Could this be the ice-cold truth?
Dara Tucker, who goes by @darastarrtucker on TikTok, explained the eerie reason why cruise lines have free ice cream parties for passengers on board.
In the 1 minute and 24-second clip with over 2.3 million views, the former cruise singer, who lived on a ship in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, claimed ice cream parties don’t only equate to a sweet celebration and brain freezes.
“If the crew suddenly makes a bunch of ice cream available to the passengers … it is often because more people have died on the ship then they have room for in the morgue,” she alleged in a viral clip.
“If more than seven people died on that particular ship, they would have to start moving bodies to the freezer, which meant they needed to make room in the freezer,” she continued, “so they would have to take out a lot of the ice cream and other frozen goods in order to make room for the extra bodies.”
Tucker admitted she didn’t have to work in the morgue but knew colleagues who worked as nurses in the morbid space.
“They said, ‘Maybe four to ten people die every cruise,’ [and] there are a lot of older people on ships,” she added about the cruise ship she worked on that carried around 3,000 passengers.
The Post reached out to Tucker for additional information regarding her disturbing claims.
In a follow-up video, Tucker clarified that the statistics she shared were based on upscale cruises that cater to an older demographic of passengers who averaged around 75 years old.
“With this particular cruise line because it attracted so many older people they were dying,” Tucker said. “This was a floating retirement home.”
Regardless, cruise lines are legally required to have body bags and a morgue for passengers who die on the cruise.
Each morgue varies in size depending on the ship’s dimensions, but they can usually hold three to four bodies, reported The Telegraph. However, when a morgue has reached its storage capacity, it brings the question of where the other dead bodies go.
The cruise ships have morgues that are stainless steel refrigerated rooms with shelves where bodies are stored, either until the end of the voyage or until they can be disembarked in a port of call and return home, explained The Point Guys.
Morgues are typically located on the ships’ lower decks near storage spaces for food, alcohol and miscellaneous ship supplies.
Many TikTokers were in disbelief by Tucker’s freezer allegation, but a few experts in the overseas industry quickly backed her.
“Cruise ship medic here. Can confirm the morgue and ice cream correlation,” wrote Cory L. Bucker, who goes by @cbuckc21 on TikTok.
The Post reached out to Bucker for comment.
“Former Sailor here—yes. It is accurate,” added another. “We don’t wear our covers on mess decks, and sometimes space needs to be made in the freezer.”
“It can happen on military vessels too. We had no morgue on board so if anyone died or we had to transport a body it [meant] the crew ate good cause frozen space had to be found,” commented a veteran.
Previously reported by the Post, a Florida family discovered their loved one’s body was improperly stored in a cooler after he died from a heart attack while vacationing on Celebrity’s Equinox cruise ship that sailed through the Caribbean in Aug. 2022.
Robert Lewis Jones’ family was promised by cruise staff that his body would be kept safe in the ship’s morgue, according to the lawsuit.
However, once the ship docked in Fort Lauderdale six days after his death, his wife learned her 78-year-old husband’s body was allegedly kept inside a walk-in cooler.
“When the funeral services employee in Ft. Lauderdale was brought onto the ship to retrieve Mr. Jones’ body, his body was not located in the ship’s morgue,” said the lawsuit, filed last week in Florida federal court.
“Instead, Mr. Jones’ body had, at some time not yet known, had been moved from the ship’s morgue to a cooler on a different floor than the ship’s morgue. The cooler in which the funeral employee found Mr. Jones’ body had drinks placed outside of the cooler and was not at a temperature which was sufficient nor proper for storing a dead body to prevent decomposition.”
The family sued Celebrity Cruises for $1 million for the negligent procedure and improperly storing their relatives’ bodies, causing them to decompose badly.
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Taylor Knight
