A funeral director has been banned from working with hospitals in Leeds after a mother said she was left screaming when she found her dead baby propped up “watching” cartoons at the woman’s home.

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

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

Leeds teaching hospitals NHS trust said it barred Upton from its mortuaries and maternity wards in spring this year.

A Facebook page for Florrie’s Army said it offered a baby funeral service as well as providing clothing, handprints and photographs.

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 “brilliant”.

She told the BBC as part of an investigation into Florrie’s 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’s home she said she was terrified to find her son’s body in the living room “watching” cartoons in a baby bouncer.

“I realised it were Bleu and she [Upton] says: ‘Come in, we’re watching PJ Masks.’ There’s a cat scratcher in the corner and I can hear a dog barking and there was another [dead] baby on the sofa. It wasn’t a nice sight.

“I rang my mum and I’m saying: ‘This ain’t right’ … I was screaming down the phone [saying]: ‘It’s mucky, it’s dirty, he can’t stay here.’”

She said she was left upset and angry by the “weird” experience. “I didn’t want him in that house,” she said.

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’s home 5 miles away.

The woman told the BBC she believed her child’s body had not been kept at the correct temperature, saying it was “really smelly, like she’d been in there and not kept cool”.

The BBC reported seeing evidence that babies’ bodies were not being kept in a refrigerated cot, though Upton did have one. The woman’s mother said: “It was just crazy. If I told somebody of this story … they’d think it was a horror film.”

The hospitals trust said it had been notified of “several serious concerns” over the past few years, which had been raised with the police, external safeguarding services, relevant regulators and the coroner’s office.

The trust said it had been monitoring Upton’s attendance at Leeds’s two major hospitals, St James’s and Leeds General Infirmary, since 2021 and had since banned Upton from its maternity wards and mortuaries.

Rabina Tindale, the chief nurse at the trust, said: “Some families have believed services are linked to or supported by the trust. We must be clear that neither Amie Upton or Florrie’s Army is endorsed by, or associated with, Leeds teaching hospitals.

“Since 2021 we have had specific safeguarding measures in place, including monitoring Amie’s 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.”

In England 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.