{"id":96491,"date":"2025-08-27T14:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T14:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/96491\/"},"modified":"2025-08-27T14:26:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T14:26:07","slug":"families-horror-at-funeral-director-who-kept-babies-bodies-at-home-leeds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/96491\/","title":{"rendered":"Families\u2019 horror at funeral director who kept babies\u2019 bodies at home | Leeds"},"content":{"rendered":"

A funeral director has been banned from working with hospitals in Leeds<\/a> after a mother said she was left screaming when she found her dead baby propped up \u201cwatching\u201d cartoons at the woman\u2019s home.<\/p>\n

Amie Upton has been banned from NHS<\/a> maternity wards and mortuaries in the city after keeping babies\u2019 bodies at her house in circumstances that a grandmother of another baby compared to a horror film.<\/p>\n

Upton, 38, told the BBC<\/a> she had only ever had two complaints while running a baby loss support and funeral service, Florrie\u2019s Army, named after her own baby who was stillborn in 2017. When contacted by the Guardian, Upton said she did not want to comment.<\/p>\n

Leeds teaching hospitals NHS trust said it barred Upton from its mortuaries and maternity wards in spring this year.<\/p>\n

A Facebook page for Florrie\u2019s Army said it offered a baby funeral service as well as providing clothing, handprints and photographs.<\/p>\n

Amie Upton said she started Florrie\u2019s Army in memory of her own stillborn daughter Photograph: Ben Lack Photography Ltd<\/p>\n

Zoe Ward contacted Upton after her baby boy Bleu died of brain damage at three weeks old in 2021, and said she thought the service sounded \u201cbrilliant\u201d.<\/p>\n

She told the BBC as part of an investigation into Florrie\u2019s Army that she had expected Bleu to be looked after in a professional setting, including in a refrigerated cot. However, when she visited Bleu at Upton\u2019s home she said she was terrified to find her son\u2019s body in the living room \u201cwatching\u201d cartoons in a baby bouncer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realised it were Bleu and she [Upton] says: \u2018Come in, we\u2019re watching PJ Masks.\u2019 There\u2019s a cat scratcher in the corner and I can hear a dog barking and there was another [dead] baby on the sofa. It wasn\u2019t a nice sight.<\/p>\n

\u201cI rang my mum and I\u2019m saying: \u2018This ain\u2019t right\u2019 \u2026 I was screaming down the phone [saying]: \u2018It\u2019s mucky, it\u2019s dirty, he can\u2019t stay here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

She said she was left upset and angry by the \u201cweird\u201d experience. \u201cI didn\u2019t want him in that house,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Another couple were led to believe their baby was being kept at a funeral home in Headingley until she could be buried but more than a week later were told their daughter was at Upton\u2019s home 5 miles away.<\/p>\n

The woman told the BBC she believed her child\u2019s body had not been kept at the correct temperature, saying it was \u201creally smelly, like she\u2019d been in there and not kept cool\u201d.<\/p>\n

The BBC reported seeing evidence that babies\u2019 bodies were not being kept in a refrigerated cot, though Upton did have one. The woman\u2019s mother said: \u201cIt was just crazy. If I told somebody of this story \u2026 they\u2019d think it was a horror film.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hospitals trust said it had been notified of \u201cseveral serious concerns\u201d over the past few years, which had been raised with the police, external safeguarding services, relevant regulators and the coroner\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

The trust said it had been monitoring Upton\u2019s attendance at Leeds\u2019s two major hospitals, St James\u2019s and Leeds General Infirmary, since 2021 and had since banned Upton from its maternity wards and mortuaries.<\/p>\n

Rabina Tindale, the chief nurse at the trust, said: \u201cSome families have believed services are linked to or supported by the trust. We must be clear that neither Amie Upton or Florrie\u2019s Army is endorsed by, or associated with, Leeds teaching hospitals.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince 2021 we have had specific safeguarding measures in place, including monitoring Amie\u2019s attendance when visiting deceased patients at the mortuary in her funeral service role. Any visitors to the mortuary are always accompanied by mortuary staff. Any handover of a body is undertaken in line with trust policies and procedures and takes place to an authorised funeral director.\u201d<\/p>\n

In England<\/a> and Wales, there are no regulations governing funeral homes, including how bodies should be handled or stored. Two professional associations, the National Association of Funeral Directors and the National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors, have a joint code of conduct, which includes standards for inspections, but membership is not compulsory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A funeral director has been banned from working with hospitals in Leeds after a mother said she was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-96491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}