by Justin Nobel

The Chinese have been burning Hell Money and 3-D paper objects to aid the dead in the afterworld for thousands of years. But setting ablaze tiny paper condoms, Viagra pills and barroom dancers is a relatively new trend that has both Buddhist monks and Chinese officials worried.

Next month, millions of Chinese will head to cemeteries to burn Viagra, brandy bottles, toiletries, tweed shoes, stiletto heels, credit cards, cosmetics, exotic potions, common pain relievers, camcorders, rice cookers, flat screen TVs, cell phones and Mercedes coupes. These tiny paper offerings are meticulously crafted to resemble real world items. In setting them aflame it is thought the objects will be carried to the afterworld, where they will become available in full form to the recently deceased.

The idea is to provide the dead with everything they will need in the next life, including, in some instances, things that they may never have had in this one. A recent article in the Nanjing Morning News listed some of the more explicit paper offerings being sold, such as condoms and scantily clad barroom dancers. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

White ring neck doves can barely fly more than a mile but white homing pigeons can find their way home from distances of more than 500 miles. The birds are used to relay messages in war, and are also released during weddings and funerals.

“Dear God, make me a bird. So I could fly far. Far far away from here.”

It’s a memorable scene from “Forrest Gump”, young Jenny skips school and Forrest stops by her home to see why. She is standing in the backyard, wearing a sundress and looking morose. The two tear through a cornfield and hide among the stalks, Jenny’s abusive father stumbles after. She asks God to turn her into a bird and the camera pans out, in the distance a flock of white birds flies up from the field.

Something about a white wing in motion plucks the heartstrings. And catering to this preference has developed into a handsome niche industry, funeral doves. According to some estimates, there are more than 1,000 companies that specialize in “white dove releases” in the United States. Operators release birds at graduations, grand openings and bar mitzvahs, but their bread and butter events are weddings and funerals.

The actual birds used are white homing pigeons, which can return home from as far away as 600 miles; ring neck doves, which look almost identical to the untrained eye, are highly domesticated birds that can not fly more than a mile. Dove clearly has more emotional appeal than pigeon, and thus all providers label their services as such. But these are far from your typical nuisance city pigeon, hopping around the sidewalk pecking at crumbs pooping on everything.

“These birds are like the racehorses of the sky,” says Jeff Newsom, who, several years ago, founded the dove release company “Crystal Wings & Amber Dreams”, in loving memory of his daughter Crystal. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Apical Ballooning Syndrome, better known as “broken heart syndrome”, may not be complete hooey. J.A. and Relda Auger, a Louisiana couple that had been married 75 years, died less than 24 hours apart. There are many other examples.

Upon finding his lover lifeless in a crypt, a young man guzzles a vile of poison. The maiden awakens, spots her man dead and buries a dagger in her heart. Ah, Romeo and Juliet, a love so strong it vanquished life. Their youthful tale is fictional, but elderly lovers’ dying one after the other is actually a phenomenon of significant scholarly intrigue.

“We see it all the time,” the medical director at a Washington state hospice recently told a reporter. But the question remains, do these cases result from coincidence, a true medical condition or something more sublime, perhaps even the intervention of a divine hand? A suite of examples indicates it may be a bit of all three. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

In ancient Egypt, only the holiest of priests performed the act of embalming, often shrouded in the mask of Anubis, the jackal headed god of embalming. A British TV show is currently looking for a human to embalm.

A British TV show is currently searching for a terminally ill patient to embalm.

“It may sound rather macabre but we have mummified a large number of pigs to check that the process worked and it does,” a producer told a volunteer interviewing for the show, who was actually a reporter in disguise. “Afterward one thought was—though this is not obligatory—to put the body in an exhibition in a proper museum so people can properly understand the mummification process. That is something we would be flexible about.”

An unnamed English scientist has unlocked the secrets of mummification, producers say, and the on-air demonstration will be a trial run of this researcher’s theory. The Brit has reason to keep his methods secret. A world-renown anatomist with the Swiss Mummy Project—he previously proved that King Tut did not actually die of a blow to the head and that a 5,000 year old glacial mummy from the Alps named Otzi indeed died of blood loss from an arrow wound—is working on the mummy riddle too.

The Swiss’s work mimics a famous mummy study from the mid-1990s conducted by a Maryland M.D. and an Egyptologist from Long Island. The pair claimed to have successfully mummified an entire human body using only the tools available to the ancient Egyptians. While their exact solutions were a closely guarded secret it is widely believed the main ingredient was about 600 pounds of a naturally occurring salt called natron. Most second graders know what a mummy is and that the Egyptians made them, but exactly how they did it, surprisingly, still nobody knows for sure. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Bubonic plague victims exhibit the classic "buboes" that gave the disease its name. Many who died from plague were buried in mass graves that are disturbingly similar to those being dug right now outside Port-au-Prince for victims of the Haiti earthquake.

Dead bodies from Haiti’s earthquake are being piled into dump trucks and unloaded in mass graves outside Port-au-Prince. This burial method dates back to the Middle Ages but according to the field manual, Management of dead bodies after disasters, produced by the International Committee of the Red Cross, burying bodies in mass graves can be traumatizing for survivors and lead to legal troubles later on, as family members seek to retrieve loved ones. The manual also notes an important misconception, one still being posited by some newscasters in Haiti: “The bodies of people who have died in a disaster do not cause epidemics…In most cases, those who have survived are more likely to be spreading diseases.”

It was fear of disease that led to some of the largest mass graves in history, those dug across Europe during the Bubonic Plague. A particularly virulent outbreak, called the Black Death, killed one-quarter to one-half of the European population in the mid-14th century. Flea-infested rats are believed to have spread the plague from the Gobi Desert to the Crimea, Constantinople and eventually all of Europe. Bouts of plague continued to erupt in the centuries to follow, with one of the last ones occurring in London, in 1665. In The Decameron, a bloody chronicle of the plague in 14th century Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio describes a scene similar to those presently being witnessed throughout Port-au-Prince.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Catherine de' Medici at a funeral in the 1560s. The Romans first wore black at funerals and for some reason the Western World has followed ever since. Some cultures wear purple or yellow.

“Wear Black in sunlight and you will roast as the Heat VIBRATIONS absorb easily. Hence Black is the most absurd colour for funerals & Hospitals: It attracts all sorts of Dark moods and energies and influences just when you need extra protection…In certain contrasts Black garments act as a Vacuum cleaner for Bad vibrations…MANY WOMEN WEAR BLACK HEAD TO TOE, THIS IS VERY DANGEROUS.”

These words come from Samuel Sagan, who pasted the lines in an email he dropped Funeralwise earlier this week. Sagan, author of books such as Bleeding Sun, Entity Possession and the Atlantean Secrets tetralogy, comes at it from an odd angle but raises a good question: why wear black at funerals? Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Pope Formosus died in 896. Six months later, his successor, Stephen VI, had his corpse brought to trial for capital crimes. Formosus was found guilty and his cadaver was stripped of its papal vestments, dragged through the streets of Rome and dumped in the Tiber River.

A mentally unstable woman in a bright red coat jumped a barrier and tackled Pope Benedict XVI during Christmas Eve mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. Benedict survived the attack but an examination of papal history reveals that strange and horrible deaths are actually quite common. A book has even been written on the topic, The Death of the Popes: Comprehensive accounts, including funerals, burial places, and epitaphs. The following are some of the most disturbing and unknown papal deaths..

Pope Saint Clement I – He was born in the first century A.D., became bishop of Rome and rose to the pontificate during a schism at Corinth. Not much beyond that exists in the written record, but according to legend a riot arose in Rome and a city official named Mamertinus put it down and arrested Clement. The Emperor banished him to Pontus, a city on the shores of the Black Sea, where he was condemned to work in a marble quarry. Clement gained the respect of his fellow convicts and began preaching the word of God. The group took their water from a faraway spring but one day Clement noticed a nearby lamb scraping the soil and took it as a sign that water was below. He dug and sure enough, found a spring. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

The "Serene Urn Compartments" at Nirvana, a luxurious columbarium being constructed in the land-starved city-state of Singapore. Costs will range from $2,988 for a single-urn lot to as much as $26,888 for a double-urn compartment. (Photo courtesy of Nirvana Memorial Garden Pte. Ltd.)

From the outside it looks like a downed spacecraft and on the inside, a Las Vegas casino. There are red carpeted VIP rooms, curved hallways lined with lavender and neon-yellow psychedelic swirls and several statues of Buddha. There are skylights, a café and 40,000 niches. What is it? Nirvana, a “six-star” columbarium currently being constructed in Singapore.

The massive structure will be a luxurious home for the dead in a city-state increasingly short on space. Costs will range from $2,988 for a single-urn lot to as much as $26,888 for a double-urn compartment. “Hallways with sumptuous embellishment and dignity closures remind the visitors of a 5-star hotel, so they can abandon the fear and sadness but instead cherish the memories and remembrance,” reads the Nirvana website.

Singapore is the smallest nation in Southeast Asia, with a land area less than most U.S. counties. The present population is 5 million, and that number is expected to rise by 40 percent over the next half-century.

“It’s a spatial competition between the living and the dead,” Lily Kong, a National University of Singapore researcher, recently told the New York Times.

A national law states that bodies must be exhumed after 15 years to make room for new burials. This has led to an entirely new vocation across the country: the grave digger-upper. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Celestis, a Houston-based company, first launched humans, in their cremated form, into space in 1997. Current prices for a Celestis space flight run as low as $695. A spot aboard Virgin Galactic's recently released SpaceShipTwo costs $200,000.

On a stormy December night in the middle of the Mojave Desert, SpaceShipTwo was unveiled. The sleek Virgin Galactic craft, which has been in secret development for two years, can hold six passengers and has windows on the sides and ceiling. By 2012, Virgin hopes it will put the first passenger astronauts into orbit; tickets start at $200,000. The company is billing the craft as the world’s first commercial spaceship, but that is not necessarily true. Non astronauts, in cremated form, have been flying through space for more than a decade.

The first craft was an American Pegasus rocket, launched from Grand Canary Island, off the Moroccan coast, on April 21, 1997. The official goal was to put a Spanish satellite into space but bolted to the rocket was a canister with the ashes of 24 people, in separate aluminum capsules. They contained the 1960s drug icon Timothy Leary, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and a four year-old Japanese-American boy who apparently, “loved to talk about the stars.” The post-mortem flight was organized by Celestis, a Houston-based company; the cost for a capsule was $4,800. Read the rest of this entry »