Dan Aykroyd Recalls Seeing 7 Dead Bodies at a Funeral Home as a Child: 'I'll Never Forget That'

Dan Aykroyd said the eerie childhood experience came immediately after his first time performing on stage and "turned me right off performance" for some time

Dan Aykroyd is recalling an eerie childhood experience.

Saturday Night Live legend Aykroyd, 71, appeared on the latest episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade's Fly on the Wall podcast to talk about his experiences over decades of performing in comedy and on the screen. During the episode, Aykroyd spoke about the first time he ever felt interested in the performing arts as a child — and how his childhood friends brought him to a funeral home to view dead bodies immediately afterward.

"I'm in grade three, and they're doing an Irish St. Patrick's Day concert and they compelled me to learn 'McNamara's Band.' So they put me in a green bowler and a green vest and green pants and leprechaun shoes, put me out on stage with a sync track, they made me learn it," he shared on the podcast. "So the concert comes and I go to the concert and I start singing — I remember it vividly — and I finish and I give the tap dance finish and they're howling, the crowd."

Aykroyd recalled feeling surprised by how much the audience seemed to enjoy his performance immediately afterward until his two friends proposed leaving the church hall where the concert was staged.

"There was a big applause, they take me off stage and I'm thinking 'Wow, that was very, very interesting,' and then two of my friends come up and say 'Hey, that was nothing man,' like the bad donkeys in Pinocchio," he recalled.

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Aykroyd said he and his young friends went to a funeral home to view seven dead bodies as the home prepared for a funeral. An entire family had drowned after a car crash, as Aykroyd recalled.

"So I go from from the elation of singing 'McNamara's Band' and getting cheered, to two minutes later, walking into the funeral home where seven bodies are laid out," he said. "Seven. The father, the mother, the brothers, the sisters."

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"I'll never forget that as long as I live. He rolled his car in [a river] and drowned. So they bring me from my performance, euphoria, to... whoa," he added, noting the experience turned him away from performing for a time. "I didn't do any jigs for years and years afterward. That turned me right off performance." 

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Aykroyd did not avoid performing for too long. By age 17, the Canadian native was performing as a professional comedian in Toronto. He also stood out as the youngest member of Saturday Night Live's original cast when it debuted in 1975, per his biography on Second City's website. Aykroyd went on to star in SNL's first four seasons and has written in appeared in beloved movies like The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters and Coneheads.

Aykroyd's experience in that funeral home also came back in a roundabout way; he played a funeral home owner in the two 1990s My Girl movies, in which he co-starred with Jamie Lee Curtis. He is next expected to appear in the upcoming Ghostbusters sequel Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

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