by: Maddie Rowley

When a Hunt A Killer member mentioned the “My Funeral Home Stories” podcast a couple of weeks ago, I was skeptical. Just from the name itself, it sounded macabre (good) but not like it was in my usual true crime wheelhouse (potentially bad). 

I gave it a try one morning as I bustled around doing chores and wow. What. A. Podcast. The first episode, aptly titled “Burning Man - 3 Dead, 2 Stabbed, 1 Burnt” was a crash course in what it’s really like to work at a funeral home. In this episode, host Grant Inman describes how it feels to show up to the scene of a murder/suicide where three people had died—two were the victims of a stabbing and the third was the murderer who had set himself on fire—and what it’s like to pick up the crispy burnt man’s body and place him in a disaster pouch. 

One thing to note from the get-go: Inman is extremely descriptive when it comes to the smells and sights of his surroundings and he doesn’t hold back on his private inner thoughts either, which is perhaps the best part. Admittedly, this is the first podcast where I’ve had to pause and take a break while Inman was in the middle of describing such stomach-churning things like what happens when you have to move a morbidly obese, 700-pound dead man by cutting a hole in the side of his home and then using a machine to lift the body onto a huge stretcher and load him onto a truck. Fun fact: it can take days to cremate an obese person because of all the extra fat on the body. Like I said, not for the faint of heart. 

Inman is really a writer first and foremost. He works by day on iHeartRadio’s popular JohnJay and Rich show and has a clear knack for storytelling. To give a no-spoiler example, in the episode titled “Hotel Drain Cleaner Suicide - A Normal Day at the Office,” he recounts buying drain cleaner for the clogged sink in the funeral home’s bathroom when he gets a death call to a local hotel, where he then picks up the body of a woman who tragically committed suicide by drinking Drano. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.

Inman grew up in his family-owned funeral home, where his dad worked as the Funeral Director for many years. 

“When we were born, my older sister Sarah and I just jumped into the life,” Inman said. “I feel like it’s kind of a cliche that kids who grow up in funeral homes are weirdos or they see things really young and are then unaffected by everything, but it's a cliche for a reason, I guess because we were thrown right into it.”

Inman said he doesn’t remember a time in his upbringing that didn’t include dead bodies. 

“I’ve always been aware of death, which is kind of a kickass way to live because I knew things were more finite,” Inman said. 

At 13, Inman was sent out on his first death call, which he talks about in “77 Times.” The police called the funeral home to pick up the body of a murder victim who had been thrown out of a moving vehicle and stabbed multiple times. 

“The first thing I realized was that the movies are full of shit,” Inman said. “When you’re at a crime scene, you’re in such a strange situation that you become hyper-aware. Everything is so colorful. Like the smell of ammonia will never be just ammonia to me, it will always be the smell of blood from a body that has lost a lot of it,” Inman said. 

Like I said above, Inman is descriptive to the point where other podcasts might scrub out certain details that he chooses to openly talk about. 

“There’s been four or five things that I thought were going to get me taken down so far,” Inman said. I’m surprised that people are stoked on my level of honesty. I’ve gotten a fair amount of messages from people saying it’s gratuitous and insensitive and that’s fair. Sometimes if you hear an episode out of context I can see it being questionable, but that’s the part that makes me excited to do it. It’s the wild west.” 

Inman is planning on writing six seasons of My Funeral Home Stories, which you can subscribe to on Apple Podcasts or any other streaming app, and check him out on Instagram at @pomoandkitsch.

“If nothing happens and nothing goes anywhere other than what it’s doing right now, I’ll be really proud of myself,” Inman said. “At the end of the day when I’m done with the podcast, I think I’ll finally be done with the funeral home...I’ve been holding onto this stuff for like 20 years.”