by Justin Nobel
Both magicians and the non-magical have patiently awaited Harry Houdini to return from the grave every Halloween since his death on October 31, 1926. This year, a seance will be held online.
Every Halloween, a group that has included celebrities, master magicians and ghost writers waits patiently for Harry Houdini to return from the grave. He hasn’t come back yet, but this has ceased to dispirit the séance-goers, who in recent years have moved the event to the internet.
“We are asking everyone to attempt to contact Harry Houdini sometime during Halloween for the 24 hours of October 31st,” reads a banner on the website of the Harry Houdini Museum, which is located in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “Email us with any results and lack of results. No kooks please, this is a serious Halloween test and tribute.” Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
Life Gem is an Illinois-based company that transforms cremated human remains into gem-quality diamonds. The inspiration for the company came from co-founder Rusty VandenBiesen, who began worrying about death at age four. “His way of resolving this was to come up with an idea,” said Dean. That idea was diamonds. (Photo Courtesy of Life Gem)
Four year-old Rusty VandenBiesen was alone with the pictures of Jesus in the scary room at his grandmother’s when he burst into tears. His older brothers were watching TV and rushed in to see what was wrong. “He said he was afraid of dying,” said his brother Dean.
It was a fear that remained with Rusty. Even into his twenties, he would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic. He wasn’t so much afraid of death, but that after he died he would be forgotten. “His way of resolving this was to come up with an idea,” said Dean. That idea was diamonds.
Rusty researched chemistry, Dean obtained a degree in geology and the brothers teamed up with an entrepreneurial friend named Greg Herro. The plan was to transform cremated human remains into gem-quality diamonds. The group obtained a U.S. patent for the process of extracting carbon from cremated remains and in 2002 they launched Life Gem. It took almost three months for the first orders to come through. “We were very nervous,” said Dean.
Since then, Life Gem has been featured on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”, National Public Radio and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” The company has offices in England and Japan, where the cremation rate is over 98 percent. They fill about 1,000 orders a year, most for diamonds that end up on a ring or in a pendent.
“Our clients are often approached by strangers, maybe in line at a grocery store,” said Dean. “People will say, ‘that’s a beautiful ring.’” Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
Professor Marla Toyne’s class about death at the University of Western Ontario is one of a surprisingly few college courses on the topic. “In North America, we have had a sterilization of death,” says Toyne. (Photo by Justin Nobel)
Writing an obituary was their first assignment and next month Professor Marla Toyne’s students will visit a cemetery.
You can take a course on virtually anything in college: University of Iowa offers a class entitled, “The American Vacation”, students at Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky, can formally study the “Art of Walking” and at Georgetown, discussions revolve around time travel and the possibility of sentient robots in “Philosophy and Star Trek”. But, despite college student’s notoriously death-defying lifestyles, there are virtually no college courses on death. Toyne, an anthropologist at the University of Western Ontario who studies human sacrifice in the ancient tribes of Peru, believes that’s a problem, so she started a course on the topic.
Young adults may think they are immortal but they need to know about death, said Toyne. “As an adult you have to think about the future, and one thing that happens in the future is that death will come.”
The different ways it can come is the focus of her research. She studies the Incas, as well as the Chimu and Lambayeque tribes, who inhabited the deserts along the coast of Peru from the 12th to the 15th centuries. By looking at skeletons, Toyne can determine if people died naturally or violently, and amongst the indigenous cultures of Peru, violent deaths were common. “You have children who have frozen to death,” she said. “Some show evidence of vomiting, maybe they were forced an alcohol beverage. Some were buried alive. In other cases, throats were cut and a great deal of blood was spilled.” Read the rest of this entry »
