1Crash Test
For decades universities and automobile manufacturers have used human cadavers to get realistic crash test results.
2. According to one researcher, ancients such as Alexander the Great were sometimes buried in honey. After about a hundred years, candied corpses were supposedly dug up and eaten as medicine.
3. Before the introduction of the catacombs, there was once a cemetery so overflowing with bodies in central Paris that they made soap with the fat of the corpses and had houses with bones protruding from the rooftops of adjacent houses.
4. In 1983, Peter Reyn-Bardt, confessed to the murder and dismemberment of his wife after a corpse was discovered in the town peat bog. The body was then dated to 1740 A.D. and Reyn-Bardt tried to retract his confession but was still convicted.
5. Lenin’s dead body is bathed and dressed in new clothes every year. His tomb is in the center of Moscow open to the public, despite his death wish to be buried next to his wife.
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6Ho Chi Minh
The Russians have done such a good job of embalming Lenin that the Vietnamese fly Ho Chi Minh’s corpse to Russia once a year to “refresh” him.
7. When researchers from Texas State University left a human corpse on a 26-acre woodland site to study how human bodies decompose in the wild, they ended up capturing the first image of a deer eating human remains.
8. Doctors still have no concrete idea how to define death. Science has observed “beating heart corpses” that can urinate; their bodies rumble, their wounds heal; they can blush and sweat, and can even have babies. Yet, clinically, they are dead. One method to determine death has won a Nobel Prize.
9. As of 2018, most of the early cryonics companies that froze dead bodies for future revival had gone out of business, and their stored corpses have been thawed and disposed of.
10. In the 1880s, coffins were equipped with a “cemetery gun” to kill grave robbers. The gun would be set up in front of the grave with 3 tripwires attached to it. If someone triggered a tripwire the gun would turn and fire in the direction or whatever tripwire was pulled, killing the person.
11Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln’s corpse was sent on a two-week funeral tour across America, shown openly to thousands. In the course of the trip, the body visibly decomposed, bloated, and darkened. In New York City alone, the body was seen by over 150,000 and exposed to the air for 23 hours straight.
12. North Korean “Ghost Ships” often wash up on Japanese shores full of corpses. They are often always fisherman trying to fulfill government-mandated unattainable quotas of fish to catch. They risk staying out long and straying too far from shore on their boats with unreliable engines. When the engine dies at sea far from help, everyone starves and the boat drifts toward Japan because of currents/wind.
13. The production of Apocalypse Now had actual dead bodies on set, from someone who supplied bodies to medical schools for autopsies. It turned out he was a grave robber.
14. In 2010, during a heatwave Siberian bears began to dig up cemeteries and eat human corpses.
15. “Jim Wilson” is the American Airlines code for coffin or cadaver shipments.
16Charles Byrne
Charles Byrne (aka “The Irish Giant”) fearing grave robbers would steal and dissect his body after his death, requested in 1783 that his coffin be weighed down and buried at the bottom of the sea. Before burial, his corpse was stolen, dissected and his skeleton is still on display to this day.
17. In 2011, it was discovered by police that the 26 life-sized “dolls” that Russian academic Anatoly Moskvin kept in his apartment each contained a child’s corpse. He had dug them up, planning to resurrect them through magic, and built the dolls to give them a body for their resurrection.
18. In 2002, a scandal involving the Tri-State Crematory in Georgia garnered national attention. It was revealed that its owner would just dump the corpses all over his ranch instead of cremating them. Investigators found over 300 decomposing bodies on his property.
19. The Cadaver Synod was the posthumous trial of Pope Formosus. His corpse was dug up and found guilty, and his papacy voided. His corpse was then thrown in the River Tiber but became a source of miracles. His trial was then overturned and he was reburied, but a later pope upheld the conviction.
20. William the Conqueror’s body exploded at his funeral. He had died due to an intestinal infection from his horse rearing and throwing him against his saddle pommel. At his funeral, as his too large body was being forced into a too-small coffin, his abdomen burst. Mourners ran to escape the stench.
21Deceased Actress
The skeleton found by Tuco in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” inside the wrong coffin at Sad Hill cemetery, was a real human skeleton. A deceased Spanish actress wrote in her will she wanted to act even after her death.
22. In the 1880s and 1890s, a camel roamed the Arizona desert for a decade with a corpse strapped to its back.
23. A man in Florida man named Carl Tanzler dug up the body of the “love of his life” Elena “Helen” Milagro de Hoyos, essentially taxidermied her, and then lived with her corpse in his home for 7 years.
24. The World’s oldest mummies are not from Egypt. They are from the Chincorro people of the Atacama Desert, present-day Chile and these mummies date back to 5000 B.C., nearly 2000 years before the Egyptians. These mummies are now turning into gelatinous black slime due to bacterial growth associated with increasing humidity.
25. The oldest genetic proof of malaria was found in King Tutankhamun’s body. He had more than one strain of malaria, indicating that he had multiple infections throughout his life. The strains belonged to the most virulent and deadly form of the disease.