There are three reasons people are typically buried alive. The first is a tragic accident: a person who seems to be dead but is not gets buried and awakens in the claustrophobic horror of a casket. The second is a criminal act: someone is purposely buried alive as torture or as a very slow and hideous method of execution. The final reason people are buried alive is the reason humans do most things: for fun and the ability to show off.

None of these reasons are good, just for the record.

Accidental burial is often rumored, in history and fiction, but only rarely documented. The New York Times reported in 1885 that a man named Jenkins who was disinterred a year after burial, found upside down in a coffin filled with scratch marks, most of his hair pulled out. In 1955, young Essie Dunbar was presumed dead following an epileptic seizure and nearly buried. Her sister asked to see her body one last time at the final moment, and Essie was saved. She lived another 47 years. In 1792, Duke Ferdinand of Braunschweig was so afraid of being buried alive that he commissioned the world’s first “safety coffin,” featuring holes for light and air to enter, and being fit with a lock instead of nailed shut. The keys to escape were buried with the duke, in the pockets of his robes. This is not, however, just a kooky idea that belongs in the past. In Macedonia in 2014, a woman was presumed dead of asphyxia and buried alive and only rescued because children playing near the cemetery could hear her screams.

Also among the accidentally buried, we must include the unknown and untold numbers of people buried by natural disasters: flood, landslide, and tsunamis have brought people to this terrible end at a rate even the most negligent funeral directors could never match.

Purposeful vivisepulture has been recorded historically as a means of punishment or a type of warfare in ancient China, Germany, England, Persia, Sweden, Denmark, and Rome. In the Netherlands during the centuries-long feuds between Catholic and Protestant dynasties, live burial was used to torture people on the wrong side of the Christian fence into converting, or to kill them if they refused. Aside from state violence, interpersonal behavior can sometimes culminate in live burial. Jessica Lunsford was nine years old in Florida when a sex offender raped her and buried her alive. Ashley Piccirilli of Massachusetts was in the wrong place at the wrong time, buried by a construction crew moving earth nearby where she had picnicked. (Hard to say this one is an accident, exactly. They meant to move that earth, she meant to be there.) Without supports or a structured trench, her odds of survival were quite low. Piccirilli said she survived because she didn’t think she could die. That’s mind over quite a lot of matter.

In the matter of being buried alive on purpose, Harry Houdini is the most famous case. An established escape artist who had made his name escaping chains and cages, he elected to be buried alive in 1919, to amaze his audience via his escape. The attempt was nearly fatal, and he had to be rescued. In 1990, California magician Joe Burrus decided to replicate the original Houdini attempt and have himself buried seven feet deep in a Plexiglass coffin. Tragically, Burrus instructed helpers to pour concrete into the hole, adding nearly seven tons of weight to the burial and destroying the coffin, killing him inside. Not to be outdone, stunt man Bill Shirk of Indiana replicated the deadly stunt one more time in 1992, on the same date that both Houdini and Burrus had attempted it. After previous escapist stunts involving interment with a python and tarantulas, Shirk must have figured that there was no place to go but down. In another Plexiglass coffin, Shirk was buried at the same depth and with the same dangerous choice of wet concrete poured into his grave. Like Burrus, Shirk suffered the splintering of his coffin and found himself in mortal dangers. Unlike Burrus, like Houdini decades before, Shirk survived thanks to quick intervention.

Despite a lot of high-profile stories to send shivers down our spines, most people buried alive will remain forever unknown to us. They died deep in culverts and the ditches beside highways, in basements and root cellars, in featureless patches of desert and deep in the woods. Many of them remain on lists of the missing, and many will never be found. We often assume a careful demeanor when walking in a graveyard, taking care to speak softly and show respect. But if you think about it too long, you might realize you should behave that way almost everywhere. The unmarked dead can be beneath our feet at any time—and some of them went that way with their eyes wide open.

I love when the private home of a very rich person finally passes out of the cycle of inheritance and the place gets turned into a museum that’s open to the public. I go with the brawling masses to see the unabashed plunder-horde of the super-rich, and it’s always worth it. Most recently, I did this at the Hilldale Estate in our nation’s benighted capitol. The robber barons who owned it filled it with Russian Imperial treasures and furniture sturdy enough to stage crucifixions on, but I went for the Dior show they were putting on: clothes that had been designed for and worn by Grace Kelly, and the silhouette that came to define mid-century elegance for women. However, the biggest surprise of the day was the long-dead mistress of the house’s dog cemetery.

Like a lot of rich people Marjorie Post had an enduring interest in and ability to bond only with pure-bred and fussy dogs, so a dozen of them are buried on the grounds of her estate. It’s beautiful tribute to the friends who define much of one’s life. Unlike human remains, animal remains can legally be buried on one’s private property. The experience made me wonder how many pet cemeteries there are (aside from the one imagined by Stephen King when he was deep in his appropriation period.)

There are well-known examples from antiquity of mankind burying pets with great reverence and love, and dogs have been buried with kind words and deep care for almost as long as they’ve been domesticated. The Romans in particular were known for their touching dog epitaphs: “If you happen to see this monument, laugh not, I pray, though it is a dog’s grave.” The Cimetière des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques in a suburb of Paris is one of the oldest in Europe, being a fancy pet cemetery since the 19^th century and featuring sculpture and monuments dedicated to and depicting pets.

Nor is this custom limited to the west. Hiran Minar in Pakistan was built by a Mughal emperor in the 17^th century as a game reserve for his beloved antelope, but became a resting place to many more. Ashkelon National Park, just north of the Gaza strip, is the oldest known dog cemetery in the world. Beginning in the 5^th century BCE, people of various Semitic religions like the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Babylonians, and Assyrians may have had religious relationships with their dogs resulting in this space where thousands of dogs (mostly puppies) were interred, but much of that period is lost to history and countless centuries of intervening bloodshed in fighting over that region.

But what of modern man’s best friend? If one is not as rich as a robber baron, is there hope for a dignified end for one’s faithful tabby cat without a private estate? As a matter of fact, some cemeteries allow for pets to be buried in the same place as their humans, including Aspin Hill Memorial Park in Montgomery County, Maryland. As a result of a 2011, New York State also allows for family burial: people where pets are, pets where people are. The famous Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, a woman asked to be laid to rest where her pets were, and the rest is legislative and funerary history.

As more and more people opt for a life without children, as home ownership becomes increasingly impossible, as many households come to regard pets as sacred, beloved personages who deserve all the honors of death, the idea of a pet cemetery only becomes more important. If the internet has taught us anything over the last twenty years it’s that we cannot let go of cats, even cats we’ve never met. We’d die for them, so digging a hole in the backyard isn’t going to cut it for most. For a landless generation, pet cremation can be an excellent choice and offer mementos if you lack the space for a proper monument like the one I saw at Hilldale.

Every time I bury a pet or help a friend bury theirs, my memory always returns to the first of these rituals that I can remember. My little brother and I got a pair of hamsters: one brown and one red. We named them Ricky and Lucy and kept them in a cage full of wood shavings in our shared bedroom. Ricky died within a year. Lucy, somehow, lived to be seven years old. No one understood how. My brother fed her fried chicken, and more than ones I saw her eat a live cricket. She bit savagely and ran like a champion on her little wheel. By her seventh year, I began to think she might live forever.

When we woke one day to find her cold and still, we devised the kind of burial that only very weird kids can come up with. One day I like to imagine that an archaeologist digging in what used to be a suburb will find the delicate little bones of a rodent who was wrapped in toilet paper like a mummy, put in a shoe as a sarcophagus, and surrounded with dried corn, sugar cubes, wild flowers, and a letter from a child who loved her very much buried beneath the metal skeleton of her exercise wheel. Perhaps that they will conclude that children formed meaningful attachments to cats and dogs and fish and snakes and guinea pigs and rabbits from the little holes we all learned to dig when we were just learning that death comes for us all. Even dogs.

Maybe they will look thousands of years of human history over and see that we have always loved our pets enough to lay them gently to rest.

Image by Dave Parker – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30408894

The last English monarch to be killed in battle was Richard III, end of the Plantagenets, killed in 1485 at the battle of Bosworth Field. In 2012, his remains were discovered and identified, buried in what used to be a churchyard belonging to some friars and since having become a carpark (as the Brits say; you might say “parking lot” on this side of the pond). His royal bones were then reburied with great ceremony in Leicester Cathedral, replete with a big marble plinth. Richard III might be the most famous example of the odd practice of exhumation and reburial.

Human history, all the way back to the start, is defined by the ways that we bury our dead. Our early ancestors buried their dead in ways that indicate cultural meaning: in the fetal position or laid out, with fellows and alone, with grave goods like tools and jewelry. Even Neanderthals had their own customs and actions around burial, with pollen from flowers showing up in the samples of their grave dirt. Catacombs, ossuaries, and other arrangements have been made for human remains, even making bones into the main decorative feature, as in the case of the famous Sedlec Ossuary.

However, the practice of unburying and reburying the dead is a relatively recent one, made possible by the methods of preservation applied to corpses from ancient Egypt onward, and hewing to specific requirements about repatriation, border disputes, and even status among the deceased. But not all bodies are unburied to put them in their right place. Some dead are brought out to worse purposes.

Pharoah Tutankhamun lay undisturbed in his grave for three thousand years before his rude awakening. His mummified corpse has toured the world, being put on display for the benefit of school children and tourists, as well as scores of scientists and researchers. Though touted as a discovery that electrified the world, these are after all the remains of a very young man who died a sudden death and is not allowed to rest, for the crime of being too interesting. He was returned to the land of his birth in 2011, but remains on display. Not all the dead get to go back to sleep.

Murder victims, who cannot always said to be resting in their graves, are sometimes exhumed to obtain or confirm additional evidence long after their deaths. Katherine Menendez, a 17-year-old girl who was killed just outside of Cleveland, OH, was dug up 30 years after the end of her life to see if there was anything under her fingernails. The so-called “Lady of the Dunes,” Ruth Marie Terry, was killed in 1974, but her body was not identified until it was exhumed in 1980, 2000, and 2013, and her husband was not named as her killer until 2023. Justice is often a long time coming, if she finds her blindfolded way at all.

Some bodies are exhumed for the purposes of disrespect, often by graverobbers. But some are singled out by people who figure that death simply let them off too easy. Oliver Cromwell, usurper of the British throne and statesman of the interregnum died in 1658 of (probably) sepsis, and left his son unable to carry on his work of keeping kings out of business. Despite this full defeat, the English were so determined to punish Cromwell for the loss of their monarchy (and possibly for his attempted genocide against the Irish) that they dug up his body out of its honored place in Westminster Abbey, and gave it a postmortem execution. Cromwell was hanged in chains, and his head was displayed at the palace of Westminster until it decayed too badly to stand, and what remained of him was subsequently reburied under humbler circumstances (and probably in a handful of places).

One of the most interesting exhumation and reburial events is the story of the Mercy Brown vampire incident in Rhode Island in 1892. In life, Mercy Brown was a nineteen year old girl who suffered a great deal of misfortune, including dying of tuberculosis along with most of the rest of her family. One of the other misfortunes was that tuberculosis or “consumption” as it was then known, was poorly understood. The people of New England at that time were superstitious and frightened, and believed that the persistence of the deadly illness could be blamed on the influence of the undead, or an indication of vampirism. Upon frenzied exhumation, Mercy’s body was found to be less decomposed than the diggers expected, and she still had blood in her heart. These signs made them feel even less scientific, so they burned her heart and liver, powdered the ash, and gave it to another tuberculosis sufferer to drink. He died. Mercy was reburied, after having been shown none.

Sometimes the dead are better off left alone. Some still have tales to tell. Most of us would prefer not to be forgotten beneath a carpark, but then again most of us aren’t a Plantagenet king…or an unlucky kid mistaken for a vampire. If we are lucky enough not to be murdered, if we have forethought enough to plan for own remains before the deadline, we might escape the final humiliation of being put on display for school kids at the Met. But just like exhumation, death can always take one by surprise.

Image by VeteranMP – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30408894

My dear friend Charlie died by suicide when he was just 18 years old. He was not the first person I knew who died young, or the first person to leave my life through that particular door. However, he was the first person I knew who died in the prime of his physical existence and thus represented a cornucopia of rich and strange gifts to the organ donors list.

I’ve been marking yes on the organ donation button since my very first driver’s license, believing that someone might benefit from my death and liking that idea very much. I’m not a smoker; take the lungs while they’re still pink. Everyone has thought of the heart in a cooler being delivered by helicopter to a person on the brink who needs help pumping blood and maybe will inherit my emotional connection to Star Trek. Poetic souls have made much of cornea and iris transplant; what is it to see through the eyes of someone else, incorporating the gift of vision from the dead. These aren’t simple operations; they represent highly sophisticated science that must be executed by skilled surgeons and technicians who train for this specialty in medicine. But it’s become normal to us. It’s part of the world we know: some people who need a liver or a kidney will get lucky enough for a living or nonliving donor to give them one.

But Charlie’s death taught me that there are more parts to it than we typically think about, or that even show up on television shows about this visceral drama. For example, most people don’t know that bones can be donated. Cadaver bone can be used in grafts and in surgeries to lengthen the bones of a person’s arms or legs. Skin can also be harvested from a recently deceased person and donated to burn victims for grafting. The idea of a grafted tattoo is compelling to the writer of this article, but there are requirements in all things: donated skin must be free of tattoos, scars, and stretch marks.

Quiet, patient people came for pieces of Charlie I didn’t know could be of use. Cerebrospinal fluid can be recovered from a body for testing and research that could benefit folks suffering from neurological diseases. Researchers in this field can also use brain tissue, pituitary glands, and the spinal cord itself. Blood, too, can be harvested for research, although scientists in Russia in the early 20^th century experimented with cadaveric blood transfusions to the living, as well.

Nor are reproductive organs exempt from this fascinating process. Uterine transplants have been tried over the last few years, with a successful live birth arising from some lucky recipients. Penile and scrotal transplants have been tried out on people recovering from combat-related injuries, restoring urinary and sexual function. However, transplanting ovaries or testicles raises a complication: gametes produced by the donor body will carry the donor’s DNA. The recipient of the transplant, if able to produce offspring, would be as unrelated to that child as a surrogate or a step. Legally and perhaps spiritually, we’re not sure what to do with that yet.

Faces, our most significant identifying feature and arguably our most personal possession, can be donated by a cadaver and transplanted to a new person’s body. This series of complex operations can be indicated after major trauma to the face, or to replace a genetically compromised facial structure. Whatever the reason, this process is incredibly delicate, involving thousands of minute nerves and rich blood supply. Think of all the things a face can do, every little twitch and quirk, every function of speaking and eating and kissing and spitting. Multiple surgical teams must coordinate to make this happen, but there are documented successes of swapping one face for another.

Even hands, those clever servants of the mind whose oppositional dexterity makes us different from all other apes and lets us play sonatas and stamp ravioli can be transplanted from one person to another. Following disfigurement through industrial accident or amputation, some people have been able to regain manual control of their lives through cadaver donation. Like facial transplant, this is an incredibly difficult process, involving multiple surgeries and not typically included on the list of acceptable donated tissues when someone just marks yes on a form at the DMV. The consent of the grieving family must be obtained to remove the hands from a body and attempt this wondrous act. But where that decision can be made, a virtual miracle can be wrought.

They came for Charlie’s hands. They came for his eyes and skin, his spinal fluid and his bones. I remember when it happened I kept thinking about whalefall. When a massive whale dies and falls to the seafloor, it breaks down and nourishes the life around it. Scavengers eat what they can, making their homes in the richness of the leviathan’s wake. Coral and limpet attach to the skeleton and grow strong off the free calcium. Charlie and the whale and of course, thinking about myself. I imagined dying one day, maybe biting the dust on my walk home, and thinking how much better it would be if I could signal to the people around me: take these groceries I just bought. Empty my wallet and take my boots—they’ve still got plenty of tread. Shave my head and make a wig for a drag queen. I said yes and I meant it; take everything from me that someone else might still use. Charlie said give it away now, and to my dying breath, I agree.

Chimpanzees

Similar mourning behaviors to humans have been seen by primate researchers often unintentionally. Both gorillas and chimpanzees and other non-human primates have displayed distinctly observable mourning and grieving behaviors and patterns. Here we’ll be focusing specifically on chimpanzees. Chimpanzees often share in the same care patterns of humans in how they care for those dying in their community. Often, grooming practices which are essential to chimpanzee socialization are taken up by other members who also care for the cleanliness of dying chimps. Healthy chimps are also known to stay by the side of those dying. Some chimpanzees even carry the deceased with them for some time after their death. While the reasoning behind this is unknown, it suggests that chimps similarly grieve and mourn for some time. It is clear, that while not human, chimpanzees do comprehend death and experience, in some form, the mourning and grief associated with it

Crows

Crows are fairly unique in their mourning and ritualistic presentation which is highlighted through their social nature where gatherings of crows act as a form of funeral for the deceased.When a crow finds the corpse of one of its murder, they tend to alert others through an alarm like song that lets others in the area know. Crows will not touch the corpse but instead, will surround it and caw and lean in to inspect the body. Interestingly, unlike humans, crows do not differentiate between those specifically in their murder, although some observations suggest they can. Instead, they hold “crow funerals” for any of the dead of their species that they come across. According to some researchers, these funerals can even act as a form of teaching that socializes other crows into the patterns and rites surrounding the dead. While no specific burial practices have been observed, crows are a good example of animals who comprehend and process death.

Elephants

Elephants are perhaps the best-known examples of animals that mourn and have associated rituals. These mighty creatures have been observed experiencing significant behavioral changes after the death of one of their own. Elephants can be somewhat more unpredictable, however in their responses. But they do have some commonly seen mourning practices and rituals. For example, large groups of elephants will visit the corpse of the deceased elephant due to their highly social nature creating a funeral of sorts. Elephants, like chimpanzees, build significant bonds that can last through their entire lifetime. One way elephants display further responses and mourning rituals is by surrounding the deceased elephant and trying to awaken it while vocalizing and protecting the remains. Elephants have also been known to try and help others near death to stand up on their own and to stay with them as they approach their end. Some elephants, particularly those who have experienced the loss of their young, have even stayed with the corpse while it is eaten by scavenger animals such as hyenas.

Dolphins and Whales

Dolphins have been known to share different similarities to humans and have interacted quite heavily with us. While whales and dolphins are different creatures, they have some similar forms of mourning rituals associated with dealing with the dead. One reason for the similarity to human rituals exists in the fact that both dolphins and whales have large brains relative to body size! Some differences in the way in which these animals attend to their dead exist based on their sex which will determine which member of the pod will attend to the dead and dying. It is said that both dolphins and whales have both physical responses to death through mourning and an emotional grief. Researchers have observed both dolphins and whales continuing to maintain close contact with deceased pod members as a means of watching over them. Often times, these pods will work together to keep the corpse afloat and communicate through varied forms of communication, namely clicking and whistling, that audibly differs to the vocality used in relation to the living members of the pod. These changes reflect the emotional distress present upon the death of a pod member and affirm that grief is not a solely an innately human sentiment. The babies of mother dolphins and whales who have died are often supported by the wider pod which emphasizes a distinct sense of connection and understanding regarding death, kinship and the maintenance of social bonds and protection of the weak.

A possible answer to the above question is, quite literally, poison. Poison was practically everywhere and readily available during the Victorian era, from grocery shops to apothecaries, to people’s own homes.

Arsenic was particularly common as it was used in everyday items, especially ones containing pigment (Scheele’s green). Alcohol, sweets, candles, household pesticides, clothing, even children’s stuffed toys were also manufactured using materials that contained arsenic. A person’s home could be wallpapered entirely in significant traces of arsenic and they wouldn’t even know it until it was too late and low-level poisonings were already a common occurrence. This brings to mind the 1892-published short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a woman suffering from an “affliction of the nerves” becomes obsessed with her room’s wallpaper, believing it to be malignant, ill, and hiding a trapped woman inside it. Even William Morris, whose vibrant wallpapers of birds and flowers are famous to this day, had painted those artworks originally using green paint with arsenic compounds. Photographers also used cyanide to produce their daguerreotypes (as well as mercury fumes emitted during the process).

With the easy availability of arsenic and other lethal substances for household uses, poisoning became an art that was almost impossible to trace—or the poisoner’s culpability to prove. Examples of famous poisoners were women like Adelaide Barlett, who used chloroform to poison her husband, a death surrounded by an air of mystery that intrigued the press and public, since the autopsy showed liquid poison in his stomach, but no traces in his mouth, esophagus, or lungs. Madeline Smith used arsenic to poison the man she had had an affair with after he threatened to show her fiancé the erotic letters she wrote addressed to her illicit lover. The odorless arsenic had been poured into a cup of hot chocolate. And, of course, called Britain’s Mass Murderess, Mary Ann Cotton had poisoned four of her husbands with arsenic to get their life insurance money, as well as several of their children. She was young and well-regarded, and at times worked as a nurse which gave her a good standing in the community, as well as an alibi. Despite that, a doctor grew suspicious of her activity, and a while later she was tried, imprisoned, and hanged.

Eventually, laws were introduced to limit the ease of purchasing poison. This was in the form of the poisons register, in which anyone who bought arsenic, strychnine, and other substances had to sign their name. By then there was a certain glamor and sensationalist element around the use of poisons as a murder method, but also as medical gaslighting—convincing a loved one that they are sick in mind or body, when you yourself control that sickness through the administering of the toxic substance.

Books written around that time often features female figures that were labeled as “madwomen,” locked away, thought to be suffering from hysteria and paroxysms of bad judgment, loosening morals, hauntings or possession. You have women that kill their family members, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where Madeleine murders the brother who deprives her of the outside world, artistic expression, and socialization. You have women locked in attics (such as in Jane Eyre, where Bertha is revealed to be the “mentally disturbed” first wife of Mr. Rochester). And you have the gothic tradition of increasing malaise, supernatural phenomena, ghost hauntings, and muddled faculties that appear as pervasive, all-encompassing, and intangible manifestations throughout the narrative.

The connection of the gothic tradition (particularly the disturbed woman and the unseen haunting) to the prevalence of poisoning in the Victorian era is not easily provable. You could argue that the vampire novel is inspired by a fear of poison, or that the poison itself is a metaphor, a fear of change, of the Other; a bigotry suffusing the upper echelons of society. But no matter the interpretation, Victorian-era literature is rife with depictions of malaise and madness, spreading slowly and thoroughly like a trickle of poison through the bloodstream, or inhaled like air blighted by an arsenic-laced wallpaper.

The answer depends on where you die.

New York City has buried the unclaimed and indigent dead, including people who die while incarcerated on Hart Island for over a century. Bodies are buried at a rate of about 1,100 a year, with bumps around the time of Covid and AIDS, the latter prompting officials to dig graves extra deep given the then-unknown nature of the deadly disease. It’s also the final resting place of people too poor to afford burial, and stillborn babies whose parents lacked the resources to handle their death. Control of the island was passed to the parks department in 2021, with plans to develop and beautify the area to open it to the public and give the living a way to enjoy the space.

The city of Paris offers secular funerals with music and poems to people who die without provision. For the last twenty years, climate change across Europe has killed more and more elderly people, creating a need for government-funded burials for folks who couldn’t take the heat. Politicians have appeared at these burial rites, signaling that they can grieve for the dead, even if they refuse to take meaningful action to protect the living.

In San Francisco, where so many died of AIDS without family or anyone to claim them, there is a ritual and a custom for these lost souls. The city collects the remains of those who died alone and unclaimed and cremates them. The ashes are given to a ship called the Bravo, which is piloted out to the Golden Gate bridge. Poured out into the sea, the dead are sung out of this life by Louis Armstrong and offered a prayer by one of the people doing the job. The GPS coordinates of this burial are recorded, in case someone comes forward too late.

Customs around aging and dying vary throughout the world, but even nations with strong traditions of filial piety must decide what will become of the unloved dead. Municipalities across Japan hold these bodies with their information before defaulting to cremation and disposal. In 2023, there were 60,000 of these folks who had no one to see to their final arrangements.

In places where cities, states, or countries lack the funding to properly store or identify the unclaimed dead, the results can be very hard on people who are searching for the remains of the lost. In New Orleans, bureaucracy hindered by poverty has kept families from claiming their family members’ corpses until decomposition has rendered them unrecognizable. Why would that be? Well, keeping a dead body fresh requires a great deal of refrigeration, and identification takes paid hours. If a municipality is running short on either, the results can be grisly. Quick cremation seems a mercy, in light of failures like that.

In some places, the dead may have to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Someone dear to me recently called to tell me that he’d paid for an unclaimed member of his community. He had reached out to try and find this man’s people, and, failing that, he’d done the work of the remains, as well.

He called me to ask, “Why did I do that?”

Death is one of those things that will elicit responses we didn’t know were in us. Our honor is deeply involved, our sense of responsibility to the people around us and our belief in what is proper may manifest from parts of our past or our morality with which we rarely converse. What we do in these moments always reveals something of who we are, and that revelation may be a surprise to everyone involved.

“It’s what we do,” I told him with all the compassion I could offer. “It’s what I hope someone would do for me, too.”

I am grateful for the folks who love the unloved dead.

The Hanging Coffins of Sagada – The Philippines

While this tradition can be seen in a few other areas globally, the hanging coffins of Sagada are perhaps some of the boldest examples of this tradition. The wooden coffins of the indigenous Kankanaey people hang from the sides of cliffs in Echo Valley, Sagada. These coffins are usually carved by the deceased themselves before inhabiting their new home. Once they die, their coffin is either stacked in a cave, such as in the Lumiang Cave nearby or suspended from a cliff face. The Kanakaney people believe that this tradition brings the deceased closer to the afterlife and their ancestors thus aiding their ascent to the next world.

Merry Cemetery – Sapanta, Romania

This colorful, vibrant cemetery is one that continues to enchant visitors for the great magnitude of ornate decorations that adorn these graves. Each internment is provided a hand-carved gravestone with inscriptions ranging from short to lengthy depictions of the deceased’s life to how they died more specifically. These inscriptions range from being positive and reflective to negative and directed towards who or what killed the deceased. Some even have poems written either to honor the dead’s qualities or the life they lived.

Okunoin Cemetery – Kōya, Wakayama, Japan

This cemetery is unique for the great deal of graves that it houses approximately a quarter of a million graves. By far the largest cemetery in Japan, this burial ground is so sought after as it is home to the final resting place of Kobo Daishi, the founder of Shingon Buddhism who is said to be eternally meditating awaiting the future Buddha. Followers of this branch of Buddhism believe that the closer they are buried to Daishi, the more likely they’ll achieve eternal salvation with the coming of the future Buddha. While this cemetery is home to many long departed, it is also home to a great deal of ornate statues, lanterns and other symbolic offerings to Daishi which add to its mystique.

Neptune Memorial Reef – Key Biscayne, Florida, United States

Perhaps best known both for its quirky burial practice and for being the eternal home of acclaimed American chef Julia Child, the Neptune Memorial Reef is a manmade reef where the deceased can become interwoven with the present aquatic life. Whilst this is a unique creation in that this form of burial at sea is achieved through the mixing of ashes with concrete to form this reef, it serves as a way to benefit both sea-life and the preservation of local species.

Fagg El Gamous – Faiyum Governorate, Egypt

This burial ground dates from the first to the seventh centuries, and was created during Roman control of Egypt. Over a million mummies are estimated to be buried in this cemetery with most of its dead buried without coffins or any grave treasures as one might expect from mummies in Egypt. Fagg El Gamous is a cemetery used by low-status inhabitants of Egypt who couldn’t afford the funeral rituals of the pharaohs. However, some of the graves present from the latter period of this cemetery’s active usage may have also be adherents to the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judiaism and potentially early converters to Islam. Archaeologists have not ascertained why so many corpses were buried here as the quantity of bodies seems to suggest foreign burial inclusion as well.

Greyfriars Kirkyard – Edinburgh, Scotland

This graveyard is notorious for its widespread use of grave protection devices that were popularized throughout the late medieval and renaissance period. Mortsafes were used for a variety of reasons including: preventing grave robbers from exhuming the deceased, protecting the deceased from those who had nefarious ideas for the corpse and in some cases, a fear of reanimation of the departed. While this graveyard is a famous tourist attraction it is also full of stunning memorials and graves that allow the visitor to peek into a distant past.

New Lucky Restaurant – Ahmedabad, India

Whilst this location isn’t quite your traditional cemetery, this restaurant exists atop a burial site and proudly advertises it! With a variety of open sarcophagi dotted between the tables, this restaurant is sure to make for a macabre, quirky and fascinating dining experience. Although no one is sure who these graves belong to, their existence is approximated to be over 450 years old with some linking these graves to followers of a Sufi Muslim holy person. Ironically, this eatery’s owner claims that it is “lucky” to eat with the dead and even suggests that the dead have been a source of positive energy which has helped the business. A strange concept indeed!

[image of Merry Cemetery by Aw58 — CC BY-SA 3.0]

These mummified bodies are found in peat bogs typically found in northern and north-western Europe, with varying degrees of preservation present.

Arcane Examples

While most ancient human remains no longer have skin and internal organs due to decay, bog bodies typically retain them due to a combination of highly acidic water, low temperature, and a lack of oxygen that preserve skin while heavily tanning it. While the skin of bog bodies tends to be very well preserved, their bones are not due to the acidity from the peat. This has allowed archaeologists to discover everything from tools, wood and leather whose richness in keratin has allowed them to be preserved for, in some cases, thousands of years. In normal human decomposition, typically only teeth and bones remain unless specifically preserved, so this allows for us modern humans to peer into the murky window of the past.

The oldest known bog body is the skeleton of the Koelbjerg Man in Denmark. The Koelbjerg man has been carbon dated to 8000 BCE. The oldest bog body with substantial remaining flesh is the Cashel Man, dated to 2000 BCE from the Bronze Age.

Theories

Iron Age bog bodies show many similarities, including violent deaths and a lack of clothing, which has led archaeologists to believe that they were killed and left in the bogs as a part of widespread cultural traditions of human sacrifice and death rituals surrounding local cultures within these areas of Europe. Some have also speculated that this was a dishonorable form of burial for executed criminals. A more fringe anthropological and archaeological theory suggests that the bogs could have been viewed as connected to the afterlife or viewed as a necessary step in the passing between this life and the next. Contemporary theories suggest that the bogs may have been deemed as contaminated areas where decay was best placed to protect the living.

Historical Context

It is estimated that agricultural practices were introduced to the region of modern-day Denmark around 3900 BCE. During the early part of this Neolithic period, some human corpses began to be placed in the peat bogs, which have been confirmed through carbon and archaeological means of testing. Interestingly a majority of the bodies found from this period were between the ages of 16 and 20 when they died, which suggests that age-specific human sacrifices or indeed, wrongdoings may have been a major contributor affirming the aforementioned criminal theory.

However, a significant majority of the bodies discovered hail from the Iron Age where peat bogs were vaster and more present in northern Europe. These Iron Age bodies also shared similarities such as the items they were buried with reaffirming the belief that a cultural tradition existed in the burial and ritual sacrifice of at least some of these bodies. Examples include rings, general jewelry, and specific clothes for the dead, typically made of bronze. Some historical accounts do make note of slaves being drowned and buried alive although these are harder corroborate.

Evidence of violence from stabbings to strangling and beheadings were also evident such as with the Osterby Man found at Kohlmoor, near Osterby, Germany in 1948, found without a head. Differing examples suggest that certain groups and tribes placed their dead in the bogs without clothes while others did. Other examples of violence include the Tollund Man from Denmark, who was found with the rope used to strangle him still around his neck. The Yde Girl, found in the Netherlands was also found similarly. Archaeologists have also pointed to the pressure of the peat bogs and their weight on bodies, which influenced our view of some injuries in the contemporary era.

So, what do you think of the bog bodies? Do you think that ritual sacrifice or simply common burial resulted in the mystifying remains that we have found today or, do you think that this practice simply happened by chance?

For our American readers, you only have to look to the south west where a handful of cases still emerge yearly. Thankfully, with decades of scientific development and painstaking medical work, this disease can now be treated and has a mortality rate of just 10% with treatment. Let’s explore three historical outbreaks of the Plague.

Persia & The Gulf

Historical records suggest that the plague was first encountered in what is now modern-day Iran around 543 CE through its spread from Italy and the Roman Empire’s army before spreading to  the Persian Empire when the two were at war. Subsequent outbreaks in the following century saw tens of thousands die with over 100,000 dying near the Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon, close to the  modern day Iraqi capital of Baghdad. For centuries to come, several notable waves of the Plague ravaged the area. The plague reemergence of 688-689 CE saw over 70,000 people become victims of this invasive disease. Interestingly, the Plague was responsible for the eventual immobilization of Persian armies for generations which ultimately allowed for the swift conquest of Persia by the Muslims during the seventh century.

Notable instances throughout the Gulf in the last 500 years illustrate that the threat lingers even if presumably out of sight, but most certainly not out of mind. The Plague outbreak of 1773 in Kuwait affirms this and the 1831 outbreak saw over 60% of the Kuwaiti population lost. As recently as the 1990s, a handful of cases in Jordan and Saudi Arabia arose, with the consumption of camel meat cited as a factor in both cases.

Western Asia & North Africa

The “Black Death” pandemic emerged in Asia through the Silk-road trade route beginning in the far east. Modern theories are centered around changing climate influences which forced rodents, and the fleas that spread this toxic bacterium, to migrate farther west. Although no singular explanation is universally accepted, virologists, epidemiologists, and other scientific professionals, tend to agree on this theory due to biological evidence and the length and heavy usage of the trade route both to and from Asia.

In Asia, this disease also spread through warfare. The Mongol Horde, who was suffering from the disease, would catapult corpses over the besieged city of Crimea 1346-47 in an effort to take the city through the infecting of its population. Unfortunately, this meant that many would ultimately spread the disease farther.

Warfare and trade were arguably the sole driving causes of this contagion reaching Alexandria by the fall of 1347. The plague swiftly spread throughout the Islamic world and despite the great deal of medicinal action, medieval hospitals, and policy used to contain the Plague, the disease could not be contained and eventually decimated the populations of the Eastern Roman Empire and those throughout the Levant.

Modern day Tunisia and Morocco also suffered greatly with the plague reaching these areas by the spring of 1348.

Europe

Medieval Europe faced an onslaught of Plague waves over 1347-1353 with successive waves reaching ever farther into the continent and its isolated areas. From Alpine villages to seldom explored areas of the Baltic region, and the furthest vestiges of modern-day Great Britain, the Plague left no home unscarred. The worst wave of the Plague is said to have originated from the Italian island of Sicily through merchants traveling by boat; by the summer of 1348, few areas of the continent, bar much of modern-day northern Russia, had not been ruthlessly attacked. By 1351, even the most northerly bastions of Europe had been overrun.

Notably, English depictions of the Black Death have been preserved well with examples of some of the healing remedies used at the time including the use of sweet spices and herbs used to block the Plague’s transmission through the air. The belief that the Plague was transmissible by “Bad Air” is particularly intriguing as it highlights the shift in human thinking as to what is transmissible. An estimated 50 million lost their lives throughout the Black Death period in medieval Europe.

[image: chromolithograph of flagellants in Netherlands 1349.]

Poltergeist

A loud, angry ghost. The word poltergeist comes from the German poltern which means “to rumble, make noise or cause a disturbance” and Geist, which translates to “spirit.” The poltergeist is a type of supernatural entity of the deceased that can manipulate its environment. It can make objects move and cause a ruckus, disturb the physical realm, and interact with the humans the poltergeist haunts. Occasionally, this rumble escalates into harm coming to the humans within the haunted house as a direct result of the poltergeist’s force on the physical realm.

Shade

In the original Greek: σκιά / shadow, and umbra in Latin. Shades were the ghosts of the deceased that resided in the Underworld. The name shade refers to the fact that these ghosts are not what they once were. Only extant echoes of everything they desired and held dear on Earth while they remained alive. When Odysseus descends into the Underworld, the dead he meets are shades, including his own mother. So are the dead in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the spirit of Eurydice that Orpheus is tasked with leading out of the Underworld. These spirits do not move on, but rather stay there in a forever liminal state of shadow.

The Common Specter

In some cultures, a house’s mirrors are sheathed in black veils after a death in the family, to avoid having the spirit trapped in the mirror forever. In other instances across the spectrum of ghost lore, haunted houses are sometimes plagued by mysterious phenomena. Most commonly, a vortex of cold wind or displaced air in certain parts of the house where disaster struck in the past. That way, the ghost, or what remains of it, is making itself known to the house’s new occupiers, although it can be an involuntary process on the spirit’s part. Ghosts also tend to appear in the shape of ectoplasm, particularly when seances are involved. According to occultists, ectoplasm is a thick substance of magical or supernatural origin exuded when a spirit is near during a summoning.

The Revenant

Opinions vary as to whether the revenant (the one who returns) is a ghost, ghoul, or animated corpus. In some stories of European origin, the revenant haunts the graveyard they are buried in, acting as a deterrent to the invasion perpetrated by tomb raiders and looters of fortunes and body parts. In other myths, the revenant wanders, walking aimlessly as long as they have unfinished business with the living that keeps them from the quiet of the grave.

The Doppelgänger

A wraith and portent of doom, this “double goer” can assume a person’s shape and size, copy their facial features in perfect imitation. This apparition can fool others into thinking it is you as it walks through your life, turning you into the metaphorical, and literal, ghost instead. To see your own double is to face an imminent death or doom. According to various myths and legends, all living beings on earth have their own spirit double, but rarely do the two meet.

The Hungry Ghosts

Ghosts whose desires were never spoken while they lived, or whose needs were never met. Spirits with unfinished business, with a bottomless ache to devour, often the psychic energy of the living. These ghosts can be spiritual leeches in some cultures, while others, particularly in a Buddhist context, regard hungry ghosts as beings of such emotional cravings they lose sight of who they are and all that remains is that insatiable hunger. When they die, they are reborn as beings of need, of hunger.

The Headless Ghost

Just as several cultures have stories of hungry ghosts, so are the headless ghosts often found in oral and written tradition. Queens beheaded while their former subjects cheered on and hanged witches and heretics whose necks broke as they dropped from the gallows, headless horsemen and riders of the apocalypse. The Dullahan, for example, is an unseelie being who rides a black horse through the Irish countryside, carrying its own severed head, as well as a whip made out of a human’s skin.

These are only a few types of ghosts or spirit-like creatures found in mythology and incorporated into popular culture. Perhaps the existence of such an extensive list of beings is related to all the many, different ways human beings know to express the fear of death and the inescapability of loss. If not two humans love alike, then not two humans grieve alike, either. The ghostly spectrum explored above is proof of that.

Is it any wonder such strange myths and legends arise from the drowning deep?

Here are some of them from Greece:

The Yiousouri Tree

According to Greek folklore believed by sailors and fishermen, there is a tree growing from the floor of the sea—though it would be more accurate to call it an animal, since it is a living organism—and that darkwood, fragrant tree of twisting spires and digging roots is capable of providing the cure to all ills. The yiousouri can even change or inhibit the natural process of life and death—but supplicants must catch the tree sleeping, or risk being impaled by its sharp branches when they dive to steal a piece of the miraculous yiousouri wood.

The Cetus

Best known from the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, the Cetus is a giant sea monster (interestingly enough, in modern Greek, the word “ketos” refers to any sort of marina mammal, most commonly the whale) summoned by Poseidon. Andromeda was a young princess meant to be sacrificed to the sea beast after her mother, Queen Cassiopeia, bragged that her daughter was more beautiful than a sea nymph. Perseus slayed the beast and saved Andromeda from the rock she was chained to surrounded by sea water. Another interesting fact: this happened right after Perseus had beheaded Medusa, the mythical hero killing one female figure, and then going on to save another.

Ghosts of the Drowned

Greek islands such as Kalymnos in the Aegean sea used to have a prosperous economy selling sea sponges across the Mediterranean. Before the invention of protective suits and oxygen pumps, divers used the skin-diving method: they fell into the water naked, sunk to the bottom with the help of the skandalopetra (a heavy stone weighing them down), and cut the sponges loose with their knives for as long as they could hold their breaths. The profession was a dangerous one, which led to many accidents underwater. Later, once the diving suit was used, it introduced a newer complication: decompression sickness, also known as diver’s disease, which made the sponge collectors more prone to drowning. Legend has it, their spirits still lie entangled underwater with the sponges and seaweed.

Scylla and Charybdis

Best known from Homer’s Odyssey, each monster occupies one side of a strait, acting as each other’s counterparts. Scylla was said to have once been a beautiful water nymph before she was turned into a monster by bathing in poison. Her counterpart Charybdis inhaled and exhaled large amounts of water, which created whirlpools that drowned passing ships. Scylla and Charybdis have a symbiotic relationship as they hunt together: if a ship moves along the strait to escape Scylla, the vessel comes within range of Charybdis, and the opposite.

“Between Scylla and Charybdis” is a phrase synonymous with “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” which both arise from a marine metaphor, solidifying the historical danger of sea travel faced by both sailors and their vessels.

The Mermaid Madonna

Sailors are a superstitious sort. As a result, the numinous and the esoteric couldn’t be missing from a life touched by the sea. Superstitions of monstrous constellations, patron saints guiding sailors home, and maidens who live in the water and lead ships astray are numerous. A rarer manifestation of a local, niche folk figure is The Mermaid Madonna (η Παναγιά Γοργόνα). There is a tiny chapel in Lesbos, set upon a steep rock facing the sea. Inside, a mural of the Virgin Mary has been painted by an unknown artist centuries ago. That mural depicts Mary as having a scaly mermaid’s tail.

Ichthyocentaurs

Literally: fish centaurs. These mythical creatures had the head and upper torso of a human, the legs of a horse, and the tail of a fish (although sometimes they were also portrayed having the claws of a crab or lobster). The name ichthyocentaur was given to them much later, but the creatures appeared in Classical mosaics and sculptures for centuries without proper classification. The two best known sea centaurs are Aphros and Bythos, which are the personification of sea foam, and of the deep. It’s unclear whether the creatures were considered dangerous sea demons, or apotropaic deities during the creation of their mosaics.

Often, the sea and its mysteries inspire more awe than even the idea of space exploration itself. In that aspect, sea and space are very similar: they remain vast, and every effort to cartograph them is only a single drop in an abyss of possibilities.

So it makes sense for humans to want to populate that abyss with legends of monsters and ghosts, in an effort to understand the impossible, salt-stained and waterlogged.