Making an injury "unnatural"

Corpse with a stomach filled with rocks? Of a kind only found in some remote place thousands of miles away?

Died of being flash-frozen mid-stride, shattered when it hit the ground?

Corpse inverted, with organs and bones on the outside?

Corpse covered thickly in dead flies?

Rigor mortis (the period that the body is very stiff starting a few hours after death and lasting a few days) is something that could be inverted. Maybe it could happen earlier, later, longer, or shorter than normal...or not at all in your story.

Also, the pupils are usually very dilated on death...maybe they aren't in your story. Maybe there is still some activity in a particular organ like the heart, brain, or lungs in your version while all of it ceases in real life.

instead of decomposing the body is metamorphosing at a cellular level - like how wood can become fossilized turning to stone.

The outer body is intact, no bruising or anything but the internal organs are pulverized, and or the bones are melted

The brain or heart is missing as if cut out but no marks or cuts on skin or bone

There's no medical examiner's term for death by sorcery. Make one up.

On the flip side, why would sorcery cause a death that doesn't already exist? A body could burst into flames, with no apparent source of ignition, and be suspicious, but it's still someone who burned to death. A sorcerer could make someone believe they can fly, so they jump off a rooftop, but the death is still impact trauma. A sorcerer, or Jedi who has gone to the Dark Side, could make someone unable to breathe, but the death is still strangulation.

A death with no obvious cause could be construed, in the proper society, as magical.

Jeff

I dunno but I really love the idea of carrion eaters avoiding it - a line of ants circling around it, a fly buzzing over top only to die and fall on the chest, stuff like that. That kind of weirdness hits home for me.

I have nothing to add but wanted to say, this thread is so full of incredible ideas. You guys are great!

It perhaps depend a little on whether you want the hints of unnaturalness to be visible outwardly, or only after medical examination.

For immediately visible things you can go to spontaneous human combustion or strange markings on the skin. Maybe tattoes of unknown runes appearing on the skin when the victim never had tattoes, or burns in the form of spirals without any obvious means by which they were made. Blood pooling in strange patterns. The victim drowing miles away from water? Bites of exotic animals on the body?

For things only found at autopsy: foreign objects in the body without an obvious entry would be definitely weird. I like the idea of stones that was suggested earlier, very creepy that. Maybe all the blood turned to ice in a blink of the eye. Only the brain but not the skull burned to a crisp. Parts the body is decomposing but others like the artery system remains completely intact.

efreysson said:

I want to hint that a body found died through unnatural means. Unnatural as in sorcery. I haven't decided on all the details, but I'm leaning towards odd burns that are somehow different from real-life burns (attested to by an in-universe medical professional). But I'm not married to the idea. I could also go with flies and other carrion eaters disregarding the corpse to a suspicious degree, or it decomposing at an unnaturally slow or rapid rate, or whatever.

What NORMAL thing about deadly injuries or decomposition can I turn around and make weird?

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Burns that are worse on the inside than the exterior of the body. Badly broken bones, damaged organs, etc. without the required external injuries that would go along with them. When the circulatory system shuts down, blood pools in whatever the low point of the body's position is as it coagulates, so having it instead pool somewhere incongruous.

The movie The Autopsy of Jane Doe kinda touches a lot on that kind of stuff.

Thomas Vail said:

When the circulatory system shuts down, blood pools in whatever the low point of the body's position is as it coagulates, so having it instead pool somewhere incongruous.

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You'd have to be careful with that. If they found a body with the blood pooled & coagulated on the side of the body facing up, wouldn't they conclude that the person died & laid facing the other way until the blood had coagulated, and then it was turned over or moved?