Record droughts in Texas have lowered the level of Lake Buchanan, revealing long-forgotten tombstones.

Hurricane Irene roared up the East Coast last August, leaving a wide and varied path of destruction: in New Jersey at least one woman drowned in her car, Virginia experienced the second largest power outage in the state's history, in Delaware a tornado tore off the roof of a house and in Rochester, Vermont a river flooded its banks and swallowed a large section of a graveyard. “A terrible and sad situation,” read one local report. “Homes are destroyed, so are roads and bridges and even a cemetery…the final resting place for Rochester residents.” Much of the nation has seen weird weather lately, putting a crimp on lives and also affecting the dead. Some cemeteries have been submerged by flood waters, in other cases a lack of water has brought old graveyards back to life.

Flooding along the Mississippi River over the summer popped three caskets out of the ground in the cemetery of a 150 year-old Baptist church in Yazoo City, Mississippi. “It was just shocking,” a church deacon with a mother and a sister buried in the church cemetery told a local paper. The flood inundated the entire cemetery with two and a half feet of water, leaving only the tops of the headstones showing. Even a concrete vault was set afloat. The unearthed bodies were brought to the state medical examiner's office, which soon became full, forcing officials to keep bodies in a refrigerated truck.

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Just to the west, in Texas, the story has been drought. Water levels in area lakes have dropped by more than a dozen feet, unearthing surprises across the region. Along the Oklahoma border, a town flooded in 1944 when the Red River was dammed to make Lake Texoma has reemerged and at Falcon Lake, along the Rio Grande, on the Mexico border, a century-old church has reemerged. Other objects reappearing from Texas lake beds have included, prehistoric skulls, ancient tools, fossils and a small cemetery that appears to have contained the graves of freed slaves. At Lake Georgetown, near Austin, fishermen found what seems to be the skull of an ancient American Indian. The discoveries have attracted interest from local historians and also looters. At Lake Whitney, south of Fort Worth, more than two dozen looters were arrested for removing Native American tools and fossils that experts believe could be thousands of years old.

In Bluffton, a small town in the center of the state, the past 12 months have been the driest on record. The receding waters of nearby Lake Buchanan have revealed the concrete foundations of a two-story hotel, scales of an old cotton gin and concrete slabs from a Texaco gas station that also served as a general store. A handful of graves have appeared too, including the cracked marble tombstone of one Johnny C. Parks, who died October 15, 1882, two days before his first birthday.

But usually it is a flood that unearths old graves, and also puts people in new ones. In Terrell County, Texas in June of 1965, thunderstorms dropped nearly a foot of rain in only a few hours. Sanderson Canyon Creek, typically dry, turned into a furious 15-foot high wall of water. It struck the town below without warning, wrenching homes from their foundations, destroying businesses, washing out bridges and laying waste to five miles of Southern Pacific railroad track.

Entire families were swept away, others barely survived. A railroad brakeman named Charles Horsely was stranded atop an apartment for three hours and watched helplessly as the raging waters engulfed the town. Another brakeman nearly drowned in a futile attempt to save a family of children, clinging to a collapsing motel roof. “It just started crumbling and went over and everybody was going to die and I couldn't help them,” said the brakeman. Amazingly, one of the children actually survived. “I grabbed a tree, but there was a snake on it and I let go,” he later told a reporter at the hospital. “I went under 5 times, maybe 10 times. I thought  I was going to die.” He didn't, but unfortunately all his siblings did.

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Mixed in with the new bodies were old ones that washed out of Sanderson Cemetery. These bodies were later recovered and, to eliminate additional health hazards, mass-buried in a bulldozed pit.

Weird funeral crimes are on the rise. Some of the strangest of the year include two Denver men who allegedly took their dead friend to a strip club and a New Hampshire man who stole a priest's Subaru while he was giving a funeral sermon.

Maybe it's the bad economy but weird funeral crimes are on the rise. Earlier this fall a Wisconsin cemetery worker allegedly swiped a $2,000 guitar from the casket of a 67 year-old grandfather. “It was his pride and joy,” said one family member. “This isn't something I normally do,” said the robber. “I just have a respect for fine musical instruments.”

The dead grandpa guitar thief is only the beginning, below is a list of weird funeral crimes that have occurred within the past year…

Accidentally Carjacking Grandma - In West Virginia, 23 year-old Angela Jeanette DeHart was accused of stealing a hearse from a funeral home that contained the dead body of an 85 year-old woman. The driver had left the trunk door open and the engine running when someone jumped inside. Police found the black Cadillac Fleetwood hearse parked next to DeHart's house. The corpse “had been jostled around,” said police, “possibly from reckless driving.”

Dead Friends, Burritos and Strippers - Two Denver men allegedly took their dead friend for a night on the town, visiting several bars, a burrito joint and a strip club. They also took his credit card. It went down something like this, according to a Denver police officer: “Rubinson and Young go into the restaurant and drink. Jarrett is in the back seat of the car…[They] use Jarrett's credit card to pay for the drinks they consumed.” The pair stopped at a diner before taking their dead friend back home and putting him to bed. They kept his bank card, withdraw $400 then went to a burrito restaurant and a strip club. Robert Young, 43, and Mark Rubinson, 25, were charged with identity theft, criminal impersonation and abuse of a corpse.

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Priest's Subaru Stolen During Sermon - Michael Kanclerowicz snuck into a church in Massachusetts during a funeral, stole the priest's Subaru then drove to the beach. Kanclerowicz was arrested at a hotel on charges of using someone else's credit card. He had apparently entered the church through a back entrance and sat behind mourners, wearing a large knapsack on his back. He was witnessed kneeling down and making the sign of the cross. Kanclerowicz then reportedly exited the church, entered the sacristy, took the keys and hopped in the Subaru. He has been sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison. “My message to him,” said the priest, “is to not steal.”

Would You Ever Take Your Girlfriend's Urn? - In Connecticut, a 37 year-old man named Mark Kzakrzeski, armed with a handgun, took an urn containing the ashes of his girlfriend's grandmother and chucked it into the woods behind her home. Kzakrzeski was charged with larceny, illegal possession of a firearm and disorderly conduct. The urn is yet to be recovered.

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Stole the radio, left the 98 year-old - In South Florida, a man stole a mortuary company van, only to discover the body of 98 year-old Matilda Kazimir inside. She had recently passed away at a nearby nursing home. The van's driver had left the keys in the car and run back in to get his cell phone. When he returned the van was gone. Police found the vehicle a few blocks away, minus the radio. Kazimir's body was still inside, seemingly undisturbed.

Game Boy Swiped from Dead Teen's Coffin - In Hillsdale, Pennsylvania, 37 year-old Jody Lynn Bennett reached into the coffin of an 11th-grader and stole his Game Boy. The teen had died Christmas morning, when his SUV skidded out on a snowy road and struck a utility pole. The crime occurred just after the funeral service. The boy's uncle approached Bennett just as she was about to drive away and asked about the missing Game Boy. What Game Boy, she asked. Bennett could see it in her car. She had also taken three games. The total value of the stolen goods was placed at $46.90.

Charlie Chaplin's Corpse Stolen by Auto Mechanic Duo, No Joke! – Not recent but it may be the best funeral heist of all time. The legendary silent film star died on Christmas Day 1977 and was buried in a 300-pound oak coffin in the village of Corsier, Switzerland. The following March his body was stolen by a pair of crooks who demanded 400,000 pounds for its return. Chaplin's widow, Lady Oona Chaplin, refused to pay, saying, “Charlie would have thought it rather ridiculous.” Police set up false pay-offs but the robbers didn't show. The police, expecting a call from the robbers, then tapped the Chaplins' phone and assigned officers to monitor more than 200 phone booths across the area. The call came and the police traced it back to the originating booth. Roman Wardas and Gantscho Ganev were arrested, both auto mechanics. They led police to Chaplin's remains, buried in a cornfield about 10 miles from the graveyard.

Know of a weird funeral crime we missed? Tell us about it in a comment..

At Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, in New York, some 700 people have been buried with their pets, though the practice is now under scrutiny. In the sixth and seventh centuries, Anglo-Saxon warriors were often buried with their horses.

Carol Mundy, of Cornwall, England already has her cemetery plot picked out. She wants to be buried beside her husband Robert, and Dylan, the couple's 17 year old golden retriever. Nearby will be Merlin, their Irish thoroughbred, an abused dog the couple rescued from Romania. Merlin's plot cost about $1,000, Dylan's cost nearly $5,000. “I don't see why he shouldn't have the same resting place as me,” said Mundy. “Nothing makes me more angry than people saying ‘it is only a dog'. Some think you're screwy but they need to realize what a difference animals can make to people's lives.”

Burying people with their pets has become more common in England and also America, although in the US the practice has recently come under scrutiny. Just this past June, the New York Division of Cemeteries issued an order to animal cemeteries to stop the practice of burying human ashes with animal remains. The ruling infuriated customers of the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, the nation's oldest pet cemetery, located in the suburbs north of New York City, where several people had already prearranged to have their ashes interred alongside their pets. “Suddenly I'm not at peace anymore,” said one woman, who planned to be buried with her two dogs, BJ I and BJ II. “You want to be with the people you are closest with, your true loved ones…the only loved ones I have in my life right now are my pets.”

THE RICHEST DOG ON EARTH DIES

Hartsdale Cemetery officials estimate some 700 people have been buried with their pets in the cemetery. A total of 75,000 animals are buried there, mostly cats and dogs. Despite the new order against pet/human burials the cemetery's owner says he plans to continue them . “My uncle wants to be buried beside his wife and what he considered to be his children and I'm not letting anyone stand in the way,” said a lawyer representing the cemetery. “His love for those dogs was just as real and just as strong as any parent's for any child.”

The first pet/human burial at Hartsdale was in 1925, when a woman had her ashes sprinkled over her dog's grave. The inscription on a tombstone for one Edward Way, who died in 1976, reads: “Miss Bibi Way, 1959-1973 – Here we sleep forever, I and my beloved Bibi, my loving companion for fourteen years, together in life, together in death.” Cemetery records indicate Bibi was a cat. One Arthur Link, who died in 1995, is buried beside his wife and their 16 cats; Aspen, Fritzie, Ginger, Gidget, Muffin, Bambi, Cricket, Snoopy, Gina, Patches, Foxy, Buttons, Dudley, Omar, Khayyam and Valentino.

PET DEATH LEGAL ISSUES

Wealthy New Yorkers are not the trendsetters here. Anglo-Saxon warriors were often buried with their horses. Graves with both human and horse remains dating from mostly the sixth and seventh centuries have been found in Scandinavia, Germany and Britain. Sutton Hoo, a British site excavated in 1991 is famous for its ship burial, which contained a host of precious artifacts now at the British Museum, such as a metalwork dress fitted with gold and gems and silver plates from the Eastern Roman Empire. Equally impressive are a group of 20 earthen mounds.

Inside Mound 3 are the ashes of a man and a horse, in a wooden trough together with a Frankish iron-headed throwing-axe, the lid of a bronze ewer, part of a miniature carved plaque with the winged Goddess Victory and fragments of decorated bone. Under Mound 4 are the cremated remains of a man and a woman, together with a horse and what is likely a dog. Mound 7 contains cremations in bronze bowls, gaming-pieces, an iron bucket, a sword-belt fitting and a drinking vessel, together with the remains of horse, cattle, red deer, sheep and pig.

Even earlier pet/human burials can be found amongst the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, who were often buried alongside mummified cats, monkeys and birds. Cats were embalmed and adorned with papier-mâché masks then placed in a mummy case or bronze coffin and buried with mummified mice and pots of milk for the afterlife. In 1888, a farmer in the Egyptian town of Beni Hasan accidentally discovered a massive cat tomb. Inside were the remains of thousands of felines, dating from 1,000 to 2,000 B.C. Most of the remains were shipped to a plant in Manchester, England, where they were turned into fertilizer.

When Leona Helmsley, known as the “Queen of Mean”, died in 2007 she left $12 million to her Maltese, Trouble. Fortune magazine branded it the third dumbest business moment of 2007. The dog retired to Florida and recently died.

In 2007, real estate tycoon Leona Helmsley died of heart failure, leaving explicit instructions on what to do with her $4 billion fortune: the bulk would go into a family trust and some $12 million would go to “Trouble”, her fluffy white Maltese. Like many who come into money, the dog retired to Florida. Carl Lekic, the general manager of one of Helmsley's hotels, looked after Trouble, receiving $60,000 a year for his troubles. Another $8,000 went for grooming, $1,200 for food and $100,000 went for full-time security, as Trouble had received numerous death threats. Earlier this month it was revealed that Trouble was dead. He was 12 years old. Helmsley's wishes were to have the dog buried with her and her husband in their $1.4 million mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow, New York, but these wishes were not carried out. New York state prohibits interment of pets in human cemeteries.

But the way we deal with the death of pets is changing. Although most places still prohibit pets to be buried with people, pets now receive many of the same death rites that humans do, such as funeral services and cremations. The first pet funeral home opened in Indianapolis in 2004, now there are more than 750 of them. Other companies have sprouted up to offer grief counseling to people who have lost pets. And just like in the human funeral industry, pet burial scandals have arisen. “On the human side, the biggest issue out there is always wrongful cremation,” one funeral industry consultant recently told the AP. “On the pet side, it's not wrongful cremations, but whether cremations are being done at all.” In cases in Arizona, Virginia and Tennessee pets slated to be cremated were actually dumped in landfills.

HOW TO DEAL WITH THE DEATH OF A PET

But most pets these days are treated well in death, and sometimes exceptionally well. In 2007, an Indianapolis police dog named Bo was struck down in the line of duty. The dog had been with the force for about four years when a burglar turned around and fired several shots into the animal. “Bo went back to his handler and died in his arms,” said one lieutenant.  More than 140 people attended his funeral.

The oldest pet cemetery in the country is the Hartsdale Canine Cemetery, which houses nearly 70,000 pets, including birds, rabbits and a lion cub, and is in the suburbs just north of New York City. The cemetery was begun in 1896 in an apple orchard owned by a New York City veterinarian named Samuel Johnson, in an effort to console a city dwelling friend who had nowhere to bury his dog. After a newspaper article reported the story other requests came pouring in. Johnson set aside three acres of the orchard and devoted it to a burial ground for pets. In 1921 a memorial was erected in honor of the dogs that died serving in the trenches and battlefields of World War I. “Judging from a walk through the pet burial ground, most owners opt for impressive monuments and headstones,” reads a 1986 New York Times article. Numerous celebrities have pets buried there, including Diana Ross, Mariah Carey, opera singer Robert Merrill, ballroom dancer Irene Castle and George Raft, an actor who often played the criminal in early mob movies.

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Some of the newest pet cemeteries in the world are in China, which is experiencing a veritable pet cemetery boom. In a cemetery covering 300 hectares at the foot of a large mountain range in Xian, the capital of Shaanxi Province, there are some 600 graves. Prices for plots range from 1,680 yuan ($256) to more than 36,000 yuan, or about $5,600, according to an article in the Sanqin Daily. Just like with humans, there are often messages etched onto tombs. “Dou Dou, my love for you is eternal,” reads one. Although snakes and pigs are among the animals buried there, 80 percent are dogs. The most expensive grave is for a Tibetan mastiff and costs 4.8 million yuan, or $733,000. The dog is buried in a jade coffin. Even grander graves may be to come. A coal baron from Qingdao recently paid 10 million yuan ($1.54 million), the most amount of money ever paid for a dog, for a red Tibetan mastiff named Big Splash.

Many of Mexico's most notorious narco-lords are buried in Sinaloa's Jardines De Humaya, a cemetery that looks more like a Mediterranean villa.

Ignacio “El Nacho” Coronel and Arturo Beltrán Leyva, known as Mexico's “Boss of Bosses”, were rival drug dealers and mortal enemies, but in death they lie side by side in the lap of luxury. Their home is Jardines De Humaya, a cemetery in the city of Culiacán, the capital and largest city in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. The city is also the capitol of the region's lucrative drug trade, but even narco-lords die, often much sooner than the rest of us, and the Jardines De Humaya serves as the eternal resting place for many of them. As one might expect, it is utterly over-the-top.

The two and three story tall stucco buildings that line the wide leafy avenues of the cemetery are in fact tombs, though they look more like condos. Many are whitewashed, others are painted cheery pastels; sky blue, sunshine yellow, ocher, with large crosses atop gilded cupolas. The place looks more like a dreamy Mediterranean villa than a graveyard. Inside the tombs it is just as lavish. There are windows, air conditioning, couches, giant portraits, ivory statues, Persian rugs, party balloons, children's toys and stereo systems. In some are models of the dead drug lord's favorite cars and guns. A few have phone lines. “The tomb of a drug pilot is actually adorned with crystal planes!” exclaims one Mexican newspaper article.

GRAVE MARKERS, MEMORIALS AND BURIAL VAULTS

The narco-tombs are part of a broader narco-mania sweeping the country. As revolted as Mexicans are with the brutal drug killings, the lavish drug life has swooned many. The way of this life has been broadcast via music known as narcocorrido, the Mexican drug ballad. The music is a danceable accordion-based polka that dates back to traditional Mexican ballads from the 1930s, but the lyrics more resemble American gangster rap, referring to murder, drug smuggling and government corruption. One of the first narcocorrido artists was an LA Mexican immigrant named Rosalino Sanchez, or simply, Chalino. Through the 1980s, he wrote songs about immigrants he met in seedy LA bars, many of whom came from drug-infested parts of northwestern Mexico. Chalino put these stories to music, recorded them and sold cassettes by the thousands. The tapes made their way back to Mexico too, where Chalino became something of a legend, known also as El Pelavacas (Cow Skin Peeler), El Indio (The Indian) and Mi Compa (My Friend).

But he was not everyone's friend, in 1992 after a concert in Culiacán, Chalino was murdered. He was 31. Death only enhanced his fame, sparking a wave of narcocorrido imitators known as Chalinillos. Groups sprouted up all across the country, bands like Los Morros Del Norte, Grupo Exterminador, Revolucion Norteña and El Bandido. Many bands achieved success in Mexico and the US, but numerous musicians were murdered. The Mexican government's attempts to ban narcocorrido music have met with little success.

THE RICH HISTORY OF DEATH IN MEXICAN ART

Another narco-trend is the narco-wife. Across Sinaloa, where good employment opportunities for females are few and far between and often based on beauty, the narco lifestyle is appealing. Attractive young women, and even girls still in school, are chatted up, snatched up and sometimes literally even kidnapped at gunpoint by drug lords. They show up at Sinaloa beauty pageants, looking to lure girls with their glam. Once a narco-wife, life can be easy, reports a recent Mexican newspaper article: “Landing a prominent drug trafficker means entering a world of untold riches—luxury mansions, SUVs, endless spa sessions and a closet full of the priciest labels on the planet…[women] laze in beauty salons, draped in designer gear, getting Swarovski crystals glued onto their fingernails.” But it's not all glitter and gold, the narco-wife life sometimes means murder, too. A few years back a druglord's former lover was found dead in the trunk of a car with Z's, insignia of a rival drug gang, slashed across her belly, butt and breasts.

The narco life was recently documented in a film called “El Velador”, or The Night Watchman, a raw look into the violent narco world, told via a man who overlooks Jardines De Humaya. In one eerie scene the night watchman calmly describes the cemetery. “There are a lot of shoot outs,” he says. “They throw parties at night. They bring their bands and shoot their guns.”

Step inside New York's most unique tour vehicle and take an intimate journey to the sites where famous New Yorker's have died and famous New York City deaths have taken place.

Peter Plogojowitz died in a small Serbian town in 1725 but is said to have returned from the dead to murder a handful of villagers, including his own son. When his grave was dug up a dagger to the heart drew fresh blood, revealing that Peter had indeed been a vampire.

In 1818 in the Scioto Valley of southwestern Ohio, there one hot summer day occurred a murder trial that involved an angry bitter old mountain man named Crile Williams. Crile had suspected his brother Clayborne was stealing his horses and on a damp foggy morning Crile was hunting rabbits in the woods near his cabin when he noticed a man moving about suspiciously near his land. Suspecting it to be his brother Crile fired a shot, hitting the man square in the head. Upon walking over Crile realized that the man was dead and furthermore that it was not his brother, but a neighbor, Louis. Crile turned and ran.

Other neighbors found the body and realized immediately the man had been murdered. As Crile was known as a very angry man who drank with the devil and sometimes kicked dogs around, he was suspected. Boot prints found near the body were said to have been the same as Crile's and the bullet extracted from the murdered man's skull was said to have come from Crile's rifle. Rumor spread across the region that Crile was the murderer, though when questioned he adamantly denied his involvement. Several months passed without any arrests and locals decided to hold a trial of their own to find the murderer.

There was a tale in this area that said when a murderer touched the corpse of the man he murderer it would bleed. On a sweltering July day Louis's body was removed from the grave and placed in a courthouse. All of the men were required to come up one by one and touch the corpse. Folks were convinced that when Crile touched it black blood would spout from the bullet hole and bloody worms would emerge. As expected, one by one the townspeople laid their hands on the corpse and nothing happened. Then it was Crile's turn.

“Crile Williams stepped past the other men,” describes Michael Jay Katz in his book Buckeye Legends: folktales and lore from Ohio. “He walked slowly, as slow as pond water. When he got to the table, he examined the body all over. He looked at it from head to toe. He put out a hand and he touched the shoulder, just like the other men had touched it. Then he turned, and again, as slow as molasses in January, he passed out of the room and into the glaring sun in the street outside…Nothing happened—nothing whatsoever.”

Some thought the body had been too long in the grave for the test to work, others speculated Crile had bewitched it; some figured maybe Crile wasn't guilty after all. The story may be farfetched but it does have some precedent. In Eastern Europe during the 18th century it was also believed that a bleeding corpse could yield certain clues, in this case, the presence of vampirism. One of the earliest and most well documented cases occurred in Serbia in the 1700s. A man named Peter Plogojowitz lived in the village of Kisilova and died in 1725. Within eight days of his death, nine other people perished, all dying from strange ailments that killed them within 24 hours. On their death-beds, the victims claimed to have been choked by Peter during the night. His wife said he came to her one night, looking for his shoes. Frightened, she moved to another village. Peter later came back to his house demanding food from his son and when his son refused, Peter brutally murdered him. Villagers decided to dig up Peter's body and examine it for signs of vampirism, such as the absence of decomposition and freshly growing hair, beard and nails.

As a local priest looked on, the villagers viewed the exhumed body. Astonishingly, it was indeed undecomposed, fresh hair and a beard were growing, there was new skin and nail growth and blood could be seen in the mouth. The distressed villagers drove a stake through Peter's heart, which caused a great amount of fresh blood to flow from the ears and mouth. The body was burned but it wouldn't be the last case of vampirism in the region. Years later, a woman named Sava Savanović who lived in an old watermill is said to have killed several millers and drank their blood.

New York City's Marble Cemetery is home to a whale oil tycoon, a revolutionary war hero and a swashbuckling Mayan archaeologist. Last week military-grade C-4 explosives were discovered.

New York City's Marble Cemetery has contained the remains of Preserved Fish, a nineteenth century whale oil tycoon, Marinus Willet, a Revolutionary War hero, John Lloyd Stephens, a swashbuckling Mayan archaeologist, John Ericsson, inventor of the ironclad Monitor, President James Monroe, six Roosevelt's and all of the Kip clan, prosperous Dutch settlers who in 1655 established a farm in a section of the city now named after them. But last Sunday something other than famous bones was found in the quaint cemetery, which lies in New York City's bohemian East Village neighborhood: a decaying garbage bag filled with 10 pounds of military-grade C-4 explosives. The explosives, in the shape of bricks, were individually wrapped in plastic and had green and yellow military-like markings. “We thought it was like a movie prop,” said a Marble Cemetery board member. “It was sort of crumbly, the plastic was coming off. It clearly said explosive on it, but it had been outside for so long that the plastic was sort of delaminating.”

The New York City Police Department is currently investigating just how old the explosives are and where exactly they came from—a nearby Hells Angels clubhouse and a bookstore known to be a congregating site for anarchists are potential targets. Given the heightened concern over terrorism the find is particularly disturbing, but cemeteries are notorious for strange and unexplainable finds.

This past August in a cemetery in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania police investigating a grave robbing learned about a host of weird objects that somehow ended up in the cemetery. The body of 9 year-old Paula Ream was laid to rest at Lancaster's Riverview Burial Park almost 50 years ago, but sometime in mid-August her remains were dug up and stolen. Investigators believe it happened on either August 12 or August 13, which was a Friday. “It was raining that day, and I got here and ran into a guy wearing an action figure like outfit,” said Jeff Miller, the cemetery superintendent. “He jumped and threw something, maybe a jar of blood, at me and it hit me in my shoulder.” Miller described other items he had recently found in his cemetery: chicken heads, a pig head, a goat head and candles dug into the ground in the shape of a circle.

Earlier this summer in South Carolina the LeVeille family lost Pixie Dust. The two month-old miniature horse was stolen from her mother's side while grazing in a field. The worried family spent hours posting fliers then received a strange call, someone had found the 20-pound horse roaming in a cemetery. Pixie was dehydrated but survived.

Deep in the jungle of Rwanda, in central Africa, is a cemetery that contained one of the strangest finds of all, alien bodies, about 200 of them. “Surprisingly, they were very well preserved,” explained Swiss anthropologist Dr. Hugo Children, at a November 2009 press conference. “Now we are trying to find out where they appeared on Earth.” The graves held about five bodies, each close to seven feet tall. The heads were disproportionately large and there were no signs of a mouth, nose or eyes. “I guess they communicated with each other telepathically and moved like bats, with the help of some biological radar,” commented one blogger who wrote about the find. It is thought that the aliens were killed by a deadly virus they had no immunity to.

The Rwanda find was not the first alien cemetery. In 1937, in the remote mountains of the Bayan-Kara-Ula region on the Tibet-China border a professor from the Beijing Academy of Sciences discovered a cemetery in a honeycomb like cave. The bodies were only four feet long and had disproportionately large heads and thin limbs. There were drawings of the sun, earth, moon and some unknown world with a chain of dots leading off, thought to be the markings of an interstellar flight path. There were also strange ceramic discs with a hole in the center and small obscure icons on the outside. A Chinese professor named Zum Um Nui made a partial translation of the inscriptions on the disks and revealed that the beings called themselves the “loot” and had made an emergency landing in the area that destroyed their craft.

A pyramid tomb in Metarie Cemetery in New Orleans. In April, Nicolas Cage announced he will be buried in a similarly shaped tomb in a New Orleans cemetery.

Nicolas Cage owns a Gulfstream jet, two Europeans castles, a haunted mansion, a collection of shrunken heads, a dinosaur skull, a line of comic books called VooDoo Child and more than 30 cars, including nine Rolls Royces, an Enzo Ferrari and a Lamborghini once owned by the Shah of Iran, but this past April he purchased what may be his most outrageous possession of all: a nine-foot tall pyramid in a New Orleans cemetery. In it, he plans to spend eternity.

Cage's pyramid is just the latest eccentricity in a city with a colorful, and often ghostly, cemetery history. Because much of the city lies at or below sea-level, early graves were dug just a few feet down rather than the standard six. Still, they often became soggy and filled with water. During big rainstorms, caskets would pop out of the ground and float away. Settlers placed large stones atop coffins to try and keep them down or bored holes in the top, but to no avail.  The solution was above-ground burial vaults.

The first cemetery in New Orleans with above-ground burial vaults was Saint Louis Cemetery #1, which was built in 1789 by Governor Esteban Miro, while the city was still under Spanish rule. People continued to be buried below ground but in the early 1830s a series of epidemics struck the city. Many died and the outbreak was blamed partly on noxious fumes emitted by corpses. The city council passed an ordinance requiring all future burials to take place on land adjacent to the Bayou St. John, but an exemption allowed burials to occur elsewhere as long as they were in above-ground structures. This began the tradition of above-ground tombs.

Buried in Saint Louis Cemetery are numerous legends from the early days of the city, including Homer Plessy, a Creole man who in 1892, violated a Louisiana state law by boarding a white only railroad car. His famous case, Plessy vs. Ferguson, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The resulting decision institutionalized segregation in the south for more than half a century. There is also Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville, a French-Creole American playboy and businessman who now has a section of the city named after him. As a child, he dined on plates of gold and is credited with introducing the dice game craps to America. Eventually, Marigny lost his fortune gambling and died impoverished.

Also buried in the Saint Louis Cemetery is the famous voodoo queen of New Orleans, Marie Laveau, a mysterious 19th century Creole hairdresser who serviced wealthy white families. She supposedly owned a snake named Zombi, after an African god, and may have run a brothel. According to the local papers, she died on June 16, 1881, but many residents claimed to continue to see her in town. Doubters said the sightings were simply that of one of her daughters, also named Marie, but some were sure it was her. Her tomb still draws crowds. Visitors customarily mark three X's on the side of her grave in the hopes that her spirit will grant them a wish.

Other famous New Orleans cemeteries include The Carrollton Cemetery, established in 1849. It was divided into two sections, white and colored. The colored section had smaller plots and wooden tombstones with handwritten epitaphs. After Hurricane Katrina, this side of the cemetery lay scattered with bones. The white section consisted of elaborate vault tombs decorated with copings.

The Charity Hospital Cemetery, built in 1847, was a mass grave for the cities poor for nearly 150 years. Most of those buried within died during the Yellow Fever and Malaria epidemics that ravaged the city during the 19th century. Many of the dead were lain in unmarked graves. Bodies are no longer buried here and because dogs kept getting into the cemetery to dig up body parts, the gates were closed. The cemetery is now surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire.

The Cypress Grove Cemetery is dense with live oak and magnolia trees though it has few actual cypresses. Inside a large tomb for Chinese immigrants is a small fireplace where family members burn prayer notes for the deceased. Also in Cypress Grove is the grave of the first New Orleans firefighter to be killed in the line of duty. His name was Irad Ferry.

In Chris Rock's new comedy, “Death at a Funeral”, mourners continually battle each other. The flick is lighthearted, but in many funerary tiffs the blood is real. At a Bay Area funeral two years ago a man killed a close friend with a World War II collector's knife.

Men in sharp suits carry a well-lacquered coffin into a fancy suburban house. “Who is this?!” screams Chris Rock, when the lid is cracked. The body is supposed to be his father but there's been a mix-up, inside is an Asian-looking man. Thus begins “Death at a Funeral”, a slapstick movie released last week that stars Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence and Luke Wilson. It tells the story of a family funeral that turns into mayhem. The fiancé of a foxy niece accidentally takes mescaline and her jealous ex-boyfriend shows up to win her back. An invalid and irascible uncle goes off the deep end, two competitive brothers brawl beside the coffin and a suspicious dwarf in a leather jacket is demanding money and packing heat.

“Death at a Funeral” pulled in $17 million last weekend but some reviewers weren't so fond of the edgy aspects of the flick. For others the film's violence is hilarious, but in many funerary tiffs the blood is real.

Two years ago, a funeral in the Bay Area turned deadly in what began as a booze-fueled altercation. Emotions were running high and many guests were drinking heavily, a lawyer involved in the case later said. Two close friends, Darien Munson and Derrell Woods, got into a loud argument outside the funeral home. Munson passed out and later awoke to the sound of yelling, two women had gotten into a fist fight. Munson, still in a stupor, grabbed a large World War II collector's knife from inside the funeral home and sprinted outside like a madman. He thrust it into Woods' stomach; his friend died later that day.

At a funeral home in Martinsville Indiana, a fight broke out last month between brothers who were putting their mother to rest. Eulogies had been given and the coffin was in the ground when “out of nowhere” Eddy and Dennis Nail began beating the hell out of each other. “My concern was that if somebody would hit their head on a monument,” said the funeral director. The police showed up with stun guns to find a barroom-like brawl. Both brothers and one of their wives were arrested on the charge of disorderly conduct.

A 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal about violence at funeral parlors provides insight into the trend. “I've been in this business 42 years and I'm jittery now,” says a Cincinnati funeral home director named Clarence Glover. On at least two occasions he says that gunfire at grave sites has forced him to dive into the dirt. He recently installed a surveillance camera in the chapel of his funeral home and now regularly hires security guards. Often, before a wake he will brief staff on who potential trouble-makers might be.

The article describes a funeral in Louisville Kentucky for an elderly man named Frank Sherley Jr. who had died of natural causes. It was “a perfect day,” remembered one funeral home employee, “there was no expectation of violence.” Suddenly two gunmen appeared in the parking lot and began firing. One attendee was killed and four others were wounded.

Another incident involved funeral home director Carl Swann Jr, whose family has been in the business for a century. He expected trouble from the beginning for the funeral of Raeshaun Hand Jr., an ex-con who had continued to deal drugs after being released from prison and was also wanted for murder. Hand was murdered himself, inside his car. His family tried to keep the funeral private but word got out. Once inside mourners guzzled booze and smoked in the church bathroom. Just as the lid was coming down on the casket a group rushed in and pinned the undertaker. They clocked Swann in the face then attacked Hand's father and brother. “I started fighting back, throwing punches,” says Swann. “This wasn't in the job description.”

But with funeral violence showing no signs of slowing up, self-defense just might have to be added to a funeral director's job description. “Death at a Funeral” certainly makes it seem like fights are a requisite. By the end of the film nearly the entire cast has gotten into some sort of violent argument. But the tone stays light, quite a few of them have also accidentally ingested mescaline.