When someone passes away and their remains are buried or cremated, it’s said that they are being “laid to rest.” Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. For some people, the journey is just beginning.
Claim to Fame: Writer, critic, and member of New York’s famous Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s and 1930s Final Resting Place: Her ashes were interred in 1988, after spending more than 15 years in a filing cabinet.
Details: Parker died in June 1967. She left instructions that her body be cremated, but didn’t specify what she wanted done after that. When nobody showed up to claim the ashes, the funeral home stored them (for a few years), then mailed them to her lawyers. The lawyers put the box containing her ashes on top of a filing cabinet, apparently waiting for Parker’s friend and executor, Lillian Hellman, to collect them. Hellman never did, so when she died in 1984, the law firm began meeting with Parker’s surviving friends to figure out what to do.
Parker had left her entire estate to Martin Luther King, Jr. (whom she had never met), and when he was assassinated, everything went to the NAACP. When both the Algonquin Hotel (her legendary hangout) and the New Yorker magazine (her publisher) turned down Parker’s ashes, the NAACP volunteered to create a memorial garden for her at their headquarters in Baltimore. Finally, in 1988, Parker’s ashes were placed in an urn next to a marker inscribed with Parker’s self-penned epitaph: “Excuse My Dust.”
Claim to Fame: Founding Father and author of “Common Sense,” a political pamphlet that helped spark the American Revolution Final Resting Place: Unknown
Details: Paine didn’t mince his words; he offended just about everyone he knew in the United States, England, and France. When he died in 1809 at the age of 72, he had few friends left among the Founding Fathers. He was buried on his farm in New Rochelle, New York; only six people attended his funeral.
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Ten years later, an English admirer named William Cobbett decided to return Paine to England, where he could be given a proper funeral and burial. Rather than getting permission from Paine’s relatives or the new owners of his farm, Cobbett just dug the body up and snuck it to England in a shipping crate. But since he didn’t have money for a funeral or a decent grave, Cobbett had to stage a series of “bone rallies” across England, raising money by charging for a peek at Paine’s corpse.
No luck—the public wasn’t interested. When Cobbett couldn’t even interest people in buying locks of the dead man’s hair, he finally gave up and stored the bones under his bed.
When Cobbett died penniless in 1835, the bones were seized as part of his estate and scheduled to be auctioned off to pay his creditors. Even that plan failed—the auctioneer balked at the idea of selling human remains to satisfy a debt. Paine’s skeleton was turned over to Cobbett’s son, and what he did with it remains a mystery.
Claim to Fame: King of France from 1643 to 1715
Final Resting Place: An English dinner plate
Details: During the French Revolution, as the country collapsed into anarchy, Louis XIV’s tomb was raided and his embalmed heart was stolen. It was eventually purchased by an English nobleman named Lord Harcourt. Harcourt sold it to the Reverend William Buckland, dean of Westminster Cathedral; when Buckland died in 1856, the heart was passed on to his son Francis.
Francis Buckland was a peculiar man with some peculiar theories. He believed that the way to assure national security was to make England completely food self-sufficient and that the best way to do that was to raise—and eat—exotic animals. How exotic? Over time Buckland graduated from eating ostrich and buffalo to more unsual fare, including moles, flies, slugs, and porpoise heads. He eventually decided that even the king of France himself was fair game as a protein source, so one night he cooked up the royal heart and ate it. “Never before,” he told his astonished dinner guests, “have I eaten the heart of a king.”
Bad omen? If you add up all the numbers of the roulette wheel (1 to 36), the sum is 666.