R.I.P...myself?
"That's where I... left."
— Pete Boggs, Grounded
When a character turns out to be Dead All Along, they often only realize this upon finding their own corpse. Whether they're actually a ghost, have been cloned, time traveled to the future past the time of their death, gone to an alternate dimension or have since become a robot, the discovery is shocking and traumatizing for a character who was unaware they had actually died. If none of the above applies, and the character is indisputably alive, then it's usually an indication that the character is destined to travel to the past at some point and die there. Almost always results in a Heroic BSoD from the character in question, and often overlaps with Tomato in the Mirror.
The state of the body can be anywhere between "can be mistaken for alive but sleeping" and "skeleton with the clothes still on" but are always recognizable as being their own. Often a body found in such a state is still exactly where the person died, to indicate they were never found. For extra pathos it may even be stuffed and mounted to indicate a severe lack of respect for the deceased.
Attending Your Own Funeral may overlap if The Reveal occurs at a character's own memorial service, although that trope does not require the character in question to die first. A more benign version may involve a Psychopomp arriving to spirit off someone's soul and the recently deceased taking one final look at their discarded body. The more supernatural versions of Prematurely Marked Grave may also be related. If done early in the story, can lead to a Whodunnit to Me?.
In video games, where Death Is Cheap, this situation could be quite common. One of the standard punishments for death is that you drop all you inventory items, in which case your body will mark the location where you should go to retrieve them. The body is sometimes replaced by a symbolic chest, or a Bag of Holding, to not disturb the player with the vision of their own dead body, to simplify the rendering, or maybe, in case of a first-person game, the developers might even not create a body model for the player in the first place, since he'll never see it. The community of Souls-like RPGs even coined a phrase "walk of shame", for the situation where a player must go from the nearest Respawn Point to the place of their death in order to retrieve the lost resources.
Compare Foreseeing My Death.
As this is a Death Trope and an Ending Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In an episode of Galaxy Express 999, Tetsuro watches from afar as his enigmatic guide and companion Maetel weeps over a dead body under ice on Pluto. It is later more or less confirmed that it is Maetel's own original, pre-robotization body.
- Near the end of the third season of Hell Girl, Yuzuki runs back to her apartment and finds it in a dilapidated state, with the skeleton of a little girl lying on the floor. Turns out that she had died a long time ago, and her spirit had been living in an illusion ever since.
- In episode 11 of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Fate sees what appears to be her own body in a jar and finds out that it's actually Alicia, her mother Precia's original daughter whom she was cloned from. Worse, Precia considers Fate to be a failure (for among other things having a different dominant hand than Alicia) and willingly dies with the original Alicia's body even when Fate tries to save her.
- Happens in Brook's backstory in One Piece. His Devil Fruit ability is to revive back when he's dead (among other slew of underworld-themed abilities). So when he dies, his soul comes back... but he had to spend a year finding his body because it's trapped on a ship in the middle of a foggy sea. By the time he found it, it already became a skeleton. That's how he becomes a Dem Bones guy nowadays.
- Red Garden features the four main girls be taken to their own corpses laid out in coffins while it's explained that they died in the first episode and are now in artificial bodies, but can get their original bodies back if they do exactly as they are told.
Audio Plays
- The Big Finish Doctor Who story Cobwebs has the Fifth Doctor and his companions arrive at a base on another planet where they find their own dead bodies, including their own clothing right down to a cut on the Doctor's coat. It turns out in the end that what appeared to be the bodies of the Doctor and his friends were actually copies created by a deranged computer who had convinced itself that it would be 'saved' once they returned.
Comic Books
- In Action Comics #399, Superman is pulled into the future along with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and General George Custer as part of a history lesson. He confronts the teacher, and notes that the Presidents were all taken at the point of their deaths. The teacher confirms that Superman was fated to die during his current mission, and offers to show Superman his own dead body. It turns out that he had been brought into an alternate future.
- Deadman: Boston Brand is murdered during an acrobatics act. His ghost falls to the ground and thinks the other circus performers are telling a tasteless joke about covering his body, until he sees it for himself.
- Jonah Hex: This has happened a couple times to Jonah Hex, since his final fate is to have his body stuffed and mounted as part of an old west traveling show, so it's almost inevitable that when traveling to the future he'll run into it.
- In the final issue of Hex 1987, after he has been transported from the The Wild West to a 21st century Post Apocalyptic Wasteland, finds his own dead body stuffed and mounted in the remains of a wild west show. This is considered a good thing, because it means that someday he'll be transported back to his home time. He sets a shot glass in front of his dead body and shares a drink with himself. While he does eventually go back to his time, the body isn't actually his, but an impostor's.
- It happens to him again in the New 52 relaunch of All-Star Western, when he finds it in Metropolis. This time, however, it causes him to have a Heroic BSoD.
- Secrets of Haunted House: In the first issue's story "Dead Heat", the doctors investigate a crash to make a head count and find out they're the casualties when they discover their own corpses in the wreckage.
- Swamp Thing: In The Saga Of Swamp Thing #28, Swamp Thing finds the skeleton of Alec Holland, in the process discovering that he wasn't the real Alec and was just a sentient plant that had absorbed Alec's memories. Swampy was lead there by the ghost of Alec himself, and after retrieving the skeleton Alec's soul is able to move on to the afterlife.
- The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: In issue #29, the mysterious coffin the Lost Light found floating in space last issue is revealed to contain the embalmed corpse of Rodimus — minus half his head — who is at present alive and well in his captaincy of the ship. Upon determining that the corpse belongs to his future self, he immediately attempts to cut his arm off with a chainsaw, reasoning that since the corpse still has both arms, his death won't come to pass if he's missing one. Fortunately for Rodimus, it turns out to be a case of Dead Alternate Counterpart.
- Venom (2003): After the first Vic and Frankie pair dispatched to collect the symbiote are killed, a second pair arrive on-scene only for one of them—initially identified as a Vic but later as a Frankie—to discover their precursors' corpses and realize the awful truth: that they are a series of clones that Bob gaslights into believing are unique individuals and views as utterly expendable. She is seemingly Driven to Suicide, but later shows up to help Trish and the Suit—having gone rogue.
Fan Fiction
- In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Smurfed Behind: Smurfing To Heaven", Empath is awakened by an angelic version of Smurfette who told him that he had died, and he doesn't believe it until he sees his own body lying on the ground, lifeless.
- A Growing Fire in My Heart: In chapter 18 when Chrysalis abandons Lord Redskull and his followers to Celestia and attempts to flee as they are all being slaughtered to save herself, she begins boasting to herself that she always survives, right before feeling something painful hit her neck. The pain goes away quickly but she feels cold for some reason, and turns around to see her own headless body and decapitated head, with Luna standing nearby cleaning her sword, having beheaded Chrysalis from behind as she fled. Shortly afterwards her ghost is Dragged Off to Hell by The Grim Reaper.
- White Devil of the Moon has a variation. While exploring the ruins of the Moon Kingdom, Nanoha and the Sailor Senshi come across the bodies of their previous incarnations (all the bodies had been perfectly preserved due to the lack of oxygen on the Moon). Luna had specifically brought them their in hopes of triggering some of Nanoha's memories as princess Serenity.
Films— Animation
- The "Johnny Appleseed" segment of Melody Time ends with Johnny, now an old man, dying quietly in his sleep. His guardian angel summons his soul to Heaven, but first Johnny pauses to stare at the strange man lying under a tree. Johnny is shocked when the angel tells him he's "just your husk, Johnny, your mortal husk."
Films — Live-Action
- A variant occurs in Avatar: The Way of Water when Quaritch, or technically a Na'vi Recombinant Avatar with his memories implanted into it, discovers his original self's skeletal remains, which still lay where he was killed in battle in the previous movie, and gets to pull an Alas, Poor Yorick on himself. He crushes the skull in his hand before moving on.
- Avengers: Endgame has a variation; time travel causes past Nebula's cyborg systems to pick up and project memories from her present self, allowing past Thanos to watch himself get decapitated. While he may seem to take it in stride at first, he's actually incensed by the heroes' "ungratefulness" and decides to unmake the whole universe and remake it to his liking instead of simply killing half of everyone.
- In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Stephen Strange is shown the body of one of his alternate selves by America Chavez as proof of her story. At the movie's climax, he's able to dreamwalk into the corpse to fight Scarlet Witch, since the alternate you you dreamwalk into doesn't have to be alive.
- Ghost (1990) does this twice as a Bait-and-Switch:
- During Sam's fight with the mugger, we hear a gun go off and then we see Sam apparently chasing the mugger away. Sam then returns to Molly and discovers to his horror that she's holding his corpse; only then do we realize that he died instantly from the gun shot and it was his ghost chasing after the mugger.
- The same thing happens to said mugger, Willie, near the end. After being struck by two cars coming at him from opposite directions, his body seems to be thrown several feet and land with a thud on the concrete of the road. After he slowly gets up and staggers over to the crashed cars, that’s when he sees his bloody corpse, and it becomes clear that it was only his ghostly body that was thrown across the road.
- The main character of Hellraiser: Hellseeker survives a fatal car crash in which his wife dies. The rest of the film is a Mind Screw, as he's constantly experiencing hallucinations and isn't able to tell what is real or not. The ending reveals that he's been in Hell all along after Pinhead shows him his own body.
- Impostor: A variation on the trope where Dr. Olham becomes a fugitive after he's accused of being a bio-robot infiltration unit sent by a hostile alien race and set to explode when he comes in contact with the Earth's chancellor. His wife is then revealed to be the real impostor, but then it turns out that both he and his wife had been replicated when he discovers the real Olham's body.
- Inverted in Moon when Sam's older clone agrees to die in the harvester so the newer Sam can escape to Earth.
- Mulholland Drive has a Mind Screw version when Rita and Betty find the body of Diane Selwyn, who is Betty in real life/a Dying Dream/an alternate reality/the future/what have you.
- Shattered (1991) has an interesting variation. When Dan Merrick dredges up the preserved corpse of Jack Stanton, he discovers that its face looks exactly like his. He then realizes that he's not Dan Merrick at all, but Jack Stanton, who suffered Laser-Guided Amnesia and underwent Magic Plastic Surgery after a car wreck.
- In both Topper and Topper Returns, freshly deceased ghosts discover that they are dead by noticing their own corpses. In the former, George and Marion are only mildly annoyed to find out that they died in a car accident. In the latter, Gail discovers that she was murdered, and the plot has her enlisting Cosmo Topper to find out who killed her.
- In Triangle, Sally finds dozens of her dead bodies, killed in the past/future/whatever the tense in the Stable Time Loop is.
- The protagonist of Wild Strawberries observes a funeral, and sees his own body in the coffin. Since it's a dream, there's no in-universe explanation.
Literature
- A magical version appears at the end of The Adventures of Pinocchio. By courtesy of the Blue Fairy, Pinocchio wakes as a human boy. Then he watches for a long time his old lifeless wooden body, abandoned on a stool, and he is very, very pleased to be a now a "good boy". In this case the character is not dead: well, excluding Alternative Character Interpretation.
- Bruce Coville's Book of...: The protagonist of "The Thing in Auntie Alma's Pond" from Bruce Coville's Book of Spine Tinglers does this near the end when she's forced to confront the truth about herself and finds her own body in the pond, having been caught in the chain for the boat's anchor when she tossed it overboard.
- Played with in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: although the ghost who finds his own corpse already knew he was dead, he still faints upon finding it, because it falls out of a cupboard at him Peek-a-Boo Corpse-style.
- In the Dragonlance Legends trilogy, Caramon and Tasselhoff end up traveling to a Bad Future where Caramon's twin Raistlin destroyed all of the other gods, and the two only realize they are in the future of their own world rather than another when they discover the ruins of their hometown complete with the tombstone of Caramon's wife Tika, and Caramon's own lifeless corpse lying in front of it.
- In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Alien Bodies, the Doctor becomes entangled with a strange auction selling a Time Lord body to the highest bidder. It turns out to be his own.
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights: In "Alone Together", Travis realizes that he's been Dead All Along when he gets trapped in the same place that he died. After rethinking the story Once More, with Clarity, he is finally able to be at peace.
- The Garden of Sinners: In the fifth chapter, Enjou Tomoe eventually discovers his own preserved brain in the basement of his apartment building. His response shows how badly this shakes him, and his artificial body starts breaking down soon after. Earlier, he almost finds his actual corpse in his old apartment, revealing that his recurring nightmare of his mother stabbing him and then herself after killing her husband actually occurred, but Shiki prevents him from clearly seeing this.
- Imperial Radch: The protagonist of Ancillary Justice is an AI who controls a lot of individual bodies. Therefore, she gets to have the experience of finding her own dead body several times.
- Philip K. Dick's "Impostor" ends the same way as the film adaptation: the protagonist finds his own body in a wrecked spaceship and realizes that it is human and he is the android duplicate he thought he had been wrongly accused of being, which triggers a bomb in him that destroys the Earth.
- About halfway through John Dies at the End, Dave realizes that he can't remember anything that happened for the last half-hour or so, looks around for clues, notices that his handgun is missing one bullet, and eventually finds a human corpse wrapped in a tarp and hidden in his shed. At the time, he's too freaked out to look closely enough to identify the body, and soon after, when John tells him about a friend's sister who just went missing, Dave assumes he murdered her in a fugue and tries to figure out why, but this is actually a Red Herring. At the end of the arc, he finally gets a good look at the body in his shed and discovers it looks just like him. At first he assumes it's an evil clone meant to Kill and Replace him that he was able to kill first, but after failing to find the distinguishing mark on the body's foot that showed up on the other imposters he's encountered throughout the arc, the puzzle pieces start falling into place. He checks his own foot and confirms that he's the imposter, and killed the original Dave and took his place, but had no memory of this.
- In The Ka of Gifford Hillary, the eponymous character realizes he is seemingly dead when he gets to see his own body — from the outside. He is later on faced with the problem of re-animating his body and getting out of the coffin.
- Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard has the title protagonist forced to look at his corpse prepped for burial into a chapel. He's very weirded out, and quite dismayed since he actually wished to be cremated.
- The protagonist of James Herbert novel Nobody True is a man with the power to astrally project, but after a night drifting incorporeally around central London he comes home to find he's been rather brutally murdered in his bed while he wasn't there. A Whodunnit to Me? plot ensues.
- The Misfit of Demon King Academy: Upon reincarnating in the form of a half-demon, one of the first things Emilia Ludowell witnesses is her lifeless prior body from when she was a pure demon. This is averted in the anime as Anos disintegrates her dead body as he reincarnates her into a buck-naked half-demon.
- Early into the Red Dwarf novel Last Human, the crew find an alternate Starbug crashed. When they board the alternate 'Bug, The Cat discovers his alternate counterpart's severed head. When the others go to get a portable generator and some proper lighting, Lister and Rimmer are left alone on board. While Rimmer, of course, stays put, Lister explores the ship and finds the alternate Kryten's remains, Rimmer's destroyed light bee and Kochanski badly wounded in a deep sleep booth. He's somewhat disturbed that his own alternate self is noticeably absent, with good reason.
- During the fourth arc in Re:Zero, Subaru attempts to speak with Echidna and loses consciousness, immediately being shown Emilia and others grieving over him after he committed suicide in an attempt to save Rem. Subaru is then shown what has happened in each scenario after his deaths, enough to cause him to vomit off-screen.
- In the short science fiction novel Rogue Moon, a special kind of transporter is used to make two copies of a person which are briefly telepathic; one copy is sent through an alien death trap while the other copy can see & hear what the other is seeing so they can learn the safe way through the maze. When we see the final run through the maze we are also shown hundreds of copies of the same man lying about having been killed in various ways.
- Sword Art Online: After the last battle in the Alicization arc, Gabriel Miller wakes up laughing mad after being defeated by Kirito, until he notices something laying motionless in the STL unit he was using. Which turns out to be Gabriel's own body, as a result of the energy he used in the Underworld to transform One-Winged Angel and the damage Kirito gave him was so overpowering it destroyed his own fluctlight and killed him, and moments later he's Dragged Off to Hell.
- The Wandering Inn:
- Near the end of Volume 8 the ghost of Drake hero, General Sserys (begrudgingly) borrows a body to help save the day. Before they set of to their final battle, they visit their own gravestone to pay respect to the ashes of their love that where recently buried with them.
- During Volume 10's Palace of Fates arc. A badly wounded Mrsha du Marquin distracts The Grim Reaper to allow the Alternate Self's of the simulated timelines to escape the failing palace. Outrunning death itself until falling and still remaining defiant when cornered at scythe-point. Only when they see a broken form next to them and realise that don't feel the pain anymore does the truth dawn...
Oh. Looks like you were too late. I guess I won the race.- At the arc's end, a loophole is allowed for any remaining counterparts to make a Merger of Souls with their original, even if they died. This leads to poignant moments where a resurrected Mrsha and Kevin get to see their own Memorial Statue's and the former notes the feeling of being both alive and buried.
Live-Action TV
- What happens to Violet in "American Horror Story: Murder House".
- Battlestar Galactica (2003):
- Starbuck finds a crashed Viper with her own body inside it during the final season. She and the Leoben who find it are completely freaked out by it. What exactly the Starbuck we've been following actually is never gets made clear, but she's implied to be an Angel Unaware since the crash.
- The same episode has Chief Tyrol wander around a post-apocalyptic Earth, drawn to something he can't explain until he comes across a shadow silhouette burnt against the wall of a building. This triggers the memories of his own death as a result of a nuclear holocaust. When the rest of the Final Five catch up with him, he points to the shadow and remarks wistfully that this was his past self.
- Somewhat common with Cylons in general due to their Resurrective Immortality. Their reactions at coming across their own bodies vary between indifference, annoyance and sadness, depending on the circumstances of their deaths.
- While she didn't exactly discover it, Being Human (UK) establishes that the new character of Alex Millar is now a ghost when she joins vampire Hal in standing over her own dead body after Hal has been tricked into drinking blood from Alex's corpse.
- Continuum: In the first episode of the third season, Kira, having been protected from alterations to the timeline, steps outside and finds New Timeline Kira's dead body. Which on one level simplifies things, since it means there aren't two Kiras running around, but on a more immediate level is all kinds of worrying.
- The CSI: NY episode "Near Death" has a variation of the alternative dimension type. During his "limbo" period, Mac subconsciously visits and converses with each member of his team. When he gets to the M.E., he finds Sid about to remove a sheet from a body. He asks Sid to wait and wants to know if that's himself on the table. Sid says, "Only if you've given up." They continue talking, but the body is never shown.
- Doctor Who:
- In "The Space Museum", the Doctor and his companions land on a planet but they're Just One Second Out of Sync. While they're out of sync they wander around the museum and find their own stuffed bodies on display. When the timelines resync they go on the run from the authorities to make sure that they don't wind up dead.
- In "The Name of the Doctor", the Doctor says that a time traveler should always avoid this trope.
Doctor: When you are a time traveller, there is one place you must never go. One place in all of space and time you must never, ever find yourself.
Clara: Where?
Doctor: You didn't listen, did you? You lot never do. That's the problem. The Doctor has a secret he will take to the grave. It is discovered. He wasn't talking about my secret. No, no, no, that's not what's been found. He was talking about my grave. Trenzalore is where I'm buried.
Clara: How can you have a grave?
Doctor: Because we all do, somewhere out there in the future, waiting for us. The trouble with time travel, you can actually end up visiting. - Happens to the Twelfth Doctor in "Heaven Sent" hundreds of millions of times, although he doesn't realize that it's his skull and dust until it's almost time to die again.
- Happens a couple of times in Ghost Whisperer when someone realizes they're dead.
- The most common is a newly "born" ghost in the hospital, confused at everyone running around until they see the doctors pulling a sheet over their body.
- Melinda is helping a realtor who's being haunted by the ghost of her husband who believes (wrongly) she poisoned him. Melinda finds her after she smashed up her office in a rage. The husband shows up and the pair spend a few minutes bickering at each other... until it hits the woman she can see and hear him. Melinda sighs "I was trying to figure out how to tell you" and waves as the woman turns around to find her own body lying on the ground and realizes she accidentally electrocuted herself during her rampage.
- Good Omens (2019): On reading the address for his fourth delivery, the International Express Man steps out into a busy street where he'd previously had a close call, a truck screams past, and for a moment it looks like he made it again. Then the Fourth Horseman draws his attention to the mangled body next to him.
- Primeval has a time travel version: in the first episode, Captain Ryan calls Professor Cutter's attention to some remains in a ruined camp. Strangely for this trope, Ryan doesn't realize that one of the sets of remains they found was his own until the sixth episode after Cutter realises that they had just made the camp they encountered the first time.
- In the Space: 1999 episode "Ring Around the Moon", Carter and Koenig discover each other's corpses, perfectly preserved by vacuum, in a crashed Eagle on the other Moon.
- Stargate Atlantis: An Alternate Universe variant in "The Daedalus Variations", where the team get stuck on a version of the Daedalus that is randomly shifting through alternate dimensions. They stumble across the corpses of their alternate universe doppelgangers who had also become trapped and then starved to death, foreshadowing their eventual fate if they can't figure out a way to get back home.
- Stargate Universe has a variation in "Time". Rush discovers a skull on the jungle planet but does not realise until later that it belongs to a version of himself from an Alternate Timeline.
- In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Visionary", Chief O'Brien has several brief jumps into the future. By the end of the episode, O'Brien — or, at least, the O'Brien the episode ends with — has witnessed two alternate versions of himself die and come upon the sheet-covered corpse of a third. He's understandably somewhat freaked by this.
O'Brien: I've had a few brushes with death in my career, but... there was something about watching myself being killed. Feeling my own neck for a pulse that wasn't there.
- What kickstarts the plot of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Time's Arrow" is finding android Data's severed head in a cavern beneath San Francisco, with evidence suggesting it has been there for over five hundred years. When the crew attempts to comfort Data over this, he is instead delighted that he will have a "death" since it means he has a finite time to exist and won't see all of his friends live and die while he continues on forever. Also a notable aversion of Living Forever Is Awesome. Technically subverted; after the time-travel accident occurs that leaves Data's head in the nineteenth century, the rest of the crew return to their present with Data's body and are able to reactivate him using the salvaged head.
- Torchwood: In "Random Shoes", Eugene wakes up in the middle of a road after having died in a road accident, but due to his Ghost Amnesia, he doesn't realise that he's dead until he sees Torchwood hovering over his body.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): "Death Ship" has the crew of a starship finding a crashed ship with bodies looking just like their own, down to the ID cards. They speculate on what happened ranging from time travel to aliens playing tricks on them and the captain orders them to take off and land again and again to prove that they're not going to crash... and Rod Serling implies that they've become the Flying Dutchman of space.
Professional Wrestling
- This is one of the rarely-used mind games that The Undertaker employed to intimidate his opponents. Its most memorable use was against Diesel as part of their feud going into WrestleMania XII, when Diesel found a casket with himself inside it on the March 18th, 1996 episode of RAW.
Roleplay
- In We Are All Pokémon Trainers, when Tagg visits the PMD-B timeline he comes across the skeleton of his multiversal counterpart, entombed for 600 years after he died of old age. He chooses not to attempt attaining his memories because he figures it might be too traumatic.
Tabletop Games
- Curse of Strahd: During the "Death House" module, the party is tasked with going inside the haunted house by two children, Rose and Thorn, after being told that there's a monster in the house, and upon reaching a room in the attic find their skeletons, since their insane parents had locked them in there centuries ago and forgot about them. The children's ghosts then appear and attempt to possess the party if they try to leave, but the party can put their spirits to rest by placing them in the crypts that their parents already made for them in the house's basement.
Video Games
- In ARK: Survival Evolved, not only can you find your own dead body, you can harvest it for meat, assuming the surrounding carnivore fauna didn't do it before you.
- In the beginning of episode 2 of BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea, Elizabeth finds her own dead body, revealing that her Rapture version was killed by the Big Daddy immediately after the battle at the end of episode 1, which is a major problem, since by returning to an alternate reality where she had died before, Elizabeth has lost all of her reality-warping and dimension-hopping powers.
- Susan Ashworth dies at the very start of The Cat Lady, finding her own body three times in three different positions when she is in the land of the dead.
- CloverPit: A skull and four corpse pieces can be found and reassembled as special lucky charms. It's not spelled out who the corpse belongs to, but the game's Ironic Hell theming and lack of other characters makes the player character the most likely candidate.
- Diablo III: During the "Finding the Forgotten" event, inside the House of Corpses, several corpses are scattered, and a frightened woman called Lady Arsonia asks player(s) to help find her precious pendant. After checking several corpses, she will find the pendant and recognize the bearer as herself. Furious and refusing to believe that she is dead, she will attack the players as a unique ghost. Killing her ends the event.
- Downplayed in the sense that it's not complete death, but in Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, the Player Character "Aiba" is forcefully logged out after being attacked by an unknown creature in EDEN, manifesting as a semi-corporeal data mass with no idea what happened to their body — until they visit a secret ward in the local hospital and find victims of "EDEN Syndrome", a coma-like sickness which only affects those who were logged into the virtual world. It is here they discover their physical body, and they realize they're a victim of EDEN syndrome too — it is later revealed that the creature which attacked them is the culprit behind EDEN Syndrome, but Aiba's narrow escape (they were attacked while logging out, as opposed to the other victims whom were ambushed unawares and never got the chance to start the logout process) allowed their mental data to escape to the physical world as a Liminal Being. From this point on, one of Aiba's goals is to return to their body somehow, since, despite their "Half-Cyber Body" having some neat abilities, they're also on limited time before their mental data disperses completely and they face a Cessation of Existence. Unfortunately, they ultimately fail due to pushing their Half-Cyber body over the limit to save their friends but Alphamon is able to create a copy of Aiba by using the scraps of mental data they found and combined them with the memories from Aiba's Digimon companions, and sending it back to their body to revive them.
- In Dungeon Crawl, Felids are playable cats who have multiple lives. They start with one extra life, and gain more as they gain levels; when killed, they will revive elsewhere on the level. Should you go back to wherever you died, you'll find your own corpse. (In previous versions, you could even butcher and eat your own corpse. Or turn it into a zombie. Or eat the flesh off your corpse and reanimate the skeleton.)
- During the main quest of Enderal, one of your companions is startled to find your own dead body (alongside the body of a companion who died during the prologue) in an ancient underground temple, though you both quickly come to the conclusion that it's an illusion sent by the High Ones to confuse and deceive you. It's not.
- In Everspace 2, in the Khione system Adam finds several shipwrecks belonging to previous clone iterations of himself, some of whom got themselves killed before even making it out of the Clone Carrier which produced them.
- In Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, Choushiro Kirishima sees the events that lead to his death prior to the game and looks down at his own body on the ground, where he woke up at the start of his story with no memory of how he got there.
- In Fear & Hunger, it is possible to be transported into a pocket dimension, where the protagonist can then explore to find a grave with their name on it, and dig it up to find their own partially skeletonized corpse.
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach features an ending in which Vanny is unmasked post-death, confirming that she is Vanessa, the PizzaPlex's Head of Security. However, a post-credits scene shows another Vanessa standing on top of the burning PizzaPlex looking down at the sight with a shocked expression. One way to read this is that the second Vanessa is a ghost staring at her own dead body.
- This happens frequently enough in Ghost Trick that one of the first things Sissel says to ghosts he runs into is, "You're the person lying on the ground there". This also applies to Sissel himself, who kicks off the game waking up in a junkyard to see his own corpse lying on the ground. As it turns out, that wasn't his corpse. He does see his corpse not long after, but it's still moving around because of ghost powers.
- Invoked in Grand Theft Auto V's "Bury The Hatchet" mission if you play as Michael, where the next to final objective involves you going to Michael's grave. Subverted, as it is Brad who is Dead All Along.
- In Journey to the Savage Planet, if you die without any materials, you can not only go back to where you died, but scan it with your visor to add it to the index.
- The only (non-holographic) body in Lost Ember is the skeleton found in the opening sequence. The spirit you're following believes it's his, but reconsiders after seeing that the name on the amulet clutched in its hand doesn't belong to him. The appearance of Kalani's spirit immediately after leads him to conclude that the body is Kalani's, and your character is her reincarnation, keeping the trope intact. The Reveal at the end confirms that the body was his after all.
- In the Dark Side of the Moon mode of Moonbase Alpha, you can potentially hallucinate seeing your own corpse when you contract Space Madness. But it’s just a hallucination. Right?
- You and the one other survivor in The Persistence have corpses of their original bodies placed somewhere around the ship for you to discover. Your body doesn't do anything, but sucking the DNA from your friend's body lets you clone them and use their statistics.
- In Returnal, Selene Vassos crash lands on the alien world of Atropos and discovers her dead body, learning she already died on the planet. After the first death, you can find other bodies from previous runs which have scout reports from later timelines. If you're connected online, you can find dead players and scavenge their bodies at the cost of Ether, or avenge them and fight a Malformed miniboss to get more Ether and better loot.
- Serena (Senscape) strongly implies that the corpse in the armoire belongs to the narrator, explaining his initial reluctance to open the armoire and see its contents. At first he panics and believes he killed his wife, the title character (especially since the body is desiccated enough that an immediate identification isn't possible), but the end of the game suggests it was the other way around. The clock on the wall also stops when you find it.
- In Adam Cadre's Shrapnel, the player can die repeatedly and find the resulting corpses. This is because you're stuck in a Time Crash caused by the accidental destruction of a time machine. Those bodies are technically from deaths that occurred in alternate timelines.
- SIGNALIS: In the Memory and Promise endings Elster can find her own corpse inside the ship, confirming she's not the original Elster but either a construct of Ariane's mind or another Elster with the original's resurfaced memories. Which is which is just as up to interpretation as the rest of the game.
- A possible outcome of an archaeological expedition in Stellaris. This earns the leading scientist a unique archaeology debuff.
- You can visit the future version of your vessel in Sunless Skies, find it a frozen wreck lost with all hands, and loot the navigation chart. You can go on a similar dive in the expansion for Sunless Sea by the same company, but Sea's stronger theme works against the game here, as Sea is about sea stories and sailors' tales where Skies is about any weird crap in space, and finding your own corpse doesn't really work in a sea story.
- The System Shock Infinite mod for System Shock 2 begins with the unmodded game's final battle, then with the unmodded game's opening but with subtle changes plus your own corpse next to the word "FOREVER" written on a wall in blood. It's rad.
- In a variation, Yuyuko Saigyouji of Touhou Project is aware that she's dead and a ghost, but doesn't realize that the body under the demonic cherry tree that she seeks to resurrect is her own due to Ghost Amnesia until the end of her boss battle in Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom. Furthermore, actually succeeding in resurrecting her body would not only be undoing all the good her death did after she was Driven to Suicide because of her powers to control the spirits of the dead, since her body was then used to seal said tree, but also destroy her ghost completely.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has a moment where Eunie discovers a husk that looks similar to herself, even carrying a dogtag with the same name. Not long after, Eunie has flashbacks of a time where she was in a different colony and attacked by a Moebius, which undeniably led to her death. This moment has her shaking whenever the thought comes back to her, including when she remeets the Consul that turned into the Moebius that killed her. It turns out that basically anyone was capable of doing this, as Kevesi and Agnians who die in battle are reborn to continue fighting. While Eunie's situation is rare, it's not unique, as a few other characters can acquire de ja vu or even regain all their memories depending on what from their old life reignites their memory.
Visual Novels
- In Zero Time Dilemma, Sigma and Diana transport themselves to another timeline and find the bodies of their alternate selves.
Webcomics
- In The Boy Who Fell, any nagging doubt Ren has over being dead and trapped in Hell is sadly quashed when he receives a vision of a students crowding around his corpse after falling from the school roof. Later, it turns out that the vision was an illusion made by Lord Devil; Ren is still alive, and the reason why he's in Hell is actually because Lord Devil had him dragged there.
- In Drowtales, Diva'ratrika has a fairly blase reaction
to her own body, and comments that at least she dressed up before killing herself so she could escape her daughter's involuntary confinement in her tower via Grand Theft Me of her servant.
- Gunnerkrigg Court:
- A variation during the flashback to Mort's death, young Mort sees his own helmet, bloodied, while he's still wearing one.
- In Chapter 92, a bald robot-turned-human is stabbed to death by a memory of Jeanne. While onlookers are still processing what happened, they turn up behind them.
- Homestuck has Dave discover the body of an alternate Dave and while he at first acts nonchalant about it and shoves it out a window he stares at his blood covered hands for quite a while after.
- In Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi, Blossom is fatally wounded during the battle with Mandark and sees her body being cradled by Dexter. Just as Grim is about to take her into the afterlife, Dee Dee shows and convinces Grim to give Blossom a chance to go back.
- Swords:
- The ghost of a warrior discovers his own dead body in CXCV - "Slay It Forward", though it takes him a moment to realize it.
- A wraith discovers his in CCCXXXVIII - “Days of Stabbings Past”, but he’s been dead for a long time, so instead of being frightened, he just finds it amusing.
- The ghost of a warrior discovers his own dead body in CXCV - "Slay It Forward"
Web Videos
- Drb0sch: In "under", the player encounters his Dead Alternate Counterpart from this alternate timeline: a corpse labeled "Heironymous B." wearing an exact copy of his own outfit. Creepily, a glimpse of his Pip-Boy in an earlier video shows that his character is actually named "H. Bosch", meaning the game did not simply copy his character's name to give to the corpse...
Western Animation
- BoJack Horseman: "The View from Halfway Down" takes place in a recurring dream of BoJack's, where he attends a dinner party and show with his deceased friends. However, there are signs that something is different in this dream, as it doesn't end where it usually does and BoJack keeps coughing up sludge. BoJack speaks with Secretariat (who also represents BoJack's father), who reveals to BoJack that he's not going to wake up, flicking a cigarette into a pool... showing BoJack the floating silhouette of his drowned body. However, the next episode reveals this as a subversion, as BoJack gets found and rescued from the pool.
- In the two-part G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero episode "Worlds Without End", a few members of the team found themselves in an Alternate Universe where the world was taken over by Cobra. Grunt and Steeler (who weren't with the group that discovered the alternate timeline) stumble upon the skeletons of three Joes. They're shocked to discover one of them is Clutch (who's also with the group) while the other two are themselves.
- Miraculous Ladybug: In "Cat Blanc", when Ladybug travels to the Bad Future, she finds herself cataclysmed into a fragile statue in the ruins of Paris, courtesy of the titular villain.