Funerals to Die For: The Craziest, Creepiest, and Most Bizarre Funeral Traditions and Practices Ever

by Kathy Benjamin

If you managed to come to terms with your mortality at some point, you might have left behind a will outlining what you would like to happen to your corpse.

While there is evidence that some prehuman prodigies may have started adding a flint knife or two to graves as many as 320,000 years ago, it was only about 100,000 years ago that ritual burial really took off.

it was only about 100 years ago that cremation became acceptable in the Western world, and today, the funeral business is a billion-dollar-a-year industry.

some slightly weird professional criminals would dig up graves in order to find valuables to resell,

The “town” of Dargavs is really a necropolis (literally “city of the dead”) in North Ossetia,

While interments stopped in the 1920s, you can still visit the dead. Most of them are laid out on shelves lining the walls, but some better-preserved ones are hung from hooks, and a few families even had their relative placed in a pose for all eternity.

catacombs

But the most famous part of Qin’s tomb was the 8,000 terracotta soldiers crafted to stand guard outside. Every single figure is unique, with its own hairstyle and facial expression. Each soldier has a rank, and some have horses.

THEY SAY SUCH NICE THINGS ABOUT PEOPLE AT THEIR FUNERALS THAT IT MAKES ME SAD TO REALIZE THAT I’M GOING TO MISS MINE BY JUST A FEW DAYS. GARRISON KEILLOR, AUTHOR AND RADIO PERSONALITY

These funeral crashers are called placebos. (And yes, our modern- day usage of placebo comes from these people, who would “deceive to please,” just like fake pills do.)

In the Middle Ages, Europe had a problem. Sure sanitation was nonexistent, there was the whole Black Death thing, the mortality rate wasn’t great, and medicine was rudimentary to say the least, but the real problem was the increasing number of vampires.

this is how I talk and I love the authors sarcastic humor

Possibly the earliest attempts to keep the dead from rising up occurred in Ireland around A.D. 700, which is impressive, since it would be hundreds of years before anyone even coined the word “vampire” and hundreds more before Stephenie Meyer ruined them forever by making them sparkly.

Since she was clearly a vampire, her father cut out her heart, sliced it open, then burned it, mixed the ashes with water, and made his family members drink it so they would not get sick themselves. While it was probably less effective, this concoction almost certainly tasted better than liquid cold medicine.

lol

ACCORDING TO MOST STUDIES, PEOPLE’S NUMBER ONE FEAR IS PUBLIC SPEAKING. NUMBER TWO IS DEATH… . THIS MEANS TO THE AVERAGE PERSON, IF YOU GO TO A FUNERAL, YOU’RE BETTER OFF IN THE CASKET THAN DOING THE EULOGY. JERRY SEINFELD, COMEDIAN

Since 1968, cremations have outnumbered burials in the United Kingdom.

Victorian women would not suffer the indignity of their corpses being invaded by maggots and worms, something everyone agreed was seriously unladylike.

These days we would resign ourselves to the fact that it was too late, that photographing someone in their coffin is slightly creepy. The Victorians decided it was not only appropriate but beautiful—and hell, who even needs the coffin?

forced to pose with the dead bodies themselves. While in many cases the dead were posed to look as if they were still alive, with their eyes propped open, or reclining as if they were sleeping, you can usually tell who the late family member is.

But in the 1800s the loved ones of famous people could make money just by displaying the dearly departed’s corpse.

it was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that really made embalming a funeral necessity. As his preserved corpse traveled back to Illinois from Washington, D.C., thousands turned out to see it and were impressed by how good the late president looked compared to their own deceased relatives.

Here’s a tip: if even maggots think it’s a bad idea, it is a really bad idea.

These days, the cliffs with the hanging coffins are popular hiking destinations for tourists. But, if you ever find yourself trekking through southern China, try to remember what hundreds of years of wind and wet do to exposed wood: the heavy, decaying coffins have been known to plunge several hundred feet to the hiking trails below.

The Fore people of Australia also practiced mortuary cannibalism until the government put a stop to it around sixty years ago,

Ancient peoples didn’t like the idea of a loved one going to the afterlife all alone and they decided that it was so much easier when you brought a friend along. So, when an important person died, the community made sure someone else went with him, whether it was a wife or slave or just a random prisoner.

Originally, white was a more common color for mourning, and it is still the standard funeral color in many Asian countries.

While people would often wear mourning colors for a long time after the funeral of a spouse or child—in some cases for the rest of their lives—it was the Victorians who laid down a specific code for exactly when people could start dressing normally again.

The most important part of the outfit for a widow in full mourning was a thick black veil that covered her face. After all, even a year after the fact she was probably still crying over her husband every day and nobody needs to see that.

You might sometimes wonder just what people will say about you at your funeral. Some people have gone to great lengths to find out, but others take the easier way and have a funeral of sorts before their (last) big day.

While marrying a dead person might not seem like the most obvious idea in the world, four different cultures on three continents came up with it independently, so there must be something to the concept.

The wedding also legally legitimizes any children the couple had out of wedlock. Instead of a wife, the woman (and it is usually a woman) legally becomes a widow. However, the marriage does not allow her to collect any inheritance the deceased might have had coming, so the bride doesn’t have to go straight from the altar to a lawyer’s office to fight over the will.

both Alexander the Great and the Egyptian pharaohs built great tombs for their most beloved dogs and horses.

CALVERTON NATIONAL CEMETERY The largest military cemetery in the world in terms of size is Calverton National Cemetery. Located on Long Island, it is new to the grave game, only opening in 1978. Even though it spreads over 1,000 acres, Calverton is filling up fast, with more than 200,000 interments already and another 7,000 per year at present. Funerals there occur so often that the cemetery has set up almost an assembly-line process of burying people, allowing numerous interments to occur at once.

Literally hundreds of famous people from the entertainment industry are buried there, and if you want to join them in a sweet mausoleum of your own, it will only set you back $825,000. Oddly enough, the three chapels on site are popular not only for funerals but weddings; Ronald Reagan married his first wife in one of them.

before it was a national graveyard, Arlington was a plantation,

smallest tombstone in the world. Measuring about 5 by 4 by 3 inches,

That’s exactly what one WoW guild (a group of players who meet online to complete tasks together) thought when one of their members unexpectedly died of a stroke in 2006. They organized an in-game funeral ceremony to commemorate their late friend

Obviously, burials are not the most environmentally friendly way of leaving the planet, especially if your body is full of embalming fluid and your coffin is made of lead-lined processed wood.

decomposing bodies let off a lot of carbon dioxide, and plenty of that is affecting our ozone already.

Numerous firework companies advertise the fact that they will pack the remains of your loved ones into tiny rockets and explode them in a dazzling display.

Imagine that same neighbor’s shock when he came to pay his respects and found an empty coffin.

umm excuse me

Unfortunately, not all wakings have a happy ending. In Russia, a woman reportedly sat up during her funeral only to be so terrified that she suffered another heart attack and died … again.

One of the benefits of cremation is that you can arrange for your ashes to literally become part of something you love.

At least two people that we know about faked their deaths in the September 11 attacks, one to avoid prosecution for passport fraud and the other so her family could cash in on her life insurance policies.

“I paid a lot of money to get a fake death certificate and bribe undertakers to deliver an empty coffin. I really thought a lot more of you, my so-called friends, would turn up to pay your last respects. It just goes to show who you can really count on.”

The ease of attending a funeral without getting out of your car might sound like a great idea in today’s fast-paced world, but the idea for a drive-thru funeral home is actually forty-five years old.

When Ohio State fan Roy Miracle died his family wanted one last show of school spirit from him. Laid out in his open casket, he made the perfect “I” in OHIO, and three of his family members provided the other letters, all while smiling widely. The image went viral, but many fans questioned why Roy was buried in such a boring casket if he was such a huge fan.