Plenty of petrified people are unearthed every year. Despite this overpopulation, the fascination with the dried-out dead remains. It is not hard to see why. Mummies offer unexpected markings and ailments. They also appear to move and cluster together in bizarre imitations of a living society.

Sometimes, all that remains are mummified pieces. Even these lonesome fragments can reveal bizarre traditions about love, death, and living cocktail drinkers who must kiss amputated toes.

10 The Hun Warrior

In 1993, a girl found a grave. Alena Kypchakova, then 12, found a collapsed grotto near the rural Kam-Tytugem settlement in Siberia. Inside were the remains of a Hun warrior and his weapons.

Around 1,700 years ago, the man was wrapped in fur and placed on a wooden bed. Next to him was a bow that originally was nearly as tall as a modern man. Pieces of birch arrows revealed that the shafts were marked either white or black, possibly for quick selection during a hunt. They originally came with iron tips and bull horn pieces.

According to ancient Chinese literature, the horn carvings produced a whistle when the arrow shot through the air. This was meant to scare the enemy and distract deer from fleeing. Try as they might, researchers failed to reproduce the effect.^[1]

The mummified archer is kept at a relatively unknown museum because locals refused all attempts by bigger institutions to acquire him for their collections. Located in Kokorya, the museum is now managed by Alena Kypchakova, who found the body as a child.

9 Pygmy Woolly Mammoth

The “island effect” is when a large species turns smaller to adapt to an island environment. The woolly mammoth was one of them. However, rumors circulated about the existence of mammoths that were naturally tiny and not because of island evolution. In particular, people reported finding the bones of these animals, adults and infants, on Kotelny Island in Siberia.

In 2018, scientists headed over to the island and found the first official remains. The unique carcass had yellow fur which soon earned it the name “golden mammoth.” There was a big problem, though. The body was in an inaccessible area. Not much can be proven until its recovery.

The surrounding permafrost did give it a date—between 22,000 and 50,000 years ago. It appears to be an adult about 2 meters (6.6 ft) tall. Normal-sized mammoths measured around 5 meters (16.4 ft) tall. The age of the animal provided the first real hope of a dwarf mammoth species. During that time, Kotelny Island was attached to the mainland, which removed the “island effect” as an explanation for the small adult.^[2]

8 Greenland Surprise

Finding heart disease, atherosclerosis in particular, in mummies is nothing new. However, when researchers wheeled five bodies from Greenland into the scan room, they expected healthy tickers. The mummies belonged to 16th-century Inuits, four adults and a child.

Atherosclerosis narrows the arteries in older people, and these were young adults (plus junior). The condition is also associated with high-cholesterol foods such as pork, beef, and dairy. The Inuit group would have dined on marine mammals and fish. The latter is packed with omega-3 fatty acids, a heart health tonic.

The 2019 study was done at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. During the CT scans, atherosclerosis showed up in three of the adults. Considering their ages and diet, this was surprising. However, there was no mistake. The mummies were exceptionally well-preserved. Even their blood vessels were intact. When the disease showed up in their arteries, the results were fairly conclusive.

These are the first cases of atherosclerosis from Greenland mummies, although their condition remains mysterious. A likely cause could be that they inhaled too much smoke from indoor hearths.^[3]

7 Unique Thigh Tattoo

In recent years, the British Museum obtained the body of a woman. Her mummified remains were found in 2014 in northern Sudan on the banks of the Nile River. When researchers examined the body, they found a tattoo on her inner thigh.

To make the faded design clearer, they zapped it with infrared imaging. They found something recognizable but unique. The tattoo’s unusual look was due to stacked ancient Greek letters. It read “Mixaha,” the name of the archangel Michael.

The monogram was familiar. Archaeologists had found it before on church artifacts and mosaics. However, this was the first time it showed up on a human body. The religious-flavored tattoo might have been a protection charm, or perhaps she wanted it because her faith was important to her.

The ink was around 1,300 years old, which also made it the first body art found from this time period. Although not the oldest tattoo in history, the Sudanese woman’s symbol remains a rare find.^[4]

6 Earliest European Autopsy

In 2013, researchers examined a gruesome relic. The partial mummy consisted of shoulders, a neck, and a head. The man’s death expression was disturbing, almost like a permanent scream.

Scientists thought it was preserved during the 1400s or 1500s, but analysis placed it between AD 1200 and AD 1280. This made it Europe’s oldest preserved human autopsy. It also placed the body right in the middle of what many considered Europe’s most backward time for science.

However, the mummy was prepared by experienced hands and surprisingly advanced techniques. The ancient doctor mixed lime, beeswax, and red cinnabar mercury. The potion was injected into the veins to preserve the body and add a touch of color to the circulatory system. The back of the skull and brain were also skillfully removed.^[5]

This went against the prevailing view that human dissection in the Middle Ages was a “cut up and throw away” affair. This man was possibly even preserved for future use in medical education.

5 Embalmed Human Hearts

France is known for romance, but things went a little too far during the 16th and 17th centuries. During this time, it was considered romantic to be buried with the heart of one’s husband or wife.

In 2015, a group of mummified hearts was found under a convent. The Convent of the Jacobins in Rennes was also home to a large cemetery dating back to said centuries. One lead coffin contained a woman from the elite class, which adhered to this macabre tradition.

Lady Louise de Quengo died in 1656. While her remarkable state of preservation was noteworthy, the best find inside the coffin was a lead urn. Shaped like a valentine’s heart, it contained the real heart of her husband.

Soon, a look through more elite vaults produced four similar urns. The hearts were cleaned and scanned. The images gave researchers a good view of the 400-year-old heart valves, chambers, and arteries. Apart from a healthy organ and another that was too damaged for information, the remaining three showed signs of atherosclerosis.^[6]

4 The Mummified Hand

In Hungary, the village Nyarlorinc has an ancient graveyard. Around 540 people were buried there between the 12th and 16th centuries. When researchers paged through old photos of excavations, they found the mummified hand of a baby.

Curious as to why only one limb mummified, the remains were analyzed. The infant’s copper levels were astronomical. After digging through the cemetery’s artifacts, both the source of the copper and preservation was identified as a coin that fit inside the baby’s hand.

This revealed an unknown way of mummification, but the coin also reflected a known tradition. When a child died before it was baptized, the youngster was buried in a jar with a coin to pay St. John the Baptist to perform the ceremony. That way, the baby could go to Heaven.

The Nyarlorinc child was indeed buried in a jar. Oddly, this tradition was never recorded in Hungary before. A deeper mystery was the coin’s date—between 1858 and 1862. It meant that the baby was buried at Nyarlorinc 150 years after the cemetery was abandoned.^[7]

3 Human Toe Cocktail

Bars are known for alcoholic creativity. However, one cocktail is hard to beat. To order the sourtoe cocktail, one must travel to Yukon territory in Canada. The next step is to find the Sourdough Saloon in Dawson City.

Ask for this particular drink, and the bartender fills a tumbler with spirit (often whiskey). The final ingredient—a mummified human toe—is then plonked inside.

The drink comes with one rule. Your lips must touch the toe. When that happens, the saloon hands over a certificate. So far, over 100,000 people have earned their certificates.

The drink’s history is just as weird. It was born in 1973 after an entrepreneur found the frostbitten toe of a rum smuggler. The digit had been kept in the smuggler’s shack since the 1920s and was around 50 years old upon discovery.

The entrepreneur started the drink as a way in which people could prove themselves as worthy Yukoners. The original toe was swallowed in 1980, but several frostbitten toes have taken its place since.^[8]

2 Double Mystery Solved

Rosalia Lombardo is among the most famous mummies in the world. When pneumonia killed the two-year-old in 1920, her father commissioned Alfredo Salafia to embalm her. This procedure went so well that Rosalia still appears to be napping.

Along with thousands of others, her body was interred in the Capuchin Catacombs under Sicily’s Capuchin Convent. The rest of the corpses were prepared by monks and dried out naturally. Rosalia’s perfect looks came from a long-lost embalming recipe that nobody could crack. For decades, the pretty girl also creeped people out because she appeared to open and close her eyes.^[9]

In 2009, anthropologists tackled both mysteries. One of Salafia’s handwritten manuscripts was found, and it revealed the ingredients. He used glycerin, formalin, zinc sulfate, chloride, and a blend of alcohol and salicylic acid. He simply injected the combined fluid into Rosalia.

The creepy eye thing is an optical illusion. She was mummified with her eyes slightly open. Nearby windows cast enough light to highlight her blue eyes. But as the day shifts and shadows change, viewers are tricked into seeing closed lids.

1 Club Dead

Rosalia is not the only tourist attraction in the Capuchin Catacombs. There are thousands more bodies. Although they are not so well-preserved, the mummies belonged to what researchers called “Club Dead.” It would appear that only the elite, dressed in their best, could hope to be buried there.

Creepily, nobody was buried. Instead, the dead were arranged in poses or hung on the walls. Corpses were dressed in their best uniforms, ball gowns, and religious robes. People were separated according to gender, age, and career. In the hall of professionals, several physicians and lawyers hung from wall hooks. In the nursery, children were in their cribs.^[10]

The subterranean world was maintained by monks who were paid by relatives to change the dead’s clothes and keep them clean. Today, most of the mummies have fallen into disrepair, but their doll-like desperation to act alive remains tangible. The Club Dead collection is part of a greater mystery. Sicily once had a strong tradition of drying out their loved ones. Experts still do not know why.

The past few years saw an unprecedented slew of remarkable fossils. It is not always the biggest dinosaurs that are the most valuable to science. More important are the fragments that reveal behavior, extinct diets, missing ancestors, and the answers to tough puzzles.

New finds can also introduce intriguing mysteries about unknown human species and animals. They can be dramatic, too, showing for the first time the creatures that died minutes after the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck Earth.

10 Comb Jelly Ancestor

Some researchers love their jellies. The predatory and gelatinous kind, not the wobbly dessert. Recently, a scientist from the United Kingdom visited colleagues in China. When he was shown a particular fossil, he got very excited over the creature’s tentacles. The fossil, later named Daihua sanqiong, sprouted 18 whips around its mouth.

Each tentacle had robust ciliary hairs, something only found on comb jellies. The latter is alive today. This bizarre creature uses “combs” of cilia to travel through seawater. The comb jelly was a bit of an orphan. Nobody can follow its evolutionary progress on the tree of life.

However, the 518-million-year-old fossil shared enough characteristics with comb jellies and other ancient creatures that researchers could tentatively build the entire early lineage of comb jellies. It even gave the Oliver Twist of the jelly world a few likely cousins—corals and anemones.^[1]

9 Bandicoots Were Nimble

Pig-footed bandicoots went extinct in the 1950s. Like most marsupials, they were delightfully different in their own way. These bandicoots looked like they had been assembled from pieces taken from a deer, a kangaroo, and an opossum. Weighing about the same as a basketball, bandicoots were among the tiniest grazers that ever lived.

As there are no living animals, researchers turned to the aboriginal community for insights about the creature’s behavior. Done in the 1980s, the interviews revealed something surprising. The ungainly animal could gallop quite fast.

What made this fact so unexpected was the structure of the bandicoot’s feet. Each front leg had two functional toes, and bizarrely, the hind legs had one each. This arrangement appeared unstable. But according to witnesses, the herbivores zoomed into the distance like the Road Runner when they were startled.

Interestingly, in 2019, a DNA analysis was performed on the last remaining 29 skeletons in museums. It revealed that what researchers thought was one species, Chaeropus ecaudatus, was in fact two. The new species was called Chaeropus yirratji to honor a local aboriginal name for the animal.^[2]

8 Worm City

In 2018, rocks were analyzed from Canada’s Mackenzie Mountains. Nobody had worms on the brain while preparing the rocks for another study. However, during the grinding and sawing, unusual colorations prompted a look—and it changed a big belief.

To find out what caused the unfamiliar shades, samples were scanned and digitally enhanced. Almost instantly, a crowding network of tunnels appeared. Previously invisible, the tunnels were made by a thriving community of worms. This may sound torture-level normal, but it showed life where none was expected.

The rocks dated back 500 million years when the region was a seafloor. Most experts agreed that it was a dead zone due to no oxygen. But some rocks were so tunneled that they resembled the highways of a busy city. This proved that the dead zone harbored more life—and definitely more oxygen—than anyone had guessed.^[3]

7 Step Closer To Ancestor X

Ancestor X is the mysterious focus of a scientific argument. It involves the early evolutionary tree of vertebrates, animals that include humans. Ancestor X is not a primate but a fish. This aquatic grandparent, so to speak, was identified in absentia when researchers had a look at some the oldest vertebrates alive today.

Most felt that the boneless hagfish and lampreys belonged at the bottom of the tree. This suggested that X looked similar to the two eellike species. Fossil finds supported this theory. DNA tests did not.

Genetic analysis suggested that lampreys and hagfish had an ancestor that branched off much earlier. The debate swung in the DNA’s favor when a fossil was discovered in Lebanon in 2011. It was an early type of hagfish that was around 100 million years old.

Considering that hagfish have no bones, finding one was “like finding a sneeze in the fossil record” as one scientist put it. The rare discovery had features suggesting that Ancestor X was not some squishy eel but more probably looked more like a fish.^[4]

6 Unique Fingerprints

Around 1 percent of tracks revealed that dinosaurs had skin on their soles. As skin forms patterns, dinosaur feet could stamp “fingerprints” unique to each individual. However, none of the fossils in question had more than a few traces of skin.

Fingerprint-obsessed scientists thirsted for just one measly fossil fingerprint, and then they got five. Few people have heard of Minisauripus, the smallest theropod. The larger theropods were the type of bipedal carnivores that often chase people in movies. Tyrannosaurus rex is the most famous.

Although Minisauripus is not dramatic enough to hit Hollywood, one of these creatures gave the world footprints unlike any ever seen before. Around 120 million years ago, it left tracks in modern-day Korea.

Discovered in 2019, the exquisitely preserved feet measured 2.5 centimeters (1 in) long. The paws were entirely covered in “fingerprints.” The pattern was surprising. Tiny scales wove together like fabric, producing a pattern that resembled those of Chinese bird fossils. It was something that the team had expected from a much bigger theropod.^[5]

5 Ancient Diet And Digestion

When paleontologists want to know what extinct species ate, they have limited options. The shape of teeth and chemical deposits in bones can suggest an animal’s diet. However, to narrow things down, researchers really prefer to find fossilized stomach contents. Unfortunately, soft tissues like the stomach and a digesting meal do not preserve well.

In 1965, a pterosaur fossil (161 to 146 million years old) was unearthed in Southern Germany. The significance of the find was not immediately recognized. In 2015, scientists reviewed the flying reptile at its home museum in Canada. Thankfully, the fossil was in great condition.

Among the well-preserved details were clues about its diet. Inside the guts was something resembling the skeleton of a fish. Best of all was a lump near the base of the pterodactyl’s spine. It was likely a coprolite, or fossilized feces.

Coprolites are rare enough, but finding one inside a pterodactyl would be a first. Analysis of the possible poop revealed what the reptile snacked on. There were spiny remnants suggestive of a marine invertebrate like a sponge or starfish-like prey.^[6]

4 Whale Ancestor With Hooves

Whales began as land mammals and evolved until they permanently took to the seas. There are gaps in this story, but in 2011, a crucial piece was recovered. A 42.6-million-year-old whale fossil turned up in Peru. The creature had four legs.

Each foot had a hoof and was webbed like an otter. This odd combination suggested that the animal had walked on land and swum very well. Other whale fossils from this time were too fragmented to suggest how whales went from land to marine mammals.

The flipper-hoofed thing, technically named Peregocetus pacificus, provided a valuable gem. It proved that early whales sometimes lived on land, probably to mate and have young, but could also stay in the water for weeks. It was an extreme semiaquatic lifestyle for a crossover species.^[7]

The 4-meter-long (13 ft) animal also provided crucial information about how and when whales spread to the Americas. The Peruvian fossil suggested that they crossed the South Atlantic, which was 50 percent smaller than today, and came from somewhere near India.

3 Cache Of 50-Plus New Species

In 2019, scientists were trudging along China’s Danshui River when they hit the jackpot. The team encountered hundreds of ancient remains, which were duly ogled and discussed.

The fossilized bodies of 101 animals were recovered. Astoundingly, over half were unknown species. Ironically, the researchers sat down to have lunch when they made the discovery.

While eating, somebody noticed telltale signs of ancient mudflows. These are great preservers of fossils, but the Danshui batch blew everyone away. The creatures were so well-preserved that soft tissues and animals that normally did not fossilize appeared to be freshly pressed. There were perfect jellyfish, eyes, gills, digestive systems, soft-bodied worms, and sea anemones, to name but a few.

The cache dated to the Cambrian Period (490 million to 530 million years ago) when animal life diversified at an uncommon pace. The new species present the perfect opportunity to better understand this strangely fruitful time.^[8]

2 A New Human

Modern humans are the only survivor of the hominid “family tree.” Cousins like the Neanderthals, Australopithecus, and Homo erectus are long gone. It is not often that a new human species is identified.

But in 2007, a bone turned up in the Philippines. Part of a foot, it was 67,000 years old and the most ancient human fragment in the Philippines. In 2019, 12 more bones were found nearby. Together, they outlined an unknown miniature species of human beings.

This part of the world is already famous for the 2004 discovery of Homo floresiensis, an unrelated tiny hominid nicknamed the “hobbit,” in Indonesia. The newly named Homo luzonensis shared traits with H. sapiens, H. erectus, and Australopithecus.

This mix proved that it was a new species, but a lack of viable DNA obscured evolutionary links with the others. The discovery also contradicted the belief that the first hominins out of Africa were H. erectus, followed by H. sapiens around 40 thousand to 50 thousand years ago.

The small human was outside of Africa almost 10,000 years earlier. Incredibly, their Australopithecus traits are much older. Australopithecus remains have never been found outside Africa, but some specimens are three million years old.^[9]

1 The Day The Dinosaurs Died

The K-Pg boundary is a terrible grave marker. Discovered in the 1970s, this layer can be found in rock separating the Cretaceous and Paleogene eras. It is filled with iridium from a massive asteroid that hit near Mexico about 66 million years ago.

The impact left a crater 145 kilometers (90 mi) wide and killed three out of four species, including the dinosaurs. Despite the mass extinction that followed, known as the K-Pg event, no fossils reflected the disaster right after it happened.

In 2019, ancient fish turned up at Hell Creek, North Dakota. They were the first group of large species found at the K-Pg boundary. Even better, the fish had glass spheres in their gills. Caused by the impact, the glass rained down at Hell Creek minutes after the asteroid struck and before the fish were buried in mud, together with animals, plants, and insects.

It was the glass-smothered fish that proved the group had died within a short period from direct consequences of the impact. To view the Hell Creek fossils is to see the day the dinosaurs died.^[10]

The name of Babylon, today, is used as a synonym for evil and debauchery. Our view of the ancient empire is colored by biblical history, and it’s not exactly flattering. It calls Babylon the “mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations” and says that “happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks.”

In its time, though, Babylon was one of the world’s most powerful cities, a name uttered with awe. Much of the real Babylon has been lost to time, but archaeologists have found pieces. Through them, we glimpse into one of the world’s first great civilizations.

10A Babylonian Home

In 1899, archaeologists found the city of Babylon itself. Inside, they saw a hint of what life was like in an ordinary Babylonian home.

Babylon was made without stones. Every building and every wall was built out of clay bricks. Those bricks were glazed with color and pictures of gods, beasts, and men. The walls of the city were coated in lapis lazuli, a blue mineral worth its weight in gold.

A Babylonian home would be built out of clay bricks, as well. Most would be on dusty, unpaved roads, off the side of the main streets. Many would be a single room leading out into an open court, though some with a little more wealth would have extra rooms attached.

Inside, they kept decorative pots and lanterns, glazed with little dashes of color to bring it alive. The children would have small clay toys or toy terracotta ships to play with. The grown men would gamble, playing games with the ankle bones of animals.

9Babylonian Medicine

When Babylonians walked down to the marketplace, they would see more than just shopkeepers. Sick people would be sitting there, too, and they were everyone’s responsibility. No matter who you were, you were expected to take a minute to give them your best medical advice.

The elite didn’t have to do this. They could go to the temple. There, a sorcerer might sit down with them and explain what evil they’d committed to anger the gods and what charms they need to make penance. Or they might get a doctor, who would be trained to make plaster casts and to perform surgery.

The poor, though, were not so lucky. They would have to take care of their own, usually in their own home. That’s why they would go out to the marketplace, where people would pass by and, if they’d suffered the same symptoms, let him know how they treated it.

Babylonian medical tablets show they based all their medicine on what had worked in the past. They call medicines “tried and tested“ and pass them down. One, for example, outlines an illness a woman had 1,500 years ago and the way she treated it, passing a remedy that worked down through the centuries.

8Erotic Clay Plaques

Babylon was considered unusually sexually open, even by the standards of ancient kingdoms. According to the historian Jean Bottero, people would have sex out in the open—sometimes on the terrace of their homes and sometimes even on the streets.

We know for sure that they passed out around little terracotta plates that showed people in the act, like ancient issues of Playboy. There is a whole Kamasutra-like range of techniques displayed on these things. There was no taboo on them—they were everywhere. Archaeologists have found them in homes, in temples, and even buried with the dead in their graves.

It’s easy to imagine how uncomfortable the Israelites, who give us much of our understanding of Babylon today, must have been when they walked through Babylon. In ancient Israel, sexual art was few and far between. To them, Babylon’s sexuality made it a depraved place.

7The Temple Of Ishtar

One of the strangest Babylonian traditions, according to the Greek writer Herodotus, took place at the Temple of Ishtar. At least once in her life, a woman had to come there, and she wouldn’t be allowed to leave until she’d slept with somebody for money.

We’ve unearthed some of these temples. One was found at the top of the city, on an acropolis where the king kept his royal seat of power. Next to his royal seat is a temple to Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. It is upon a massive stone terrace with a ramp leading up to it and, in its prime, is believed to have been a gigantic ziggurat that towered into the sky.

“Here when a woman takes her seat she does not depart again to her house until one of the strangers has thrown a silver coin into her lap and has had commerce with her outside the temple,” Herodotus says. It was easier for some women than others. “Some of them remain even as much as three or four years.”

6Fortune-Telling

The Babylonians believed they could see the future in a sheep’s liver. When they needed to make an important decision, they would cut the liver of a sheep’s body to predict how it would go.

They’ve left behind clay models of livers, mapped with abnormalities that they believed indicated different fates. Some would be for specific purposes. One, for example, marked with the words “destruction of a small town,” was consulted whenever a Babylonian king was considering razing a village to the ground

Different cultures viewed this in different ways. The Greeks thought they were on to something and copied them. The Israelites, on the other hand, viewed it as a type of dark, foreign sorcery and as something to be feared.

5Astronomy

Babylonian astronomers would climb up to the top of their great ziggurats and watch the movements of the stars in the sky. The stars were a major part of their religion, and they made some incredible advances in astronomy centuries before anybody else.

The Babylonians, we’ve learned, discovered the Pythagorean theorem 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born. They spotted Venus, tracked Haley’s comet, and tracked Jupiter using mathematical techniques that European society didn’t develop until the 14th century.

Their astronomy was incredibly advanced—but that doesn’t mean they understood what space was. As accurately as they tracked the planets, they just used them for astrology. They believed that the constellations were placed there by the gods, and movements in the skies were a portent of things to come.

Oddly enough, in some ways, their astrology worked. They were able to track the changes in a season by where a constellation was in the sky—so, when they predicted a strong harvest, they were often right.

4The Ritual For Eclipses

Of all the cosmic warnings across the sky, an eclipse was the most terrifying. The Babylonians believed they brought on catastrophes, murders, and rebellions. We’ve found a tablet that tells us exactly what they did during an eclipse—and it was a pretty intense reaction.

First, they were to light an altar on fire. Then every Babylonian was to take off anything they might be wearing on their head and, instead, pull their clothes over their heads. With their tunics over their heads, they sang dirges, begging the gods to protect their fields and not to destroy them with floods.

At the end, they broke into tears and begged the gods to spare them. The crying was scheduled. Part of the ritual required the people to have an emotional breakdown.

3The Adoption Of An Abandoned Baby

A contract between a priestess and the state has been found, revealing the compassionate side of the Babylonians. A priestess, it states, had found a newborn baby abandoned at a well and snatched it “from the mouth of a dog.”

That part wasn’t too unusual. Abandoning babies to die was a fairly standard practice in most nations in those times. In Rome, parents were required by law to abandon babies that were deformed. In Babylon, though, it seems to have been handled differently.

The priestess adopted the baby as her son. The Babylonian state, the tablet reveals, took this type of gesture very seriously. Not only did they approve of the priestess’s actions, but they set up consequences to ensure that she cared for the child as her own.

“If Simat-Adad, the nugig, says to him, ‘You are not my son!,’ ” the tablet warns, “she shall forfeit house, field, orchard, female and male slaves, possessions and utensils, as much as there may be.”

2The Lives Of Conquered People

When a nation was defeated by Babylon, the people were relocated to new parts of their empire. It happened to the Israelites, which was a lot of the reason they hated Babylon so much.

We’ve found tablets that track the lives of Israelites in Babylon, revealing they had more freedom than expected. At the very least, they were not treated as slaves—they were allowed to live their lives. They signed contracts, traded commodities, paid taxes, and received loans.

That doesn’t mean the Babylonians were saints. They slaughtered the Israelites’ babies, destroyed their city, and tore them from their homes. There were plenty of good reasons to hate them.

Because the Babylonians gave them rights, though, some didn’t hold the grudge forever. As time passed and the memory of the tragedy became fainter, some Israelites integrated into Babylonian society. In time, they would have become indistinguishable from their conquerors.

1The Graves Of Dead Babylonians

Along the city walls of Babylon are the graves of their dead. When a Babylonian reached the end of his days, his body was brought there, and he was buried under the earth. Their bodies were stretched out at full length and usually were buried unadorned, without any casket or tomb. Sometimes, though, they would be wrapped up in reed mats or walled in with bricks.

Some would be buried with the possessions they had in life. Graves would be filled with beads. According to Herodotus, some of their graves would even be filled to the brim would honey.

They would rarely be buried with their weapons. For their time, the Babylonians were a peaceful people—lovers and not fighters.

Dead people and skeletons are often the last thing we expect at tourist attractions—at least most of the time. While some places are visited for their human remains, most aren’t. Nonetheless, there are some vacation destinations that happen to have dead people or skeletons lying around.

Some tourist attractions discreetly contain bodies that tourists may not even realize are there. In other cases, the remains are in the full view of the visitors, who just pass by them as if they’re another artifact. Here are ten tourist attractions filled with human remains.

10 Mount Everest

Mount Everest is littered with lots of dead bodies. In fact, the north side is filled with so many bodies that it has been unofficially renamed Rainbow Ridge, after the colors of the clothes and gear of the numerous tourists and Sherpa guides who’ve perished there. The total number of bodies on Everest is unknown, but the figure was put at over 200 as of 2015.

One popular corpse is that of Tsewang Paljor. His body has remained on Everest since he was killed in a blizzard in 1996. Paljor is called Green Boots because he wore green boots. He has become so well-known that the enclave in which he froze to death is called Green Boots’ Cave. The enclave is a popular resting point for climbers descending from Everest.

Bodies are often left on Everest because of the cost and dangers involved in recovering them. Between six and eight Sherpa guides are required to retrieve a body from Everest. The bodies are always heavy, sometimes up to two times the victim’s weight when alive, because they are frozen. Sherpas often need to dig around the body and carry it with the ice. Retrievals cost thousands of dollars.^[1]

9 Yellow River

China’s Yellow River is always filled with the remains of people who committed suicide, drowned while swimming, or were dumped in the river after they were murdered. The government is uninterested in retrieving the bodies, causing creative entrepreneurs like Wei Xinpeng to retrieve the cadavers for money.

Xinpeng has noted a footbridge where bodies that end up in the river cannot pass. He paddles to the footbridge with his boat and pulls out any corpse he finds. He keeps the bodies in a cove and then takes out newspaper ads describing them.

Families pay a small fee to confirm if the body belongs to a relative. When it does, they pay another $500 to take the remains. As of 2010, Xinpeng said he’d found 500 bodies within seven years. Nine years later, we wonder how many more he has found.^[2]

8 Catacombs Of Paris

In the 18th century, the city council of Paris realized they were running out of cemetery space. So they agreed to turn the quarries underneath Paris into a catacomb and fill it with the remains of over six million people buried in cemeteries scattered across the city.

Whoever transported the skulls and bones into the catacombs initially just threw them in. However, workers began to artistically arrange the skulls and bones.

Many visitors never get to see the millions of bones and skulls that lie along the 2 kilometers (1.2 mi) of tunnels which are part of a tour. The tunnels can be reached by a staircase that leads further down into the catacombs. At the end of the tour is another staircase that leads to the upper sections of the catacombs. Tourists are said to be often covered in bone dust at the end of the journey.^[3]

7 Museum Of London

Roughly 20,000 skeletons are kept in an underground vault in the Museum of London. The vault is built with concrete walls and hidden from tourists. It is called the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology and is believed to be “the largest single collection of stratified human remains anywhere in the world in one city.”

The skeletons belonged to people who died from when the Romans ruled over Britain up until the 19th century. They are stored in cardboard boxes that are labeled “human skeleton” or “human infant skeleton,” in the case of infants. The museum keeps the bodies to study the history of London.

For instance, historians know that the people of the Middle Ages had better teeth than the people during the Age of Discovery after analyzing their skeletons. The latter had bad teeth because they ate lots of sugar.^[4]

6 Roopkund Lake

Roopkund lake in Uttarakhand, India, is known for its skeletons. The lake is often covered in ice. But when the ice melts—as it often does—tourists are treated to a chilling view of over 200 human skeletons scattered along its edge.

The skeletons were first discovered during World War II in 1942. The skeletons have dents on their skulls and shoulders, indicating that they had been struck by something from above. The British initially suspected they were the remains of Japanese soldiers who attempted to sneak into India.

They later realized the skeletons were too old to be the Japanese. Historians revisited the lake in 2004 and confirmed that the bones belonged to two groups of people killed by hailstones around AD 850.

One group was a family or tribe, while the other were either their porters or guides. The party was crossing the area when they ran into an hailstorm. They had no place to hide and died after they were continually hit by cricket ball-sized hailstones.^[5]

5 Pompeii

Mount Vesuvius erupted around noon on August 24, AD 79. The eruption threw hot ash into the air and down onto the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The ash fell on people and homes, blocking doors and causing roofs to collapse. It also filled the roads, further preventing people from escaping.

While thousands braved the ash and escaped, thousands more remained in their homes, where they cowered in fear and covered their heads with pillows. Whoever survived the falling ash and collapsing roofs was dead the next morning when a pyroclastic flow came pouring down the sides of the mountain.

Pompeii was forgotten until it was discovered in 1738. Excavators got to work and soon realized that the skeletons of the people killed during the AD 79 eruption were surrounded by empty spaces in the shape of what used to be their bodies. So they began pouring plaster of Paris into the spaces around the skeletons.

Today, we have hundreds of casts of the remains of people who died during the infamous eruption. There are also the plastered remains of a pig and a dog. The casts clearly show the faces and features of the people and animals—just as they were at the moment of death.

Around 1,150 bodies have been excavated from Pompeii as of 2015. However, historians believe over 2,000 people died in Pompeii. Considering that only three-fourths of Pompeii has been excavated, there are probably still more skeletons underground.^[6]

4 Sac Uayum

A cenote is a sinkhole filled with water. It is created when weak limestone ground collapses to expose the cavern underneath. Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula has lots of cenotes that are top tourist attractions. However, the Sac Uayum cenote stands out because it contains the remains of dead people and animals.

Sac Uayum was feared by the ancient Maya and is still feared by the locals, who have lots of folklore advising anyone against entering the cenote. In 2013, a team of archaeologists led by Bradley Russell dared the supposed dangers and decided to go into the cenote to investigate.

They discovered it is filled with skulls and bones of humans and cattle. They found 15 skulls but believe there are more. Some of the skulls are flattened, indicating they were from the Mayan civilization. While they suspect that the cows fell into the hole, they could not confirm how the humans ended up in the cenote.

The archaeologists know the cenote was never a cemetery and that the humans were never used as sacrifices. They think the people were possibly buried there temporarily because the Mayans believed in reincarnation. Alternatively, they could have been plague victims dumped there to prevent them from infecting the living.^[7]

3 The Great Wall Of China

The Great Wall of China, totaling some 21,000 kilometers (13,000 mi) altogether, is probably the most popular structure built in ancient China. It was built by several emperors, starting with Qin Shi Huang circa 221 BC. However, most of what remains of the wall today was built during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

Convicts and soldiers formed the bulk of the workforce at the time Emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the construction of the wall. It is estimated that 400,000 workers died during construction at the time. Most of the dead are believed to be buried inside the wall.^[8]

2 Sedlec Ossuary

The Sedlec Ossuary (aka The Bone Church) in the Czech Republic is filled with the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people. The bones are not hidden but left in public view, where they have been turned into artworks. There are pyramids, candle-holders, and a chandelier made with human skulls and bones.

The history of the ossuary began in the 13th century, when a monk returned from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with some soil. He threw the soil all around Sedlec cemetery. Soon, everyone in today’s Czech Republic and neighboring kingdoms wanted to be buried at Sedlec. More than 30,000 people were buried there before the cemetery ran out of space.

The city agreed to move the bodies into a crypt so that newer bodies could be buried in the cemetery. That crypt is the Sedlec Ossuary. A woodcarver named Frantisek Rint turned the skeletons into artworks in 1870, when he used the bones to create designs. It was he who created the famous chandelier. He also bleached all the bones so that they’d be the same color.^[9]

1 Tower Of London

King Edward IV of England died on April 9, 1483. His successor was his son, Edward, who was crowned as King Edward V. But Edward V was only 13, so his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was assigned as protector. A protector was a person who ruled until the king was of age.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, soon got greedy and decided he wanted to be king. He imprisoned Edward V and his ten-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, in the Tower of London. Then he claimed Edward V could not become king because he was an illegitimate son of Edward IV.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was crowned king in July 1483 as Richard III. Meanwhile, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, mysteriously disappeared. Many believe they were killed by Richard III.^[10]

Several bodies have been found in the Tower of London over the years. Sometime between 1603 and 1614 (or even in 1647 as some sources claim), the skeletons of two children were found on a table in a walled up room.

The skeletons were initially thought to belong to the brothers until the suspicions were superseded by claims that they belonged to children aged between six and eight. Another body was found in 1619. It was thought to belong to one of the brothers until it was discovered to be the corpse of an ape.

Two more skeletons were found under a staircase in 1674. Yet more skeletons were found between 1830 and 1840, when the moat surrounding the tower was drained. Another body was found in 1977. However, carbon-dating revealed it was from the Iron Age. The skeletons of the royal brothers remain missing.

Since its release in 1981, the movie Silence of the Lambs has become a horror icon. The American Film Institute considers it one of the best films of all time, and it is only one of three movies to win the “big five” Academy Awards for Best Actor, Actress, Director, Movie, and Screenplay.

In a movie filled with terrifying moments, there is one that stands out. While investigating a storage facility, FBI Agent Clarice Starling finds a large jar that contains a human head. The gruesome sight horrified the agent, not to mention the audience.

While discovering a head in a jar might be the stuff of movies, finding human remains in storage units is not unrealistic. Dozens of such cases have happened around the world to people who never imagined seeing a tiny corpse stuffed into a suitcase or a military hero’s ashes on a shelf. From murders to thefts, accidents to suicides, gruesome crime scenes to sadly forgotten histories, storage units have many stories to tell. Here are ten of them.

Related: 10 Family Secrets That Will Truly Horrify You

10 Forgotten Children

The idea of finding something valuable in an abandoned storage unit has made TV shows like Storage Wars and Auction Hunters popular. In those shows, as in real life, if a storage unit goes unpaid or has been abandoned, the owners of the facility can auction off its contents. The bidders don’t know what they might find—it might be valuable art or jewelry; it might be nothing but empty boxes. And sometimes, as in a recent case in New Zealand, it might be something horrific.

On August 11, 2022, after trying their luck by bidding on abandoned storage items in an online auction, a family in Auckland brought home their unknown winnings. They hoped to find something of value. What they found instead, crammed into suitcases, were the remains of two young children, between roughly five and ten years of age.

Authorities were called to the scene, and investigators say the remains have likely been in the suitcases for several years. Although their names have not been released, the children have been identified. After a South Korean woman was linked to the victims, the Korean National Police Agency became involved in the ongoing investigation.^[1]

9 Cali in the Cage

In another horrific case involving a child, the remains of five-year-old Cali Anderson were found in a plastic drum in a Sacramento storage unit in May 2018. The police say Cali had died approximately two weeks before her body was discovered. In an arrest affidavit, Anderson’s stepmother said the little girl was experiencing health problems, but since she wasn’t her own child, she didn’t get her any medical attention.

When Cali died, her body was placed in a duffel bag, hidden in a closet, and finally moved to the storage unit. When the police investigated the child’s home, they found handcuffs in an animal crate, along with clothing belonging to the girl, hinting that little Cali’s short life had been a very tragic one.^[2]

8 No Show of Respect

While storage units have been used many times by killers trying to hide evidence, sometimes the remains are of people who died of completely natural causes. The crimes perpetrated against them and their families instead occurred after death by the very people trusted to handle their remains with dignity and care.

In one such case, the winner of a storage auction in Rhode Island was shocked to find the bodies of two adults and one infant in his unit. The remains of the adults were so decomposed their gender could not be determined, while the infant, found in a small coffin, was thought to be a female. The unit had been rented by funeral home operator Alfred Pennine of Providence. Dozens more sets of remains were discovered in the funeral home he operated. Once his crimes began to come to light, Pennine committed suicide.^[3]

7 A Long-Overdue Honor

In some cases, it is not criminal activity that results in human remains being found in storage but merely time and tragedy. In early 2022, storage auction winner Bob Blank stumbled across the story of a forgotten military veteran. While looking through items he had won from the auction, he found a sealed box with cremated remains, along with other documents, including a letter from former President Ronald Reagan. A death certificate and Army discharge documents said the remains belonged to a World War II veteran. Two medals indicated he had been a heroic one.

Decorated soldier George Ralph Brady died in 1984 at the age of 59, and his ashes were stored in a cardboard box for 38 years. Determining that Brady had no living relatives, the American Legion performed a burial service with an honor guard and a flag line. The once-forgotten veteran’s remains now lie at the Riverside National Cemetery in California.^[4]

6 Work Goes up in Flames

Although most people use storage units to secure their personal belongings, some also use them to work on their own property. Unfortunately for a man in Russellville, Alabama, doing repairs on an automobile might have been responsible for his death.

On January 14, 2022, emergency workers responded to a fire at a storage facility. Initial reports about the number of units involved varied, but they all claimed one thing: that a dead body was found inside one of them. Subsequent reports said the unnamed man was known to have rented several units in the facility and that he often worked on vehicles in them. Authorities speculate the victim might have been using an alternative heat source that could have sparked the blaze. No foul play was suspected.^[5]

5 Murderous Greed

Money has always been a powerful motivator for murder, and hiding a victim’s remains while continuing to rob them is not as rare as one would hope. In one such case in Las Vegas, the bodies of an elderly couple were hidden in trash bins for ten years while their killer stole their Social Security income. The remains were found in a unit at All Storage at the Lakes in 2015, but the last time Joaquin and Eleanor Sierra were seen alive was in 2003.

Their killer, Robert Dixon Dunn, had apparently met them at a nursing home where his own mother was living. After killing them, he succeeded in stealing from them for all those years by moving around the country and using a fake name. After someone reported him for suspected fraud, he was finally caught. His ex-wife said Dunn claimed he was concealing the bodies of his aunt and uncle, who had committed suicide. In truth, the bodies were found to contain drugs and injuries caused by a sharp object.^[1]

4 A Bug Reveals All

That lure of money does not just attract evil strangers to potential victims. Violence within families is not uncommon, sometimes between spouses or between siblings. And sometimes between parents and children. In 2001, police in Las Vegas accused Brookey Lee West of killing her own mother and hiding the remains in a trash can in a storage unit. The remains of Christine Smith, 68, were discovered after reports of a foul odor caused the police to seek a search warrant.

The unit, which also contained many of Smith’s belongings, had been rented by her daughter, though she had used a different last name. During the trial, it seemed possible the murderer might evade justice because the remains were so decomposed that the coroner could not determine a cause of death. West said her mother died of natural causes, and the coroner could not absolutely refute that. But in a surprising twist, an entomologist was able to prove the case for murder. Dr. Neal Haskell testified that the absence of blow flies on the corpse proved she had been put in the can either while she was still alive or immediately after death. West was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

In an interesting footnote, Brookey Lee West returned to the headlines when she tried to escape from prison. Although wearing a disguise, West was spotted and recognized by staff right before she reached the prison exit.^[7]

3 A Daughter’s Deceptive Plan

Even when murder is not involved, the lure of money can cause some people to do unimaginable things. After her father apparently died from natural causes in June 1990, Judith Maria Broughton concocted a plan to steal his Social Security benefits, beginning in 1997. Leasing a storage unit at Econo Self Storage in Lexington, Kentucky, Judith stored the body there and kept collecting her father’s retirement funds.

On January 8, 2014, authorities discovered the mummified remains of Luther Broughton and charged Judith with the theft of nearly a quarter-million dollars. After pleading guilty to the theft, Judith was sentenced to ten years in prison.^[8]

2 Horrific Hoarding

It’s not always murder, and it’s not always money. Sometimes remains discovered in storage units were kept there due to family secrets, psychological disorders, and grief. After her death by natural causes in 1995, Ann Bunch’s body was released to her family for burial. Family members built a casket, domed so the old woman’s hump would fit inside. It was painted blue and loaded into a family van to be transported to Alabama for burial. But the body never got there.

On her deathbed, Ann’s daughter, Barbie Hancock, confessed to her own daughter, Rebecca Fancher, that the remains were in unit B8 of U-Stor. Although Hancock claimed the burial had been delayed because of bad weather and truck problems, family members say otherwise. Fancher’s ex-husband claims his former mother-in-law couldn’t deal with her mother’s death and that her hoarding compulsion made her keep the body nearby—possibly even in her own home before it was moved to U-Stor. Hancock and Fancher’s hoarding eventually led to their house being declared uninhabitable.^[9]

1 A Wife Dismembered

One of the most disturbing instances of remains found in a storage unit would have to be the case of Jessica Rey. On October 20, 2017, Rey gave birth in a Kansas City, Missouri, hotel room. Her husband, Justin, claims she died after the child’s birth, saying at one time that she had committed suicide and at another that Jessica died of natural causes. In any case, Justin spent two days in the room with the corpse, the newborn infant, and the couple’s toddler. Then, in the presence of his children, he dismembered Jessica’s body, put the parts in a cooler, and took it to a U-Haul storage facility. Alarmed by his suspicious behavior, facility workers called the police.

Authorities found Rey in the storage unit—where he might have stayed for a few nights—with his two small children and his wife’s dismembered remains. Faced with charges of endangerment of a child and sexual exploitation of a minor for photos found on his phone during the investigation, Rey was convicted and sentenced to nearly nine years in prison. He remains under investigation in a separate murder case in California.^[10]

It seems obvious that a former president should be given an appropriate and honorable final resting place. For most who have served their country, that has been true. But there have also been a surprising number of issues with former leaders’ deaths. From George Washington to the present day, presidents have been memorialized in some strange ways. Worse still, some of their remains haven’t been allowed to rest as they should.

Here are ten tales of the strange fates of former presidents after death.

Related: Top 10 Faux Pas Committed By US Presidents

10 George Washington

When George Washington died in 1799, his will was clear: He wanted to be buried close to his Virginia home. But the mausoleum at his plantation, Mount Vernon, needed considerable renovation to hold the first President’s remains. Prior to his death, Washington himself laid out the issue. He wrote about repairs that had to be done to the vault: “I desire that a new [tomb] of Brick, and upon a larger Scale, may be built at the foot of what is commonly called the Vineyard Inclosure… In which my remains, with those of my deceased relatives… may be deposited.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Congress ignored his request and conspired to erect a crypt in the U.S. Capitol building. But by 1830, three decades after Washington’s death, that memorial hadn’t been built. Washington’s remains were still in Mount Vernon—but no renovation had been done on the vault there, either.

That’s when things got strange. That year, Washington’s nephew and last surviving heir, John Augustine Washington II, fired a gardener who had been employed at Mount Vernon. The landscaper was upset about the dismissal and sought revenge. He crept into the crypt with the intention of stealing the late president’s skull. Thankfully, Washington’s body had been encased in lead to prevent post-death tampering. Even so, the crypt was in such bad shape that the bones of dozens of people were scattered and mixed together inside. Instead of taking a piece of Washington, the gardener swiped the skull of one of his distant relatives. A year later, the surviving Washington heir erected a new crypt to honor the president, and—pardon the pun—the rest is history.^[1]

9 James K. Polk

James K. Polk died only a few months after his term ended in 1849. The nation’s 11th President died of cholera, which at the time meant a quick burial in a mass grave to slow the disease’s aggressive spread. That burial was unbecoming for a former president, though. After a year in a common grave in a city cemetery in Nashville, lawmakers in Tennessee ordered the remains moved. The intended final resting spot was to be Polk Place, where the president died. And for a while, that was that. But in 1893, the Polk family sold the expansive property. When that happened, Tennessee officials moved Polk’s remains to the State Capitol in Nashville—and again, for a while, that was that.

In 2017, Polk’s final resting place came back into question. At issue this time was the late president’s last will and testament. In the document, he requested to be buried at Polk Place. That property was demolished not long after his family sold it back in 1893, though. So state lawmakers began the process of moving the remains to a property in the city of Columbia, an hour outside Nashville.

Polk had also owned that home during his life, and politicians reasoned the move would essentially fulfill the request in his will. In 2018, the Tennessee legislature passed a resolution to move Polk yet again. However, six months later, it was put on hold when the Tennessee Historical Commission refused to grant permission to disturb the remains. Today, Polk rests at the State Capitol Building—for now.^[2]

8 Zachary Taylor

Not long after Polk’s death, his successor died. Zachary Taylor had the unfortunate distinction of dying in office when he perished a year into his term in 1850. He was 65 years old upon death, which was an advanced age at the time. However, just days before passing, he was in good spirits at a Fourth of July ceremony. The sudden death left supporters wondering if he was poisoned. Taylor had been strongly against allowing slavery in the west at the time. Thus, his supporters wondered whether pro-slavery insurgents poisoned the milk and cherries he ate on the Fourth of July. But no definitive proof of poisoning was ever revealed.

Taylor was buried in his home state of Kentucky. For a while, he rested peacefully. But over the next century, the possibility of poisoning continued to be debated. In 1991, the former President was exhumed for an autopsy. Kentucky’s chief medical examiner performed the procedure. He conclusively found Taylor had not been poisoned. In his report, the death doc wrote Taylor died of “a myriad of natural diseases which could have produced the symptoms of gastroenteritis.” Satisfied at the conclusion, 140 years later, lawmakers had Taylor reburied. Today, he rests in the National Cemetery that bears his name in Louisville.^[3]

7 John Tyler

John Tyler was America’s tenth President, serving before Polk. The Southerner died in 1862, during the middle of the Civil War. He had been elected to the insurgent Confederacy’s legislature in his final days. Thus, rebels held the Virginia native’s body on their side of the horrifically bloody war. This riled up men on both fronts of the conflict and altered how Tyler’s final resting place was designated. The write-up of Tyler’s passing in The New York Times was vicious, asserting he went “down to death amid the ruins of his native State.” The obituary continued: “[Tyler] himself was one of the architects of its ruin; and beneath that melancholy wreck his name will be buried, instead of being inscribed on the Capitol’s monumental marble, as a year ago he so much desired.”

That obituary writer would be proven correct. Tyler had requested a simple funeral at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virgina. That did not happen. Seeing an opportunity to promote rebel pride, Confederate President Jefferson Davis threw a “grand event” for Tyler. Davis even draped Tyler’s coffin in a Confederate flag. In response, Union lawmakers refused to acknowledge the former president’s resting place. Today, Tyler is still interred in Richmond. The old bitterness has carried on, too. According to cemetery officials, he is still the only former president whose resting place is not recognized in Washington.^[4]

6 Abraham Lincoln

After Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 assassination, his body was taken by train around the country. Millions of Americans mourned their murdered leader. The body was embalmed for the trip—a relatively new procedure at the time. It hadn’t been perfected yet, though. The 19-day rail journey required morticians to travel with Lincoln’s corpse and re-embalm it at every stop. However, the experts were unable to prevent the corpse’s ultimate decay. When the train stopped in New York, a reporter wrote: “It will not be possible, despite the effection of the embalming, to continue much longer the exhibition, as the constant shaking of the body aided by the exposure to the air, and the increasing of dust, has already undone much of the… workmanship.” Thankfully, after three weeks, Lincoln was finally laid to rest in an Illinois tomb.

A decade later, in 1876, a group of criminals devised a plan to steal Lincoln’s remains and hold them for ransom. There were no guards at the late president’s tomb, and the marble sarcophagus serving as his resting place had only been lightly sealed. Unbeknownst to the group, they revealed their scheme to a man who was a government informant. He told the Secret Service, and on the day the crew went to the tomb, officers were waiting. Following that near-theft, Lincoln’s remains were secretly buried in the vault’s basement. In 1901, he was disinterred once more and reburied inside a steel cage under ten feet of concrete.^[5]

5 Warren G. Harding

Warren G. Harding suddenly died at a San Francisco hotel in 1923. At the time, he was in the midst of a nationwide speaking tour. He’d also recently suffered food poisoning. But nobody expected him to pass without warning. His wife, Florence, was adamant about the aftermath: no autopsy and immediate embalming. Harding’s doctors were furious. They wanted to know what had suddenly killed the sitting President. One frustrated medical professional even wrote: “We shall never know exactly the immediate cause of President Harding’s death since every effort that was made to secure an autopsy met with complete and final refusal.” The grieving widow was unmoved, though, and her late husband was buried.

For a while, the public blamed Harding’s doctors for his death. But a few years later, the truth started to come out. In 1928, a woman named Nan Britton wrote a tell-all book about an alleged affair she had with Harding. And in 1930, a former administration staffer wrote a book alleging Florence poisoned her husband after learning of the infidelity. Then, almost a century later, Britton’s descendants wanted answers about their lineage. Ancestry documentation linked them to Harding, and they took the late president’s offspring to court over it. Before Harding’s body could be exhumed for DNA proof, though, his progeny relented. They admitted Harding did indeed have an affair with Britton that produced a child.^[6]

4 Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of America’s greatest presidents. He saw the country through a bit more than three terms spanning much of the Great Depression and World War II. When he died in 1945, he had been very sick for a very long time. Still, his death was not expected. Roosevelt had been at one of his vacation homes with an alleged mistress when he perished. He told her he felt “a terrific pain in the back of my head” and passed out. Three hours later, he was dead. But while officials knew the importance of embalming quickly after death, their response was slow. An undertaker wasn’t contacted until four hours after the president’s death. All the while, aides waited on Eleanor Roosevelt to arrive as the next of kin.

Nine hours later, the embalming process finally began. The undertaker, F. Haden Snoderly, recorded a detailed 15-page memo about the significant issues he faced at that point. “Rigor mortis had set in,” he wrote, and Roosevelt’s abdomen had been “noticeably distended” by the time embalming began. Worse still, FDR’s “arteries were sclerotic,” which meant it was nearly impossible for Snoderly to get embalming fluid into the great man’s veins. The process was so difficult that accusations later appeared in books that Roosevelt had been poisoned and his body had turned black upon death. Those claims were false, but rumors persisted. As for FDR’s afterlife, the president wanted to keep things simple. He wrote out a very detailed set of instructions demanding a bare-bones coffin, a low-key funeral, and no lying in state.^[7]

3 John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy’s body rests in the Arlington National Cemetery. His brain, however, is missing. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. During the autopsy, his brain was placed in “a stainless-steel container with a screw-top lid.” Secret Service agents stored it in a secured file cabinet for safekeeping. From there, it was later brought to a “secure room” within the National Archives. But then something horrible happened. Three years after Kennedy’s death, officials discovered the late President’s brain had vanished. But nobody knew when or how it had been removed from the National Archives.

Author James Swanson reported on the macabre caper in the book End Of Days, writing: “the brain, the tissue slides, and other autopsy materials were missing—and they have never been seen since.” There is no shortage of conspiracy theories focused on Kennedy’s death, but his missing brain has only added to the lore. Swanson played right into it with his own theory too. The author claimed JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was the one who swiped the organ. “My conclusion is that Robert Kennedy did take his brother’s brain—not to conceal evidence of a conspiracy but perhaps to conceal evidence of the true extent of President Kennedy’s illnesses,” Swanson wrote, “or perhaps to conceal evidence of the number of medications that President Kennedy was taking.”^[8]

2 Tassos Papadopoulos

Tassos Papadopoulos, the former President of Cyprus, succumbed to lung cancer in 2008. Papadopoulos had been a political hero in the island nation. After his death, his body was interred in a cemetery in the city of Nicosia. But on the day before the first anniversary of his passing, the remains were stolen. On the morning of December 11, 2009, one of Papadopoulos’s former bodyguards went to the gravesite to light a candle of remembrance. It had rained hard the night before. When the mourning man arrived, he found an empty hole and a pile of dirt where the grave had been. The shocked man immediately called the police.

Officials were baffled by the heist. For weeks, they failed to determine any suspects. Then, three months later, an anonymous tip led police to a different cemetery in Nicosia. There, they found Papadopoulos’s body reburied in another grave. The tip gave investigators a lead, too. It turned out the late president’s body had been dug up by a man seeking leverage to ask for his brother’s release from prison. The scheme came apart after another accomplice called Papadopolous’s family and asked for money instead. The grave robbers were caught and quickly punished. Each man received less than two years in jail for the crime. Thankfully, Papadopoulos was reburied peacefully.^[9]

1 José Eduardo dos Santos

When José Eduardo dos Santos died in early July 2022, it kicked off a series of tense exchanges. Dos Santos had ruled over Angola for decades after taking power in 1979. During that time, his regime oversaw a brutal civil war. He died in Spain, thousands of miles away from his political opponents. But the geography and timing were both tough: Angola was on the eve of an already-tense election campaign when dos Santos succumbed in Barcelona.

His daughter openly claimed foul play had felled the 79-year-old man. She demanded an autopsy in Spain to determine his cause of death. The autopsy was performed, but the evidence of misdeed was not there. Certain of an unsuspicious death, a Spanish judge ruled weeks later that dos Santos was not the victim of foul play. The judge also ordered dos Santos’s body be released to his widow, Ana Paula, and not his children. The grieving wife flew it back to his homeland days before the August elections.

The current Angolan government protested that choice but eventually allowed it. Longtime supporters met the late president’s casket at the airport in Luanda and mourned as it traveled through the city. Finally, in August, dos Santos was laid to rest in the capital “after a long waiting period.”^[10]

What do you do with human remains? Many people feel uncomfortable with just tossing granny in the compost heap when she dies. Luckily, it seems humans have always treated the bodies of the dead with respect. Most cultures have some sort of ritual to mark the end of life. Some of those are very different from the burials most people are familiar with. Sometimes they involve giving the deceased a makeover.

Here are ten ways that human remains have been embellished.

10 For the Love of God

There is a common motif in European art that some have found a bit macabre. Memento Mori are artworks designed to remind viewers that death is coming for us all. Painters have long included skulls in their works to underline the transience of human life. Damien Hirst decided to go a little further in his piece For the Love of God.

After buying an 18th-century skull, he had the teeth removed from the jaw and cleaned by a dentist. A perfect cast of the skull was then made, and platinum was used to replace the bones. Into the platinum skull were placed 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a large pink stone on the forehead. The original teeth were then inserted back into the jaws.

The grinning skull was put up for sale for £50 million.^[1]

9 Tezcatlipoca Turquoise Skull

One of Hirst’s inspirations for his decorated skull was the Tezcatlipoca Turquoise Skull held in the British Museum. This Aztec skull dates from the 15th century and is covered with small tiles made from turquoise, lignite, and seashells. The staring eyes are made from polished lumps of pyrite. The skull has been cut away at the back, and the inside is lined with deer skin. The jaw is loosely attached to allow it to move up and down.

It is thought that the skull is a representation of the god Tezcatlipoca. He was a god associated with divination, obsidian, the night sky, and conflict. The skull has straps attached that were originally painted red, so it is thought that it was designed to be worn—possibly by a priest for use during a ritual.

Other decorated Aztec skulls have been discovered. Researchers who studied them concluded that only the most high-ranking human sacrifices had their skulls converted into these decorated masks.^[2]

8 Gobekli Skulls

Gobekli Tepe in Turkey is one of the most intriguing ancient sites ever discovered. Dating to around 8000 to 9000 BC, it contains some of the earliest large carved stones in the world. These are decorated with images of lions, bulls, foxes, and other animals, as well as abstract patterns. The largest stones at the site would have taken tens of people a year to carve and even more people to move into its location.

As well as the remains of animals, which may have been sacrificed, a number of human bodies have been found at Gobekli Tepe. They have led some researchers to describe a “skull cult” that once existed there. This is because some of the skulls have deliberately carved marks on them.

Once the skin and flesh had been flayed from the skulls, it appears that deep gouges and holes were made into the bones for some purpose. That the marks may have been part of a ritual is suggested by their deliberate nature and that the pigment ochre had been dabbed onto the bones too. These may be the earliest examples of decorated human remains ever found.^[3]

7 Monk in a Statue

A statue of a Buddhist monk from China made its way to a market in the Netherlands. There it was snapped up by someone who appreciated its aesthetic qualities. When the purchaser took it to be restored, he and the restorer were undoubtedly startled to discover a human skeleton inside.

In 2014, the statue was taken to a hospital to undergo a CT scan to reveal more about the person who had been turned into their own sculpture. The scans revealed that the 1,000-year-old body was in a sitting position that exactly mirrored the shape of the statue. The body is assumed to be that of the Buddhist Liuquan, who died around the year 1100 AD.

Probes were inserted into the gold-painted statue, and samples were taken from the body. The researchers found scraps of paper that had Chinese writing on them. The internal organs of the body had been removed and replaced with these papers before the body was turned into a statue.^[4]

6 Kapala Skulls

Kapala is a term in Sanskrit which can refer to a bowl—or a skull that has been turned into a vessel. Following Tibetan ritual, bodies were given “sky burials,” which involved leaving the dead open to nature and allowing birds and animals to consume the flesh. Once all that was left were bones, then the skull could be retrieved and turned into something beautiful.

These Kapala skulls were then ritually anointed with oils and prepared for use in other rituals. Sometimes this involved carving images and patterns into the skull itself or decorating the skull with silver and stones. The Kapala could be placed on altars or used as drinking and eating bowls. It was thought that the wisdom and knowledge of the dead could be taken in by the one who consumed from the skull.

To ward off the anger of destructive deities, cakes shaped like human body parts would be placed in the Kapala and offered up to the vengeful spirits.^[5]

5 Bad Durrenberg Shaman

When people die today, they are often dressed in their best suit or favorite dress. In the past, however, the dead might be buried with the tools of their profession, like ancient archers interred with flint arrowheads. In Bad Durrenberg in Germany around 9000 years ago, a woman was dressed for burial in an outfit that suggests she was a shaman.

The Bad Durrenberg Shaman was a woman aged around 25 or 30, found buried sitting upright and packed in thick red clay. Nearby was the body of a young baby. What marks her as special are the objects she had been dressed in—the regalia. These included an extraordinary headdress made from animal bones, teeth, and two horns from a roebuck deer.

Studies of the body suggest that the woman suffered from a malformation of her neck that would have restricted blood flow. By holding her head in certain positions, she would have fainted. This might have made her an effective go-between for her people and the world of the spirits.^[6]

4 Dressing the Dead

On Sulawesi Island in Indonesia, a festival takes place called the Manene. Everyone is expected to attend: young, old, and even the dead. At the Manene, families gather to clean the tombs of their ancestors and take their bodies out into the sun. Once they have been removed, the corpses are dressed in fresh clothes.

This allows the living to show the departed that they are still respected and treasured. Some are given their favorite things to underline the reverence they are held in. Some bodies might get a pair of sunglasses to shield them from the glare. Others might be given a cigarette. It is thought that by treating the dead with respect, the dead will help to bless the community.

The Manene is only performed every few years. Many of the bodies are in a remarkable state of preservation. They must enjoy the good afterlife.^[7]

3 The Oldest City

Çatalhöyük has been described as a proto-city and may be among the earliest-built human communities. The ruins were found in Turkey and are markedly different from what you might expect a city to look like. The mud-brick buildings were all built one against another—there were no roads or walkways between homes. To enter your house, you walked along the roof and descended a ladder. Çatalhöyük was inhabited from around 7100 to 5600 BC.

While most attention has been drawn to how people lived in this early city, other researchers have found the dead of Çatalhöyük to be equally interesting. Many of the homes had dead bodies buried under their floors. The purpose of burying people inside houses is unknown, but it is found in several cultures. What marks the bodies of Çatalhöyük as different, quite literally, is that they were ritually painted after their deaths.

Some of the bodies have striking marks of red cinnabar painted on them. One body shows a stripe of pigment applied to the skull. Only a minority of bodies found in the city were painted in this way, which opens questions as to what purpose the decoration served.^[8]

2 Saints

In Catholicism, there has long been a tradition of treating the body parts of saints as holy. These relics were often thought to grant miracles to worshippers. Less known is that even to this day, all Catholic altars used for mass celebrations have small relics in them. Not all relics are hidden; some are ostentatiously put on display.

When most people think of reliquaries holding the mortal remains of saints, they think of a little golden object—maybe with a saint’s finger or a bit of bone inside. Sometimes the whole body is turned into a sparkling relic, however. Some, like Saint Deodatus in Rheinau, Switzerland, are shown sitting upright and clothed in shining armor. His skull is covered in a wax mask. Others prefer to only show the skull of the saint.

Known as catacomb saints, these bodies were mostly shipped out from Rome for churches elsewhere in Europe. The churches who took the bodies often spent lavish sums to coat the bones in layers of gold or silver and stud them with precious gems.^[9]

1 The Jericho Skull

About 9,500 years ago in Jericho, modern Palestine, a man died. We know this because his skull was discovered by excavators in 1953. Unlike most nameless skulls from the past, however, we know what this man looked like. After he died, his head was removed from his body, and a hole was cut into the back of the skull, into which soil was stuffed before plugging it with clay. Then the skull was coated in plaster and modeled to resemble the man’s face in life. Shells were then inserted to resemble eyes. It is probably the oldest portrait held in the British Museum.

The skull was scanned to ascertain whether the face that was put on the skull was supposed to be a portrait or just a symbolic representation. From these scans, a scientific reconstruction of the face was possible. They also revealed that the man’s head had been bound as an infant to permanently change the shape of the head.

Other plastered skulls like the Jericho Skull have been discovered. One in the Ashmolean Museum uses the ridged sections of cowrie shells to mimic eyes. If you don’t want to see a skull squinting at you, it is probably best to avoid searching this one out. ^[10]