by Justin Nobel

Frankie Yale was murdered by Al Cappone's gunmen. His Brooklyn funeral was the most ostentatious in mob history, featuring a $15,000 silver casket and 110 Cadillac limousines. One woman bolted from the crowd and spit on the gleaming coffin; Yale’s thugs had murdered her husband while in bed some years earlier.

With a heavy police presence and a bevy of gawking onlookers, a golden coffin was carried through the streets of Montreal’s Little Italy neighborhood earlier this week. Inside was the body of 42 year-old Nick Rizzuto, gunned down in broad daylight while standing beside a black Mercedes. His father Vito, considered Canada’s most powerful mafia boss, is presently in a Colorado prison on racketeering charges related to three mob murders.

For Montreal, it was a noteworthy funerary event, but as crime family funerals go, the funeral procession was uneventful and the end for Nick was swift and unexpected. Mob deaths can be much worse. Salvatore Maranzano, a Sicilian-born New York mobster known as the “boss of bosses” was shot and stabbed to death in September 1931 in his Park Avenue office by four thugs posing to be detectives, a murder arranged by Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano. Carmine “Cigar” Galante, acting boss of the Bonanno crime family in the late 1970s was showered with bullets in an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn with a cigar in his mouth, having just polished off a plate of spaghetti. And then there is the unlucky end of Frankie Yale. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Zombie walks are a relatively new phenomenon. Their increase is linked to the recent surge in the popularity of zombie films and may be a result of modern society

A ragtag mob with ashen, blood smeared faces and darkened eyes roamed downtown San Diego two weeks ago, flailing their arms, searching for brains. They were zombies, on a zombie walk to promote Woody Harrelson’s much anticipated film, Zombieland, due out in October.

The first such walk was about ten years ago, according to Erik Zempel, co-founder of the Zombie Reporting Center, one of several websites that tracks zombie films. Three years ago, nearly 900 zombies stalked the Monroeville Mall, outside Pittsburgh, setting a Guinness World Record. So far this year, zombie walks have occurred in dozens of states, including Georgia, Arizona, Illinois, Idaho, Alabama and Alaska.

“I think if we as a society were more involved with the death process and the funeral process these sorts of themes might never come up,” said Zempel.

Americans have been physically distancing themselves from death for the past century, he argues. The more we distance ourselves, the more popular zombie movies seem to become.

“It seems to me there is a fear of dead bodies and perhaps 100 years ago that wasn’t so,” said Kempel.

The economic recession may also be partially responsible for the recent pulse in zombie walks and films. This year’s selection includes: “Mud Zombie”, a Brazilian film in which zombies emerge from the mangroves and overrun a tiny fishing village. “Dead Air” reveals what happens at a radio station the night zombies created by a chemical terrorist attack storm the city. “Gallowwalker” is a zombie western, shot by Wesley Snipes and “Samurai Zombie” is a Japanese film about old samurais that return from the dead to stalk a family on a hiking trip in remote mountains.

“Pathogen” is a zombie flick written by a 10 year-old and “Zombie Girl” is the documentary about the making of it. “Le Horde” depicts an epic battle between corrupt cops and gangsters the night of a zombie outbreak and “Dead Snow” is a highly buzzed about Norwegian film that tells the story of eight friends at a remote cabin who discover Nazi zombies frozen in the snow.

The first Zombie films were in the 1930s, and focused more on mind control than hordes of blood thirsty half-dead. The most well-known film from this era was “White Zombie”, released in 1932, in which a man resorts to voodoo to transform a beautiful woman into a zombie so he can scare off her lover and woo her himself. The story takes place in Haiti, and draws heavily on Haitian vodou, which has roots in West African beliefs and practices.

It wasn’t until the 1968 film, “Night of the Living Dead,” directed by George Romero, that the zombies in movies developed a mad craving for human flesh. Romero actually didn’t call his nightmarish figures zombies, but that was the name that stuck, and the genre under which his film and the many it inspired came to be known.

Zombie films remained popular through the 1980s and lost ground in the 1990s. They have now returned with a vengeance.

With the increased popularity comes a more diverse fan base, said Zempel. The idea that zombie fans are all macabre goths obsessed with death is inaccurate, said Zempel.

“They really cut across a wide cross-section of the U.S. population,” he said.

by Justin Nobel

Michael Jackson's after-death has been relatively normal, considering. British aristocrats have had their hearts stolen and their heads put on sticks. (Photo by Justin Nobel)

Michael Jackson is still missing his brain but it has been a pretty normal after-death, considering. The afterworld of royalty can be much stranger…

Sir Thomas More was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. More’s head was taken from the scaffold, parboiled, stuck on a pole and exhibited on the London Bridge. His daughter, Margaret Roper, bribed the bridge-keeper to knock it down. She smuggled the head home and preserved it in spices. When she died, the head was buried with her. In the nineteenth century the tomb was opened and More’s head was put on public view in St. Dunstan’s Church, in Canterbury.

Queen Anne Boleyn was beheaded in 1536 on the orders of her husband, King Henry VIII. Her heart was stolen and hidden in a church. Three centuries later it was re-discovered and placed under the church organ.

Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England, died in 1658 and was embalmed and buried in Westminster Abbey. After the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, his body was dug up and taken to Tyburn where it was gibbeted until sundown. The Public Executioner lowered the body, cut off the head and impaled it on a 25 foot pole on the roof of Westminster Hall. It remained there until 1685 when it was dislodged during a gale. A soldier found the head and hid it in his chimney. On his deathbed, he bequeathed it to his daughter. In 1710, the head appeared in a freak show as ‘The Monster’s Head.’ A doctor bought the head for a significant sum and donated it to Sydney Sussex College in 1960 where it was buried in a secret spot on the college grounds. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

When Bob Hickey first visited Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery in the early 1980s he encountered a strange man with a Band-Aid on his chin, smoking a joint. The grave is one of the most visited cites in Paris, according to several travel websites. (Photo by Bob Hickey)

Bob Hickey arrived in Paris and went straight to the cemetery.
“I had heard that there was a joint constantly burning at Jim Morrison’s grave,” said Hickey, a sound technician on tour with James Taylor. “I thought, ‘Great, I will go there and see if I can catch a buzz.’”
Attendants at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, the cities largest, handed Hickey a map written in French that he was unable to decipher. Fortunately, finding his way was easy. Spray painted arrows led him along and graves marked with mystical lyrics and messages like “Jim this way” confirmed the route. At Morrison’s headstone, he encountered a strange man with a Band-Aid on his chin, smoking a joint. “He was sharing it with Jim,” said Hickey. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Body snatching was once so pervasive in America that wealthy families hired shotgun-wielding watchmen to protect the graves of their kin. Sentiments against the body-snatchers exploded in New York City during the Doctor’s Mob Riot of 1788. (Photo by Justin Nobel)

“The activity engaged in by this funeral director was utterly repulsive,” reads a recent newspaper article.

The man referred to is Stephen Finley, a funeral home director who clipped skin, bones, tendons, ligaments and heart valves from his clients and sold them for use in transplant surgeries. The case shocked the nation but the crime goes back centuries.

Leonardo Da Vinci, the sixteenth century artist and inventor who painted The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, also sketched sinews, sex organs, skeletons and one of the first reproductions of a fetus in utero, all of which he obtained from corpses. Da Vinci received his bodies from the hospital Santa Maria Nuova, in Florence. Michelangelo drew cadavers from the nearby church of Santo Spirito. Surgeons, who required corpses for medical study, had a much more difficult time obtaining them.

In England, the demand for cadavers was alleviated somewhat by the Murder Act of 1752, which gave surgeons access to the hung bodies of murderers. Anatomy schools flourished and the corpses of murderers did not suffice. Surgeons paid shadowy villains known as Sack’ em up men, or Ressurectionists to unearth bodies from cemeteries and churchyards. Thieves dug with a wooden spade, quieter than metal, cracked the coffin open and dragged the body out with a rope. Because bodies had no value stealing them was not considered a crime. Body snatching occurred primarily in winter, when corpses lasted longer. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Helen Sclair, 78, has coffins in her dining room and a copper-lined burial vault in her living room. She lives in a cottage on the grounds of Bohemian National Cemetery, in Chicago, and is writing a book about the ethnography of Chicagoland cemeteries. Buried in Bohemian are Muslims, Assyrians, Romanians and Bohemians. (Photo Courtesy of Matt Hucke, http://graveyards.com/)

In Helen Sclair’s dining room are coffins: one from the 1940s fit for a baby, a wicker model from the 1920s and a Civil War-era pine casket. A copper-lined burial vault adorns her living room, and on her walls are the death mask from a notorious Depression-era Chicago bank robber and paraphernalia from Day of the Dead and Qingming, Mexican and Chinese festivals that involve decorating ancestral graves.

“People seem to be somewhat afraid of death,” said Sclair, a 78 year-old widow who adores it, and is known locally as the cemetery lady, “But if you look closely you’d be amazed at what you’ll find in cemeteries. You step back in time and you cross oceans.”

Sclair sang opera as a young woman and taught kids with learning disabilities in inner city Chicago. The death of her husband, some 30 years ago, led to a fascination with Chicago’s cemetery history. “It was just total idle curiosity,” she said, “something to fill the time on weekends.”

When Sclair took a bad fall ten years ago, her daughter suggested moving to a one floor home or an elevator building. Sclair scoffed at the idea, and instead, called the Bohemian National Cemetery, on the north side of Chicago, and asked for a home. After a nod from the board of directors, Sclair moved into one of three simple cottages on the property. “It’s been wonderful,” she said, “I live with death on a daily basis.”

Read the rest of this entry »