Apparently the son of Satan, a.k.a. Damian, has died and been buried, because there’s a two-foot-tall granite cross for him in Lake Forest Cemetery in Illinois. There were several movies made about this dark spawn, but I’d always thought they were just fiction. In fact, when I first heard about the stone, I figured it was the product of the recent (extremely dangerous) practice among kids of soaking tobacco or marijuana in embalming fluid to get a hallucinogenic high.
Yet there appears to be a genuine grave plot with an inscription to the little devil to the effect that he was born in 1862 and died on November 24, 1932. He’s buried in a ravine at the back of the cemetery, his stone leaning forward. Local folklore has it that if he rises again, he will have to walk through water to get anywhere, and somehow that will cleanse him and make him holy. However, what was once a small body of water around the grave has now dried up. From the heat, perhaps?
Laura and Jane live nearby and have visited the stone several times. What they told me is this:
“A local cop told us everyone in the area knows about Damian. He said people leave toy monsters and mess up the grave, but we’ve seen no evidence of this. What I can tell you is that this grave is very unusual. There are two sections of the graveyard. The first and largest part, south of the ravine, has very elaborate headstones, mostly family plots and mausoleums, and a lot of the graves date back into the 1800s. The newer section, north of the ravine where Damian lies, holds only flat, new graves. I don’t think I saw one dated before the latter part of the 1900s. Which means that for many years, Damian was buried alone, far away from anyone else. His stone is crude and amateurish, the only one in the graveyard like it. The jagged rock shows that it was hand-cut, and the writing on the stone could only have been hand-carved. Etched along the side is the word ‘ROANIA.’ We thought that might be a last name, but it’s along the side on an angle, like an afterthought. Maybe it’s some kind of a protective mantra? There are also some indecipherable words between the name and the word ‘Died,’ which incidentally is done in a script that makes the i look like a cursive j.”
They added that they’d heard stories about devil worshippers in Lake Forest, and that some of the mansions had pentagrams and other ritualistic symbols laid into the marble.
So if Satan’s son can die, does that mean his soul automatically goes to hell, or can he be redeemed?
This odd little grave brought to mind the medieval Celtic concept of the sin eater, or the person in a community who agrees to eat ritual foods off the corpse of someone who has died. According to the legend, the food represents the dead person’s sins, so it’s laid on his or her chest and stomach during the wake for the sin eater to come and consume it. Once the food has been eaten, the person is cleansed. However, the sin eater himself has risked his salvation and is subsequently shunned. No one can look on his face or they’ll see pure evil. They despise him, but they desperately need him, because only through him can they be saved. (During Ireland’s Great Famine, people were only too happy to be the sin eater, because then they’d get fed.)
Another mystical ritual, in Illinois, got a man hauled off to jail. John P. Hawk, forty-three, requested a private viewing of his uncle’s corpse outside normal visiting hours. He came and left quietly, but the funeral director soon discovered that his visit involved more than just paying his respects. He had taken his uncle’s head. The police arrested him and he underwent psychiatric evaluation. It turns out that he’d founded a business, JPH Health products, which promised to raise people from the dead. Hawk claimed in his flyer that with “bionecrobiology,” the soul’s energy can pass from the deceased into another person. All that was required was to consume the deceased. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Some people don’t want to eat the dead, but they do want to keep a corpse nearby. One man in Arizona lost his twenty-nine-year-old wife to heart failure, and he asked if he could take her body home. Then, for six thousand dollars, he bought an airtight glass container to put her in. This he kept in his living room. He lost a few friends, who were understandably disturbed, but others claim that they just view it as an interesting piece of furniture.
The business at 6340 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California, claims to be the only museum dedicated solely to death, and it appears to have the most comprehensive collection anywhere of death-related artifacts and memorabilia. It also has a gift shop. You get there by trekking the “walk of fame” till you reach Bela Lugosi’s bronze star. The doors are right there. Within this museum’s ten dark rooms you can see the shrouds worn by members of the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult (donated by a mortuary worker), along with some of their beds. Other rooms contain running videos of actual deaths, posters of hangings, displays devoted to cannibalism and autopsies, and stained clothing from an electrocution. There’s also a serial-killer art gallery, with paintings by such notables as Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy, and if artwork isn’t your interest, there are plenty of photos of crime and accident scenes, along with death shots of the famous.
Across the country is another death-related museum that has some of the most astonishing “oddities” exhibits. The Mutter Museum is located at 19 South 22nd Street in Philadelphia. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia opened the place in 1863 to provide a way to house a collection of instruments and human anomalies that would help to document the more unique aspects of the history of medicine. The curator of this strange resource for medical students and gawkers is Gretchen Worden, who thrives on the bizarre. She couldn’t imagine dedicating her life to anything else, and she urges people not to shy away from deformity. The exhibits merely confront us with our own human reality. “It teaches you humility,” she says.
On display are the more extreme cases of human abnormalities. For example, there’s a row of skulls, numbering over one hundred, from pirates, mummies, murder victims, and people whose skulls were deformed by disease. On the wall are three mummified people who had been eviscerated, and in another area is the skeleton of a man who’d had a disease that caused his muscles to turn into bone. Then there’s the “Soap Lady.” This obese woman had died and was buried, but was later exhumed. To everyone’s surprise, her body had had turned to a brownish soap, or more correctly to “adipocere.”
Now, this is a subject that not many people discuss, but it’s part of the decomposition process as well. I first learned about it from a guy who actually goes by the online screen name of “Adipocere.” He’s dedicated an unusual amount of time and effort to collecting and disseminating information specifically about this substance.
Specifically, the word adipocere is French for fatty substance—i.e., that stuff that, when conditions are right, any of us may transform into after death. Generally it depends on having little to no exposure to free oxygen. It took me a few attempts to even read about it, but essentially it’s a cheesy substance that forms on the body, and it can be either dry or wet. At first it smells like ammonia, and tends to range from white to beige to brown in color. Later it can take on a sweeter odor. People who die or are dumped postmortem into water are often found with adipocere formation, which tends to preserve their internal organs.
In fact, there was a 1913 murder case in Scotland that was actually solved by adipocere. Two young brothers were discovered floating in a river. When they were pulled up, it was clear that they’d been murdered, but they’d also been in the water for almost two years. It seemed an impossible case, except for the fact that the adipocere that encased their bodies had preserved their internal organs to such a degree that the contents of their stomachs provided a perfect specimen of what they’d eaten for their last meal. This was traced back to a specific region and then to the woman who’d made the meal. It wasn’t hard to pinpoint the brutal slayings to the boys’ father. Thanks to adipocere, he was convicted.
To distinguish the online historian Adipocere from the substance, I’ll refer to him as “A.” He seems to know the complete history of humankind’s handling of adipocere, from using it for soap and candles to analyzing its chemistry. He claims that possession of true samples is relatively rare, but he knows how to make it.
Born in 1958 in Chicago, A claims that his religious training influenced his unusual hobby. “My interest in all things dead probably began with being a little Catholic kid,” A said. “Roman Catholicism is essentially about preparing to die, from the Eucharistie ceremony to the twelve Stations of the Cross to the holy relics.”
He first visited a cemetery on his own when he was twelve, after which he developed a fascination with cemeteries, death, and corpses—specifically the stages of decomposition.
“I’m interested in what may happen to the human body after it has died. All things being equal, the greater the time between onset of death and presently, the greater the degree of degradation to the remains.”
He can rattle off facts about bacteria, oxygen, and the effects of water in the body the way sports fans list home-run statistics. Then get him going on the effects of various methods of interment.
“Factors determining decay rates,” he says, “include ambient temperature of the interment space, humidity, and exposure to air. Generally speaking, the warmer the temperature, the faster the decay rate. Typical burial precludes entry of air, which inhibits aerobic bacteria, but encourages growth of the anaerobic kind. Adipocere formation is thought to be caused only by anaerobic bacteria.”
I listened to all of this, but it didn’t change my mind about adipocere. Body fat turned to cheese is one of the most hideous things on a corpse that I’ve ever seen.
Some things never change, including a few corpses. A typical embalmed body may show little sign of necrosis for as long as five months, but stories are told about people who just did not decay—and it had nothing to do with a plastic coating. For example, in 1921 Julia Petta died in her twenties and was buried in Chicago’s Mount Carmel Cemetery. A life-size statue of a young woman marks the spot. Legend has it that her mother continued to have dreams about her in which the young woman claimed to still be alive. Finally, after six years of mental torment, the mother obtained permission to open the grave. To everyone’s shock, although the coffin had rotted, Julia’s corpse still appeared fresh, and no one had an explanation.
Incorruptibility has been thought to be a sign of sainthood. The idea is that some supernatural power keeps these holy people immutable. It may even improve upon their appearance, as was the case with Saint Teresa Margaret, whose fatal gangrene changed from black to a rose color. She even started smelling better, contrary to all expectations.
The story of Saint Bernadette Soubirous is another example. In 1909, thirty years after her death, the Ecclesiastical Court disinterred her remains. According to the reports of those present, she appeared exactly as she had on the day of her death. There were no odors, although the crucifix she held in her hands was covered in mold and her face was a dull white. She was then washed and reinterred. Ten years later, in 1919, her casket was opened, and again she appeared perfectly preserved. A third exhumation was performed some six years later to take relics from the body. She still looked just the same. The surgeon who took the relics was amazed at the preservation, stating that it could not be a natural phenomenon.
And she’s not the only one. Such tales can be found wherever sainthood exists, such as when a flood washed away part of a bridge at Avignon, France, in which the coffin of Saint Benezet had lain for five hundred years. The body was recovered and found to show few signs of putrefaction.
Just as astonishing, construction workers digging in the ancient Chinese city of Nanjing unearthed the well-preserved corpse of a sixtysomething bearded man buried five centuries earlier. Experts believed that he’d been a scholar during the Ming dynasty, and they attributed his supple skin and flexible joints to an exceptional casket lined with medicinal herbs.
Even parts detached from bodies may remain fresh, as appeared to be the case with the severed head of England’s King Charles I. Although the skin was discolored when it was dug up after 165 years, the musculature was still intact and one eye was as it had been at burial. The hair was thick and black.
However, once these incorruptibles are removed from the environment that has so carefully preserved them (lack of oxygen or bacteria), they do eventually blacken, shrivel, and disintegrate.
Not all saints, it turns out, are incorruptible, and not all incorruptibles are saints. Some just had the right casket. A specific type of metal casket that was made in the 1800s did a remarkable job of preserving bodies. When the Ohio River flooded in 1927, it washed out a casket from a nineteenth-century cemetery. The casket was located and taken to an undertaker for identification and reburial. The remains of the man inside were so well preserved that they had no trouble identifying him as the founder of Henderson, Kentucky. He had been buried 113 years earlier, but his corpse was in such good shape, it might have been only days earlier. Even his clothing and the casket lining were perfectly preserved.
There’s a video in the Beacon Museum of Whitehaven, England, of an autopsy performed on a perfectly preserved six-hundred-year-old corpse found in 1981 in nearby St. Bees. Apparently the man died from a chest wound, possibly around 1368. The lead coffin had been soldered shut so it was airtight, and the shroud was soaked in bitumen, then coated in beeswax. Strangely enough, over his chest was laid several locks of a woman’s hair.
Telling a story about a corpse is one way to induce anxiety about cemeteries, but it’s the corpseless soul that inspires the most fear. Around the world people believe that souls or spirits detach from the rotting flesh and then continue to hover nearby. Some are confused, some angry, some out for revenge. We can’t see them, but they have the decided advantage of being aware of us, and many people have told me about a sudden chill or sharp breeze felt near a grave.
Ghost stories go with cemeteries like capes with vampires. Some graveyards are reputed to be haunted because there are regular sightings of a spook, although if modern ghost hunters are right, almost any cemetery can yield an otherworldly encounter. When I was a kid, I used to hold my breath while passing a cemetery in order not to imbibe anyone’s spirit.
While I’ve spent my life as an amateur ghost hunter, I never really thought that keeping a vigil at a cemetery would bring me face-to-face with the filmy essence of a dead person. I mean, no one had actually died in the cemetery, and there was nothing particularly meaningful for them in such places, so why would anyone’s spirit haunt it?
Then I met some people who use equipment like digital cameras, motion detectors, temperature scanners, and electromagnetic-field detectors to lock onto the position of an otherwise invisible ghost. To my surprise, they frequently go into cemeteries. In fact, several of them have a theory that cemeteries contain “portals” through which spirits move in and out of our dimension. That means that ghost photography and what they call electronic voice recordings (EVP) are more likely to capture something “anomalous” in a graveyard. In other words, people looking for ghostly manifestations have a better chance here than elsewhere of getting evidence of the spirits.
I had seen these photos—foggy substances, bright round lights, and long strings of illuminated circular objects—so I was eager to try this myself. I went with Rick Fisher of the Pennsylvania Ghost Hunters Society to one of his favorite country cemeteries, near Lancaster. He’d told me about disembodied voices that he had gotten on tape in various graveyards, and I wondered why he did this kind of thing alone at night. One voice had called him by name and another had told him, “Get out!”
The area recently had experienced a serious drought and that night a major storm was on its way: This is a prime condition, I was told, for surges of electromagnetic activity, which in turn gooses ghosts. Rick had a videocam with “night vision” capabilities, while I had a digital camera, a small digital recorder, and a thermal scanner.
We entered a small, enclosed cemetery with around three dozen graves surrounded by a thigh-high stone wall. I took a number of photographs but nothing unusual showed up. Then I had an idea. I went over to the stone wall, aimed my camera away from the graves, and took pictures of the surrounding woods. Bingo! Out there in the trees I had located hovering lights that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. It seemed like they were just hanging out there waiting for us to leave. I recalled the voice on Rick’s tape that had told him to “get out.”
Rick walked around with his videocam, claiming that he’d recorded several bright orbs that had gone zipping by, so I sat down on the grass and pulled out my tape recorder. I looked around to ensure that there would be no obvious disturbances and then began.
“Does anyone want to communicate?” I asked into the recorder. This was a standard procedure. You invite the spirits to talk. Then I listened closely but heard only the sounds of the chirping crickets. A car went by down the road and then it was silent again. Lightning shot through the distant western sky. Aside from the insects, there was no other noise. After a few minutes, I turned off the recorder so I could play it back. In great anticipation, I pressed the button.
First I heard my own voice asking the initial question, “Does anyone want to communicate?” Then there were crickets, then the car, and then crickets again. Ten more seconds went by and then came a clear voice on the tape that sounded like a young boy’s. He simply said, “Yes.” This was not Rick’s voice or mine, and there was no one else around.
I shivered, sensing that “someone” was quite near, perhaps right behind me, and he wanted to talk. I was about to call Rick over when another voice came on. This one was older, whispery, and I could not make out the gender, but the words were clear enough:
“Why are yon doing this to us?”
A chill shot through me. I looked around. Was he talking to me? Why are we doing what?
Okay, it was time to leave. Rick and I packed up the equipment and left just as the storm came crashing.
I never returned to that cemetery, and I also never forgot how chilling the experience was.
Sometimes ghosts appear to make contact in a less direct manner, as was the case for “Anne.” She’d had a very close friendship with a girl in high school, but eventually they parted ways and moved into different worlds. The friend went off to New York and while there she was brutally raped. She then committed suicide. Anne was aware of her death but had never found out where she’d been buried, and that bothered her.
One day Anne was walking through a cemetery near her home and began to think of her friend. She moved into an area that she did not normally go to, but she was looking at the trees and simply found herself in that unfamiliar part of the cemetery. She was about to turn around when she stepped onto a stone that was flush with the ground. Looking down, she was startled. The name on the stone was that of her friend. Finally, she had closure.
On the island of Barbados, in Christ Church cemetery, the Chase burial vault is renowned for its inexplicable history. The first member of the Chase family to be interred was Colonel Thomas Chase’s two-year-old child in 1808, soon to be followed by her older sister, the victim of a suicide. Both were placed in heavy lead coffins. Within weeks, the colonel died. When the pallbearers carrying his lead coffin went into the vault, they were startled to see that the other coffins were out of their original places although the seal on the marble slab over the entrance remained unbroken. And it wasn’t even as if shifting earth had shaken them out of place. One coffin was lying upside down and across the vault.
They were restored and nothing further occurred until 1816. When the vault was opened, it was clear that all the coffins inside had shifted once again, and quite violently. They were repositioned and the tomb was sealed with cement. However, three years later, the same thing happened, with the colonel’s coffin found near the entrance. This time the governor placed his personal seal on the vault and spread sand on the floor to detect intruders. When rumors began of noises within, one member of the Chase family decided to give the vault a thorough inspection. As he and several men chiseled away the mortar, they heard a grating sound inside. Opening the crypt, they discovered one coffin learning up against the door, while another had been flung so hard across the vault that it chipped a wall. Yet the sand on the floor revealed no footprints.
At a loss to explain it, the owner ordered the coffins to be removed and buried separately elsewhere. The vault still stands empty to this day.
Supernatural black dogs with red eyes show up in many world mythologies. Called hellhounds or devil dogs, they appear and then vanish, as if to forewarn of a sudden death. Sometimes a black-robed figure accompanies them, but usually they’re alone. Such dogs have been reported patrolling cemetery grounds, particularly slave cemeteries in the South. They frighten most people who see them, but bring comfort to mourners.
I was in one small country cemetery around dusk when a woman warned me not to remain there much longer.
“Why not?” I asked.
“You don’t want to be here when the dog comes.”
I thought she meant that the cemetery closes and they let loose some sort of guard dog, but that wasn’t the story.
“There’s a large dog that circles the perimeter,” she said. “Some people think it’s a wolf. Anyway, the legend is that if you’re still in here by the time it circles the cemetery three times, you’ll die.”
Classic ghost stories often feature the image of a person who keeps going through the motions of how he or she had died. This type of incident has been reported so many times by enough credible witnesses that there’s no reason to think it does not happen.
Andrea R. Del Favero, a licensed practitioner of mortuary science, told me the following story about a legendary grave in Totowa, New Jersey. Traveling Route 46 west to the Browertown Road exit, just past the Passaic River, and getting to Riverview Drive, one eventually reaches the Laurel Grove Cemetery. One night years ago, a girl named Annie was walking home along this road. It was dark and rainy that night, so she could barely see her way. A wind coming up off the river made conditions even worse, but she kept going. She never even heard the truck approaching her from behind. The driver, like Annie, could barely see a thing. He hit her hard and dragged her nearly one hundred feet along the pavement before driving off, oblivious to what he’d left behind. Annie was dead. Her family buried her in the cemetery right next to the scene of the hit-and-run.
The rain that night should have washed away her blood, but to everyone’s surprise, a long red streak remained. It can still be seen on the road, measuring approximately the distance that Annie was dragged.
Many stories about haunted cemeteries involve an actual encounter with the other world. Initially it seems ordinary enough, but then something happens to prove otherwise.
For example I’ve heard the tale of the man who met a young woman at a dance and offered to take her home. When she felt cold, he offered her his sweater, and then left her off at the house she indicated. The next day he went back to retrieve his sweater, only to be told that the girl he’d dropped off had died years earlier. Unable to accept this, he was shown a picture and only then was he able to accept that he’d been with an apparition. Then he drove away. Eventually he passed the cemetery where this girl had been buried, so he went in to see her grave for himself. There next to the headstone on which her name was inscribed, along with the date of her death, was his neatly folded sweater.
A story from Savannah, Georgia, that began with similarly romantic intentions had a more disturbing ending. This happened not long ago in Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah’s historic district, which is laid out in a series of squares and appears to be saturated in supernatural activity.
It seems that a young blond man used to come quite often to the bar in the eighteenth-century tavern known as the Olde Pink House, which had been built by a man named James Habersham, Jr. The man generally said nothing as he sat there over his beer. A woman who worked in the tavern wondered about his quiet reticence. She watched him every time he came in, and before long she became infatuated with him. Finally she decided to follow him and see where he came from.
So one evening as he got up to leave, she went after him and watched the direction in which he walked. She followed him for several blocks, trying to screw up enough courage to speak to him. Then, just as she was about to say something, he took a quick turn and walked into the old cemetery. Surprised, she stayed back, but watched as he went toward the Habersham family plot. She wondered if he had some connection to this family, if perhaps he was a descendant. He stopped at the iron fence surrounding the aboveground monument and then walked right through it and disappeared.
The girl couldn’t believe what she’d seen and thought that maybe it was just a trick of the shadows, so she ran to get a closer look. Although he had seemed as solid as anyone on the street, he simply was no longer there.
Thoroughly shaken by this incident, the woman quit her job and left Savannah.
From a young man named Marcos, I heard about another type of encounter that happened in a small, deteriorating cemetery in Canindé, Brazil.
“The name of the cemetery is Cemitério Municipal de Canindé,” he said. “This event took place on a winter day. It was raining torrentially and wasn’t going to stop any time soon. Returning from work, a man got off the bus in the wrong place, so he was lost and alone on a dark street. Walking with his head down as fast as he could, he suddenly looked up and saw the old cemetery with its gate ajar. He wanted to leave, but the storm was getting even worse and the street was flooding.
“Then someone called to him, ‘Hey, you there!’
“He saw another man about his age, over near the cemetery. Since the stranger did not appear threatening, he stopped.
“‘Come here!’ said the other man. ‘Stay here until the storm goes away!’
He thought twice about that, but finally he walked over to the other man and went into the cemetery with him.
“‘Terrible night, isn’t it?’ the stranger said.
“‘Yes, terrible. I don’t think I’ll get home tonight.’
“They continued to talk together until the rain eased up and the man who’d gotten lost decided to find a way home.
“‘Oh, no problem!’ said the stranger. ‘I’ll stay here. Have a good night.’
“‘Good night, then!’ The man left, but then realized he’d forgotten something and came back. ‘Excuse me, I forgot to ask your name. What is it?’
“The stranger smiled and said: ‘When I was alive, they called me Alberto.’
“That was a strange statement, but a few days later the man who’d been lost came back to look through the cemetery stones to see if any bore the name ‘Alberto.’ He found one and then described the man to several people in town. They agreed that he’d seen Alberto and then told him that Alberto was indeed dead and buried in that cemetery.”
Not all encounters are quite so obvious. Gettysburg historian Mark Nesbitt had once lived in a lodge located in the military cemetery there, and he had an eerie experience.
“I lived in a house in the National Cemetery when I was a park service ranger,” he recalled. “The chief of maintenance had lived there once and his wife claimed to have heard the sound of babies crying, although their own children were grown. This house had been built on the same site as the original cemetery lodge, where the artifacts were stored that had been removed from the pockets of corpses that had lain all over the field. They hoped that the next of kin would come to claim them. Eventually the building was torn down and the artifacts yet unclaimed inexplicably disappeared.
“So anyway, one night I was downstairs in this lodge watching television when I heard footsteps come down the steps. They stopped on the landing, so I turned to see who it was, but there was no one there. That bothered me. I was so sure someone had come down that I went looking for my housemate. As I went up the steps, it felt like I passed through a cold spot, which seemed strange. I found my housemate in his room, with his door closed. I knocked and asked what he wanted and he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said he hadn’t come down the stairs.”
Not all cemetery ghosts are benign. On the island of Malta, south of Italy, two cabdrivers had been robbed and murdered near Addolorata Cemetery. The killers had tried removing their heads, but took off before the grisly deed was complete.
One evening sometime afterward, another taxi driver was returning from a run to the airport that took him near the cemetery when he suddenly felt a cold chill. Glancing into the rearview mirror he saw a mutilated man in the backseat. The apparition had two black holes where his eyes should have been.
The driver slammed on his brakes and leapt screaming from the taxi. Then he watched as the apparition slowly rose and floated soundlessly through the locked gates of Addolorata Cemetery.
Of all the forms an apparition can take, I’ve only heard of one that involved music. Andrew Saal told me this one. A friend named Sharkey had come up with the idea that they ought to practice their tubas in the cemetery. They agreed to meet at the gates at midnight.
As he got to the place, Andy prepared his tuba. “I tightened the last of the screws,” he said, “and then looked up to scan my surroundings. The dim moonlight shadowed the trees and headstones. A low-lying fog seemed to be flowing in from the woods. I hoisted the tuba over my shoulder and wandered toward the woods.
“We found an open area with only a few graves along the perimeter. We respected the dead. No way either one of us wanted to march over someone’s grave.”
Silhouetted by moon and misty fog, the two tuba players stepped off to the thunder of an imaginary marching band.
“When the imaginary drums rolled off the introduction to the school’s fight song, I snapped my tuba to attention and bit into the opening chords. Our high school had chosen for its fight song the ‘Notre Dame Victory March.’ The pulsing rhythm of the piece that night was almost spiritual. In fact, I swear that I heard the trumpets soaring overhead with that recognizable chorus. Suddenly it hit me. I stopped playing and spun around. And for just a few seconds, lingering on the cool night breeze, I did hear a solitary trumpet playing the final lines. Its sweet perfect resonance slowly evaporated in the moonlight. For just a second, I felt as if someone somewhere were happy.
“Sharkey stood silently in the fog nearby.
“‘Did you hear …?”’
He nodded almost imperceptibly. Tuba practice was over.
Andy went searching for a likely culprit among other band members, but found no one that had been in that part of town the night before. Then he went back to the cemetery. Walking through, he noticed a military star on one of the gravestones.
“The gray-tinged stone bore the name of James Patrick Sullivan. Born February 8, 1926. Died June 6, 1944. The stonemason had delicately carved the Notre Dame ‘ND’ symbol onto the headstone. Puzzled, I slowly walked off.”
He found a woman, Mrs. Eagen, who lived near the cemetery and who’d been a town resident her entire life. Andy asked her what she knew about James Patrick Sullivan.
She remembered him. The young man had left Notre Dame his junior year to serve in World War II, and he’d died storming Utah Beach on D-Day.
“Almost as an afterthought, Grandma Eagan looked straight into my eyes. ‘Did you know that he played trumpet in the marching band?’”
If ghosts do indeed hang out like this in cemeteries, then it seems likely that they might also be in funeral homes. One undertaker told me that “we all have stories,” although most would hesitate to admit that.
A funeral director from Tennessee, Dennis Phillips, told me about something that had happened to a colleague. This man was aware of a woman who’d been placed prematurely in a home for the elderly because her son wanted possession of her house. To anyone who’d listen, she claimed that after she died she was going to haunt that son of hers. Years later, when she did pass on, the funeral director picked up her body and set it in the preparation room.
“He went into the office to fill out some papers,” Phillips said, “and then went back in. When he opened the door to the prep room, a blast of cold air hit him liked he’d never felt. It went right to the bone. He stood there stunned for a moment. He noticed a curtain flutter slightly, and then it was over. He’d never had such an experience before. But then he heard that within two weeks the deceased woman’s son had moved out of her house and wouldn’t give a reason why.”
More dramatic was the story told to me by an embalmer who was taking a body into what he believed was an empty building. He wheeled the corpse through one room, and since there was sufficient light to see, he decided not to bother with the light switch. Then he noticed movement at the far end of the room, so he stopped and peered down that way. It looked like someone—possibly two or three people—were watching him. Walking back to the light switch, he turned it on and caught a glimpse of someone disappearing into the next room. That was the viewing room, and he knew that no one was supposed to be in there at this time of night. Thinking it might be kids, he went in to investigate. No one was there. He checked the only other door into the room and found it locked. Now he was really mystified. He knew he’d seen someone come in here, yet he couldn’t find any evidence. For all he could tell, he was completely alone.
He went ahead and finished his task. Then after checking again and finding no one in the building, he locked up. The next day he mentioned his strange experience to someone else who worked there and she turned pale. “I’ve seen them, too,” she whispered. “They just watch me and then they’re gone.”
Richard Kramer lives at Hardesty Funeral Home as a caretaker. He’s not a funeral director, but he transports bodies to the crematory and runs errands, such as picking up death certificates. It’s his belief that although he’s the only living person there at night in the funeral home, he’s certainly not alone.
“I had someone here who seemed to like to watch television with me,” he told me. “When I’d go to bed and turn the TV off, it would be on a certain channel. Then about two o’clock in the morning, I happened to wake up and heard voices downstairs. So I went down and the television was on. I looked and saw that it was on a different channel than I’d had it on and it had dirty movies on. That’s not a joke.
“The next night, I turned off the TV, but this time I made a note of the channel it was on when I shut it off. I sat up for about half an hour smoking a cigarette, and then I went to bed. Once again, around two in the morning, I woke up and found the television on. I went down and saw that the channel had been changed to dirty movies on HBO.
“So I said, ‘Look, when I watch television, you can watch television, but when I go to bed, you go to bed. The television stays off.’ And after that, the television never came back on at night like that.
“At times I did feel that someone was in there with me, but that happens in a funeral home. Strange things occur at night that don’t happen during the daytime. For example, I was vacuuming around eleven at night and I turned the vacuum off. I wrapped up the cord and I heard a little voice that said, ‘Thank you.’ No one was around, so I didn’t know who could have been talking to me. So the next night, I decided to see what would happen if I vacuumed again. When I got through and wrapped up the cord, I heard it again, ‘Thank you.’ It was a dainty, tiny voice. Evidently the noise bothered them.”
One of the most surprising tales that I heard involved a funeral. A woman was burying her mother and she had left a special ruby necklace on her for the viewing. Several times her husband reminded her to remove it before the casket was closed, but she got caught up in talking with the many people who arrived to show support.
The casket was duly closed and locked, then taken to the cemetery. After a brief service, it was lowered into the ground, and the woman stayed until they had filled in the grave and covered it with flowers. Only at home the next day did she realize that she’d forgotten the ruby necklace. She was heartbroken.
Days later she was cleaning the top of her dresser and to her astonishment, the ruby necklace lay there in a box. It seemed impossible, but it was true. She asked her husband if he had removed the necklace at the viewing, but he denied it. Her only explanation was that her mother somehow had known about her grief and had transported the necklace from beyond the grave. Such items are known among spiritualists as “apports,” which is a small material object that a spirit can “bring through” from seemingly out of nowhere. How it got out of a locked coffin and through six feet of dirt is a mystery known only to the dead.
In the Highgate section of North London is the thirty-seven-acre Cemetery of Saint James, which dates back to 1839. Around 167,000 people are buried in the fifty-two thousand graves. The most famous occupant is Karl Marx, but Bram Stoker also “buried” one of his characters, Lucy Westenra, in a fictional cemetery based on “Highgate,” as it is generally called. Dracula had attacked her and made her a vampire. Out of Highgate she rose at night to hunt for her own prey. It’s not surprising, then, that some of the notorious vampire hunters in England claimed that a real vampire has inhabited the cemetery.
Vampires are mentioned in 95 percent of the world’s cultures, dating back to the earliest written records. From reanimated corpses to charismatic counts with profound sexual allure, they raise the fear of a creature that has the power to deplete our most precious resource—specifically, our blood. A vampire thrives off the lifeblood of others, taking his or her fill and leaving the victim for dead. It may also be the case that the vampire’s attack will transform the victim into another vampire, doomed to face an eternity of thriving by murder and the drinking of blood.
The “vampire of Highgate” was spotted mostly during the evening, and the initial sightings were documented in the 1960s. Some people thought it was a ghost, but according to some accounts, Sean Manchester, the head of the Vampire Research Society, said that a couple of girls told him that they had seen things rising out of the graves. Similar accounts alerted Manchester to the possibility of an undead infestation and he wanted to investigate. One girl, who developed a suspicious case of anemia, actually claimed that an evil figure visited her at night. Only after her room was filled with garlic and holy water, as superstitions dictate, did she improve.
The vampire theory hit British newspapers when it became evident that blood rituals involving animal sacrifices were being performed among the graves. Manchester described how another woman who had seen the entity and who had fallen into a trance had led him to a group of burial vaults. He found several empty coffins, so he and his cohorts lined them with garlic, salt, and holy water, and then placed crosses inside. Apparently the vampire did not return.
However, in 1970 the body of a woman who had been buried in Highgate was found in the cemetery. She’d been beheaded and partially burned, as if someone had taken her to be a vampire. The police stepped in to protect the other interred bodies from such fanaticism. They arrested other vampire hunters who showed up on the grounds, but the reported sightings of something odd hanging around the cemetery continued. There are people today who still claim that a vampire’s coffin is secreted away in this venerable old cemetery.
Other vampire tales spread for a time throughout New England, and numerous corpses suffered the indignity of being exhumed and cut open. Henry David Thoreau wrote about such an incident in Vermont—that the family had dug up one of their own and burnt the internal organs.
In 1896, the New York World reported that areas of Rhode Island were rampant with belief in vampires that issued forth from the graveyards; six separate incidents were reported near Newport alone. Generally the corpse’s heart was taken out (because that’s the organ that the vampire supposedly inhabited), examined for evidence of fresh blood, and then burned. When the deaths of a mother and her four children occurred closely together, for example, the villagers exhumed the last victim, removed the heart, and burned it.
This practice was related to the fact that an infected tuberculosis patient typically passed the mysterious illness along to his or her family members. In those days, the illness was called consumption—a vampiric term if ever there was one—because people physically deteriorated over a period of time. No one knew the cause, and whenever more than one person in a family died, the community suspected that the already-deceased relative was feeding first on the people it knew best before it targeted others. There is some evidence that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, was influenced by these accounts.
I visited a cemetery where one of these incidents occurred, in Exeter, Rhode Island. It took place in the late 1800s, although it appears not to have been altogether resolved. George Brown lost his wife to TB, and then his eldest daughter died. One of his sons, Edwin, soon grew ill but moved away, and then another daughter, Mercy, died on January 18, 1892. Edwin returned and grew ill again, so George exhumed the bodies of his wife and daughters from the Exeter Cemetery, which was behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. The wife and first daughter had decomposed, but Mercy’s body was surprisingly fresh. In fact, the legend says her body was turned sideways in the coffin and blood dripped from her mouth. They assumed that she’d been moving around, which meant she was alive. (Obviously they didn’t think of the possibility of premature burial.) They cut out her heart, burned it, and dissolved the ashes in a medicine for Edwin to drink. It didn’t help. It wasn’t long before he died, and Mercy Brown was saddled with the reputation of being Exeter’s vampire. She also shows up as a ghost in this nondescript little cemetery: People around there told me that there’d been reports of blue lights hovering at night close to her grave.
Not far away, a grave in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, bears the epitaph I AM WAITING AND WATCHING FOR YOU. This is for Nancy (Nellie) Vaughn, who died in 1889 at the age of nineteen and was buried in Rhode Island Historical Cemetery #2. Her five siblings supposedly died soon thereafter, which struck up the rumors about her demonic activities. Added to that is the fact that her stone is sinking into the earth and no vegetation can be made to grow on her grave.
One man, Vlad Kinkopf, published an account of his search for this grave, indicating that he came upon it near an abandoned Baptist Church on Plain Meeting House Road just as dusk was falling. He claims that this encounter really happened. He was determined to remain in the small cemetery all night and it wasn’t long before he thought he heard muffled noises beneath the earth, located at Nellie’s grave. It frightened him, but he stood his ground. Then he saw the faint outline of a woman approaching him, and since he’d heard that the act of offering blood to the dead would get them to speak, he took out his penknife and cut his forearm. She came to him, he claimed, and licked his arm. Then she told him that Rhode Island had more vampires than any state in the union, and that they’d been there since the days of the Narragansett Indians. The proof of this, she said, was that the Indians had tied the hands and feet of corpses, or else had slit their feet to keep them from leaving the burial mounds. Her own immortality derived from a Jewish cult that had discovered the secret of Christ’s resurrection, and she had passed that on to others—including a girl named Mercy Brown from Exeter.
It’s not just vampires and ghosts that haunt cemeteries, but practitioners of dark religions as well. I had heard about one cult back in the eighties in New York that stole heads and other parts from fresh graves. While police were sent to investigate the cemetery desecration and to get the headless corpses reburied, the cult evaded capture.
Cult experts speculated that this was the work of a particular sect of the Santeria religion, which is similar to voodoo, but which practices the black arts for nefarious gains. Such people are known as mayomberos and there are reputedly no limits to what they will do. They specialize in spells for revenge, necromancy, and murder. To empower themselves they use animal sacrifice, and the apprenticeship requires a peculiar cemetery ritual:
First the candidate selects a recent grave that will serve his purposes.
Then he sleeps for seven nights under a ceiba tree.
After that, he procures a new set of clothing and buries it in the prechosen grave for three weeks while he takes purifying baths.
Then he digs up his clothes, dons them, and goes with his teacher back to the tree.
Others join them to invoke the spirits of the dead for the initiation.
The candidate is crowned with ceiba leaves, which signifies that the dead have possessed him.
Finally he receives a scepter made from a human tibia bone that is wrapped in black cloth.
Ready now, he returns to the graveyard to perform a ceremony on a recent grave, preferably someone who had been violent or insane in life, because such spirits are more likely to act on orders to go out and destroy.
He sprinkles rum in the shape of a cross over the grave and then opens it.
He and his companions raise the corpse, remove the head, fingers, toes, tibia, and ribs, and wrap them in black cloth.
The new priest then lies on the floor back at home, in the posture of death, and a ceremony is performed to ask the dead parts to do the bidding of the mayombero. A negative result means the parts must go back to the grave, and a different grave opened. If positive, another ceremony takes place involving fresh blood and further sacrifice.
To this group of Santeria priests, laws and fines mean nothing. They see themselves as outside the bounds of any code but their own.
I learned that cemetery thefts had occurred in Maui as well. “Hawaiians believed that bones have power,” said Debbie Iida, a longtime resident, “and they would steal them from the grave sites. That’s why a lot of Hawaiians were buried at night in sand, because sand leaves no trace of the digging. The sand dunes of Maui are full of old bones.”
Satanists, too, get into the act, and they generally take the blame whenever there’s evidence of a grisly ritual in a cemetery. The grave of General Elisha G. Marshall, who served on the Union side in the Civil War, was violated on the night of the summer solstice in June 2000. He’d been buried in 1883, in a pine casket in Rochester, New York’s Mount Hope Cemetery. Sometime between 8 P.M. and 11:30 A.M. the next day, thieves dug down six feet, smashed though the moldering coffin, and took the general’s skull. The police found bones scattered on the ground around the open grave, and they surmised that this group believed that grabbing the remains of a corpse during the change of seasons empowered their rituals.
On one of my trips to New Orleans, I decided to visit Holt Cemetery. While people know it as a pauper’s graveyard, it’s also a spot believed to draw voodoo practitioners in search of body parts and bones.
Believers in voodoo, which is a hybrid of African and Catholic beliefs, claim that the gods speak through spirit possession and that pleasing them results in the reward of a good life. The pantheon of gods, known as loas, include the deified spirits of ancestors, and they can inspire either good or evil.
One secret voodoo sect, Bizango, worships the loa of the graveyard. To protect their nighttime ceremonies, they have elaborate passwords and rituals. If someone gets in but cannot say the password, he supposedly gets sacrificed or made into a zombie. Those who are quite serious about this art may sleep in tombs to commune with the spirits and thereby gain knowledge and power. At any rate, parts of the dead are thought to heighten these powers.
In fact such a case occurred in Florida in 1997. A garbage collector named Willie Suttle had died and when no one claimed his body, it was taken to a funeral home to be buried as an indigent. No one seemed to notice that Suttle’s left hand was missing, but when it washed up onto the banks of the Manitee River, the prints were traced back to Suttle and his body was exhumed. Only then did someone investigate further. Inside him, they found an odd assortment of fabric dolls on which notes were pinned. There were twelve dolls in all, eleven of which were black, and the notes contained what appeared to be chants and curses, along with the names of local funeral home directors. Since the last person to handle the body was Paula Albritton of the Green Funeral Home in Bradenton, she was questioned. Initially she denied knowing anything, but she eventually confessed. She was a voodooist, she claimed, and had used the hand in a religious ritual. This “helping hand” was meant to protect her business and free Suttle’s spirit.
However, when detectives told her that they’d be able to find fingerprints on the duct tape wrapped around the wrist from which the hand was removed, she admitted that she’d lied. In fact her mentally ill son, Jimmie Clark, had obeyed voices in his head that told him to stuff the body with the dolls to curse competitors. He was convicted of corpse abuse.
I had this story in mind as I wandered into New Orleans’ Holt Cemetery.
Established in 1879, this crowded, seven-acre plot is unlike the many aboveground cemeteries in the area, and in fact the majority of graves are marked with improvised wooden crosses. Though thousands of burials have taken place here, many grave markers have no names, and some of the graves are loaded with weeds and trash. Strangers share caskets as the remains of one occupant of a particular grave are dug up to make room for another. Leftover bones and teeth get bagged and tossed into the new casket.
Off to one side stands a magnificent oak tree hung with Spanish moss, and that’s apparently where voodoo rituals take place under the cloak of night. Several people told me that a small group gets together here on a fairly regular basis to draw on the power of the dead.
In the past, the sextons reported that odd things have been buried in the graves; clearing them up might yield a collection of pins and needles—implements common to voodoo. People also take dirt from a relative’s grave to sprinkle around the house, and some voodoo practitioners believe that taking a withered flower and a pinch of dirt from the grave of an enemy makes the possessor powerful over that person’s people.
On a cold December afternoon, not long before twilight, I walked in through an iron gate to look around. People had dumped off old ironing boards, tires, and broken furniture here, yet I saw attempts at artistic expression as well. I walked past cracked, sunken graves, as well as fresh mounds of dirt that suggested recent burials. Then I stopped near one grave just off the main path. I thought I’d seen something odd and decided to have a closer look. I stepped over to the grave site and bent down.
Sticking out of a heavy-gauge black bag dumped on top of the grave was something white that looked like bone. I nudged the bag with my finger, but it felt solid. The bag was torn a little, so I opened it further to have a look. I still couldn’t tell.
I went and found a stick, and again bent over the bag. Digging at the white object, I managed to move it out a little further for inspection. The chill I experienced was not from the overcast skies. There was no doubt about it, this was a bone of some kind. It was fairly sizable, too, about the measure of the top of a femur. Someone had dumped a sack of remains here on top of this grave.
The bag wasn’t large enough to hide a corpse, but it could certainly contain someone’s half-baked cremains. It might also hold the hasty deposit of exhumed parts.
Looking around, I wondered if anyone was watching. The bag appeared to have been here awhile, and surely others had seen it, but I wanted to take no chances. The sun would be gone within half an hour, and since I didn’t know the password to any voodoo ceremonies, I decided that it was time for me to leave.
By far the majority of people who work in funeral homes are professional, caring people, but they’re aware that there are some who get into the business for nefarious reasons. One funeral director hinted that there was a secret underground, a network of sick individuals who protect one another. They might even go so far as to “share bodies,” i.e., call others when an attractive corpse comes in to indulge in a party.
In fact it was a caterer who described one such gathering to me: “I knew this wealthy funeral director who owned a number of homes. He was a raunchy kind of guy and when he got really drunk, he’d get pretty disgusting. He had a small circle of associates who worked for him and who enjoyed the same things he enjoyed. He’d throw these after-hours parties where bodies were laid out and they could do anything they wanted, as long as the corpse didn’t suffer a lot of damage. Apparently they were going to be prepared for viewing the next day, so there wasn’t time to cover anything up.”
“Why did they let you see it?” I asked. “I would think they’d keep it a secret.”
“I think they just didn’t care. I had workers quit, I can tell you that, after seeing some of the things that went on. These parties were orgies. Everyone would get naked and run around using food and anything else they could find to be really outrageous. They’d pour bottles of wine down the throat of a corpse to watch its stomach bloat and then see if it would leak out anywhere. And if they had a young male or female, they’d pose the corpse over a couch and line up for a gang-bang.”
“Why didn’t anyone report them?”
“I think they were pretty careful to screen who got into these parties. There was some kind of initiation in the funeral home. First they’d say some things to see how a new guy reacted, and then they’d dare him to do things to a fresh corpse. If he seemed okay after a few times, he’d get told about the parties. It was quite a little club.”
Such things are likely rare, but I did hear about another get-together that involved injecting corpses with fluorescent fluid. They’d set the corpse up against a wall, turn out the lights, and play black strobe lights onto it while they turned up the music.
Corpse abuse isn’t limited to parties. There are handlers of the dead who have no regard for postmortem dignity.
In 1999, Ohio funeral home worker James Harber left the embalmed body of an eighty-eight-year-old man in a hearse while he made a visit to a topless bar. He was transporting the corpse from a funeral home that was 165 miles away to the one where he worked, so he decided to take a break at The Candy Store. He parked the minivan and walked away. A patrol officer spotted the uncovered body lying on a cot in the unlocked vehicle. He claimed that it was in plain view of anyone who might happen by. Harber was arrested on charges of corpse abuse.
Then there was the investigation of the Glebe morgue in Sydney, Australia, in March 2001. Allegedly, the staff had allowed physicians to use corpses for medical experiments. One former worker said he’d seen a pathologist stabbing a corpse to study blood spatter patterns, and another corpse was hit with a hammer to get results on blunt-force trauma. Sometimes organs were removed without obtaining permission and sent to research labs. The morgue boss admitted that approximately one thousand bodies left the morgue each year without a brain, which to his mind was just routine postmortem study. Apparently, the silence of relatives was taken as consent, and this discovery will likely inspire new laws.
Sometimes even a funeral home can be a Little Shop of Horrors. It was rumors that led to the downfall of the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, California. In 1986 people complained about the way David Sconce was running his cremation business—the intense black smoke coming out of the stacks, the overwhelming stench, the impossible numbers of corpse disposals—and a full-scale investigation eventually led to twenty-one felony charges against him.
Highly ambitious, Sconce packed his prep room with bodies nearly to the ceiling. He’d pick them up daily from a large group of area funeral homes that hired him for cremation. As a side business, he harvested organs to sell to schools and labs. Generally he tricked relatives into signing the permission forms, and they often did not realize what they were allowing him to do.
Sconce threatened violence against competitor and employee alike. His “tissue technicians” quietly went about their business harvesting eyes and other organs as Sconce ripped gold fillings from the teeth of cadavers.
None of his clients realized just how many others he had, or they might have had second thoughts. Since he offered a price that couldn’t be beat, no one asked questions. In short order he’d managed to orchestrate a cremation monopoly, and when he needed new facilities, he set them up illegally. He sent masses of bodies together into giant ovens disguised as ceramics kilns—as many as thirty at once. His employees were instructed to just keep shoving them in, as many as would fit. The commingled ashes were weighed and put into individual bags, and given back to people who were under the illusion that their loved ones had been cremated in a separate process.
When investigators finally came in to have a look, they found behind his “ceramics” building a sludge pile of human fat and cans full of remains. He shouldn’t have been in that neighborhood, let alone leaving remains in the open.
Astonishingly, the judge eliminated half of the charges and allowed Sconce to serve a minimal amount of jail time. Even worse was the fact that his mother had masterminded the thefts and organ sales, but apparently believed that she’d done nothing wrong.
Unfortunately, theirs was not an isolated case. A funeral director in Arizona was arrested for taking valuables off corpses, and yet he’s still in business. I’d also heard about the arrest of sixteen city morgue workers in Philadelphia for theft from the dead over a ten-year span. They got caught using some purloined credit cards. Apparently, when they went out for a removal, they saw this as an opportunity to explore someone’s home and remove other things as well.
So it appears that there’s some degree of truth in the stereotype of the callous body handler. I heard about others along the way and already knew the story of John Wayne Gacy, one of the most notorious serial killers of the century. When he’d lived in Las Vegas as a young man, he’d worked as a janitor in a funeral home. There were rumors that he’d taken advantage of the privacy at night and the fact that corpses can’t fight back to fulfill his sexual needs. Later diagnosed as a psychopath with no sense of human attachment, he’d had no qualms about fondling the dead. He apparently also had no qualms about turning people into corpses, or of having them around him.
Years later, in the 1970s, he lured boys and young men to his home in Des Plaines, Illinois, tricked them into bondage devices, and then raped and strangled them. He admitted to keeping at least one in bed with him. Getting rid of the bodies was no problem. He just dumped them in the garden or the crawl space under his home, covered them with quicklime, and explained away the noxious odors to his wife and friends as “moisture.” When police finally investigated the disappearance of one young man, they searched Gacy’s house and found seven bodies down below. More turned up in mounds in the garden and the floor of the garage. Four others he’d thrown into the river. In all, they convicted Gacy of thirty-three counts of murder, and he was finally executed.
A case of the fraudulent handling of a corpse turned up in Florida recently when a funeral director murdered his wife. Since he buried bodies every day, he figured how hard would it be to dispose of an extra corpse? He and his wife of two years had been having problems and he just wanted to put it all behind him. He’d seen her walking with other men and he’d had enough. One night they had an argument that pushed things too far. She went to bed, and while she slept, he grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen drawer and stabbed her over and over until she was dead. He then took the body to his funeral home and stored it in a cooler. That was simple enough. Then, when he scheduled a closed-casket ceremony for an eighty-nine-year-old woman, he put his dead wife at the bottom of the casket, placed the mattress on top of her, and put the other woman’s body inside. He closed the casket and buried them together. He might have gotten away with it, too, except that he ended up confessing to the police. The grave site was exhumed and, sure enough, the two bodies were found in the same casket.
The movie Kissed, directed by Lynne Stopkewich, is about Sandra, a young woman who’s erotically attracted to dead bodies, so she finds work at a funeral home. What she does there when she handles the dead is more passionate than anything she can find in life, even when she gets involved with a man. She thinks that by having sex with beautiful young deceased males, she can channel their spirits to a better place. “I’m consumed,” she says.
The poet undertaker, Thomas Lynch, points out in Bodies in Motion and at Rest that both sex and death are “horizontal mysteries” that possess similarly disconcerting effects. Perhaps that’s why some people so closely link sex and death, such as the W. W. Chambers Mortuary, which once issued a calendar featuring a nude embalmed female corpse under the legend “BEAUTIFUL BODIES BY CHAMBERS.”
Some funeral directors assured me that now that video cameras are placed in many embalming rooms, necrophilia is rare to nonexistent, yet others said there are ways around anything. In fact, at the end of 2000 there was a lawsuit pending against an Atlanta-based funeral home about sexual high jinks with corpses in the receiving room.
“You won’t get any stories from people like that,” I was told. “They’re pretty secretive.”
On the contrary, I found several people who profess some form of necrophilia who were not only happy to talk but were quite generous with their tales. They know that people call them “sick” and “disgusting,” but they also know where they find their most pleasure. And not all necrophiles work in funeral homes. In fact, most do not.
John Pirog lives in Michigan and has dedicated himself to promoting necrophilia. He keeps track of the most notorious necrophiles in history, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Karen Greenlee, and Sergeant François Bertrand. He’s also devised a list of “Necrophile Principles” and a somewhat disturbing “Guide to Tactful Funeral Home Visits.”
I asked him why he had decided to engage in what he calls a “necrophilia outreach.”
“No one else was doing it,” he said, “and I felt that necrophiles need a rallying point. Over the years, I’ve met many folks who profess an interest in necrophilia. Unfortunately, most of us have only had limited experience with actual corpses. In Michigan, the regulations that cover mortuary science are rather strict, so finding work in any type of mortuary setting isn’t that easy.”
“Did you get attracted to corpses from some experience?” I asked.
“No, not really. I think I’ve always been a ‘latent’ necrophile, although it did not come to full fruition until around 1994.” He dismissed the idea of the romantic necrophile, explaining that those who went all out in their sexual desire had a better grasp of the experience. “My own personal necrophilic feelings are more akin to those of the nineteenth-century French necrophile Sergeant François Bertrand. He mutilated and dismembered the bodies he exhumed.”
I had a look at the profiles of the people he most revered and had to admit that these were pretty hardcore:
Sergeant François Bertrand liked to dissect animals as a child and had violent torture fantasies as he grew older. In 1849, he dug up fresh corpses with his bare hands from the grounds of Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse cemeteries in Paris in order to have sex with them. He’d also disembowel them and leave them strewn about the cemetery, and forensic evidence indicates that he chewed on a few. His youngest victim was only seven. Although he was caught and convicted, he served only one year in prison. He claimed that he couldn’t help what he did; it was a compulsion.
Henri Blot was twenty-six when he began digging up graves in France. A ballerina had died and he pulled her from her grave to penetrate her. When he was finished, he fell asleep, waking only when the groundskeeper came upon him inside the grave. The corpse had obviously been ravished, so he was arrested. This was apparently his second such episode, and in court he reportedly said, “Every man to his own taste. Mine is for corpses.”
Victor Ardisson was a mortician who reputedly had sex with over one hundred corpses in his care. He sometimes dug them up and took them home, and it was there that police found the decaying body of a three-year-old girl. He’d heard that she was ill and had fantasized endlessly about her corpse. When she died, he’d stolen her from a graveyard and had performed oral sex on her in the hope of reviving and restoring her. Then he kept her next to him when he slept. He also had possession of the head of a thirteen-year-old girl, which he referred to as “my bride,” kissed from time to time, and kept on his bedside table.
Necrophilia is an erotic attraction to corpses. The most common motive cited by psychologists is the attempt to gain possession of an unresisting or nonrejecting partner. The activity fits the psychiatric diagnosis of “Paraphilia, Not Otherwise Specified,” although I’ve met a few people who are, in Shelley’s words, “half in love with easeful Death” and reject such a shallow approach to what they feel and do. Some merely fantasize about this; others take a more active role—even to the point of killing someone. Dennis Nilsen, an otherwise meek and gentle man who lived in London, murdered fifteen men and kept their decomposing corpses in his home—even his bed. He just did not want them to leave, he’d explained.
History offers several accounts of this activity, including the fear ancient Egyptians expressed that embalmers would violate their deceased wives. One legend states that King Herod killed his wife and then had sex with her for seven more years.
Supposedly, if one can judge such a secret activity, necrophiles are primarily male (about 90 percent), but one female apprentice embalmer claimed that during the first four months of her employment, she had sex with around forty corpses. She admitted that she could not achieve satisfaction with the living, in part because she had been molested once and later raped. She could express herself to corpses without fear.
Contrary to common belief, most necrophiles are heterosexual, although about half of the known necrophiles who kill are gay. Only about 60 percent of necrophiles have a diagnosed personality disorder; 10 percent of these are psychotic. The most common occupations through which necrophiles come across corpses include hospital orderly, morgue attendant, funeral-parlor assistant, cleric, cemetery employee, and soldier—although I must point out that the majority of people thus employed are not aroused by corpses. (One woman who was engaged to a coroner did tell me that before they made love he always asked her to take a cold bath.)
Most corpse violations occur prior to burial, but there have been cases where the corpse is disinterred from a cemetery plot. In 1985, a fifteen-year-old girl was buried in Italy after she died from a head injury. Two days later, her grave was discovered open. She was lying on top of her coffin, her white dress lifted up over her hips. An examination indicated that she had been anally penetrated, and the two shovels left at the grave site indicated that more than one person was involved.
One of my first up-close-and-personal encounters with necrophilia was with a young man who identified himself as a vampire because he loved the taste of blood. He went by the name “Anubis”—the Egyptian god of death rituals. He and I went together to an embalming room to look at the instruments so that he could explain something he’d witnessed as a mortuary assistant. He himself loved to work with corpses, but he thought that the head embalmer, “John,” had taken things over the top.
John once had the experience, he told me, of actually meeting a young woman who was dying from leukemia and who would soon be in his care. Her name was Laurie, and she was twenty-four. She came in one day to make her own arrangements.
“John arranged her pre-need appointment,” Anubis said, “and sealed the arrangements with the customary handshake and escort to the car. John patted her arm in mock consolation, a stall tactic designed to aid his memorization of her body movements.”
Some time later, John invited Anubis to come and witness what he was about to do that evening, after hours.
“I arrived late the night Laurie’s body came in. John directed my attention to the tabled remains. His hands caressed the body through the sheet, and then he yanked the sheet down, dramatically revealing the as yet unchiseled work of art.”
What came next surprised him.
“John leaned down and pressed his lips against Laurie’s cold flesh. His kiss was passionate and suggestive of some response. He treated her as though she were kissing him back. He spoke to her softly, nibbling her blue earlobes and smiling. He fondled her breasts and ran his hands across her belly, while his fingers slid in and out of her navel. He became increasingly aroused, removing his shoes and clothing. When fully naked, he leaped upon the table and straddled the corpse, with feet and hands ceremoniously placed on her thighs and shoulders. He was like a mosquito positioning itself for the insertion of its stinger, psychically linking himself with Laurie’s spirit.
“He lowered himself into Laurie and began grinding his sweaty body against her icy frame. John seemed an unholy demon eagerly feasting upon the dead like a vulture picking at a carcass. His orgasm was violent, a literal blast from his loins into the cold, dry, and nonresponsive receptacle. He then dismounted from his icy lover and, kissing her sweetly, said goodbye.”
As he told me this story, he watched to see my reaction. All I could think was that when my time comes, I hope I die in the woods someplace where no one can find me.
After that, I came across a rather famous, but no less hideous, tale than the one I’d just heard. It starts in 1931, when fifty-six-year-old Count Carl von Cosel, a radiologist, became obsessed with one of the tuberculosis patients in a hospital in Key West, Florida. Her name was Maria Elena de Hoyos, and she was a beautiful twenty-two-year-old woman. Von Cosel wanted her to marry him, but she died. Fearing contamination of her body from groundwater, he built a mausoleum for her in the cemetery and preserved her in formaldehyde. Unbeknownst to her family, he would sit and have “conversations” with her. He even left a phone next to her so he could speak to her while they were apart. When his routine nocturnal visits finally proved inadequate, he secretly moved her to his home.
Von Cosel brought in a regular supply of preservatives and perfumes, but she began to deteriorate. Using piano wire to string her bones together, he replaced her eyes with glass eyes and her rotting skin with a mixture of wax and silk. As her hair fell out, he used it to make a wig to put on her head. Stuffing her corpse with rags to keep her from collapsing and dressing her in a bridal gown, he kept her by his side in bed, even inserting a tube into her decrepit corpse to serve as a vagina for making love. He also played a small organ to her as she “slept.” He did this for seven years, until de Hoyos’s sister came upon her. Horrified, she called the police.
Von Cosel was arrested, but the statute of limitations had run out on his crime of grave robbing, so he was set free. He moved to central Florida, where he sold postcards of Elena. When he eventually died in 1952, he was found in a room with a large doll in his arms that was wearing Elena’s death mask.
It isn’t only males who indulge. I had heard of female embalmers handling bodies like this, and I was curious about how they managed it. I knew that a friend of mine, Mark Spivey, had worked in a funeral home once, so I asked him if he’d seen any clandestine sexual episodes. He said that he certainly had. One of the incidents he described was orchestrated by a woman named Debbie. They were friends, and she’d told him of her activities with corpses. Curious, he asked if he could watch sometime, and she said she didn’t mind. So one night they got together in the prep room.
“She used to tell me,” said Mark,” that ‘Beautiful men without souls are a dime a dozen, but beautiful men without both soul and breath are a treasure.’ She had come to prefer beautiful but dead males. Now she had one, and she claimed that the one that had just been brought in was the most beautiful specimen she’d ever seen.
“She’d been saving the hydraulic pump for just such an occasion and now, she said, her victory was at hand. I watched as she inserted a thin plastic tube into his groin and sutured it in place. The scalpel slipped and I cringed. He couldn’t feel it, but I almost did. Finishing the last suture, Debbie stepped back and squashed the pump pedal by her foot. The pump inflated the dead phallus, filling its tissues with hydraulic fluid. It got hard, very hard, and then she turned the clamp on the pump to maintain the pressure on the swollen organ.
“‘Just look at him,’ she mused. ‘Look at his beautiful face, those pouty lips, his empty eyes, his hard dick … just like every other man I’ve ever known.’ She paused, then said, ‘Only now, I’m in charge and you won’t leave until I’m finished.’”
“Weren’t you uncomfortable?” I asked Mark.
“I was. I realized that if I were the one lying there on the table, she’d be doing the same thing to me.”
“So once she had him pumped up, what did she do next?”
“She undressed and draped her gown across the end of the table. She climbed on the table and positioned herself over her dead lover’s cold erection, staring into his eyes. I guess that she was imagining his sweat-laden face, his heaving chest and racing pulse. Then she lowered herself onto his bluish-white cock and felt the icy pole push deep inside of her. She closed her eyes, moved into a rhythm, and moaned.
“‘All of them have to die,’ she whispered, like she was in some kind of trance. ‘Sooner or later, they all die.’ Then she climaxed hard and long, raking her fingernails across the unresponsive skin on his chest. She slapped his face from side to side and twisted his nipples. When she was done, she climbed off him, and then bent over and swallowed him, tasting her own still-warm fluid.”
I winced. “And then she prepped him?”
“No. Since she didn’t need to have him ready for two more days, she saved the rest for later. Wheeling him into the storage room, with his penis still erect, she locked the freezer door. ‘Just like a frozen dinner,’ she said. ‘Just pull it out and it’s ready to go.
I let this episode sink in for a moment, and then I asked, “Was that the most dramatic incident you’ve seen, or does it get worse?”
Mark shook his head in a bemused way. He smiled and I could tell that something else was coming.
“I knew this guy once,” he said. “Let’s just call him John.”
I laughed. Another corpse-loving “John.”
“Anyway, John was in love with a younger guy, almost a boy, really. He was sixteen, but he was dying of cancer. Sometimes he mowed the lawn for John, and John told me that he tipped him really well because he did such a good job and because he always took off his shirt.
“John couldn’t believe it when the boy’s father asked him to do the funeral. The man wanted his son to be embalmed and he wanted John to do it.”
Mark asked him how he felt about it, to which he responded, “Damn lucky. I could finally touch him.”
Then John told Mark what he’d done.
“‘I washed the body first. I had washed hundreds of cadavers but none so carefully as this one. I caressed every inch of his bluish skin and gently lifted him on his side to wash his back, legs, and butt. I slid my fìnger inside his rectum … not something we do … but I wanted to feel my own flesh inside him just once. Something else we never do is wash the genitals. We usually just spray an antimicrobial mist and go on … but not this time. I washed his cock and balls and scrubbed them so hard I thought I could feel them filling with blood and getting warm.
“‘After I finished the preliminary procedures, I began to eviscerate his internal organs. Using the hydo-aspirator, I took great care in removing his innards. It upset me to be the one crushing and vacuuming out the soul of such a person, so I decided to stop when I came to the heart. It was then that I thought of a way to connect with my handsome yard boy.
“‘I used a small scalpel, the one I use to make the incision to raise the carotid for infusion, and cut into the left side of his chest and removed his heart. Placing the young and powerful organ on the table, I cut a small opening in the right ventricle. I was already excited just from working on the naked body, so it was no trouble to pull out my penis and jack off.
“‘Just when I was about to shoot, I stuck the head into the opening I made and emptied into his heart. I rammed my head against the backside of the heart wall, wanting to get some of his blood inside the little hole at the end of my dick. I wanted something of his inside of me. Then I realized I would just piss it out, so I cut a small piece out of his heart and swallowed it. That way I was sure to have him somewhere in me all the time. Sewing up the opening in the heart, I put it back into his hollow chest cavity and closed the hole.
“‘My seed would forever live in his corpse. His body will last forever—I made sure of that—and so will my sperm, dried and stuck to the inside of his perfectly pickled heart. This way, I’ll always feel like I have his heart. I wouldn’t have in real life, you know. It was the best job I’ve ever done on any body. His parents were so thankful, they even came over and brought me a gift. They said, “You took care of him as though he were your very own son.” I smiled and said nothing, knowing that my sperm was in the flesh of his heart and that in that very physical way … he was now my son, too.’”
Mark ended his tale and we looked at each other. I was squirming inside. I had started on my journey with the idea that learning more about death and death care would make me feel less anxious. This kind of story brought it all back.
Finally I broke the silence. “How many bodies do you think have been violated like that?”
Mark shook his head. “We’ll never know.”
“It can’t be that many. Can it?”
He just shrugged.
Having heard enough about sex and the embalming table, I decided to try to find a necromancer—a person who supposedly gets knowledge from communing with the dead. Necromantic rites, which generally take place in a cemetery or tomb, are a special means of divining or bringing forth energy by using the dead as a channel. Necromancers assume not only that the soul survives the body, but also that disembodied spirits have a superior knowledge or power that they can deliver to us if we approach them correctly.
Some form of necromancy was practiced in every nation of antiquity, particularly Rome, Persia, and Egypt. Some people believed they were calling forth malignant spirits, while others saw it as a form of white magic meant only for benevolent purposes. It was often the case that the person who summoned a soul simply wanted the mystery solved of how that person had died—particularly if he or she had been murdered. The rituals often involved animal sacrifice, but there were times when children were killed, too, in order to read their entrails. Necromancers who could make accurate predictions were held in high esteem, although when King Saul had the witch of Endor conjure up the spirit of Samuel, the dead prophet repaid him with an accurate foretelling of his imminent death. In later years, Christians were told that demons imitated the spirits of the dead and were not to be trusted for messages. Eventually necromancy was relegated to those forms of paganism that opened the door to the devil.
During ancient and medieval times, the same circles drawn on the ground that were used to conjure up demons or the devil himself served to draw forth the spirits of the dead. However, the necromantic ceremonies were performed in the cemeteries around a sarcophagus, and the dead person’s name was used rather than the name of a demon. If he or she did not appear as summoned, the corpse was then exhumed for examination. Often the deceased were used as part of the festivities in some nocturnal feast.
Some practitioners used a “necromantic bell,” which an eighteenth-century manuscript describes how to make (don’t try this at home): The name THETRAGRAMMATON was inscribed on the bottom and above it were symbols for each of seven planets. Then ADONAI, and lastly, JESUS. Around the bell were carved the names of the various planetary spirits that would assist in the sorcery. The person who desired “confluence” with this bell—that is, to make it work for him—must cast into the correct shape an alloy of lead, gold, tin, iron, copper, mercury, and silver, and do it on the day and hour of his birth.
When not in use, the bell had to be kept wrapped in a piece of green taffeta, but once it was taken out, it was ready for the summoning. The way to use it was to place it in the center of a grave and leave it for seven days so it absorbed from the earth the character of the deceased. That made it effective as a channeling device when rung during the conjuring ceremony. The appropriate time for performing a ritual was within a year of someone’s death, as that was thought to be how long the dead hovered around their bodies.
When I told people I was looking for a necromancer, I found the superstitions still very much alive. A few friends thought I was going to end up possessed. However, I finally discovered The Necromantic Ritual Book, by Leilah Wendell.
The basic idea is that some people need ritual to “connect with certain specific forms of energy”—in this case, death energy, or the “current of transition.” Necromantic in this context is about the romance of death, as opposed to necromancy, which is more strictly about conjuring. Doing it right can enable one to share consciousness with Azrael, the Angel of Death—to experience his perspective—and Wendell warns that some of these practices are “not for the faint of heart.”
She implores readers to consider what they are doing before trying out anything in the book. One must become comfortable in death’s presence, not afraid, so it’s a good idea to find some way to get close to death—apart from murder, that is.
I had been present at the deaths of several friends, been in a morgue, seen an autopsy, lingered in cemeteries, and had been immersed in numerous murder cases. I guessed I was ready, although I have to admit the idea of being alone in a mausoleum overnight (one of her suggestions) disturbed me. Still, I went right to the ritual of “High Necromancy,” because I consider myself to be pretty tough about matters of darkness. At least, I thought so before I read it.
Right away I felt the serious nature of this enigmatic rite, called “a ritual of passion and devotion.” It’s reserved for the practitioner who seeks “intimate consciousness” with the Angel of Death. In other words, you must have a pure desire to be “Death’s empath.” If your motives are anything less, you’ll likely be interrupted and expelled, but if you do it right, you’ll get the “high” of your life.
The requirements include finding a very private cemetery, because in some states the practice about to be described is illegal. This cemetery must provide access to a corpse without the use of force or vandalism, such as in a mausoleum. Then you need to familiarize yourself with the comings and goings around this cemetery, particularly of the caretakers. (Some have guard dogs at night, so don’t even think about it!) The ritual itself takes two days (or rather, a day and a night), beginning and ending at twilight. Wendell notes three specific dates when the “West gate” is most likely to be aligned with our world. To make this work, you need to bring:
a holly berry candle
a jasmine incense cone
a piece of amethyst
an “athame” (blade)
some milk mixed with a few drops of your blood
a rock and a wedge to keep a mausoleum door tightly closed once you’re inside
To get access to a corpse, you may need a casket key, which she says can be obtained from hardware stores (look for a hex key).
Now the ritual, which best involves a fairly decomposed corpse. This is used as a catalyst through which Azrael will emerge. You do various things with the corpse, such as:
Light the candles.
Pour some of the milk into its mouth.
Take its hand.
Extinguish all candles.
Wait silently.
You may feel a chill, a sense of presence, dizziness, melancholy, or intense sensuality, any of which are signs that Azrael has arrived. Then you may be transported into a new experience. “When you return to the present world,” Wendell promises, “you will understand those things hidden behind the scenes.”
To prepare to depart:
Savor this experience like a fine wine and allow the aroma to linger.
Relight the candle.
Kiss the catalyst.
Thank Azrael.
Make sure everything is restored to its previous state, although you leave the candle burning.
Don’t exit before the glow has left the amethyst.
Use the athame to pierce the corpse’s heart, leaving the blade behind. (This prevents both you and Azrael from being haunted by each other’s dreams and also seals the gate.)
I read this ritual and thought, okay, maybe I wasn’t ready. The idea of kissing a corpse was pretty daunting, not to mention that I’ve never been much of a magician.
However, I wanted to know if Leilah Wendell herself had actually done these things, so I made arrangements to meet her.
On Magazine Street in uptown New Orleans sits a purple-and-black house known to lovers of darkness as Westgate: House of Death. The name Westgate, symbolizes “the journey home.” Each of the four gates is a transitional point. The east gate represents birth and the west gate the shedding of the body.
It’s evident that Leilah is completely absorbed in her devotion to what she calls “death energy,” because in two decades she has grown from the author of a couple of books into a publisher. She also owns an art gallery and museum entirely dedicated to death. In her autobiography, Our Name Is Melancholy: The Complete Books of Azrael, she claims that at the age of four, she encountered an entity that she believes was the Angel of Death—one of the seven archangels. Although the visitation terrified her, she eventually accepted it. This rather romantic entity let her know that she was his physical manifestation, and he continued to enter her life in various forms.
From him she learned how to send out her astral spirit, and then she had a series of supernatural experiences. More to the point, she moved ever more deeply into the aesthetics of death via a passionate lovers’ tryst, and she now devotes herself to being a full-time prophet for Death’s spiritual messages.
Apparently others share her experience, because she has received hundreds of letters from people detailing their own encounters with Death in personal form, such as this one from a woman in New Mexico:
About a year ago, I attended the funeral of an acquaintance of my husband’s. 1 had no choice but to bring my children (ages five and seven) with me to the graveside service…. We were standing around the grave site while people took turns eulogizing the deceased. All of a sudden my five-year-old started walking off as if he saw something standing at-the foot of the grave. Everyone went silent as he walked up to a point, looked up and started talking, as if to a real person, but I saw no one. It was an awkward situation, as I couldn’t pull him away from this spot. A bit frustrated, I asked him, “Who are you talking to, anyway?”His reply unnerved everyone: “I’m talking to the really tall skinny man in the long black coat.” Of course, no one else saw this, or at least no one else admitted to seeing this. After the service I asked my son what they talked about. His reply was, “I don’t remember, but he talked without moving his lips.”
I parked in front of Westgate and walked up the steps just as a young man with long, wavy brown hair opened the door. I figured him to be Daniel Kemp, the curator and the author of The Book of Night. He shared with Leilah the desire to be close to Azrael. Daniel silently beckoned me in to a dark hallway and I looked up the wooden staircase to the right to see a slender, pale woman with brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses seated on the steps. She was dressed in black.
I knew at once that it was she. This was Leilah Wendell.
Before we talked, she invited me to look around her museum of death. She had spent most of her life researching and depicting personifications of death, and that was evident in what I saw. However, the museum is not as morbid as it may sound (or maybe my tastes are more morbid than I realize), because I found much in the room to be enchanting, even inspiring. On the black walls were detailed acrylic paintings of various scenes, from shrouded figures moving into the woods to a skeleton embracing a beautiful woman. Right in the middle of the floor was a huge statue of a winged golem. In front of this creature, Leilah told me, a businessman had once sat silently for hours until he began to cry. When he left, he simply said, “Thank you.”
In another dark room, I found a case full of silver jewelry and graveyard replicas, such as the famous skeleton image from the Susanna Jayne tombstone in Marblehead. There were no kitschy Halloween effects, no fake spiderwebs or children’s props. It seemed a place where people who loved death culture were taken seriously.
In a back room was a tall, life-size papier-mâché sculpture of the Angel of Death, Azrael, holding a swooning woman in his arms who looked very much like Leilah, and close by were more paintings and a shelf full of books about death. Leilah told me that a former army colonel had come here to ask a rather unusual favor: He was dying from cancer and wanted to stay in the gallery until his time came so that he could be in Azrael’s presence. Leilah granted his wish, and four days later that’s just where he died.
Leilah invited me into her room, painted black, so we could talk. Her black cat followed us in. I sat on her black-covered couch, while she sat on a bed.
She quickly told me that necrophilia has too long been vilified and that she wanted me to understand what it means to love Death. It’s a choice, a preference, not a compulsion. Love should not involve violation, but it does involve getting close to death. In other words, this was necromancy, as in “romantic” or necro-eroticism, not necrophilia as in the use of a corpse for selfish sexual gratification. The idea was to achieve emotional and spiritual intimacy with death.
“I don’t like life energy,” Leilah stated. “I avoid it.” In answer to the next obvious question, she admitted to several attempts to finally join Death, but then realized that she had a mission on Death’s behalf. It was given to her to spread the word.
I noticed a sculpture hanging on the wall of a figure wearing a death mask. Leilah was happy to explain it.
She said-that she’d once been a funeral director and a morgue assistant, and her primary interest had been in disinterring bodies for reburial—a passion she shared with a friend, John (another John!). Together they were called “the Resurrectionists.”
Leilah explained that she prefers the “moldy oldies” to the freshly dead and bacteria-laden “gooey Louies,” so she got the surprise of her life when John pulled up to her home one evening in his customized “Deathmobile” (a cross between a hearse and long-bed pickup truck). He hinted that he had brought her “something special” for her twenty-eighth birthday, and he then pulled out a large package wrapped in a red bow. Carrying it in and placing it on her carpet inside, he urged her to unwrap it. She did, and before her lay a dessicated corpse, remarkably preserved. It had been exhumed from a pauper’s cemetery and its disposition was pending.
“It’s yours until Tuesday,” he said. Then he left and she was alone with what had once been a man. The first thing she did was make a death mask, which became the centerpiece of the sculpture that I had noticed. The other thing she did—take the corpse to bed—I didn’t quite understand until she had me read a piece she had written about one of her first erotic experiences with a corpse. It was one of her surprise encounters with Azrael.
This had occurred in a cemetery in New York, in a small mausoleum. She had come across an old tomb, so she entered it. To her right were three coffins and to her left a sarcophagus that held a casket. What happened next is best told in her own words:
“I reached down into the ravaged casket and began to peel the sheet from the dead form. Gently unwrapping the brittle cloth from the decaying body, I had to reach underneath the corpse to untie the twine that held the withered arms folded across the chest. As I bent over him, one of the skeletal hands slowly reached up and caressed my body, and then another clasped me in a cold embrace!
“‘Here as well,’ I whispered to myself, as he pulled me down into the coffin until my lips pressed against his cool decay! The taste of his ancient love was like the bitter harvest of a dying bloom, and as sweet as an exotic nectar. I could feel the outline of his bones pressing up against my body. As I pulled the sheet away from his face I saw how magnificent and beautiful he was.
“‘Let me sleep beside you,’ I whispered as I gently parted the veil of cobwebs that covered him and climbed into the open casket and lay down beside him. Drawing the fragile corpse into my embrace, I could feel my heartbeat pounding against the hollow chest. For the first time in a long time, I felt close again to my beloved Death. Somehow, the dead were able to serve as direct catalysts between Death and myself. Being near ‘them’ somehow brought me closer to ‘Him,’ and made me more fully love all aspects of what He is.
“Lying beside Him, I suddenly began to feel more intentful movement! The attempting of a definite embrace sent shivers through my soul. The arms that pulled me down were tightening around me!
“‘Come through, come through, my love.’ I appealed silently to His attentive spirit. ‘I call to you, my most beloved,’ I said as I surrendered to His approaching gloom. The skeletal embrace became even more distinct, as the stirrings in my soul intensified…. The figure in my embrace was no longer a human remnant. The dust and decay had somehow reformed into something way beyond explanation! Something too incredible to describe. I knew it was my beloved Azrael. I could ‘feel’ His soul. By some magical means, He was able to alter the molecular structure of the decomposing elements and form them into a tangible chrysalis. A truly personified embodiment of Himself. A GENUINE, ANIMATED CATALYST!”
There was much more, but this was enough for me to understand that Leilah had certainly tried out the rituals that she had written in her necromantic spell book. She confirmed this. Being that close to a corpse not only did not disturb her, it put her into a swoon.
I felt the way I always do when someone tries to explain to me the ecstatic joys of financial planning—1 was polite but I didn’t really get it. Yet I couldn’t help but be impressed with how open and without guile Leilah was. She freely told me anything I wanted to know about these activities, and yet she’d had her share of people denouncing her. She knew nothing about me, really, yet here she was just opening up. I have to admit, I found her to be a complex and intelligent person. Although I wouldn’t want to climb into bed with a corpse, her view of necrophilia was certainly less brutal than what I’d heard before.
Body snatching has long served the purposes of religious cults that need certain human organs for their sacred rituals. In 1604, King Henry made it a felony in England to steal a corpse for the practice of witchcraft. It still goes on in New Orleans and other places around the country where cults practice dark rites, but grave robbers nowadays generally aim to raid tombs for jewelry, stained glass, or funereal statuary. One person in Cincinnati, Ohio, even “stole” images. He convinced morgue workers to allow him to take photographs of corpses posed with objects like sheet music and syringes. Into the hand of a young girl’s corpse he placed Alice in Wonderland, and he also got a shot of an infant autopsy before officials stepped in to stop him.
Despite the morbid nature of the activity, cemetery theft has a fascinating history that still reverberates. That someone has stolen artifacts from a mummy’s tomb thrills us with the idea that the thief is now cursed and will meet some dreadful end. We have some feeling that corpses are aware of violations and possess the power to avenge them.
Grave robbing reached its morbid height during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it served the medical establishments. Physicians needed to dissect bodies to improve their knowledge, and it was better for medical students to work on their own cadavers than merely watch the teacher.
At first, there were no real laws, except prohibitions against taking a corpse’s possessions, so grave robbers took care to leave behind the corpse’s clothing. However, that situation eventually changed. With the understanding that doctors could better help patients with a proper grasp of anatomy, the government nevertheless balked at allowing them to just go dig someone up. Fines were imposed and grave robbers were arrested.
In Britain, legal restrictions were especially strict. Although King Henry VIII allowed four corpses to be taken annually by doctors from the gallows, the supply was terribly inadequate for the increasing number of students. In some places, students were actually required to supply their own corpses, and there was no place to get them but the grave. That pitted them against the authorities, which gave rise to secret dissection rooms and midnight requisition crews, otherwise known as the “sack ’em up” men. At first the students (and professors) went out to dig up the bodies themselves, but those with money hired “resurrection” specialists, who were quite adept at spiriting a body out of a grave.
Corpse theft grew into big business and professionals tipped sextons or gravediggers to let them know when a body would be available. They also followed funeral processions so they would know where to go within the next few nights. Corpses were best if removed within ten days of death.
The snatchers would set up a small tent to shield the lantern, use wooden spades or picks, and dig down only at the head end. Then they’d break open the top part of the lid to lift the body out with a hook and rope. Once it was laid out at the graveside, they tied it into a compact position, generally doubled up, and shoved it into a sack. Real professionals working in teams could dig down, get the corpse, and replace the dirt and sod in about an hour. One gang of ghouls had stolen nearly eight hundred bodies in two years.
Bodies were also taken for their valuables, their teeth, and their fat, which was used for candles. A few people even had the thought that they could take a famous body, such as that of Abraham Lincoln, and hold it for ransom. In 1876, a gang broke into Lincoln’s tomb and managed to lift the former president’s coffin out of the sarcophagus before Pinkerton detectives interrupted them. The coffin was then embedded in steel and concrete.
People caught on to the danger to their deceased relatives and took pains to protect them … and themselves! Many feared the anatomist’s knife and did not want to end up on the dissecting table. Some turned to cremation as the only recourse, but there were other clever ways to outwit a ghoul. Since the snatchers generally put a hook through the jaw or a rope under the head and took a body out by the head and shoulders through broken wood, steel caskets began to be manufactured and sold. Some inventors also offered steel casket cages to place over the coffin, but since metal stayed around longer than wood, the cemetery managers frowned on these devices. They needed to recycle the graves. At any rate, the thieves figured out how to break through metal and get the corpses.
People also stood vigil until they felt sure that the corpse had decomposed sufficiently to no longer be of interest, but this was a wearing activity that required a number of people. One surgeon, who knew all too well what could become of him because he did it to others, insisted that he be wrapped in flannel blankets when he died and left in his rooms until he had decomposed. Only then was he to be transported to a cemetery.
A few cemeteries offered the service of a locked holding house, where bodies were laid out to rot past the point where medical schools would want them, but this was an extra service that cost money, so not everyone could afford it. Some undertakers sold harnesses to strap the body in place, while a few grave sites were rigged with bombs, guns, and gunpowder—and there were certainly fatalities. A medical student in Scotland tripped a spring-loaded gun and was instantly killed.
Once the body was delivered, a certain amount of haggling over price went on. Bodies were sold by the inch, and had to be in good condition—preferably without any marks on them. Sometimes only parts were brought in, or fetuses, and there was always the possibility that a fresh corpse harbored a contagious disease. Since the thieves were risking themselves, they expected to be paid well. If doctors and students wanted a steady supply from a reliable supplier, they had to negotiate well, because there was always another school looking for the same services. Resurrectionists were businessmen, after all.
Some did tire of digging up graves and figured that there was an easier ways of getting cadavers: murder. The term for a certain type of smothering that left no mark came to be known as “burking,” named after William Burke. He ran a boardinghouse in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his partner, William Hare. Together they would get their victims drunk and then either grab them from behind in an arm lock around the throat or sit on their chests while holding their nose and mouth closed. In nine months, they managed to kill sixteen people and then sold them one after another for an average of ten pounds apiece. When they were caught in 1828, Hare agreed to testify against Burke. He went free while his wife and Burke’s mistress fled the country. Burke was hanged, and in an ironic twist of fate, his corpse was turned over to the anatomists at Edinburgh University to be dissected. Thirty thousand people saw his execution and then his anatomized body, which was put on public display to deter others from mimicking his foul deeds.
The physician who was known to be Burke’s regular customer went on unhindered with his surgical career.
Only two years after Burke was hanged, another team in London turned to murder as well. They’d already supplied well over five hundred corpses from cemeteries, and then they killed three people by drugging them and then lowering them into a well, headfirst. They, too, were hanged and dissected.
Women got into the act, too, when a pair of prostitutes killed a sick child. It seems that the child just wouldn’t die as expected, so they played God. They were hanged for their deed, but the activity of selling corpses was so lucrative during certain times that one mother even tried to sell her own children.
The same conditions applied in the United States Anatomists were forced to pay someone to go dig up fresh corpses for study, and as recently as 1989, the discarded remains of some of these bodies from the nineteenth century were found in the cellar of a medical school in Atlanta, Georgia. As much as possible, the snatchers raided paupers’ graves.
Body snatching still exists today in some places. Charlie Chaplin, the famous British comedy actor, died on Christmas day in 1977 at the age of eighty-eight. He was buried in the cemetery at Corsier-sur-Vevey, near Switzerland’s Lake Geneva. By March of the following year, someone had stolen his corpse, coffin and all. His widow declined to pay a ransom of four hundred thousand pounds, claiming that he was with her in spirit and she didn’t much care where his remains were. Over two months later, some ten miles from the cemetery, the coffin was found in a cornfield. Two men were arrested and the body reinterred in a concrete vault.
As late as 1992 in Columbia, there was an attempt to murder a man to sell him as a medical specimen. He alerted police, who came upon a cache of bodies and parts. A security person was arrested and convicted of murdering fifty people to sell them to the medical school for two hundred dollars apiece.
This past year in Nepal, a woman was caught selling skulls from graves as curio items, while reward money inspired body snatchers in Vietnam to raid dozens of graves to pass off the bones as the remains of American soldiers.
The theft of a body in Italy in March 2001 made international headlines. Legendary banker Enrico Cuccia, the father of Italian capitalism, had died the year before. A team of men broke into his tomb in northern Italy, lifted the heavy slab, and removed the coffin. While authorities pondered the motive, they received a message from a man who claimed that he’d taken the corpse because he’d lost a fortune on the stock market. When the economy improved, he’d return it. Not long afterward came a ransom demand of $3.5 million, and soon Giampaolo Pesce was arrested and charged. The corpse was located in its coffin in a hayloft near Turin, and restored to its tomb.
Thus, grave robbing still happens, but these days the term “body snatcher” applies to mostly unscrupulous undertakers who want to claim the state’s burial allowance for the homeless or destitute. They “snatch” the bodies from morgues or hospitals, usually by some sort of bribery or manipulation that gives them an edge on this business. Since their primary motive is money, they’re viewed as ghouls.
Of all the stories I’ve heard about grave robbing and body parts, Ed Gein is the epitome of the ghoulish stereotype. Best known as the man who inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Thomas Harris’s Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, his story unfolded in the 1950s as one of shocking proportions.
When police investigated him one afternoon on suspicion of robbery, they snooped around his farm and then entered his barn. There they found evidence that he’d been hunting, but not for deer. Hung from the ceiling, feet first, was the headless corpse of a woman, slit from her genitals to her neck, washed cleaned, with her legs splayed wide apart. It was quite a shock, but that was only the beginning.
Gein had been raised by a domineering mother on a farm outside Plainfield, Wisconsin. By 1945, his father and brother had died and his mother had suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed. She eventually died. Alone and socially inept, Gein devoured books on human anatomy and Nazi experiments. Then one day he spotted a newspaper report about a woman who had just been buried. He decided to go out and dig her up so he could have a look at a real body—a female one. He got a friend named Gus, who was a gravedigger, to help him open up the grave, which was near where Gein’s own mother was buried. He continued with this habit, usually under a full moon, for the next ten years. Sometimes he took the entire corpse and sometimes just certain parts. He later claimed that he had dug up nine separate graves in three different cemeteries. (Police did not believe him until they went out to exhume the bodies … or tried to. Some weren’t there.)
Storing the organs in the refrigerator, he made things out of the bones and skin of these women. Sometimes he had sexual contact with them (though he denied that), and eventually he just went ahead and dug up his own mother. What he wanted to do was become a woman—that is, to become her. Rather than get a sex-change operation, he simply made himself a female body suit and a mask out of the skin taken from his grave thefts, and he would wear this and dance around. He also sometimes wore it to dig up graves.
Finally he decided to get bodies that were more pliable. That meant killing someone. In 1954 and 1957, Gein shot two older women who resembled his mother and brought them to his farm. No one suspected a thing, but eventually the police decided to have a look. When they invaded his home, they found a horror house that contained four noses, several bone fragments, nine death masks, a heart in a pan on the stove, a bowl made from a skull, ten female heads with the tops sawn off, human skin covering several chair seats, pieces of salted genitalia in a box, skulls on his bedposts, organs in the refrigerator, a pair of lips on a string, and much more. It was estimated that he had mutilated some fifteen women and kept their remains around him.
At his trial, he was found to be insane, and he died at the age of seventy-eight in a psychiatric institution. Since he had never actually hunted for deer, neighbors wondered what had actually been in the packages of fresh venison that he’d so generously brought them.
Gein was buried in his family’s plot, which is one of the cemeteries from which he stole bodies. On his gravestone it simply says, EDWARD GEIN, 1906–1984. A cross and two carved palm leaves decorate the front, and many tourists have come to chip off grim souvenirs.
Now someone has decided that what goes around comes around, and it’s Gein’s grave that has been violated. On a Saturday night in June 2000, some rather bold (and strong) thieves stole the two-hundred-pound gravestone. There were no leads, but police officers speculated that it would show up on some Internet auction site.