Morbid reason behind 'free ice cream' parties on cruise ships

Cruise ships are strange places. They’re essentially floating cities, complete with enough amenities to keep you occupied for weeks if not months on end, and you’ll be sharing the experience with thousands of other passengers.

Sadly, some passengers don’t make it back to port. Every so often someone will die unexpectedly aboard a cruise ship, and their body will need looking after until the ship ends its voyage.

Sailors adopted some curious tactics for preserving bodies in the days before on-board refrigeration. Lord Admiral Nelson, figurehead of the British Navy’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, was shot and killed during the battle. His crewmates, short of preservatives, kept his body in brandy en route to his final resting place at St Paul’s.

Throwing them overboard is frowned upon, to say the least (Michael Dunning/Getty Images)

It wasn’t exactly common practice in the 1800s, and it’s absolutely not the method used by cruise ships faced with similar predicaments in the 21st century.

Cruise ships have plenty of fridge and freezer space on board, although the majority of it is taken up by various perishables to be doled out over the course of the voyage.

And that’s where the ice cream parties come in.

Posting to TikTok, former cruise ship singer Dara Starr Tucker detailed the phenomenon when a comment suggested that when the 'amount of ice cream available suddenly goes up it means they need more freezer space for a body'.

In her now viral video, Dara responded: "OK, this is unfortunately often true. If the crew suddenly makes a bunch of ice cream available to the passengers, a free ice cream party, it's often because more people have died on the ship than they have room for in the morgue.

"And I don't know why when I talk about cruise ship stuff it gets morbid so quickly but this is true. I was a singer on a cruise ship about 10 years ago and I lived on a ship in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean for about six months.

"Thankfully we didn't have to deal with this kind of stuff but we were friends with some crew members who did. And they said maybe four to 10 people die every cruise. There are a lot of older people on ships and often people die on cruises."

Dara continued: "Four to 10 people on a ship like ours that carry about 2,500 to 3,000 passengers on a typical cruise.

Free ice cream on a cruise might not be the happy occasion it seems to be (David Sacks/Getty Images)

"The morgue, I believe they said held about seven people and 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.

"So they would have to take out a lot of the ice cream and other frozen goods in order to make room for the other bodies."

As excuses to have ice cream go, this is perhaps the most grim.