Eleanor's sleeve, the small object she left on the gurney—suggested Eleanor had known more than just the date. A quiet, intimate story about…
The Man Who Insisted on the Open Window
It was late November in a town called Whitethorn, Kansas, where the wind never stops and the winter wheat looks like bone. I was finishing the paperwork on a man named Edwin Parrish when his daughter called to say he had one final request: he wanted the window in the viewing room left open. Not cracked. Open. All night. I tried to explain why that wasn't possible—the temperature, the insects, the dignity of the body. She said he'd made her promise. So I did it. And for the next three days…
The Man Who Wanted His Funeral at the Railroad Crossing
On a cold October night in 2019, Luna receives a call from a widow named Margaret in the small town of Cinder Creek, Arkansas. Her husband, Owen, left explicit instructions for his funeral: he wanted it held at the old railroad crossing on County Road 9, right where he used to sit as a boy. No chapel, no pastor, just a simple wooden chair and a cassette player with a single tape—his last message. Luna drives out with the death certificate and the folded instructions, not knowing what she'll…
The Man Who Told the Time by the Prep Room Clock
Late November 2022, a town called Prentiss Crossing, a funeral home that sits at the bend of a road that dead-ends at the old railway trestle. Luna was finishing the evening rounds when a man walked through the back door — not through the chapel or the visitation room, but the staff-only entrance behind the garage. He was dressed for a funeral, dark suit, polished shoes, a white carnation in his lapel that hadn't wilted. He said he was early. He asked if he could wait. He sat in the wooden…
The Man Who Left His Glasses on the Nightstand
In late October of 2022, Luna gets a call from a widower in Red Bluff, Montana. He wants to prep his wife's body himself. No funeral home staff. Just him, the embalming room, and a single request: leave her glasses on. Luna agrees. She watches him work through the closed door—slow, precise, deliberate. He talks to her like she's still in the next room. When Luna finally enters to check the prep, she finds something that wasn't there before. Something on the eyelid. Something written. This…
The Man Who Left His Watch on the Prep Table
A slow Tuesday evening in late autumn, three months into the job at a funeral home in a small Virginia town called Orchard Gap. I was alone in the prep room, finishing the paperwork on a Mr. Harold Vance — a retired watchmaker who had died quietly in his sleep at eighty-two. His daughter had brought in his personal effects in a small cardboard box: a few photographs, a worn leather wallet, and a pocket watch that had stopped at 3:14 the morning he passed. I logged the items, placed the watch in…
The Woman Who Asked for the Quiet Afternoon
In the fall of 1997, in the small town of Misenheimer, North Carolina, a woman named Elise called Luna's funeral home to pre-arrange her own service. She came in on a Tuesday afternoon, wearing a gray cardigan and holding a manila envelope. Luna sat with her in the prep room, clipboard in hand, as Elise explained she wanted no eulogy, no music, no flowers—just a quiet afternoon in the chapel with the doors left open. She asked for one thing: that someone sit in the back pew and keep the light…
The Woman Who Sat Between Two Names
In a small funeral home tucked off Route 9 in Chester, Ohio, Luna met a woman who came to arrange her own visitation — but only after the guest book was already closed. It was late October, just past midnight, and the woman brought a single photograph in a silver frame. She asked to sit in the viewing room between two caskets: one for a man she had never met, one for a child she had never held. Luna showed her to the green velvet chair by the window, and the woman began to talk — about a phone…
The Woman Who Left the Radio On
In the summer of 1993, a woman named Ruthanne pulled up to a funeral home in Bernville, Pennsylvania, driving a rusted Datsun with the radio still playing through the open door. She asked me to plan her mother's service — but her mother had died forty years ago. Ruthanne was the one who was dying. She wanted everything arranged before she went, and she had one request: that I keep the radio on in the room, tuned to a station that plays only static. I thought she was confused, or grieving, or…
The Man Who Requested the Midnight Memorial
Luna was alone in the funeral home when the phone rang at 11:42 PM, a Tuesday in late October. On the line, a man's voice—calm, formal, asking to pre-arrange a memorial service for himself. He wanted it at midnight, in a specific hall, with a specific song, and he insisted on paying in cash left under a flowerpot on the front porch. When Luna arrived at the address the next day, the house was empty, the flowerpot was there with money, and the name he gave her—Thomas Grey—was not a man who had…
The Man Who Requested the Cassette Player
In the summer of 1998, a man named Lowell brought a cassette player to the embalming prep room of a funeral home in Wolf Creek, Montana, and asked Luna to play it for him after he was gone. He had been a widower for twenty-three years, living alone in a house with a woman's name painted on the mailbox. The tape contained no music—just the sound of a woman reading a letter. Luna tells the story of the tape, the man, and the single word she heard at the very end that she has never been able to…
The Man Who Wanted His Funeral at the Truck Stop
January 1998, a frozen truck stop off I-80 in Nebraska. Luna receives a funeral request unlike any other: a trucker who died alone in his cab, asking to be waked in the same booth where he drank his last cup of coffee. The funeral home director refuses. The truck stop owner agrees. And then the body arrives, and the clock starts ticking. No one expected the snow to keep falling. No one expected the lights to flicker at 3:17 AM. When the waitress pours a cup for the dead man, something changes…
The Woman Who Insisted on the Green Chair
In the summer of 2006, a woman named Miriam Hartley arrived at our funeral home in Pender, Nebraska, not to plan a service, but to sit in the green vinyl chair in the viewing room. She came every afternoon at 3:14, just as the clock on our wall read the same time it did when she walked in. She never spoke, never cried. She just sat, watching the empty casket display. But the chair had been in storage for years, and no one had put it out. This is the story of what happens when grief finds its…
The Register That Had One More Name
In November of 1998, the old funeral home register on my desk started adding names on its own. At first I thought it was a mistake — a smudge, a misprint, a trick of the light. But when the name belonged to a woman who had died thirty years ago, I realized the book was keeping a different kind of record. This is the story of Elma Jean Hoke, who arrived at my door on a Tuesday night in the rain, wearing a dress from 1968, and asked me to sign her in. Not as a body. As a witness. #FexingoHorror…
The Girl Who Brought a Folding Chair
A small-town funeral home in Kaskaskia, Illinois, receives a request from a local woman: she wants to be buried with a folding chair. Not in the casket—set up beside it, in the ground. The director, a practical man named Harlan, agrees because the fee covers the violation. But when the grave is dug, the hole keeps shifting, and the chair keeps being found in different positions. Luna arrived that night to help with a different burial and found Harlan sitting in a folding chair on the edge of…
The Woman Who Left Her Shoes at the Door
In a small Minnesota funeral home, Luna prepares for the visitation of a woman who, in life, had a peculiar habit: she always removed her shoes at her own front door, even when guests were present. The family insists on placing her favorite pair of worn leather loafers beside her in the casket. But as the evening wears on, Luna notices the shoes seem to shift—first an inch, then a foot. By midnight, they are gone entirely, and a thin layer of frost spreads from the casket across the carpet…
The Man Who Burned His Own Death Certificate
In the autumn of 2017, a man named Caleb Thorne walked into the Barlow Funeral Home in Elk River, Minnesota, carrying a folder of papers he insisted would prove he was already dead. Luna was the one who took his information that night—a Tuesday, just past eleven, with the first frost glittering on the windshield of the hearse outside. He was calm. He was precise. He showed her a death certificate from the state of Wisconsin, dated six years earlier, with his name and a cause of death listed as…
The House That Curtained Its Own Windows
In the summer of 1987, on a three-mile stretch of rural road outside Pella, Iowa, there was a house with no curtains. Not because the owner couldn't afford them, but because the owner insisted no one look in. When the elderly Mrs. Gunderson finally passed, her nephew hired a crew to clear the place. They found the curtains in the basement, sealed in fifty-seven black garbage bags, each one cut into narrow strips. And when they hung them back up that night, the house pulled them shut on its own.…
The Body That Could Not Be Buried
In the summer of 2019, a funeral home in the small town of Grafton, Ohio, received a body that seemed ordinary—an elderly man named Harold Phelps who died of heart failure in his sleep. But when the embalmer, Luna, began her work, she noticed something strange: the body's eyes would not stay closed, no matter how carefully she set them. Over the next three days, the body resisted every attempt at burial. The casket lid would not stay down. The grave diggers reported a tapping sound from inside…
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