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.
Within the 1 minute and 24-second clip with over 2.3 million views, the previous cruise singer, who lived on a ship within 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 actually because more people have died on the ship then they’ve room for within the morgue,” she alleged in a viral clip.
“If greater than seven people died on that specific ship, they might have to begin moving bodies to the freezer, which meant they needed to make room within the freezer,” she continued, “in order that they would should take out lots of the ice cream and other frozen goods with the intention to make room for the additional bodies.”
Tucker admitted she didn’t should work within the morgue but knew colleagues who worked as nurses within the morbid space.
“They said, ‘Perhaps 4 to 10 people die every cruise,’ [and] there are lots of older people on ships,” she added concerning the cruise ship she worked on that carried around 3,000 passengers.
The Post reached out to Tucker for extra 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 since 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’ll often hold three to 4 bodies, reported The Telegraph. Nevertheless, when a morgue has reached its storage capability, it brings the query of where the opposite dead bodies go.
The cruise ships have morgues which can be chrome steel refrigerated rooms with shelves where bodies are stored, either until the tip of the voyage or until they might be disembarked in a port of call and return home, The Point Guys explained.
Morgues are typically situated 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 just a few experts within 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’s accurate,” added one other. “We don’t wear our covers on mess decks, and sometimes space must be made within the freezer.”
“It might occur on military vessels too. We had no morgue on board so if anyone died or we had to move a body it [meant] the crew ate good cause frozen space needed 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 August 2022.
Robert Lewis Jones’ family was promised by cruise staff that his body can be kept protected within the ship’s morgue, in line with the lawsuit.
Nevertheless, 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 worker in Ft. Lauderdale was brought onto the ship to retrieve Mr. Jones’ body, his body was not situated within the ship’s morgue,” said the lawsuit, filed last week in Florida federal court.
“As an alternative, Mr. Jones’ body had, at a while not yet known, had been moved from the ship’s morgue to a cooler on a special floor than the ship’s morgue. The cooler by which the funeral worker 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 forestall decomposition.”
The family sued Celebrity Cruises for $1 million for the negligent procedure and improperly storing their relatives’ bodies, causing them to decompose badly.
