Inside abandoned funeral home with chemicals and white hearse parked outside (2025)

The funeral home operated as a family-run business for 40 years before suddenly closing - fascinating new photographs show the abandoned site left almost entirely untouched

An abandoned funeral home has been left almost entirely untouched, with mortician's chemicals and a white hearse still parked outside.

After operating as a family-run business for 40 years, the funeral home in South Carolina, US unexpectedly closed in 2020. Locals believed that the Covid pandemic was the reason - but documents found inside the home by an urban explorer revealed a 2019 lawsuit filed against the owner. They also found a chapel still set up for services, a huge white hearse, and there are even pictures of families still inside. Embalming fluid remains lying on the shelf inside along with mortician's tools, suggesting workers had been expecting to come back to work soon on the day the home closed.

The images were captured by Leland Kent, also known online as Abandoned Southeast. He explained on his blog that the original owner and his wife had also owned and operated the only floral shop in town, and were married for more than 50 years, having one son together. He continued: "As a funeral home director, he was quite successful and became revered in his small community as a leader and an elder until he died in the early 2000s.

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"The floral shop closed, and the funeral home was passed down to their only child. The company remained profitable for nearly two decades with the son as sole proprietor. The business was continuously mentioned in local newspapers until suddenly all operations ceased in September 2020."

"As a result of the sudden closure, many in the community speculated as to what had happened. Some say the COVID-19 pandemic may have been the cause."

But it has transpired the state board ordered the owner to appear before them due to the company not having a full-time funeral manager, which is one of the requirements to operate. There was also a lawsuit filed against the funeral home just one year before it closed for good.

He explained: "The funeral home's office contained a stack of documents about a lawsuit filed against the owner by the family of a deceased relative in 2019. There is no doubt that the closure of the funeral home is a significant loss to the small community, no matter what the reason is. Even now, it seems that the business could reopen at any time given everything left behind."

Back in the UK, recent photographs captured the creepy interior of mortuary dating back to the Victorian era, where thousands of corpses would have been stored. The abandoned building next to St Luke's Hospital in Bradford, West Yorkshire, closed in 2010.

It had been opened in 1870 as the new Bradford Union Workhouse, housing 350 paupers and a spacious infirmary equipped with the limited medical devices of the day. In 1898, the site reopened as a mental institution known as the Cleveland Asylum, later becoming a mortuary. Attempts to list the building in 1995 and 2009 failed, leaving it to lie abandoned and decaying.