by Justin Nobel
ARKA Ecopod is a British company that makes coffins from old newspaper and mulberry pulp. While a few big companies tend to control coffin distribution in the U.S. new casket builders are on the rise, although one Louisiana group was just told that it is illegal to sell their wares.
An embalming board referred to by critics as the Coffin Cartel has told Benedictine monk carpenters in the woods of Louisiana that they can’t sell their simple cypress caskets. The monks make the coffins from wood gathered in a forest on their property and use the income to support the abbey. Their handmade coffins cost $2,000 while many on the market today are garish, mass-produced hulks that cost between $5,000 and $10,000. The Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors says that before the monks can sell their wares they need to pay a set of fees and obtain a license that would require them to redesign their abbey into a traditional funeral parlor equipped with embalming equipment and staffed by licensed embalmers.
“We just want to do our work without the threat of prison time,” the director of the abbey’s woodshop recently told reporters outside the U.S. District Court in New Orleans.
The case, which could go all the way to the Supreme Court, brings up a larger issue, which is that those siding with the monks say laws like the one in Louisiana restrict consumer access and constrict the coffin market. The recent entry of companies like Walmart and Costco into the coffin business seems to support the notion that the market is controlled by a few giant companies. But in small work spaces across the country and around the world, strange and novel coffins are being born. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
A blooming "corpse flower" can be ten feet tall and smells like rotting human flesh. The flower, originally from West Sumatra, Indonesia, bloomed last month at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
Thousands of people visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science last month to observe the slow birth and quick death of Lois, the pet name for a corpse flower from West Sumatra, Indonesia. When in bloom, the endangered flowers can grow to be five feet wide and ten feet tall; only 28 have successfully bloomed in the United States. Over several weeks, a corpse flower will double its size then stop growing completely, a sign a bloom may be imminent. As the flower opens an unbearable smell is released, something like the “combination of cooking cabbage and the stench of a dead rat in the wall,” reads one account. Others say the smell most resembles rotting human flesh. After just two days, the bloom is over.
The corpse flower is something of an aberration; for the most part humans use flowers to cover up the stench of rotting flesh. The history of exactly how this happened is actually spotty. No one knows for certain when the practice began, but some researchers trace it to a cave in the remote Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq. 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
Model Charlize Theron played Aileen Wuornos in the Hollywood drama "Monster", which follows the life of Wuornos, a Florida serial killer. She was put to death after a grueling 12 years on Death Row.
Paul Sterling Smith is a convicted sex offender and the prime suspect in the murder of an auto shop owner in Missouri. Earlier this month, he kidnapped a four year-old St. Louis girl from the front yard of her home. She was found wandering outside a car wash with different clothes and a new haircut. Smith had been caught on surveillance tape at Walmart buying kids clothes and police tracked him to a rural region north of the city where they found him sitting in his car. When they approached, he shot himself in the head.
Smith has no money for a funeral and neither does his family. The county is ultimately responsible to pay the cost but the funeral home director is trying to gather donations, which has created quite a stir. “Should they have just let him rot in the street because no one wants to pay for his disposal,” voiced one commenter, in a local newspaper. “Ought to have dumped his carcass into a buzzard sanctuary!” wrote another.
Many killers lead sad strange lives racked with drama, they die deaths that are no different. Some of the more disturbing examples are females. 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
Rudolph Valentino was the suave Italian star of the silent film, "The Sheik", which detailed the romantic misadventures of a western woman and a rich sheik in the Arabian Desert. Valentino died unexpectedly at the age of 31. Upon hearing the news, several fans were so overcome with grief they killed themselves.
For Gary Coleman, fame was a burden. After the once well-known child actor died of a brain hemorrhage last month, his final wishes surfaced. They stipulated that his funeral only be attended by, “those who have no financial ties to me and who can look each other in the eyes and say they really cared personally for Gary Coleman.” He also barred press from attending. Coleman’s death was followed by a three week-long feud between his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend over who would get the measly savings he had left, a Utah house worth $315,000. In the end, with the hullaballoo dragging on, Coleman’s lawyer announced there would be no funeral at all.
Superstars have long tried to run from their fame, and at few times is this inclination stronger than in death. Some celebrity funerals go haywire, explaining why Coleman and others choose a quiet good bye. But some celeb funerals go off with only minor hitches, and some inspire the divine. Read the rest of this entry »
