Here is a sentence that should not be true, and yet is: for roughly a quarter century, the busiest death investigation office in the United States operated a gift shop. Not a vending machine in the lobby. A real retail operation, with a name, a logo, a mail-order catalog, and a bestselling beach towel. The LA coroner gift shop was called Skeletons in the Closet, and if you ever find yourself explaining to an out-of-town friend why Los Angeles is unlike anywhere else on earth, you could do worse than starting here.

I want to tell this story properly, because it tends to get flattened into a one-line piece of trivia — “did you know the LA morgue had a gift shop?” — when the real history is stranger, funnier, and more genuinely good-hearted than the punchline suggests.

The Shop Inside the Morgue

Skeletons in the Closet opened in 1993, tucked inside the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner complex on North Mission Road in Boyle Heights. This is the same campus where the county’s forensic pathologists handle the staggering caseload of America’s largest county — the office that examined Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, and the victims of the Manson family. You did not stumble into this shop. You sought it out, past the institutional signage of a working government death facility, which was of course half the appeal.

The shop began modestly. Coroner staff had been making novelty items for internal use and for colleagues at forensic conferences — the kind of gallows-humor merchandise that people who work around death have always made for each other, because dark humor is how that work stays survivable. Someone realized the public might want in. The public very much did.

What the LA Coroner Gift Shop Actually Sold

The catalog read like a prop list from a movie that was never made:

  • The body-outline beach towel — the shop’s undisputed icon. A white towel printed with a chalk-style body outline, so that lying on it at the beach placed you inside the silhouette. Designed by coroner employee Marilyn Lewis, it became one of the great pieces of Los Angeles kitsch, written up in travel guides and carried home in suitcases on every continent.
  • Crime scene towels printed with yellow “CRIME SCENE — DO NOT CROSS” barrier tape.
  • Toe-tag keychains — miniature replicas of the identification tags used in the morgue.
  • Garment bags styled as body bags, which is either the best or worst gift you have ever given, depending entirely on the recipient.
  • “Body Notes” notepads, mugs, T-shirts, mouse pads, and canvas totes stamped with the department’s official seal — a seal that, remember, belongs to an actual county agency, not a Halloween store.

The official seal was the magic ingredient. Plenty of novelty shops sell skull mugs. Only one shop on earth sold merchandise bearing the genuine insignia of the Los Angeles County coroner, purchased steps away from the real autopsy suites.

The Part Everyone Forgets: It Was for a Good Cause

Here is the detail that turned a potentially ghoulish concept into something Los Angeles County could defend with a straight face: the proceeds funded the Youthful Drunk Driver Visitation Program.

That program brought young offenders convicted of driving under the influence into the coroner’s facility to confront, directly and unforgettably, where drunk driving ends. Every chalk-outline towel and toe-tag keychain helped pay for it. When critics occasionally suggested the shop was in poor taste — and over the years, some did — the county’s answer was simple and rather hard to argue with: the merchandise was funding an effort to keep teenagers alive.

That is the tonal balance the shop struck for its entire existence, and it is the same balance this site tries to honor. The humor was never aimed at the dead. It was the humor of the people who serve the dead, shared outward — an invitation to look at mortality without flinching, and to laugh a little, and to leave a few dollars behind for a program that prevented funerals.

A Tourist Attraction Like No Other

By the 2000s, Skeletons in the Closet had become a legitimate stop on the Los Angeles tourist circuit. Guidebooks listed it alongside the Hollywood sign. International film crews shot segments there. The Los Angeles Times covered the shop repeatedly over the years as one of the city’s reliably great offbeat stories, and journalists rarely needed to embellish — a quote from a staffer and a photo of the towel did all the work.

Visitors described the same experience again and again: you went in expecting a transgressive giggle and came out oddly moved. The shop sat inside a building where, on any given day, families were receiving the worst news of their lives. The staff understood that. The shop was never loud, never lurid. It was a small, dryly funny room in a serious place, and that contrast is precisely what made it unforgettable.

The Quiet Wind-Down

Nothing this strange lasts forever. As the 2010s wore on, the shop’s hours shrank, the mail-order operation faded, and by the end of the decade Skeletons in the Closet had quietly wound down as a walk-in retail destination. There was no dramatic closure announcement, no farewell sale with crime-scene tape across the door — which feels fitting, somehow. The strangest gift shop in America simply receded into the institutional building that had always surrounded it.

What remains is the legend, the surviving merchandise (original body-outline towels now circulate among collectors like relics), and a genuinely unanswerable bit of trivia: name another government office, anywhere, that managed to be simultaneously a working morgue, a tourist attraction, a public-health funding engine, and a masterclass in institutional self-awareness.

Los Angeles, naturally. It could only ever have been Los Angeles.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the LA coroner gift shop open?

Skeletons in the Closet opened in 1993 inside the Los Angeles County coroner’s complex on North Mission Road in Boyle Heights, growing out of novelty items that coroner staff had originally made for colleagues and forensic conferences.

What was the most famous item the shop sold?

The body-outline beach towel — a white towel printed with a chalk-style body silhouette, designed by coroner employee Marilyn Lewis. It became the shop’s bestseller and an enduring icon of Los Angeles kitsch.

Where did the gift shop’s money go?

Proceeds supported the county’s Youthful Drunk Driver Visitation Program, which brought young DUI offenders into the coroner’s facility to witness firsthand the consequences of impaired driving.

Is Skeletons in the Closet still open?

No. The shop gradually wound down during the late 2010s and is no longer operating as a walk-in retail destination. Original merchandise from the shop now circulates among collectors.