Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies

by Caitlin Doughty

The fire has to reach 1200 degrees and stay there for two to three hours. You have to keep adding wood close to the body throughout the cremation. Even stacked high with logs, a sixteen-foot Viking boat holds nowhere close to the amount of wood needed.

Make sure your grandma’s fingernails and toenails are nicely trimmed before she’s cremated. According to Norse lore, a bunch of dark stuff called Ragnarök is going to go down, ending in a huge battle where the gods die and the world is destroyed. During the battle, a vengeful army will arrive on a giant ship called the Naglfar, or nail ship. That’s right, an entire battleship made out of the fingernails and toenails of dead people. So if you don’t want Grandma’s nails to contribute to the fall of the universe, get out the clippers and snippy-snip.

very pungent-smelling compounds called cadaverine and putrescine. Compounds named for “cadaver” and “putrid”—adorable, right? To a scavenger animal, those decomposition compounds smell a lot like dinner. If they sense their meal is an easy dig away, they might go for it.

In remote parts of Russia and Siberia, armed guards have had to stand watch at cemeteries after black and brown bears broke in to dig up human remains. In one memorable story, two village women thought they were seeing a man in a big fur coat bending down to tend a loved one’s grave. Wrong: it was a bear eating a dead body it had dug out of the ground. Sorry, ladies.

For the most part, animals won’t dig up human graves. There are several reasons why. First, the correct amount of soil laid on top of the body creates a scent barrier. Second, the soil not only covers up the powerful smell, but it actively works to decompose the body, leaving behind a stenchless skeleton.

The real question is, how deep is deep enough for a grave? Just to be safe, shouldn’t we bury all our humans six feet under in the heaviest caskets we can make, and further fortify them in underground concrete bunkers? No. Because the soil’s magic benefits are most magical (scientific terms here) near the surface.