Join in the Gruesome Fun of ‘We Bought a Funeral Home’

In the ultimate renovation horror story, We Bought a Funeral Home, the Blumberg family leaves their chic, modern home in Toronto for a new adventure in a quaint rural town. Their mission? To restore — and live in — a Victorian-era funeral home in the tiny Canadian burg of Dresden, Ontario, population 2,457.

The perpetually black-clad family of four includes mum Heather, dad Arryn, almost 19-year-old Rafferty and “12 going on 40” Noa, affectionately dubbed “Monkey” by her family. Add in their pack of Great Dane pups — Pork, Beans and Satan — and you have a full house, though admittedly a bit different from your average family unit.

“We’re a bunch of weirdos,” admits Heather. “We love Halloween, we’re huge horror fans.”

“I think we’re eccentric. A niche market if you will,” says the perpetually jaded Raff.

The Strange Beginnings of a Macabre Adventure

Heather spots a newspaper listing for the Second Empire-style funeral home offered at a “stupid price.” Five days later, her $570,000 offer — below asking price, by the way — is accepted, and the fearsome foursome find themselves the proud owners of a 12,000-square-foot, three-story brick behemoth with a widow’s walk, 38 rooms and a fetid swimming pool filled with frogs. And as paterfamilias Arryn notes, “I don’t like frogs.” This transitional resting place for the dearly departed comes with a chapel, a casket showroom (converted into Raff’s basement bedroom), a corpse elevator (soon to become a casket cocktail bar that can move between floors) and a mysterious yellow liquid snaking across the floor of the embalming room. “Body juice!” Noa shrieks in horror.

As the show’s narrator, Raff has the pitch-perfect teenage eye-rolling delivery as he recounts the many trials and tribulations that come with transforming this cavalcade of caskets and carnage into a cozy family home. “I can’t help [but] think about how many dead bodies came through this house in the past 100 years,” ponders Raff.

The discoveries are endless as the Blumbergs dig deeper into the home’s many nooks and crannies and its eerie history.

“It’s a little Silence of the Lambs down here,” dad Arryn notes of the ambiance in the creepy storage basement where casket shipping crates are piled up. Heather, a woman of incomparable inventiveness, thinks one of those shipping crates would make an ideal piece of artwork for the home. Heather is the design brain of the Blumberg reno operation and has all manner of ideas for how to take some of the accessories of funeral parlor life — including a casket and embalming instruments — and turn them into gory decor.

The Family That Renovates Together Stays Together

Did we mention they are living in the home while they renovate? Like many families going through a radical, and costly, renovation, the Blumbergs encounter all manner of complications in their ambitious undertaking (get it?), from a construction budget that quickly escalates from $250k to $400k, a burst water pipe that sends gallons of water spewing from their ceiling one night and nightly “hauntings” that turn out to be an unfortunate infestation of bats.

After interviewing a host of local contractors, the family settles on one brave soul, the likable, go-with-the-flow Dave, who also happened to work in the funeral parlor as a teenager.

“I had my doubts,” he tells Heather once he’s seen her gorgeous transformation of the funeral parlor’s embalming room into a cigar bar speakeasy. “You were right,” he admits as the incredible transformation unfolds.

But construction projects are not only plagued by structural and leaky, expensive surprises. Their funeral home redo is also marred by complications of Heather’s own making: With each new antique find, design redirection or flight of fancy, the renovation costs escalate. As she discovers new treasures — taxidermy! Creepy child artwork! Old doors! — Heather adds time, money and labor to an already slow process, Dave, with the patience of a saint, reminds her.

Curiouser and Curiouser: Buy a Funeral Parlor, Meet Your Neighbors

The Blumbergs soon find that their funeral home is a popular local attraction, meaning a good share of the Dresden community has wives, husbands, grandparents and assorted relations who have sadly passed away and through the pink carpeted, fluorescent-lit hallways and viewing rooms. And many of them have questions about why anyone, much less this goth lot from the big city, would want to shack up in a defunct funeral parlor.

On a stroll through the neighborhood, the Blumbergs discover the whole village is abuzz with speculation about their new digs. “Is it true you have a casket bar?” one neighbor asks.

There’s Beth, the former funeral home organist, whom the family cajoles into demonstrating her keyboard skills in their parlor after the local organ repairman whips their vintage electric Hammond into shape.

Neighbors are naturally curious and stop by with homemade pies and plenty of questions, including Linda, a lovely older lady who spikes Noa’s supernatural imagination by informing her that the home is most definitely haunted. Linda’s father was a funeral director there in the '40s when her family lived in the home, and she tells Noa about the resident-friendly ghost, the “Lady in Blue,” who frequents the home’s curved staircase and explains why the family dogs can’t stop growling at the stairs. “I wanted this house to be haunted really bad,” confesses Noa, who is delighted by the news that a friendly spirit dwells in their midst.

When Worlds Collide: Home Improvement Meets the Paranormal

“I hope there’s ghosts and monsters in the town!” says an excited Noa, early on in the Blumbergs’ haunted house adventure.

Thus begins another big adventure as Noa does a deep dive at the local Dresden library into the prior occupants of the funeral home. Convinced that either the Hicks or Clark family has left a ghost in their wake, Noa contracts a couple of paranormal experts to suss out whether the Lady in Blue is a genuine phantom or only a figment of the family’s imagination. The revelation about the actual woman who died in the home spooks the family almost as much as the bird skeletons in the fireplace, the bat infestation and the strange, bearded man who shows up one night on the home’s porch.

A Delightfully Gruesome Glam Goth Design

Part of the challenge for the Blumberg family is transforming the space without losing essential parts of its character, like the ornately hand-carved wooden fireplace mantel in the home’s parlor (where friends and family of the dearly departed once gathered).

“Victorian traditional with a dark twist” is how Heather envisions the style of the family’s first big project: a fancy, jewel-toned parlor that will serve as a gathering place for friends and family.

Sometimes Heather’s vision for holding onto the building’s original spirit can slightly skeeve out the rest of the family, like when she enlists Raff and Noa to turn a set of stainless steel embalming tools — some still holding “traces” of their former use — into a piece of art. Her plans for the former embalming room next to the parlor are equally unsettling and involve transforming that antiseptic white, fluorescent-lit operating room into a cigar bar.

But one of the home’s most dramatic transformations is undoubtedly the funeral home’s previous chapel and viewing room. Heather’s gothic imagination turns that sterile and character-less space into a massive living, dining, kitchen and coffee bar combination painted in tones of deepest black, ornamented with a panther coffee table, a vase of dead flowers and two statement pieces decorating the kitchen walls: wooden scythes of the sort carried by the Grim Reaper. In a stroke of imagination or madness, Heather transforms a room off the kitchen from its previous role as a casket holding area into a “sexy” pantry.

Flights of Fancy (and Taxidermy) Define the Blumbergs’ Sepulchral Style

And there’s more.

One of Heather’s final design touches is the funeral home’s entryway and receiving area, a depressing 1990s cavalcade of can lights, overwrought molding and the most overbuilt plant container in human record.

But Heather has a vision, and she’s enlisted her team of volunteers (aka her children) and professionals to help. One of her most delightful collaborators is Gary of Gary’s Gallery, a local antiques dealer who helps set Heather up on her daily picking runs with all manner of vintage treasures, including one of the original 1900s lamps from the funeral home.

Heather imagines the entry and hallway leading to the haunted staircase as an enchanted forest featuring locally sourced tree branches decorated with 2,000 butterflies and a forest floor where rabbits and squirrels frolic. A local artist paints a magical woodland mural on the wall leading up the staircase. And the ever-resourceful Heather finds an edgy taxidermist to help in carrying out her vision. Sourcing most of his squirrels and bunnies as roadkill, the scholarly stuffer provides a forest worth of furry critters for Heather’s fairy-tale naturescape, while also instructing the family on how to DIY their own eternal varmints.

Where to Watch We Bought a Funeral Home

But that’s just scratching the surface in this onion peel-layered renovation story filled with jump scares and ghosts, funeral home chic and gothic fun that you can catch in its entirety on discovery+.