As a singer revealed the morbid policy in a viral video, a doctor has explained exactly why ‘free ice cream parties’ on cruise ships have seemed to take place right after someone dies at sea.
A former cruise ship singer had spoken about it
Dara Starr Tucker, a former cruise ship singer, revealed the unsettling policy that reportedly happened when someone dies on a cruise ship to her followers on TikTok.
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She regularly performed on cruise ships sailing around the Caribbean and the Mediterranean a decade ago.
There’s an eerie detail to the cruises
The luxurious trips didn’t come without an eerie detial. In Dara’s viral video, she shared the morbid reason crusies host ‘free ice cream parties’ when a person dies on board.
The video came after one of her followers asked if it was actually a real thing.
She explained the ice cream parties
One of the singer’s followers asked if the ‘amount of ice cream available suddenly goes up it means they need more freezer space for a body.’
She responded, “OK, this is unfortunately often true. If the crew suddenly makes a bunch of ice cream available to the passengers, free ice cream party, it’s often because more people have died on the ship than they have room for in the morgue.”
She was on cruise ships a decade ago
“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,” Dara went on.
Dara explained the typical number of fatalities on a cruise
She added, “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.”
“Four to 10 people on a ship like ours that carry about 2,500 to 3,000 passengers on a typical cruise.”
Sometimes there’s not enough space
“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,” Dara went on.
“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.”
A doctor has confirmed this
It’s shocking to know that these things actually did happen, but rest assured that they don’t anymore.
Director of medical operations for Vikand – which provides medical services for over 150 ships on 33 cruise lines – Amy White, said the morbid ice cream parties used to be a very real thing.
Ships that didn’t have a morgue used to do it
For the ships that didn’t have a morgue, bodies of those who would die onboard would have to be stored in cool, covered areas, so they’d opt for the fridge.
“Before they had morgues, they put them in the ice cream fridge,” White told CNN Travel. She also added, “Sometimes the body is put outside, when you don’t have any land for three days, or the possibility of a helicopter.”
Thankfully, though, cruise ships in 2025 have morgues, and the ice cream fridge is no longer needed for anything other than storing ice cream.
