by Justin Nobel
The Shilluk of southern Sudan hold their kings responsible for drought. During prolonged periods of no rain the killing of kings is common.
Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania from 1974 through December 1989, when a revolution forced him and his wife Elena to flee the capitol. They headed by helicopter to Snagov, a commune north of Bucharest then fled again to Targoviste, an ancient city on the Ialomita River. Here the army ordered their helicopter to land and placed the pair under arrest. On Christmas Day, they were put on trial under charges that included illegal gathering of wealth and genocide. The trial lasted two hours; they were convicted and sentenced to death. Soldiers led the couple, whose hands were tied behind their backs with clothesline, outside the building then opened fire. The communist leader and his wife were dead.
Or were they? The entire episode was filmed but there is a brief break in the video, between the time when Ceausescu and his wife are led outside and the start of the shooting. By the time the camera comes back bullets have been fired and the couple lies on the ground. Fearing the tombs might be desecrated authorities brought the bodies during the night to Bucharest’s Ghencea Cemetery, where they were buried in simple plots. Aging communist sympathizers continue to place flowers beside the graves to this day. But based on evidence like the break in the tape, the couples’ three children and other critics have continued to question just who in fact was executed. For years, the group tried to obtain permission to unearth the grave but state officials wouldn’t allow it. But last month, saying they had nothing to hide, authorities agreed to the exhumation. Cemetery officials dug up the wooden caskets and a team of pathologists took samples from the corpses and placed them into plastic bags. DNA tests will be performed, although results won’t be available for up to six months.
In attempting to squash the rebellion that ultimately overthrew him Ceausescu and his political police killed hundreds of Romanians, brutality that seemed to justify his swift execution. One only has to look to examples like Saddam Hussein or Louis XVI of France to find other leaders, tyrants or not, who were put to death after public opinion turned against them. Sometimes, the killing of kings takes an invasion, sometimes a revolution from within, but in a remote stretch of southern Sudan, it takes a lack of rain. Read the rest of this entry »
bu Justin Nobel
Felix “Bush” Breazeale, of Roane, Tennessee was a hermit who became a celebrity overnight when he decided to host his own funeral. Robert Duvall plays Bush in a newly released Hollywood movie about the story called "Get Low".
Last month, Theodore “Pete” Peterson sat at a New Jersey bar with a vodka tonic in hand and an oxygen tank at his side. There was a buffet lunch, a 50/50 raffle and he was surrounded by friends and family, but this was no ordinary party, this was Pete’s wake. The 67 year-old bricklayer was also an avid hunter, fisherman, drinker and smoker. He had racked up 11 DUI’s over the course of his life, had one serious car accident and had been through one divorce, but earlier this summer he received the worst news of all: he had lung cancer as well as a tumor behind his esophagus and had just a few months to live. Pete wanted a chance to say goodbye to friends and family while still in relatively good health, so he decided to host his own wake. “Why wait until I’m dead to have one?” said Pete, to a local reporter.
Pete was an ordinary working man, though his story is uncommon; very few people have attended their own funerals. In fact, as history tells us, there is only one other, Felix “Bush” Breazeale, of Roane, Tennessee. Bush’s story was recently turned into a Hollywood movie called Get Low, starring Bill Murray and Robert Duvall, a tender and whimsical tale about a hermit who became a celebrity overnight after hosting his own funeral. While Robert Duvall reportedly puts on a good show, the true story of Bush can’t be beat. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
Daijuku Bosatsu Shinnyokai-Shonin is one of Japan's most well-known "mummy-monks". At the age of 96, he put himself on a strict diet of salt and water, then drank a poisonous tea and was buried alive.
Last week, police in Tokyo broke into the home of Sogen Kato. According to local records he was 111, the fifth oldest man on earth. But instead of a wizened old man, they found a skeleton in pajamas lying under a blanket. The body was surrounded by yellowed newspapers, whose date the police said indicate when Kato likely may have died; November, 1978. “Grandpa was a very scary man,” said one granddaughter, who had visited his room a few months back and said she saw a skull.
Police believe Kato’s family hid his death so they could continue to collect his pension checks, a sum that totaled more than nine million yen, or about 100,000 U.S. dollars. But there is another reason that explains why Kato may have ended up the way he did, he was trying to attain sokushinbutsu, a revered state of being in which Buddhist monks cause their own death by limiting themselves to a sparse diet that induces mummification. Throughout history, hundreds of monks have tried to attain sokushinbutsu, but only about two dozen are known to have succeeded. Until the case of Kato, it was assumed that the practice had been extinct for centuries. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
A man in Taiwan paid a stripper $160 to perform a 10 minute striptease beside his father's coffin. "Stripper funerals" in rural Taiwan and China have become so popular that local authorities are cracking down on the events, which they see as "obscene".
Cai Jinlai and his son Cai Ruigong had a bet; if Jinlai lived past 100 his son would hire a stripper for his funeral. He lived to 103, and Ruigong followed through on his end of the deal. He paid the equivalent of $160 for an adult dancer to perform a ten minute striptease in front of his father’s coffin.
In farming villages across rural China and Taiwan, stripper funerals have become commonplace. Local folks believe that the number of mourners who gather for a funeral indicates the worthiness of the deceased. Also, the more people who come to the funeral, the more luck will befall the surviving family and offspring. Strippers are a surefire way to draw mourners. In some towns in Jiangsu, a province in eastern China, the events have become nightly spectacles, drawing the entire town out. Sometimes rival funerals occur, and strippers compete to see who can attract the best crowd. “Some strippers even take off the trousers of male viewers and persuade them to join in the dancing, while others bathe in public or perform nude with snakes,” reports one Chinese newspaper. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
Earlier this year a New York City comedy club held a mock funeral for actress Sarah Jessica Parker. Around the world, mourners gather to remember things as abstract as city services, web browsers and political freedom.
On a winter morning in New York City a handful of mourners gathered underground. They dressed in black with black armbands, hung their heads low and listened to a bagpiper. A bushy wreath of bright yellow, green and red flowers framed a handsome photo of the deceased: a green circle with a white G in the middle. This corpse was not a person, but the emblem for the city’s G-train subway, which hauls thousands of commuters to work each day but is not as well-used as other lines; its services are being curtailed because of budget cuts. “The G Train has been on life support for years,” said one state assemblyman, “Now we stand here at its funeral.”
The event, which took place on the platform beside the G-train tracks was a mock funeral protesting the cuts. Some of the world’s strangest funerals don’t bury men or women, but instead mourn the death of things as abstract as city services, web browsers, Hollywood stars and political freedom. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
The latest funeral trend involves packing cremated remains into fireworks. The best known example is Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose ashes were blasted from a 153 foot tower he had designed with a friend decades earlier. (Photo by Justin Nobel)
On Independence Day, about 200 people gathered at a remote lake in north-central Florida to see an old friend explode. They ate barbeque and corn on the cob, some took canoe rides. As dusk settled, they sat on the grass and watched the sky. But their firework display was far from the typical small town American July Fourth event. Packed inside the casing of several dozen fireworks were the cremated remains of local man Tom Moore, who had died days before, at the age of 70. “For those who knew him, this is most appropriate,” said his wife Ann. “Don’t all men love something that goes bang?”
These days, the dead are put into diamonds, flown to the moon and made into jewelry; practically anything seems to be fair game. The latest trend involves placing cremated remains in fireworks. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
Walter Hudson weighed 1,200 pounds, the fourth most obese human in medical history. His daily diet included, two boxes of sausages, 12 eggs, four hamburgers, four cheeseburgers, three ham steaks, two chickens and four heads of broccoli. His massive coffin required 12 pallbearers.
Walter Hudson was the fourth most obese human in medical history. By age 12, he weighed 200 pounds and by age 33 his waist measured 119 inches (a Guinness World Record) and he weighed 1,197 pounds. His daily diet was as follows: two boxes of sausages, a pound of bacon, 12 eggs, a loaf of bread, four hamburgers, four cheeseburgers, eight portions of fries, three ham steaks, two chickens, four baked potatoes, four sweet potatoes, four heads of broccoli and 36 pints of soda. He made headlines when he got sandwiched in his bathroom and was unable to move, it took nine men to get him out. Hudson died in his sleep at the age of 47, just weeks after he announced plans to be married.
As the world has become wealthier it has become fatter and this creates problems for the afterlife. Morbidly obese corpses often can’t fit into mortuary refrigerators or crematory furnaces. Traditional coffins were once tapered and widest at the shoulders, but to accommodate a general increase in body-weight, most present day coffins are cigar-shaped, wide throughout. Some coffins have become so large they can no longer fit inside a hearse or in a standard grave, forcing families to buy two plots in the cemetery. Indiana-based Goliath Casket Co. specializes in oversized coffins; a normal coffin is about 28 inches wide; Goliath’s biggest is more than 50 inches wide. Such coffins can be too heavy for pallbearers to carry. “If the worst comes to the worst, we will keep the family away and the coffin will be taken in on a truck,” a British cemetery manager told a reporter. “It is not the most dignified way out.”
But many morbidly obese lose their dignity long before the die. Often, they live sad and troubled lives, and die premature and chilling deaths. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
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. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
Saint Vitalis of Milan, an early Christian martyr, was racked then buried alive in a pit of stones. Movies and TV shows love to play off the theme.
On a Virginia mountaintop, a man and a woman are buried alive by a massive mushroom which induces a hallucinogenic trip then digests its victims. Sounds farfetched, but this actually happened, in an episode of the sci-fi TV show “The X-Files“.
The theme of being buried alive has a lively history across recent television shows and films. Uma Thurman is buried alive in Kill Bill Volume II, Quentin Tarantino’s ultra gory thriller about a murderous bride seeking revenge. The theme also appears in the two-part CSI episode Tarantino directed and in an episode of the crime scene show, Bones, in which two people are buried alive in a car. The world of fiction loves to play off the theme, but its occurrences in the real world are even stranger. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
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. Read the rest of this entry »
