How America Struggled to Bury the Dead in the 1918 Flu Pandemic-- Part 1

From the February 12, 2020, History site.

The terrifying, lethal influenza virus that swept across the world in 1918-1920,  history's deadliest pandemic, which claimed the lives of approximately 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 here in the United States.  Nearly 200,000 Americans died of it in October 1918 alone.

The sheer number of bodies overwhelmed undertakers, casket makers and grave diggers.  At the same time, a prohibition on public gatherings that included wakes and funerals compounded the grief of stricken families who could not properly mourn their deaths.

The mass mortality led to macabre scenes.  In Baltimore, the Red Cross nurses reported going to disease ravaged homes to discover sick people in bed next to the dead.  In other cases, corpses were covered with ice and left in bedroom corners where they festered for days.

Inundated  undertakers stacked coffins in funeral homes and even in their living quarters.  In New Haven, Connecticut,  six-year-old John Delano and his friends played outside a mortuary, scaling a mountain of caskets piled on a sidewalk, unaware of the contents inside them.  "We thought,  -- boy, this is great.  It's like climbing the pyramids."

--Cooter