Finding frozen corpses was once a very common occurrence. Men of the sea would get frozen on their ships, lost hikers would freeze in the mountains, and even more awful, shop owners would get trapped in their walk-in freezers at a time before there were emergency handles for escape.
Body in a Barrel
Canada is known for some rather creepy body discoveries, and the frozen corpse in a barrel is in the top ten in weirdness.
In 1910, a barrel was discovered at the Montreal Railway Station. It was addressed to a janitor who worked in a college. The only problem was that the college had closed years before the barrel was found.
Wanting to know what could possibly be inside the barrel, the barrel was opened. Inside the barrel the station men found the frozen body of an aged man. No marks of violence could be found on the body and the barrel’s origin remained a mystery. [Source]
Frozen Companion
In 1898, two Norwegian men were stationed at Fort McKinley, latitude 81, as the rest of the expedition made its way to the Arctic. The building they stayed in was little more than a shed made of rock and a roof made of walrus hides.
As the nights and days grew more and more bitter, the two men made a promise to each other. They agreed to give the other a proper burial if death occurred.
Sure enough, one of the men at the outpost did pass away and his companion kept his frozen body with him for two months inside the hut until the rest of the expedition returned and a proper burial could be given. [Source]
Froze on the Train
In 1921, it was reported that Russia was shipping the frozen corpses of Polish refugees. The Polish refugees arrived at the frontier on a daily basis. In response, Russia packed the families onto trains without heat or food in the dead of winter. Many of the people, mostly women and children, arrived to their destinations frozen solid. [Source]
Frozen Mariners
A gruesome report of frozen mariners was published in 1891 and tells how, at the start of winter, a cargo ship left port and went out into the Black Sea. A gale rose up and temperatures plummeted. Then, “the weather grew so intensely cold that the men were frozen to death in life like posture at the wheel or wherever their duty called them.”
The sea swept over the boat and each new drench froze until the boat and its crew were covered in layers of ice. The ship began to swell and burst open and by nightfall it began to sink. “Already the corpses of a number of the seamen were visible about the deck, standing up against the handrails just as rest as though in full vigor – they were frozen hard as iron.”
Only four men survived the disaster and were rescued. [Source]
Whoops
A Barcelona butcher returned to his shop one day and found his wife completely distraught. Not fully understanding why she was near hysterics, he assumed that she must have been experiencing an extreme headache and decided to remove her from the butcher shop so that she could get some much needed rest.
He closed down the butcher shop for the rest of the day, locking the freezer and the doors.
The next day, he returned to his shop and opened the freezer to start his business for the day. Inside, however, he discovered the frozen body of a man.
It turned out that his wife had not been expecting her husband return to the shop and she became a nervous wreck when the husband nearly walked in on her and her lover doing the naughty. The lover hid inside the freezer and, since it was 1934, there were no safely latches inside the freezer for him to escape the cold. [Source]
