Category:
Death
Death
Diner
Posted By: Paul - Sun May 18, 2025 -
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Category: Death, Food, Cartoons, Fictional Monsters
Freakish Accidents No. 7
Posted By: Paul - Mon May 05, 2025 -
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Category: Death, Domestic, Children, 1970s
When Sheep Fly
Posted By: Paul - Mon Apr 28, 2025 -
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Category: Animals, Death, Destruction, Highways, Roads, Streets and Traffic, Australia, Twenty-first Century
The Human Mummification Project
The ancient Egyptians practiced mummification for over 2000 years, but they never wrote down how they did it. In 1994, egyptologist Bob Brier decided that the only way to figure this out was to attempt to duplicate what they did, by mummifying a body.Brier collaborated with Ronn Wade, director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board. They obtained the body of a man in his late seventies who had died of a heart attack. His name has never been made public. The man had signed up to be a body donor, though of course he would have had no idea he was going to be mummified. His family was only told that his body was being used for a "long-term research project."
Brier's mummification project was featured in a 1994 National Geographic documentary (below). The mummy they produced still resides at the University of Maryland at Baltimore.
More info: The Maryland Mummy, "Surgical procedures during ancient Egyptian mummification," "Making a Modern Mummy"
Posted By: Alex - Tue Apr 22, 2025 -
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Category: Death, Experiments, Ancient Times
The Deaths of Violet and Daisy Hilton
The recent news about the sad deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, indicating that they perished days apart in the same house, with Hackman, dying second, not seeking help, has an even stranger precedent in the passing of once-famous conjoined twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton.
You can read their entire story at Wikipedia. But the salient part for our purposes is this paragraph:
On January 4, 1969, after they did not report to work and attempts to reach them by telephone failed, the police were called to investigate. The twins were found dead in their home, victims of the Hong Kong flu. According to the autopsy, Daisy died first; Violet died between two and four days later.[15] Violet had not called for any help.[14]
Realistically speaking, what could Violet do? Perhaps the corpse of her sister could have been amputated safely, perhaps not. Sharing no organs with her twin, Violet might have survived. But she made a choice.
Posted By: Paul - Sun Mar 23, 2025 -
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Category: Death, Human Marvels, Twentieth Century
Pope Pius IX and His Evil Eye
The Wikipedia page for the phenomenon known as the Evil Eye mentions:
The wielder of the evil eye, called the jettatore, is described as having a striking facial appearance, high arching brows with a stark stare that leaps from his eyes. He often has a reputation for clandestine involvement with dark powers and is the object of gossip about dealings in magic and other forbidden practices. Successful men having tremendous personal magnetism quickly gain notoriety as jettatori. Pope Pius IX [1846-1878] was dreaded for his evil eye, and a whole cycle of stories about the disasters that happened in his wake were current in Rome during the latter decades of the 19th century.
Could this be true? Well, we learn elsewhere...
And in this volume, we learn:
Posted By: Paul - Wed Mar 12, 2025 -
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Category: Death, Religion, Supernatural, Occult, Paranormal, Europe, Nineteenth Century
The Statue of Theagenes
Some weirdness from Ancient Greece, 5th century BCE. As told by Chris Gosden in Magic a History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present (2020).Theagenes of Thasos was an athlete. Part of his demonstration of strength was to carry a very heavy bronze statue from the marketplace to his house and back again. After Theagenes died a bronze statue of him was put up. An enemy of his took to flogging this statue at night, as a substitute for hitting Theagenes himself. The statue ended this practice by falling on the man and killing him. The statue was then tried for murder in a special court, the Prytaneum, reserved for the trial of what we would see as inanimate objects, although clearly the Greeks did not place the boundaries between living and lifeless where we do. The statue was found guilty and ordered into exile, which, in its case, meant it was thrown into the sea. When a famine hit Thasos, the Oracle of Delphi said all exiles should be allowed to return, which eventually led not just to the return of human exiles but to the statue being fished from the sea. The famine then abated.
More info: wikipedia, perseus.tufts.edu
The story reminds me of the guy in Arizona, in the 1980s, who decided to shoot a 27-foot saguaro cactus, but the cactus then fell on him and killed him. Clearly, sometimes inanimate objects fight back.
Posted By: Alex - Fri Feb 21, 2025 -
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Category: Death, Statues and Monuments, Ancient Times
Freakish Accidents No. 1
Posted By: Paul - Thu Feb 20, 2025 -
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Category: Accidents, Death, 1950s
“Peace At Last: The Afterdeath Experiences of John Lennon”
You can get a cheap used edition, or an inexpensive Kindle copy, if you want to learn what the ex-Beatle was up to.
Posted By: Paul - Thu Feb 06, 2025 -
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Category: Death, Music, Supernatural, Occult, Paranormal, Books, 1980s
Snowmen by David Lynch
Weirdo filmmaker David Lynch died two weeks ago, and we failed to remark upon it at the time. But in his honor, below are some of his snowmen photos put to eerie music.YouTube info:
Published in conjunction with David Lynch’s exhibition The Air is on Fire, presented at the Fondation Cartier in 2007, the book Snowmen features a series of black and white photographs of snowmen taken by the artist in Idaho in the early 1990s.
Posted By: Alex - Mon Feb 03, 2025 -
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Category: Death, Photography and Photographers, Video, Weather
| Who We Are |
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Contact Us |