Our story begins with a segment aired last week on Malta's Favourite Channel News. Here's the summary:
Favourite Channel News is informed that a former employee of the Mater Dei mortuary had sexual intercourse with corpses in the mortuary and as a result a woman who also had a sexual relationship with the same man has reportedly suffered from a sexually-transmitted disease. The woman was in a serious condition and has been hospitalised.The report was immediately denied in a statement issued by the management of Mater Dei Hospital in Msida, Malta (published in the Times of Malta):
Mater Dei Hospital Management denies all these facts and condemns the circulation of such unfounded morbid news which is causing great pressure on the staff who works in the Hospital Mortuary.A query from The Malta Independent elicited this response from the Health Ministry:
We honestly do not know if this is even true. We have heard so many versions of the story that we have no clue what the real story should be. To date no report was made on the matter.The basic premise of the story should be familiar to regular visitors to this site. It's an urban legend I first covered back in 1999, when a Norwegian reporter inquired about a rumor then circulating in his country:
A woman (a friend of a friend, of course) met a man while out on the town one night. One thing led to another, as they say, and she ended up having sex with him. Later, the woman fell ill. She went to the doctor, who examined her and announced that she was "infected with corpse-worms" (maggots). A subsequent investigation revealed that the stranger she had slept with was a pathologist in a local hospital. He had fornicated with a decomposing corpse earlier that same day.I've since seen variants set in England, Jamaica, and various parts of the U.S.A. — truly, at this point, an international tall tale.
Read more: The Necrophiliac's Gift
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