Most of us think of human corpses as disgusting, creepy things that we would do everything in our power to keep away from. They remind us of our own inevitable mortality as they stare back at us with blank, gazing eyes. But under certain circumstances, people have shown an incredible ability to overcome this fear. Medical examiners and forensic pathologists, for example, are trained professionals who have learned to look beyond their initial squeamishness for a good cause.

While those people are professionals doing a job they’ve been hired and trained to do, others have less understandable, much weirder reasons for hanging around dead bodies—some can’t let go of a person they lost, while others might even actually enjoy being around corpses, as is the case with necrophiliacs. The line of distinction between the two is both one of purpose and legality. Here are ten people who actually lived with corpses for a while, usually under some pretty bizarre circumstances.

10 Robert Calvin Mark

The first corpse cohabitant on our list is a Tennessee man who recently received a knock at his door. Officers had shown up to arrest him for living with a dead body in his home without notifying authorities. (Yes, that’s illegal in Tennessee.) The arrest took place on December 3, 2018, after the police received a call asking to do a welfare check.

Agents with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation went into the home and found 72-year-old Dorris Ann Braithwaite dead on the floor.^[1] The man who lived there, Robert Calvin Mark, age 64, was arrested on the spot and is held on $750,000 bail for the crime of abusing a corpse. Doris, Robert’s girlfriend, had been dead for weeks or months, say authorities, judging by her state of decomposition.

Neighbors say they rarely saw Robert, and he largely kept to himself. They mentioned that they only really saw Robert when he came out to smoke a cigarette. Creepy.

9 Robert James Kuefler

Minnesota man Robert James Kuefler was open and honest about what he’d done, which was live with a corpse. He lived with two of them, actually, for over a year. The corpses in question were the bodies of his mother and his twin brother.^[2]

How Kuefler covered this up would have been a mystery if he hadn’t been so forthcoming. He explained to authorities and reporters that he wrote Christmas cards to other family members explaining that both were in poor health and that they couldn’t speak on the phone, and somehow, the family bought it. The man mentioned that his mother died in August 2015 and that his brother died a few months before that, and he just couldn’t let go. Traumatized, he kept both bodies until he was found out in September 2016.

Police say that the brother’s body was mummified and that the mother’s body was basically a skeleton by the time they got there, as revealed by court documents. It took several weeks to identify the bodies, but the medical examiner said that, while they couldn’t find an exact cause of death, the deceased did, in fact, die from natural causes, and murder was ruled out.

8 Matthew Schmarr

In 2017, when the authorities were finally able to open the door of the residence of a New Jersey man named Matthew Schmarr, they had no idea of the shocking scene they were about to uncover. There, they found two beds across from one another, one with Mattehew Schmarr, 35, and another with the dead body of a 52-year-old woman. She had been dead for three days.^[3]

The story turns out to be rather tragic. On March 18, Schmarr was babysitting for a friend when he decided to drive to another town to buy various drugs, including crack and heroin, leaving the child in the home in the care of the 52-year-old. The woman was alive when he returned, but by the time the child’s mother picked the youngster up, Schmarr had discovered that the woman was dead.

Afterward, he tried to manipulate the scene, arranging it to make it look like a suicide, and sold the woman’s laptop to get rid of evidence (and probably make a little cash). When police first showed up at the door, no one answered. They retrieved a key from Matthew’s neighbor and were able to gain access to uncover their terrifying find.

7 Doris Kirby

People who live with dead bodies aren’t always men, and they don’t always do it intentionally, or even consciously. Sometimes, the elderly end up doing so completely incidentally and tragically can’t help it. Such is the case with Doris Kirby, whose husband died in 2014 after suffering from numerous health problems.^[4] The couple lived in poor health in Alabama, and she stayed by her husband until the end.

But Doris Kirby suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and her husband took care of her at home. When he died, Doris was already so far gone that she lived with her husband’s corpse for months before the police did a wellness check. When they peered through a window into the house, they saw the dead man inside. They also found two dogs that had starved to death. Poor Doris Kirby had progressed hopelessly far in her Alzheimer’s disease and simply couldn’t make it without him. But they stayed together as long as they could, and that counts for something special, I think.

6 Rhode Island Man

Then, in a twisted case of events, 1,900 kilometers (1,200 mi) away, the same thing would happen again only a few days later, when a 71-year-old man called the fire department. He was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and the reason he called was unreported, but upon their arrival, the fire department discovered his wife’s dead body, which had been in the basement for at least two days. He was living with her corpse and completely unaware of it, tragically.

Yet again, the authorities found a dead dog in the basement, but they saw no signs of foul play and expected that both the dog and the 67-year-old woman had died of natural causes, after which the man just stayed with them.^[5]

5 David Hall

A man in Monroe County, Michigan, was arrested for living with the body of his deceased girlfriend for a month. The man, David Hall, was 49 years old, and his girlfriend, Kandance Simmons, was 56 when she died there in December 2017, but police wouldn’t make the discovery until January 2018. Simmons had a history of health issues, and the police saw no signs of violence or foul play, yet again, but David just decided to keep her corpse tightly locked up in his bedroom.

When the police entered the apartment, they found Kandace’s corpse on the bed. Hall was, of course, arrested and brought up on charges of concealing a death. Authorities say that David Hall had absolutely no explanation for why the corpse of his girlfriend had been in his home just lying there for a whole month.^[6]

4 Alfred Guerrero

In October 2015, the police responded to a call about a terribly foul and rancid odor coming from a hotel room in Ontario, California. When they arrived and knocked on the door, the man who had lived there for over two years, Alfred Guerrero, opened the door, and they asked him about the smell, noticing flies everywhere in the room. The man refused to answer any of their questions, so they took him outside and performed a check on the hotel room.

Inside, they stumbled upon a dead body somewhere in the room and phoned for detectives to investigate the scene. The corpse had been there for several days. There were no obvious signs of a cause of death, even though it was extremely suspicious that he was not at all forthcoming and would not talk to police. Even with this, the police let Guerrero go and released him without charges.^[7]

3 Michael Eugene Sticken

The date was May 13, 2015, and the police were called to the residence of Joyce Willis, who lived with her son, Michael Eugene Sticken, a Florida man. As they approached the door, they were immediately hit with a pungent odor that immediately appalled them. They instantly knew something was wrong.^[8] The officers walked in to find the 81-year-old Joyce dead, just sitting there on the couch. It was straight out of the movie Psycho.

As it turns out, Michael kept her there so that he could survive off her Social Security checks. The medical examiner did an autopsy and concluded that she had been dead at least a month and no more than four months. Michael Eugene Sticken was placed under arrest and taken to the county jail.

2 Dennis McCauley

In April 2013, yet another Michigan man was surprised by a knock at the door when the police showed up to ask questions. The 64-year-old, Dennis McCauley, would be arrested and brought up on charges for failure to report a death when police discovered he had been living with his deceased girlfriend for months.^[9] He was also charged with larceny, uttering and publishing (which is basically a bit like forgery), and identity theft, as he was collecting and using her Social Security checks.

When a friend noticed that the dead woman, Ann Marquis, hadn’t been around for months, she started to fear that her friend might be dead, so she asked Dennis McCauley, the man she lived with, where she’d been. McCauley told the woman that Ann had moved out. After Ann died, McCauley fell behind on the bills and went on that way for months with her dead inside the trailer. A court officer finally showed up to knock on the door to serve an eviction notice, and no one answered, but when he peered inside the window, he saw her corpse sitting inside, decomposing.

1 Belgian Woman

The Belgian authorities didn’t release the name of the woman who committed the act, but the dead man’s name was Marcel H., and he was found as mummified as she was bereaved. The unnamed woman was Marcel’s wife when he died in November 2012 and simply could not handle the loss at 69 years old. Marcel was gone, and there was nothing she could do about it. But that didn’t mean she had to let him go—so she kept him . . . for a year. The unnamed Belgian woman decided to keep her husband as if he had never died. She let him “sleep” in the bed with her as if nothing had happened, as if he was still there, still present, still a thinking, living person.^[10]

But she hadn’t paid the rent in over a year. The man mummified during that time, and the body didn’t smell anymore. His corpse was found dressed and laid in the bed, where she slept. She simply didn’t care. She just wanted her husband to still be there, and that’s all that mattered to her. Marcel H. would end up spending both his life and death with his living wife.

I like to write about weird, dark stuff, and history.

The term “apophenia” is defined as the tendency to see things that are not really there. Seeing figures in the clouds or a face in some random object are examples of apophenia. While this error usually has no serious consequences, sometimes it does; even soldiers have confused simple natural phenomena with enemy attacks.^[1]

It happens that the human brain can develop this process as a way to recognize potential threats, according to what we already know about them. And we all know that the experience of finding a corpse is both unpleasant and undesirable, so confusing certain objects with dead bodies is also the result of the aforementioned tendency.

But when the object that lends itself to confusion has a human form, for example a dummy or a doll, everything gets worse. Its realistic appearance, almost human, is capable of making anyone think that they have found a dead body. This list will focus on ten of those cases, where false bodies were even able to deceive experts and make them believe that they were in front of a corpse.

SEE ALSO: 10 People Who Actually Lived With Human Corpses

10 Underwater Tea Party

Imagine you are calmly diving on a picturesque spring day, when suddenly, you find yourself face to face with the skeletons of two people lying at the bottom of the river. That is what happened to a snorkeler named Martin Sholl, while diving in the waters of the Colorado River (Arizona) in May 2015. When the diver descended to the very bottom of the river, there he discovered two skeletons sitting on chairs. The corpses were partially covered with sediment and the chairs were tied to heavy rocks.^[2]

Sholl did not hesitate to call the authorities, who promptly responded to the warning thinking that the case was a real crime. A diver from La Paz County’s local fire department was sent to investigate the skeletal remains, which were facing each other as if they were having a tea party. In the end, the alleged bodies turned out to be just plastic skeletons placed there on purpose. Both had sunglasses on, while one also wore a wig.

Later, a couple from Phoenix (Arizona) confessed to the authorities that they were the ones who put the skeletons in the river, just for fun. As it was not a truly illegal activity, the Sheriff’s Office in the area decided not to file charges against the couple. Finally, it was decided that the skeletons were left there as a tourist spot. However, Martin Sholl was deeply upset that the news sites did not give him due credit for the discovery of the skeletons. So he went down again to retrieve the plastic figures and take them home, with the intention of not returning them to the river until after Halloween.

9 When A Cop Did Not Think Twice

This past February, a passerby in East London (England) noticed what at first glance looked like a corpse inside an art gallery, lying on the floor next to a noose hanging from the ceiling. Horrified, the witness immediately notified the local authorities of what he had just seen. A team of paramedics and police officers soon appeared at the scene.^[3]

A recording from security cameras on the building shows a police officer breaking into the gallery by smashing a glass door. Immediately, the officer approaches the “crime scene,” but there was no body. In fact, the corpse was actually a mannequin made of clothes, papers and wires.

The display was the work of Kollier Din Bangura, an artist from Sierra Leone who made the art installation as a way of expressing the adversities suffered by refugees. When the police verified that it was a simple mannequin, the paramedics entered to see it for themselves.

As an apology, the officers left a note saying: “Police forced entry by smashing the window due to getting calls from members of the public regarding a dead body inside the building. If you have any issues please write to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.” Din Bangura was notoriously upset by the situation, claiming that there were posters on all the doors warning that it was an art exhibition.

8 Man Overboard!

On February 6 of this year, a boater was sailing along the south coast of Vancouver Island (Canada), when early in the afternoon he noticed something that negatively caught his attention. From the sea, he saw a person slumped on the rocks on the beach shoreline. It was dressed in an orange survival suit and did not move. The tumultuous conditions of the water and the rugged terrain of the coast did not allow the boater to get closer to see if it was a person or something else.^[4]

So to take no risks, the navigator called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The authorities soon went to the beach in question, expecting the worst. But to their relief, the cops discovered that there was no body: it was a dummy from the Department of National Defense (DND). It is unknown if the mannequin was lost during a training exercise, or if it fell off a navy ship in the area, being dragged to the shore.

In a joking tone, the RCMP stated that the dummy suffered “only minor abrasions,” but that its health was “in good condition otherwise.” The local police sergeant thanked the boater for reporting the sighting, which in any other case could have been a real emergency. In the end, the dummy returned to the DND.

7 The Neighbor Who Took Halloween Seriously

For many people around the world, Halloween is usually the date in which they can make their creative ingenuity shine. That day, everyone strives to have the best costumes and themed decorations of the neighborhood. But maybe, in their eagerness to take care of every last detail, some go too far.

In 2017, the local police in Greene County (Tennessee) received calls from several frightened residents who thought they had seen a dead man outside a house. According to the neighbors who called 911, there was “a person lying in a driveway with bloody handprints on the garage.”^[5]

The officers went to the house and noticed that there was indeed a body lying on the ground, with his head crushed by the garage door. But as soon as they investigated it closely they realized that it was actually a dummy filled with straw. The “fatal victim” turned out to be a very well crafted Halloween decoration.

According to the creator of the decoration, he did it because Halloween is his favorite time of the year, but he never expected the neighbors to take the dummy so seriously. The police warned the residents that it was just a realistic display for the occasion, and urged them to congratulate the neighbor for such a great -and spooky- idea.

6 All For A Foot

In early January of this year, a resident of the city of Edmonton in Alberta (Canada) told the police that, while he was taking out the trash, he saw a dead body inside a dumpster. Police officers arrived at the alley where the dumpster was, along with homicide detectives and forensics professionals.
Then the police confirmed that there was a human foot visible in the dumpster, although the rest of the body was covered with a blanket. The whole place was cordoned off and the police stayed there for hours trying to solve the crime scene. Some officers even went house to house in the neighborhood asking residents if they had seen anything suspicious.^[6]

The initial hypothesis the authorities handled was that the body corresponded to a homeless person who fell asleep inside the dumpster and died of hypothermia . But they soon realized that he or she was not homeless, there was not a case of hypothermia, and there was not even a human body in the dumpster. It was only a mannequin burned and melted, which was later wrapped in a blanket and one of its feet was exposed.

The reason why the forensics unit could not determine before that it was not a dead body, is that the law does not allow tampering a potential crime scene with ease. In the end the police closed the case and everything was nothing but a scare. It seems that this year Canada has been busy with dummies fooling their authorities.

5 The Headless Man

It is quite difficult to distinguish a corpse from a dummy when you can hardly see anything, let alone when the creator of the dummy purposely makes it look like a dead body. On April 16, 2018, a passerby was walking near the river Rems in southern Germany, when he saw what looked like a decapitated body lying on the riverbank, with blood stains everywhere. A police patrol that was in the area also saw the body and reported it.^[7]

It was not easy to reach the site where the body was located. It was already night, and the corpse was at one end of an inaccessible drainage pipe. So the police needed help, and in fact, 20 firefighters arrived at the place to recover the body. It was then, once they got close enough, that the authorities understood that it was another ingenious dummy. In addition to the blood on the clothes, the dummy also had its legs tied. Although the causes behind the creation of such false body remained unclear, the authorities said they had little intention of continuing with the case.

4 “A Recreational Mannequin”

Engineers were working in southwestern Ohio in September 2018, when some of them spotted a woman’s body near a forest preserve. The body was abandoned in a hillside, wrapped in a garbage bag. Cops from Colerain, a township near the preserve, went to the site after being alerted by the worried engineers.^[8]

There the police recovered the body and took it out of the plastic bag, to end up noting that it was a false alarm. Authorities said the body was actually a “recreational mannequin,” or in other words, a sex doll. According to the police, the doll had a life-like appearance. This, combined with the fact that it was found in an inaccessible hillside, prevented the engineers from realizing that it was not a real body.

After photos of the doll were published, residents in the area began to pay their respects to it -although we can infer a sarcastic tone there. A memorial site was built near the zone where the doll was found, complete with flowers, candles and balloons. But the most curious thing is that people felt the need to name the doll “Mandi.”

3 Please, Stop Calling Us!

Here we go with another Halloween prank. Some weeks before Halloween in 2015, police in Detroit (Michigan) received calls from neighbors on the west side of the city, who were concerned about an individual slumped in front of a house door. From what we saw in previous points, that certainly sounds familiar. But the interesting thing about this case is that the officers did not stop receiving calls about the situation for days. And even more strange is the fact that this “dead body” was put there on purpose.^[9]

Since she loves Halloween, Larethia Haddon had been placing realistic dummies in front of her house, no matter where she lived, for 25 years. Every year the same thing happened: a lot of people stopped to help the unfortunate person until they realized that it was just a doll. But in 2015, Haddon’s life-like creation received more attention than usual. The woman said that, day after day, drivers saw the dummy lying in the front of her house, stopped immediately and got out to perform resuscitation techniques on it before realizing the awkward truth.

Due to the numerous calls, the police and the paramedics constantly appeared in the house of Larethia to verify that it was not a real corpse that time. And while the cops took the prank with humor, the paramedics did not find it so funny. According to Haddon, the rest of the neighborhood also started to see the “dead” dummy as fun -once they got used to such a weird display.

2 When A Scarecrow Had A Happy Ending

The following story happened in May 2016 in Reading, a town about 60 kilometers (37 miles) west of London (England). A decorator named Neil Maybury placed two scarecrows inside his portion of a community garden, to take care of it. Then Neil went on holiday with his family for a few days, not knowing that in the meantime an intruder stole one of his scarecrows, called Worzel, and threw it out of the garden.^[10]

Worzel remained there for four days, until a lady who was walking her dog saw it. But the woman did not notice that it was a scarecrow. Instead, she thought it was a dead body and therefore she called the police. The cops arrived at the place with sirens and lights on, just to end up being surprised that the alleged corpse was nothing more than a dummy made of straw, clothing and plaster.

One of Mr. Maybury’s neighbors, who had his garden plot next to that of Neil, retrieved the scarecrow and put it as it was in the beginning. Then, halfway through the holiday, Neil received a call from his mother-in-law who told him that someone had found his scarecrow. By the time Neil returned home, Worzel was the same as always, placed in the same spot as if nothing had happened. Months later, in August, Mr. Maybury presented his scarecrow Worzel in a horticultural contest, where he won. Now that would be an interesting story for a movie based on real events.

1 “It Felt Real”

On a Sunday like any other in September 2014, a family was picnicking near a temple in Yangju (South Korea). Then, one of the family members saw a female body lying on a waterway that ran across the temple. The alleged woman was bound with blue tape and seemed to have been the victim of a brutal murder. After being alerted, police forces rushed to the site.^[11]

And to perform their work effectively, a total of nothing less than 50 officers entered the temple. In the midst of the chaos, the authorities analyzed the woman’s body and discovered that, after all, it was an inflatable sex doll. Apparently, the doll looked very realistic. According to police sources, “the skin texture was so similar to that of an actual person that when the policeman touched it he mistook it for a human body.”

Officials said these sex dolls had being imported from Japan for many years until then, to be sold in adult stores. However, it seems that the authorities were not very aware of such products, since not even South Korea’s strict anti-prostitution laws made a comment about their use.

Economy student, graphic artist, science enthusiast and founder of “A Strange Place Called Knowledge.” My website:
https://strange-knowledge.com/

We’re a good way into this whole ‘human’ experiment now, and the first phase—the age of explorers—is wrapping up. We have mapped every swath of land to some level of detail and we are prying away at the secrets of ancient civilizations. The untouched wilderness is becoming more and more touched, by more and more people, turning wilderness into landmarks.

As more people flock to these landmarks each year, it becomes increasingly obvious the difference between settling a region and taming it. Sometimes the land fights back and people die. Sometimes the people just fight each other and people die. Either way, after 300,000 years of settlement, there are many dead humans in a lot of really cool places. Here are ten of those landmarks, places of either natural or manmade wonder, and in either case- an abundance of corpses.

10 The Paris Catacombs

What do you do when you run one of the world’s biggest metropolises, and you realize that you’ve accrued 2,000 years worth of bodies within your borders with nowhere to put them? We’ve all been there. And so has the French government. 

By the 1700s, Paris was two millennia old, and some 6,000,000 people had lived and died within its borders. Its cemeteries were overflowing and to make more room, skeletons were being exhumed and stacked in cemetery walls. The (literal) tipping point came when sections of wall around Paris’s biggest cemetery Les Innocents collapsed, sending bones and bodies spilling into Paris streets. 

The solution: empty tunnels and quarries beneath the city. Six million bodies were placed in these tunnels, and now their bones line the walls in neat stacks or in some places, ornate sculptures. It is a magnificent and ghastly display of death, and about one mile of it is open for public exploration. The rest has been ruled unsafe and is off-limits, but a quick YouTube search will show how many cavers and ghost-hunters ignore that restriction.

9 Pompeii

The ancient Roman city of Pompeii was a wealthy community. Rich Roman men frequented its fine bathhouses and brothels, artists filled the city with grand statues and frescoes, and its (seemingly) idyllic location between Italy’s Tyrrhenian Sea and Mount Vesuvius made it a trade hub and tourist destination. That all changed in the Fall of AD 79 when Vesuvius revealed itself to be an active volcano and erupted for two days straight. It began with 18 hours of pumice rain—clouds of rock dust spewed out by the volcano that blanketed Pompeii and the surrounding region in a dark, choking haze. Luckily, this stage was relatively slow and visible and allowed most of the city’s 20,000 inhabitants to flee to safety.

For the 1,200 who remained in the city for whatever reason, a series of quick ejections of hot ash sealed their fate. What’s most interesting is that many of them left spaces in the ash that allowed archaeologists to create casts of their bodies. These revealed the citizens’ final locations and positions, and so we know, for example, which people huddled together in the end, which tried to run from the city, and which—in at least one case—just sat in a tavern, having one final drink.

8 The Golden Gate Bridge

The fact that “Suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge” is its own Wikipedia article speaks volumes. San Francisco’s iconic bay-spanning bridge is famous for attracting jumpers. It’s been called a suicide magnet, the world’s #1 suicide destination, and the world’s deadliest bridge. And its reputation comes mainly from officially documented cases. Official jumper statistics grossly underrepresent the actual amount of attempted suicides because, in its 80+ year existence, many people are believed to have jumped without any witnesses.

Untold thousands have died from leaping off the bridge, either from the impact of landing, inability to swim to shore, and/or hypothermia from the bay’s frigid waters. Perhaps the spookiest detail of the whole phenomenon is that, since many jumpers did so in secret, from time to time unknown bodies in various states of decomposition wash ashore around the San Francisco Bay and neighboring areas. The grim discoveries are frequent, and the bridge has gained an almost sinister reputation alongside its touristic appeal.

7 Niagara Falls

Alright, let’s keep going and get these unfortunate jumpers out of the way all at once. Niagara Falls is a truly awesome natural wonder and attracts thousands of people to its majestic rushing waters. Most are sightseers, naturalists, or parts of destination weddings, but two other groups visit the falls, and they both have little chance of ever returning. 

The first is suicidal. Estimates as to the number of people who have sought death by jumping over the falls vary wildly, but most are around 4,000 in the last century. 

The other group that makes steady pilgrimages to the falls to meet their end are the daredevils. Traveling down the falls, with or without a barrel, is one of the most daring feats in the world. Unfortunately, roughly a quarter of those who try the stunt perish in the attempt. About 20-30 people die going over the falls each year in one of these two ways, making Niagara Falls a grim eastern bookend to the continental U.S. alongside the west coast’s Golden Gate Bridge.

6 Death Road, Bolivia

North Yungas Road is a 69 km road that winds its way through Bolivia, snaking around cliffs and through jungles. Its width varies dramatically, and lanes are dubious and ever-changing. Due to inclement local weather, its placement alongside sheer peaks and gorges, and its unreliable composition, the road is often beset by heavy rains, thick fog, sudden waterfalls, mudslides, and tumbling rocks.

Most estimates claim that 200-300 people die on the road every year, most likely from falling off its side. The road’s history and reputation earned it the title of “Death Road.” Such dubious acclaim brought thrill-seekers, most attempting to bike its treacherous length, which only added to its death toll. Happily, much of the road has been modernized in the last few years, hopefully turning Death Road into Just-Bored-to-Death Road.

5 Mount Everest

Mount Everest is the world’s highest mountain and possibly its most famous natural landmark. This has made it the… well, the Mount Everest of mountaineering. It’s no secret that many have perished attempting to reach its peak (or any base partway up). Over 300 climbers and guides have died en route to some level of the mountain. What is more notable- and more grisly- is the current fate of all those bodies. Several expeditions have been mounted to remove corpses from parts of the trail, but these have been hindered because:

1. The mountain battles corpse retrievers the same way it battles any climbers;
2. Many climbers’ families have fought against retrieval, citing their deceased’s wishes to be left on the mountain.

In addition, in recent years, climate change has melted previously perennial snow cover, revealing lost bodies and further filling the trail with death, even between expeditions. Even more ghoulish, the more well-known bodies are now landmarks themselves; it’s not uncommon for climbers to plan their progress by reaching one of their dead precursors at a certain time. Further reading: Green Boots’ Cave.

4 Mont Blanc

Every mountain is inevitably in Everest’s shadow—many of them literally. But in terms of human death, Mont Blanc stands far, far taller than its Himalayan sibling. Compared to Mont Blanc’s casualty toll, which is now estimated to be around 10,000, Everest’s 300 seem like child’s play. So why is Everest so notorious worldwide and not Mont Blanc? There are many reasons, but perhaps most ironically, because Blanc is easier. No one sets out for Everest without preparing—hopefully enough.

But Mont Blanc, one of the Alps and shared between France and Italy, is seen as more of a tourist destination than an existential challenge. A pleasant gondola ride carries would-be climbers the first 9,000 feet of the mountain’s 20,000 foot total. The rest is billed as just a “long walk” to the summit. This attracts some 25,000 hikers each year, and- on pure statistic inevitably alone- makes Mont Blanc the world’s deadliest mountain. Corpses are discovered there… frequently.

3 Herxheim

Yes, Herxheim sounds like a realm Thor would visit, and really, we can’t say for sure he didn’t. If he did, even his mighty thunder-ness might feel a chill run up his spine. Herxheim is a roughly 7,000-year-old archaeological site discovered in Southwestern Germany in 1996. And yes- corpses were found, this time in a series of mass graves. Estimates from bones and bone fragments place the number of dead at Herxheim to be over 1,000. However, the ‘how many’ is less unusual than the ‘why.’

Short answer: we don’t know.

But there is evidence to suggest a number of disturbing answers. The site was occupied by early humans for hundreds of years. The deliberate shape and pattern of the gravesites suggest that the mass graves were planned out in advance and slowly carved out over decades. This, combined with the fact that bones come from all across Central Europe, suggests that the site was a necropolis of sorts, a place for the dying to make one last pilgrimage before burial. But the city is more sinister than restful. Hundreds of skulls were split neatly in half, tongues removed from their necks, and long bones broken in half and their marrow scooped out, suggesting a truly massive cannibalistic enterprise.

2 The Suicide Forest

A place that practically defines the word ‘infamy’, Aokigahara is a forest in the shadow of Mt. Fuji, Japan, that has come to be widely known as the Suicide Forest. Entering the forest, visitors are greeted with a sign reading roughly, “Quietly think once more about your parents, siblings or children. Please don’t suffer alone, and first, reach out.” The sign exists for good reason.

The forest has taken on an almost mythical reputation as a domain of ghosts, an evil wood with sinister intent, and most notably- one of the most popular places in the world to commit suicide. No exact tally of suicides within the forest exists for the same reason many choose to end their lives there- inside, one is exceptionally isolated and alone. Police have estimated hundreds of suicides within the forest on any given year, but the exact total will never be known.

1 St. Bartholomew’s Church

St. Bartholomew’s Church in Kudowa, Poland bears the very metal nickname Skull Church. From the outside, it looks unassuming; its relatively small, muted visage makes it seem like any other old little chapel in Europe. But inside, it is far from unassuming. No, you’re forced to assume a lot of things when you see what it contains. Its floor, walls, and ceiling are either covered by or partially made up of thousands of human skeletons. There are few surfaces in the whole building that aren’t completely covered by human bone. The 3,000 skeletons that line its surfaces are stacked neatly in places and elsewhere arranged into ornate sculptures and patterns. The cherry on this sundae of death is that the basement also holds bones of its own. Another 21,000 humans’ worth. I guess that’s more the whole sundae than the cherry.

There are several ways to discard a body once death occurs. None of them are pleasant to contemplate, and some are downright disturbing. Before the 20th century, if a body only appeared to be dead, but the “deceased” was, in fact, still alive, premature burial was a possibility—a horrific fate, indeed.

However, even when death is indisputable, the thought of burying a loved one’s body in the earth or at sea, of reducing the corpse to ashes inside a crematorium, or of the cadaver’s lying unclaimed in an unmarked grave or in a remote area of the wilderness represents a horrible prospect.

There is another possibility, equally appalling, although unlikely: after death, a persons’ corpse, embalmed or mummified, might be put on public display, as an exhibit visitors would pay to see. For we who yet live, this list of 10 creepy corpses that were on public display at one time or another suggests just how ghastly and gruesome such a posthumous fate would be.

Related: 10 Ghoulish Deeds Done To The Resting Dead

10 Luang Pho Daeng

Born in 1894 on Thailand’s Koh Samui Island, Luang Pho Daeng, a Buddhist monk, gave up the ghost in 1973 while meditating. His mummified body, still in the attitude he had adopted at the time of his death, is now on display in a golden, glass-sided case in the Wat Khunaram temple.

According to an article concerning him, Luang Pho Daeng was originally ordained as a monk when he was a young man. However, he left the clergy to marry, fathering six children. When they reached adulthood, he devoted the rest of his life to Buddhism and was again ordained. Traveling to Bangkok, he learned more about his faith. On the island of Koh Samui, off Thailand’s east coast, he began meditating in a cave in Tham Yai (present-day Tamarind Springs) before returning to his family home behind the Wat Khunaram temple.

As he approached the age of 80, Luang Pho Daeng, having had a premonition that his death was nigh, assembled his students, making his last wishes known to them. If his body began to decompose, it was to be cremated with his ashes scattered at the famous “Saam Jaeg” or three-forked intersection in Hua Thanon. However, if his body did not decompose, it should be put on display in an upright coffin as an inspiration to “future generations to follow Buddhist teachings and be saved from suffering.”

Although his corpse lost its eyes when they moved back into his head, his remains, otherwise, are in excellent condition, and sunglasses, provided by the temple’s monks, prevent his appearance from looking too ghastly.^[1]

Another article on the monk points out that gecko eggs sometimes hatch inside his body, and some of the eggs “have been found in his eye sockets, [in his] mouth and beneath his skin during radiography scans,” heightening the exhibit’s creepy effect.

9 Speedy Atkins

After his demise, Charles Henry “Speedy” Atkins (1875–1928) was headed for a pauper’s grave. Instead, his mummified corpse was stored in a funeral home’s closet. Occasionally, locals or tourists were allowed a free look at what was left of him.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Atkins proved a popular attraction. When it came time, 66 years after his death, to bury his remains, 200 folks took pictures next to the open casket as they gathered to pay him “a rousing farewell,” along with their respects, during a funeral service at the Washington Street Baptist Church in Paducah, Kentucky. The embalmer’s widow, Velma Hamock, said, “I never saw a dead man bring so much happiness to people.”

The secret of Atkins’s longevity as a corpse was the special embalming fluid that undertaker A. Z. Hamock used. Its chemicals and ingredients enabled Hamock to preserve like the way “Egyptians preserved mummies.” Unfortunately, Hamock took the secret of his preservative with him to his own grave.

When Atkins drowned while fishing, there was no one to claim the body—no family nor friends. Hamock sought permission from the local coroner to experiment on Atkins’s remains and use his new embalming fluid. The condition of Speedy’s remains proved the merits of the preservative; over six-and-a-half decades after his death, Mrs. Hamock marveled that Speedy was “not stinking” and had not “lost all his features.” He also had the reverence and regard of his hometown if the attendance at his much-delayed funeral is an indication.^[2]

8 Elmer McCurdy

Train robber Elmer McCurdy (1880–1911) “swore he’d never be taken alive,” The Evening Independent newspaper advised its readers. He wasn’t. Elmer McCurdy was shot to death by an Oklahoma sheriff’s posse. Afterward, he started a new career as a “fun house dummy.”

McCurdy’s mummified corpse spent its time in a museum’s warehouse when it wasn’t painted to glow in the dark and hung from the gallows of an amusement park’s funhouse. The newspaper article reports that McCurdy’s corpse also appeared as a prop in an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man television series. However, no one knew as much until one of the mummy dummy’s arms “fell off” and a technician, attempting to glue the detached limb back in place, saw human bone where none should have been.

After the coroner also located a bullet in McCurdy’s stomach, the body’s identity was found by tracing the sale and purchase of the “prop” by various carnivals and exhibitions. First, the sheriff of the posse who shot him sold McCurdy’s corpse to the owner of a carnival, where it was mummified. After that, the outlaw’s cadaver was purchased by several others before it was turned over to carnival owner Louis Sonney as security for a loan that the borrower failed to repay.

McCurdy then became a star in Sonney’s traveling freak show until the end of World War II, when such attractions lost their appeal. Sold to the Hollywood Wax Museum, the mummy was later purchased by the Nu-Pike Amusement Park, which painted and hung it from its exhibit’s gallows.

The corpse’s final appearance was at its long-delayed funeral. His final resting place is in the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where “a laconic tombstone mentions the year of his death and burial, without explaining why the dates are 66 years apart.” ^[3]

7 Hazel Farris

Today, her hair is mostly gone. Her eyes are missing. Most of her nose has disappeared. She has lost many of her teeth. Not much flesh remains on her bones. The ring finger on her right hand is gone as well. What’s left of Hazel Farris does not have much left on its bones.

Farris (c. 1880–1906) shot five men, killing them all, before killing herself to avoid being captured. Her husband was the first to die when, drinking, he took umbrage at her intention to buy a new hat. The couple eventually came to blows. Naturally, Farris shot him. Twice.

When neighbors, hearing the gunfire, notified the police, three lawmen stormed the house. They, too, became fatalities, thanks to Farris’s “outrage, steel nerve, and deadly aim.” Neighbors spied a passing deputy sheriff and apprised him of the situation. He entered Farris’s home, and, during a struggle with the murderous housewife, he stumbled over one of the bodies. His gun went off, and the bullet shot off the ring finger of his opponent’s right hand. The mishap didn’t seem to faze Farris. Freeing herself from the lawman, she shot him, adding the fifth kill to her tally, before escaping out the back door.

In Bessemer, Alabama, the 25-year-old fugitive found herself smitten by a man. She trusted him with her story, at which point he informed the local constabulary, most likely for a reward. Farris poisoned herself to avoid being taken into custody.

After her body dehydrated at a combination furniture store/ funeral home, the local populace, roused by talk about “Hazel the Mummy,” paid a dime each to view her desiccated corpse. Her remains were subsequently bought by carnival showman Orlando C. Brooks and shown to the public “for the benefit of science”—and a hefty fee. A poster advertising the exhibition assured the public that “‘Hazel’ affords you a study worth while,” guaranteeing her to be a genuine mummy and offering to forfeit $500 to anyone, doctors included, who could prove otherwise.^[4]

6 Samuel Perry Dinsmoor

Smack-dab in the American heartland, The Garden of Eden, in Lucas, Kansas, boasts a collection of 150 sculptures, all made of concrete, which express the political and religious views of a retired schoolteacher and American Civil War veteran, sculptor Samuel Perry Dinsmoor (1843–1932).

An eccentric, Dinsmoor was a populist who, after retiring, began the art project that would carry him through the remaining 25 years of his life. First, though, he set his hand to building his limestone domicile, which resembles a log cabin and includes such flourishes as concrete porch spindles formed inside bottles that he broke after the material hardened. The amateur architect, a natural-born showman, described the cabin as “the most unique home for living or dead on Earth.”

According to the Kansas Historical Society, he next started work on his garden of sculptures over the next quarter-century using 113 tons of concrete to sculpt his take on “the Bible and modern civilization as interpreted through his populist views.”

The Garden of Eden also includes a concrete mausoleum that now contains his own remains and those of his wife. After he died, his body was mummified and laid to rest inside the concrete burial chamber, so visitors can glimpse his remains through the glass portion of the mausoleum’s concrete lid. His wife’s body reposes, unseen, in the sealed portion of the crypt below him.^[5]

5 The West Virginia Philippi Mummies

Another strange location to find mummified remains: a train station in Philippi, West Virginia. This quaint building also houses the Barbour County Historical Museum, which displays items from as far back as 1635. The wide variety of guns, knives, and cannons mingle with a historic switchboard, newspapers, ceramics, and flags. But in a small room at the back of the museum—which might have been a bathroom at one point—lies the remains of two women. And for one dollar, you can take a peek at them!

Graham Hamrick, a farmer, amateur scientist, and shopkeeper, got caught up in the late nineteenth-century Egyptomania craze and became obsessed with learning their mummification technique (Hm, sounds familiar). After experimenting with fruits and meats, as well as small animals, he wanted to try his method on a human.

He purchased two corpses from the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, also known as the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. Unfortunately, this was not an uncommon practice at that time as unscrupulous mental health hospitals disposed of some patients, especially those with no family, in corrupt and horrendous ways. It was also reported that he secured the remains of an infant and a hand. Like Hamock above, his process is unknown as Hamrick took the formula to the grave—a normal, six-feet-under grave.

These mummies briefly toured with circus great P.T. Barnum before returning to WV. They were then displayed throughout the state, being stored at various times in a barn and “under a local man’s bed for a while.” In 1985, Philippi experienced a flood, which damaged the mummies; however, after some time “drying in the sun,” they finally made their way to their current home in the museum. The infant was too damaged after the flood, and the hand was lost at some point.^[6]

4 Sir Christian Friedrich von Kahlbutz

The mummified remains of Sir Christian Friedrich von Kahlbutz (1651–1702) put the town of Kampehl, Germany, population 130, on the map. The knight’s body is also a tourist draw. It seems that the corpse has shown no signs of decay during the nearly 320 years following his demise.

In 1991, though, not everyone in the village was happy to have the cadaver on hand. Mayor Edmund Bublitz, for one, opposed the presence of the preserved body, despite its ability to attract as many as 150,000 visitors each year who are eager to gawk at the town’s star attraction.

“During the Communist era,” a Los Angeles Times story explains, the decedent’s occupation of its glass-topped crypt was not a problem. The state managed the tourist attraction, charging a viewing fee and paying the local Lutheran church where the tomb is located for its use. The church’s pastor at the time, Peter Freimark, defended the attraction but admitted that its popularity was due to the fascination of people for its “macabre, obscene, cruel, grisly and…erotic” aspects, explaining that such lurid qualities were near and dear to the German heart.

The “erotic” feature of the knight’s presence apparently stems from his lifetime interest in the pursuit of the fair sex, with members of whom he fathered 30 illegitimate children in addition to his 11 legitimate heirs, the Times article suggests, as well as Sir Christian’s claim that he possessed the right to “deflower all brides in his fiefdom.” When a groom’s beloved rebuffed the knight, her fiancé was found with a split skull soon after, and Sir Christian was charged with the murder. The accused maintained his innocence, however, as he supposedly declared, “If I am the murderer, may it be God’s will that my body never decay.”

The state’s and the church’s battle over Sir Christian continued to wage until 1990, when East Germany was reunified with West Germany. However, the conflict between the church’s pastor and the town’s mayor did not end with Germany’s reunification. The mayor, determined to display Sir Christian’s remains on city property, had arranged for six out-of-work men to remove the knight’s body from the church’s crypt and transport it to the fire station. Before they began their labors, however, the mayor tried “to push through a proposal to relocate the mummy” but failed. Afterward, he told the laborers to stand down: the body-snatching had been called off.

Undisturbed in his glass-covered crypt, Christian Friedrich von Kahlbutz continues to draw paying customers. At present, the score in the conflict between church and state seems to be, Church, 2; State, 0.^[7]

3 Charles Eugene de Croy

St. Nicholas’s Church in Tallinn, Estonia, is also the home of a mummified corpse, Charles Eugene de Croy (1651–1702). The Rough Guide to the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania tells its readers that the duke’s body occupies a “side chapel near the main entrance.”

In life, his claim to fame was that he led the Russian army at Narva in 1701; during his command, he opted to fight rather than flee, as his soldiers did. His act of courage resulted in his becoming a prisoner of Sweden’s King Charles XII. After the duke’s death the following year, no one would spring for the cost of a proper burial, so he was propped up in the chapel instead. Not long after, “protected from decay by dry weather,” his body became an attraction, until 1897, at any rate, when “authorities finally saw fit to stick it in the ground.”^[8]

The ghastly appearance of the body is apparent in a visitor’s description included in an 1883 book. Although coiffed and well-attired, the corpse is, nevertheless, frightful. He is described as having a startling-looking face with a grey complexion. With an apparently injured nose and thin lips, its body a yellowish-brown.

2 Christian Jacobsen Drakenberg

Christian Jacobsen Drakenberg (1626–1772) was a seafaring man, right up to the moment of his capture, at age 68, by Algerine pirates, during a 1694 voyage to Spain. After escaping his captors, he made his way back to Denmark, where he became a favorite at parties thrown by the aristocracy—it appears Drakenberg was a bit of a storyteller, the more outrageous, the better.

However, what is most extraordinary about him is that he is alleged to have lived to the ripe old age of 145, making the observation in the 1856 English Cyclopaedia: A New Dictionary of Universal Knowledge that Drakenberg’s lifespan represents “one of the most extraordinary instances of longevity on record,” an astounding understatement.

After his death, he was mummified and displayed at the cathedral at Aarhus. For decades, it was customary to slyly open the casket and pluck a hair from the sailor’s chin. In 1835, Drakenberg was in excellent condition, “a kind of natural mummy.” But at the command of the queen, he was given a proper burial in 1840 under the cathedral floor.^[9]

1 Xin Zhui

Also known as Marquise Dai, Xin Zhui (c. 217 BC–168 BC) was wed to the Marquis Dai of the Western Han Dynasty. As Joseph William Lewis, Jr., M.D., points out in Did They Rest in Peace?: Misadventures of Corpses That Probably Did Not, her body was unearthed in December 1971, during the excavation of an air raid shelter near an army hospital in Hunan Province.

According to Lewis, her wooden burial chamber, which itself had been buried beneath “a layer of thick white clay and 11,000 pounds of charcoal to thwart water intrusion into the tomb,” also contained the remains of her husband, a child, and more than 3,000 cultural artifacts.

The method of her entombment and burial maintained a constant temperature and humidity, creating a “deficit [of] oxygen and antisepsis,” Lewis observes. As a result, her body remained very well-preserved, while those of her companions, suffering exposure to moisture, were subject to the natural effects of decay.

Due to her body’s condition, its skin was supple, the joints flexible, and the internal organs had “escaped decay,” Lewis says, and her superior preservation allowed for her blood to be typed. They were also able to determine a likely cause of death. She suffered from heart disease, probably dying of a heart attack at about age 50, which was brought on by her fondness for “too much rich food and too little exercise.”

A secret compound, injected into her body’s circulatory system, ensured that the preservation of her corpse would continue, and her body was put on display at the Hunan Municipal Museum in Changssha.^[10]