Funeral Home Employee Accidentally Cremated While Taking a Nap-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
A funeral home employee was accidentally cremated while taking a nap on a stretcher after working a 16-hour shift.
The Truth:
A website that describes is content as “satirical” is behind false reports that a funeral home home employee was accidentally cremated while taking a nap on a stretcher.
World News Daily Report published the fabricated story under the headline, “Morgue Employee Cremated by Mistake While Taking a Nap.” Citing the Beaumont Police Department, the report claims that 48-year-old Henri Paul Johnson was accidentally cremated after a coworker mistook him for a corpse and carried him into the crematory:
Before anyone could notice the mistake, he had already been exposed to temperatures ranging between 1400 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit and reduced to ashes.
Jenna Davis, one of Henri Johnson’s coworkers, says she heard him scream for about 15 seconds after the crematory was activated.
And a mugshot of wide-eyed man that appears with the story actually shows a local politician from Desoto County, Mississippi, shortly after his arrest for drunk driving in 2015. The man in the photo’s name is Christopher Plumlee — and he was not accidentally cremated while taking a nap at a funeral home.
A disclaimer that appears at the World News Daily Report website makes clear that its stories are “fictional” and “all characters appearing in the articles in this website — even those based on real people — are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is purely fictional.” But these stories are often mistaken for factual news reports when taken out of context on social media. This particular report has been shared nearly 1 million times.
The fabricated story resurfaced in March 2018. That’s when reports surfaced from Nova Scotia that a funeral home employee had lost their license after accidentally cremated the wrong body. However, the mistake did not lead to the cremation of a sleeping employee. Rather, the body of a woman who was supposed to be cremated was embalmed, and the body of man who was supposed to be embalmed was cremated in her place, CBC reports. The mistake was attributed to a funeral home worker misreading labels attached to the body and failing to verify the identity of the deceased before the cremation.
Following that report, a fake news website that’s designed to look like ABC News re-reported the fabricated report about the funeral home worker being cremated by mistake, and it was circulated on social media. The story is still false.