People think of churches and other holy sites as peaceful places full of sunshine and fresh air, totally safe and perhaps a little bit dull. But saving souls is serious business to some, especially before the modern age. Furthermore, the business of building sacred sites upon the ruins of pagans can leave behind some unusual ghosts.

From a spring dedicated to a pagan virgin goddess to churches made almost entirely out of human bones, here are holy places that wanted to make sure you get their message and don’t mind creeping you out to do it.

10Crypt Of The Chiesa Immacolata Concezione
Rome, Italy

This 17th-century church was built by Cardinal Antonio Barberini, a Capuchin Franciscan and brother of Pope Urban VIII, and was designed by Franciscan friar Michele da Bergamo. It houses several high-profile tombs and famous paintings, but its greatest attraction is the chapels in the lower levels.

Five subterranean chapels contain the remains of 4,000 Capuchin friars and poor Roman citizens from the 17th century onward, laid out in an artistic fashion. It took 300 trips from 1627–1631 to cart the carriages filled with bones and mummified remains into place. The earth covering the pavement of the cemetery is said to be from the Holy Land, and a memento mori inscription near the exit reads, “You are what we have been. You will be what we are.”

The remains are arranged in elaborate mosaics and built up into columns, arches, or floral designs. The crypts are even arranged based on the type of bone. There is a Crypt of Skulls, a Crypt of Pelvises, a Crypt of Leg and Thigh Bones, as well as the Crypt of the Resurrection (with a centerpiece painting of Jesus summoning forth Lazarus), and a Crypt of the Three Skeletons (a highly symbolic diorama that reflects on death).

9Basilica Of Santa Croce In Gerusalemme
Rome, Italy

Also known as Heleniana or Sessoriana, The Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (Holy Cross in Jerusalem) stands on what was part of a residential complex owned by Emperor Constantine in the third century. It was once part of the Sessorian Palace, owned by Constantine’s mother, Helena. It is said that the palace was built on soil Helena brought back from Jerusalem.

Constantine had the church’s basilica built to house a collection of relics brought back from the Holy Land by his mother, specifically relics relating to the True Cross itself. Highlights of this gruesome Christian artifact collection include three supposed pieces of the Cross—a nail, a segment of the elogium (or inscription; in this case the famous INRI “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeorum”) inscribed upon a board said to come from the Cross, and two thorns alleged to come from the Crown of Thorns. They are all currently housed in the Chapel of Relics, designed by Florestano di Fausto.

If you happen to be a woman, and wish to see these holy objects, you will have to be patient. Women are only allowed inside once a year.

8Capela Dos Ossos
Evora, Portugal

Next to the Church of St. Francis in the Portuguese town of Evora is a small chapel called Capela dos Ossos. Like several entries on our list, it’s decorated with bones. Uniquely, not only is the interior of the chapel entirely covered with skulls and bones, but if you enter this small building and look up, you will find the remains of two full corpses, a women and a young boy staring back down at you, hanging from chains. It is said that they were the victims of a curse, who took shelter in the chapel. A welcoming sign at the entrance reads, “Nos ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos” (“We bones that are here, for your bones we wait”).

This 16th-century chapel houses the remains of about 5,000 monks, mostly exhumed from nearby cemeteries that had become overcrowded. There are several reasons why churches of the period decorated their walls in such a grisly fashion. One was practical—cemeteries were commonly overcrowded, and there were so few places to store the dead. The second was religious and social. Bones could be put to good use as a warning to the living to prepare one’s soul for death.

7Church Of Santo Stefano Rotondo
Rome, Italy

On the outskirts of Rome, away from the main thoroughfare of tourists, sits a church called The Basilica di Santo Stefano Rotondo al Monte Celio (Basilica of St. Stephen in the Round on the Celian Hill), or simply, the Santo Stefano Rotondo. It was consecrated by Pope Simplicius between 468 and 483 and is dedicated to Saint Stephen. Built on top of an old Roman site of Mithras-worship (known as a mithraeum), it’s a simply constructed church compared to others on this list, really only notable for being the first Roman church to be built with a circular plan, but it houses a unique collection of paintings.

Circling the inner walls are 34 paintings, each describing the death of a Christian martyr. Every one of them is hellishly violent, depicting in near-pornographic detail the tortures inflicted upon the martyrs, all in a perfectly naturalistic and life-like style. The paintings were commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII at the end of the 16th century.

No less a writer than Charles Dickens had this to say about the gruesome collection:

” . . . Such a panorama of horror and butchery no man could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper. Grey-bearded men being boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire: these are among the mildest subjects.”

6Aghia Moni Convent
Nafplio, Greece

The Monastery of Aghia Moni is a beautiful, if little-known, complex just outside of Areia near Nafplio in Greece. It currently serves as a Greek Orthodox women’s retreat under the auspices of the Bishopric of Argolis.

Aghia Moni is famous for the spring that is located on its grounds, one with seriously pagan connotations. Sources are cagey about it, but most will admit that the monastery was dedicated to Zoodochos Pigi (the spring or source of life). The spring itself is associated with Kanathos, a legendary spring from Greek mythology.

The Greek traveler Pausanias, in his “Description of Greece,” wrote that “In Nauplia [in Argolis] . . . is a spring called Kanathos. Here . . . Hera bathes every year and recovers her maidenhood. This is one of the sayings told as a holy secret at the Mysteries which they celebrate in honor of Hera.”

Hera was the Greek queen of the Olympian Gods, associated with the sky and heavens, women, and marriage. Pausanias is implying that the Hera cultists performed rituals (called “Mysteries”) at the spring that were associated with this legend, and it isn’t hard to guess the aim of these rituals. That isn’t really the kind of thing Christian Orthodoxy likes to promote, so the spring has fallen into relative obscurity.

5The Barberini Coats Of Arms, St. Peter’s Cathedral
Vatican City

At St. Peter’s Cathedral in Vatican City is the Baldachin Altar along with its sculpted bronze canopy known as the Baldachin, both of which were sculpted by Gianlorenzo Bernini between 1624 and 1633 under the direction of Pius VIII. One notable feature about the alter is four plinths (columns), decorated with the Barberini family’s coat of arms—three bees arranged in a triangle on a blue field resting on an sculptured shield, with a woman’s head above it.

A close look reveals that each coat-of-arms, arranged two-to-a-column to make up a series of eight, is slightly different from the one preceding it. Some people believe that the series represents childbirth (the position of the woman’s head and the overall shapes and elements certainly look suggestive). Furthermore, take a look at the woman’s expression throughout the series; she goes from happy to obviously distressed and back. Furthermore, the shield bulges throughout the series until near the end; the woman’s face is replaced with that of a cherub or angel. What is this doing in the middle of a church?

One popular story has it that the sculpture depicts a promise that Urban VIII made to his niece, Giulia Barberini, to build an altar in her honor if her labor was successful. Others contend that it symbolically depicts the earthly struggles of the church in the past until it was “delivered” by the pope, who took great pains to place symbols of his power and family throughout the Vatican.

4The Sheela-Na-Gig Of Kilpeck
Herefordshire, England

Kilpeck Church (The Church of St. Mary and St. David) is located in Herefordshire, England near the Welsh border. It’s a simple, Norman-style, two-cell church built atop an older structure with dozens of elaborate and often-grotesque carvings, many of which are heavily influenced by Celtic styles. It’s famous for its sexually charged corbel (a weight support for buildings that were commonly sculpted), known as the Sheela-na-gig.

Sheela-na-gigs have been found on structures all over England, Ireland, and France. They depict a squatting woman, possibly associated with “old women” or hags, displaying their grossly exaggerated genitalia for all to see. They are usually depicted in a grotesque or comical manner, and the one at Kilpeck could be said to display both. It’s a very old sculpture, dating to at least the 12th century, and possibly belonged to an earlier chapel that once stood on the site.

Popular theories have it that Sheela-na-gigs are a pagan remnant, perhaps associated with various goddess traditions, but when placed in proper context with other carvings found around them, the theory holds little water. They fit in nicely with other Christian motifs common to the region of the time and probably served as Romanesque-era warnings about the dangers of sexual sins. The earliest known figures date to the 11th or 12th century and are usually found on Roman churches. They probably had a Continental origin. Another theory holds that they were created as wards against evil, and there is some evidence for this belief. Corbels have been found above doors or gates out of immediate eyesight, where they could have stood guard as talismans.

As the symbolic significance of Sheela-na-gigs began to wane, they moved from churches to buildings such as castles and gateways. Toward the end of their use, they even showed up as carvings on flintlock pistols of the baroque era.

There are male variations of Sheela-na-gigs, some of which may have been present at Kilpeck Church. Several corbels have been removed there, supposedly by an unnamed Victorian lady who was offended by what they depicted. Whatever the case may be, corbels depicting the male member are relatively common, and they too serve as a warning about the insidious consequences of lust.

3Otranto Cathedral, Tree of Life Mosaic
Otranto, Italy

Consecrated in 1088, Italy’s Otranto Cathedral is on this list twice. The first reason is its floor, which is entirely covered by an amazing work of art called the Tree of Life Mosaic. It was commissioned in 1163 by archbishop Gionata d’Otranto and overseen by a monk named Pantaleone with labor provided by local and Norman craftsman and artisans from Tuscany. It was restored in 1993.

Every square foot of the church’s floor is covered by a mysterious mosaic that depicts a tree in a style similar to a genealogy illustration. Seen from above, the tree grows into every room of the cathedral, and the effect of the explosion of mythological and religious concepts all depicted together is mind-blowing.

What makes this mysterious work of art so intriguing is the variety of imagery and inscriptions that have no place in a Christian church. Images of the Greek goddesses Diana, Deucalion, and Pyrrha (the main figures in the Greek legend of a great flood) collide with images from Frazer’s Golden Bough, a depiction of King Arthur, and zodiac figures, to name only a few. All this is mixed alongside images of Adam and Eve, apocalyptic imagery and creatures, Cain and Abel, and other Christian concepts, but the whole thing is surprisingly free of any specific Christian symbolism. It even mixes in Islamic lore, such as bits of text in Arabic.

The Tree of Life Mosaic demonstrates that its creators were far more educated than the norm for cultures of its time. However they obtained their knowledge, the creators seem to have wanted to record all they knew of the world in one place.

2Otranto Cathedral, The Skull Cathedral
Otranto, Italy

The second reason that Otranto Cathedral makes the list is the skulls. Just off of the main altar is a chapel, and the walls therein house the remains of 800 Christian martyrs. Some of the remains were also moved to the Church of Santa Caterina in Formello at Naples. The walls are neatly lined with the skulls of these martyrs behind glass.

Turkish Sultan Mehmet II had already conquered Constantinople, and 27 years later, he began a plan to take Rome itself by establishing a beachhead on the Italian coast at the port town of Brindisi. Along the way, he changed his mind and decided to strike at Otranto instead . . . a decision that changed everything.

When the invasion hit and the siege began, 350 members of Otranto’s garrison fled, leaving only 50 soldiers to hold back the invaders. The remaining townspeople helped against the siege as best they could.

On August 14, 1480, after a two-week siege, the Ottomans broke through and began raping and pillaging and gathered the women and children to be sold into slavery. They then marched around 800 male inhabitants of the town to a place called the Hill of the Minerva (afterward called the Hill of the Martyrs) and gave them a choice: convert to Islam or be beheaded. The men chose death.

Antonio Primaldi (or Pezzulla) was chosen to be the spokesman for the town, and he was the first man to be beheaded. According to Saverio de Marco in his Compendiosa istoria degli ottocento martiri otrantini (The Brief History of the 800 Martyrs of Otranto), when the sword fell, his lifeless, headless body stood up and refused to be moved. An executioner was so awestruck, he converted to Christianity right on the spot and was immediately executed. Yet, despite this miracle the beheadings continued.

The sacrifice of the townspeople of Otranto gave Ferdinand I, king of Naples, the time he needed to eventually repel the Ottoman advance. If not for them, all of Italy and Rome itself could have fallen to Islam. This is why their skulls are displayed and memorialized today, and why, in May 2013, Antonio Primaldi was canonized by Pope Francis as a saint along with all the rest of the Otranto martyrs. The occasion was the largest canonization of saints of all time.

1Sedlec Ossuary
Kutna Hora, Czech Republic

Compared to the Sedlec Ossuary, other churches that house human remains are nothing more than a Disney park. The remains of no fewer than 40,000 skeletons are preserved here.

The Seclec Ossuary is a small chapel located in the suburbs of Kutna Hora, just outside Prague. In 1870, woodcarver Frantisek Rint was appointed to do something about all the bones interred there. The church and its cemetery had become overcrowded over the centuries, thanks both to the church’s good reputation (and the alleged presence of soil from Golgotha, marking it as a holy site) and plague. Rint’s approach resulted in one of the most unique churches in history.

Bones are everywhere within the church. One of the most impressive displays is the Coat of Arms of the Schwarzenberg family, and the famous chandelier of bones contains at least one of every human bone within it.

Interspaced within the vast display of skulls, ribcages, leg and arm bones, and every other kind of bone are intricate carvings of angels and cherubs. There are candleholders made of bones, and entire walls are lined in skulls. Rint even signed his name in a display of bones.

Words don’t really do it justice. This gallery of photos helps give a proper sense of the church.

Lance LeClaire is a freelance artist and writer. He writes on subjects ranging from science and skepticism, atheism, and religious history and issues, to unexplained mysteries and historical oddities. You can look him up on Facebook.

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]

There’s no doubt humans are the most clever animals on the planet Earth. We developed tool making 2.6 million years ago and in the present we have Swiss army knives and cheese graters, so it’s all worked out well. While animals have yet to develop iPhones and vape pens, that doesn’t mean they haven’t developed their own ingenious solutions to various problems. Here are some of the most impressive examples. 

10. Crocodiles Use Twigs To Bait Birds

Thanks to Steve Irwin, most of us have an appreciation for what a crocodile can and can’t do. These prehistoric throwbacks have a bite strength of 3,700 pounds per square inch, which is about the most powerful you’ll find anywhere on the planet, and can lunge at prey at a speed of about 12 meters per second, which means if you don’t see it before it attacks you probably never will. 

Research shows that, in addition to their impressive list of biological advantages, crocodiles are more clever than you might think. When brute force and speed fail, they can use trickery. Crocodiles have been witnessed using sticks as bait to attract nest-building birds. 

The technique basically involves using themselves as platters during the birds’ nesting season. Alligators and crocodiles will rest with sticks on their snouts. Birds that get close to try to gather the materials are snapped up and eaten. 

9. Teamwork Makes the Dream Work for Badgers and Coyotes

In school and business, we’re often pushed into working with others under the assumption that teamwork makes us all better. Research doesn’t necessarily bear that out, of course, and some people hate teamwork for good reason. But there are definitely times when teamwork does get things accomplished and there’s even unlikely evidence of it in the animal kingdom. For instance, when badgers and coyotes team up together to hunt. 

Their partnership was witnessed by Native Americans even before Europeans came to North America, so there’s a long history of it working. Both animals hunt similar prey, but in different ways. If a badger wants a gopher, he’ll dig down into a burrow for it while a coyote will chase it on the land. This means that a gopher can adapt its defense to either of the predators, but not to both. Above ground, it can outrun a badger. Below ground it can outwit a coyote. So when they hunt together, the gopher is out of options.

One member of the hunting team will inevitably win the prey and no, they don’t share. But hunting together optimizes their chances of both catching prey in the long term, so the arrangement is beneficial even if only one will ever eat at a time. The fact the animals can recognize this is pretty remarkable. 

8. Dolphins Can Hydroplane to Hunt

We all know dolphins are intelligent and they have displayed things like abstract thinking and empathy on many occasions. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that they’re very crafty when it comes to problem solving on the fly. This has been witnessed and even filmed before when it comes to how they can use their intelligence to get otherwise hard to catch prey. 

Dolphins have learned to hydroplane when they need to reach prey that would normally be out of reach. In shallow water, a dolphin can technically only travel so far. But their prey is much smaller so they can comfortably swim in water that can accommodate a dolphin. Except when dolphins hydroplane across the surface like living boogie boards to grab a fish that thought it was safe. 

It’s not a common hunting tool for dolphins, but in a pinch, they’ll do it. Young dolphins can watch their mothers do it and then learn the skill themselves.

7. Elephant Takes Out an Electric Fence

Upwards of 30,000 elephants are killed by poachers every year, despite all the campaigns people have heard about to stem the tide of this slaughter. And while there are many efforts being put into place to prevent this killing, obviously it’s not always working. And, unfortunately, sometimes that’s due in part to how craft elephants themselves can be.

In many protected areas of Africa, low-voltage electric fences are used to keep elephants in safe, monitored areas. But no one told the elephants that and they don’t always want to stay where humans want them. So sometimes the elephants will actually disable these electric fences to get to the other side. More than once, elephants have been observed testing the current with their trunks, and then using logs or even removing the fence poles to disable the fence itself.

6. Dolphins Use Sea Sponge Armor

Because dolphins are so clever, you can bet they have more tricks up their sleeves than just hydroplaning. For instance, when they need to they can use armor to protect themselves as they hunt. Back in 1984, scientists observed dolphins tearing up pieces of sea sponges and then carrying them in their beaks, making a little glove for their faces. 

The sponge is able to protect the face of the dolphin as it roots around on the seafloor to dig up prey. They won’t get cut by rocks and coral and they’ll force out fish they can eat. 

Since dolphins are fairly skilled at catching fish in open water, researchers wanted to know why they’d even bother with this complex maneuver. Turns out, the fish on the bottom are often more nutritious. They also don’t have swim bladders, which a dolphin can identify with echolocation. So hunting this way makes them easier to find.

As an added twist, this is a fairly unique skill even among dolphins. It’s only been observed in a small population, and mothers teach the skill to their daughters but not their sons. 

The honey badger meme showed up on the internet in 2011 and you could make a strong case that many people didn’t even know what a honey badger was before that. Since then, these furious little African mammals have been a part of pop culture, but they’re also causing a scene any place they’re being held in captivity. Honey badgers don’t like being enclosed and they are incredibly industrious about getting past obstacles. 

Honey badgers are some of the most adept escape artists in the animal kingdom. They will stack mud, use sticks, and climb anything placed in enclosures to help scale walls. One badger was paired with a friend once and the two teamed up to open a more complex lock together. But that isn’t the end of it. 

Beyond escaping, honey badgers can also demonstrate creativity in problem solving. They’re able to think outside the box, as it were, and solve problems to reach goals like accessing food in hard to reach places. 

4. Crows Create Hooks for Hunting

Birds have long been considered intelligent animals if for no other reason than many of them excel at mimicry. You only need to hear one bird say hello or curse you out to realize they have some skills most other animals lack. There was a budgie named Puck that has a world record for having a 1,728 word vocabulary, which may be more than some people. And that’s the least of the skills birds possess.

Crows, which can also talk, have also demonstrated a highly effective tool building skill that helps them in hunting and problem solving. Crows have been put to the test with fairly complex problems and tasked with opening boxes to get food. The number of steps a crow can go through to reach a goal is remarkable and has been filmed to show off how easily a crow can pull it off. In one test, a crow needed to solve eight separate puzzles in a row to achieve his goal, which he achieved in just minutes. 

Even without man-made puzzles designed with a specific solution, crows have demonstrated their own problem solving by way of tool building. It turns out crows understand the fundamentals of something like a hook or a rake. They’re able to create their own and use them to dig up insects that they couldn’t otherwise reach with their beaks. The hooks even have barbed ends like a fishing hook to ensure the bugs they hunt don’t slip back off. 

3. Sea Otters Use Stone Anvils

Otters are one of those adorable and playful animals that pop up in viral videos so often and get shared around. People seem to love them even though it’s worth noting an otter will straight up try to kill you if you cross it. But that aside, they are crafty animals in their own right and have demonstrated some clever problem solving of their own in the wild.

Sea otters were once nearly wiped from existence thanks to the fur trade. Efforts to preserve them have allowed them to make a slow comeback and along with that has come a study of the animals and their habits. A unique aspect of this is what researchers have learned because of the tools the animals used to hunt. 

Otters eat mussels and to break into them they tend to do one of two things. They will either hold a rock in their paws and use it like a hammer, breaking a mussel open on their chest while they float on their backs, or they use a stationary rock.

The stationary rock works like an anvil. The otter brings the mussel down on the rock to crack it open. Research on areas where otters hunt has offered up an abundance of information about how otters live. There are rocks that bear evidence of being used as anvils for years, including piles of thousands of discarded mussel shells. The damage pattern on the shells and the observation of how otters use them even shows that otters have a paw preference, similar to how a human will be left or right handed, when it comes to accomplishing these tasks. 

2. Burrowing Owls Bait Their Homes with Dung to Attract Beetles

Burrowing owls are some of the tiniest and most adorable little owls in the world. They’re smaller than pigeons and, as their name suggests, they live in little holes in the ground. Given their size, they can’t exactly hunt large prey, so they aim for smaller things. In particular, they really enjoy dung beetles. 

The thing about dung beetles is they tend to be pretty predictable. For instance, if you want to catch one, you need to look for dung. It’s right in the beetle’s name. And burrowing owls understand this. They understand it so well that they’ve learned how to bring dung beetles to them instead of going out on a hunt and putting themselves at risk.

Since dung beetles like mammalian dung, burrowing owls go out and collect poop. They bring it home and bait the entrances to their burrows with it, which draws the dung beetles in and ensures that the owls don’t have to go far to find a meal. 

It was hypothesized that the dung might be a tool to mask the scent of a den from predators, but experiments proved this isn’t the case. The owls are just fishing for beetles. 

1. Polar Bears Hurl Boulders at Prey

Polar bears are the largest carnivore on land in the entire world. It seems like, if they started using tools, it’d just be overkill. On the other hand, what’s the fun of being the largest land carnivore and not pushing the limits? Polar bears do use tools and they use them for one thing – killing more effectively. 

Polar bears weigh up to around 1,300 pounds. The biggest on record was just over 2,000 pounds. Polar bears hunt walruses and the biggest walrus ever was over 3,700 pounds. On the low end of the scale, they weigh about 1,700 pounds. They also have incredibly strong skulls. Plus, they have giant tusks. So, in general, a walrus is bigger than a polar bear. This has led polar bears to hunt walruses by hurling rocks at them. 

The Inuit have known the bears do this for generations, but science is slow to listen to people sometimes. The bears climb cliffs and hurl rocks or chunks of ice with remarkable accuracy, busting the skulls of their prey.