Cruise ship singer reveals morbid reason behind free ice cream parties

A former cruise ship singer has revealed the morbid reason vessels go about giving away quick-fire bursts of free ice cream to passengers. And it is rather tragic.

Dara Starr Tucker, an American singer, used to perform on cruise ships a decade ago.

It saw her live on board the huge vessels while they sailed around the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. Sounds lush to be fair.

But life on board a cruise ship is not all sunshine and rainbows. Oh no, some times real life hits you like a heavy sack of potatoes right where it hurts.

Tucker regularly speaks about her cruise singing career over on TikTok. She's one of a growing crowd of former cruise ship workers speaking about their time on board the ships.

In one of her more recent videos, she reveals the bleak reason why cruise ships host 'free ice cream parties'.

The video was spurred on by a question from one of her followers.

One TikTok user asked Tucker that if the 'amount of ice cream available suddenly goes up it means they need more freezer space for a body'.

Tucker responded to the social media account, confirming the grim hunch.

She said: "Okay, this is unfortunately often true. If the crew suddenly makes a bunch of ice cream available to the passengers, free ice cream party, it's often because more people have died on the ship then they have room for in the morgue.

"And I don't know why when I talk about cruise ship stuff it gets morbid so quickly but this is true.

"I was a singer on a cruise ship about 10 years ago and I lived on a ship in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean for about six months.

"Thankfully we didn't have to deal with this kind of stuff but we were friends with some crew members who did.

"And they said maybe four to 10 people die every cruise. There are a lot of older people on ships and often people die on cruises.

"So four to 10 people on a ship like ours that carry about 2,500 to 3,000 passengers on a typical cruise.

"The morgue, I believe they said held about seven people and if more than seven people died on that particular ship they would have to start moving bodies to the freezer which meant they needed to make room in the freezer.

"So they would have to take out a lot of the ice cream and other frozen goods in order to make room for the other bodies."

One person commented on the video saying: "Cruise ship medic here. Can confirm the morgue and ice cream correlation."

Another wrote: "Four to 10 every time?!"

A third said: "I swear every cruise fact I learn makes me want to go on one less."

And a fourth added: "Is this sanitary? Do they disinfect the cooler? So many questions."