Concealed with Art Simone · iHeart Podcasts Australia

Beyond The Grave ⚰️

·24 min·1 clip

“I am the Coffin Confessor” and he is hired by the deceased before they die.

1. Concealed with Art Simone follows Bill Edgar, the “Coffin Confessor,” as he explains a service built around funerals, secrets, and dead people’s final requests. 2. Bill Edgar appears as a Gold Coast, Queensland local, while Art Simone hosts the conversation and tries to work out what Bill is concealing. 3. The episode asks what it means to be hired by “the deceased” and to deliver a message at a funeral. 4. Bill says his motto is “Sit down, shut up, or fuck off,” and he says he has had to use it “quite a lot.” 5. He answers the alternate-universe question by saying he would still be himself, but “a cleaner,” because he is “always cleaning up other people’s shit.” 6. His answer to the meaning of life is “To avoid death,” which Art Simone uses to narrow down his job. 7. Bill finally identifies himself as Bill Edgar and says he is the Coffin Confessor, hired by the deceased to tell loved ones they were loved and to tell hated people to “fuck off.” 8. He explains that every person has “a skeleton in the closet,” and he reveals those secrets at the funeral. 9. Bill says the role began in 2018 after a dying man accepted his joke offer to crash the man’s funeral. 10. He says the work later expanded to viewings, pinpricking the body to confirm death, placing items in coffins, and clearing items from people’s homes. 11. Bill says he has been a private investigator for about 14 years, and he treats secrecy as part of his professional ethics. 12. He says he sits among mourners and stands up at a specific time to interrupt the service with his prepared announcement. 13. Bill says some funerals have had upset relatives, but the crowd often sides with him because they want to hear the message. 14. He says a contract and video record exist for each client, and he usually reads the letter aloud, returns it to the envelope, places it on the coffin, and leaves. 15. He says a report on Good Morning Britain led to 14,500 requests from the UK after 30 minutes on air. 16. Bill says he has “a hundred, nearly a thousand” people’s information waiting, and he keeps everything written down because he does not trust the internet. 17. He tells a story about a man whose grandmother’s funeral had the wrong coffin and wrong body, so the man wanted Bill to check the casket midway through his own service. 18. Bill says he played “Pop goes the weasel,” gave the wife a thumbs up, and she responded in hysterics because it was a private joke between them. 19. The conversation is direct, darkly comic, and full of Art Simone’s running reactions to death, secrecy, and the mechanics of a funeral interruption. 20. People who like strange professions, funeral stories, and deadpan Australian banter will get a lot from this episode. 21. People who want a conventional interview about grief or religion may skip it.

As heard by us

A light setup turns a Gold Coast hobby farmer into a coffin confessor with an unexpectedly strange line of work.

Art Simone sets up a neat contrast between how Bill looks and what he does. He comes across as a Gold Coast hobby farmer with a wife, two children, six grandchildren, and a fondness for the ocean and animals.

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Why you'd press play

You want a familiar-stranger confession where Bill looks clean-cut and ordinary, then reveals he is a coffin confessor with one very odd secret.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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