A Bad Night

Description of the bed chamber of countess Cornelia Bandi as discovered by her maid one morning in 1731, reprinted in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1745:

Four feet distance from the bed there was a heap of ashes, 2 legs untouched, from the foot to the knee, with their stockings on: between them was the lady’s head: whose brains, half of the back part of the skull, and the whole chin, were burnt to ashes; among which were found 3 fingers blackened. All the rest was ashes, which had this particular quality, that they left in the hand, when taken up, a greasy and stinking moisture.

… The bed received no damage; the blankets and sheets were only raised on one side, as when a person rises up from it, or goes in; the whole furniture, as well as the bed, was spread over with moist and ash-coloured soot, which had penetrated into the chest-of-drawers, even to foul the linens; nay the soot was also gone into a neighbouring kitchen, and hung on the walls, moveables, and utensils of it. From the pantry a piece of bread covered with that soot, and grown black, was given to several dogs, which refused to eat it.

“It is impossible that by any accident the lamp should have caused such a conflagration,” remarks the correspondent. “There is no room to suppose any supernatural cause. The likeliest cause then is a flash of lightning.”

Oops

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In 1981, wildlife photographer Carl McCunn paid a bush pilot to drop him near the Coleen River in northern Alaska. He thought he’d arranged for the pilot to pick him up again.

He hadn’t.

State troopers found his body the following year. He had tried to winterize his tent, then shot himself in the head. A 100-page diary read, “I think I should have used more foresight about arranging my departure.”

Memorial

Byron wasn’t shy with his political opinions — he proposed this epitaph for Lord Castlereagh, who died in 1822:

Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.

Dust to Dust

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An ingenious American lately computed that in the United States alone, half-a-ton of pure gold, equivalent to half-a-million of dollars, was annually put, as stuffing, into the teeth of the living, or otherwise employed by the dentist on people’s food-grinding apparatus; and inasmuch as none of this precious metal is ever extracted after death, our shrewd calculator ‘reckoned’ that, at this rate, a quantity of gold equal to all that now in circulation would, in the course of three centuries, be lying buried in the earth. It is strange to think that one digger, the sexton to wit, is constantly returning to mother earth nearly as much gold as the other digger is constantly extracting from her bosom.

— Patrick Maxwell, Pribbles and Prabbles, 1906

Editorializing

A marble-cutter, inscribing the words,–‘Lord, she was thine’ upon a tombstone, found that he had not figured his spaces correctly and he reached the end of the stone one letter short. The epitaph therefore read:

‘Lord, she was thin.’

— Frederic William Unger, Epitaphs, 1904

Playing Favorites

A tied football match in southern Congo came to an unexpected conclusion on Oct. 28, 1998, when a lightning bolt struck and killed all 11 members of the visiting team.

“The athletes from [home team] Basanga curiously came out of this catastrophe unscathed,” reported the Kinshasa newspaper L’Avenir.

“The exact nature of the lightning has divided the population in this region, which is known for its use of fetishes in football.”

R.I.P.

Here lies the body of Thomas Woodhen,
The most loving of husbands and amiable of men.

N.B.–His name was Woodcock, but it wouldn’t rhyme.

Erected by his loving widow.

From Epitaphiana: or, The Curiosities of Churchyard Literature, 1873.

Cogito Ergo Zoom

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Another great man who lost his head after death: René Descartes. The French philosopher died in Sweden in 1650 and was interred there for 16 years. When his body was exhumed for return to France, the ambassador appropriated his right index finger (“the instrument of immortal writing”) and, apparently inspired, one of the Swedish guards took the skull, engraving on it “Descartes’ skull, taken and carefully kept by Israel Planstrom when the body was sent to France and hidden since that time.”

The skull bounced around Europe for 150 years, with various owners carving their names on it; it was discovered missing only when the coffin was opened again in 1819. A Swedish chemist, no doubt rolling his eyes, tracked it down and returned it to the French academy.

Bonus beheading: When Sir Walter Raleigh was executed in 1618, his head was embalmed and given to his wife. She kept it until her death in 1647, when it was returned to Raleigh’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.

For those keeping score, our list now includes Descartes, Raleigh, Joseph Haydn, Oliver Cromwell, Jeremy Bentham, and Albert Einstein. Keep ’em coming.

(Thanks, Sarah.)

The Mummy of Birchin Bower

Terrified of being buried alive, Hannah Beswick left a bequest to her family physician, Charles White, on condition that she be kept above ground for 100 years. So when she died in 1758, White added her embalmed corpse to his collection of anatomical preparations, and every day he and two witnesses raised the veil and confirmed that she was indeed dead.

But 100 years is a long time, and the observations passed from reverent to perfunctory and finally absurd. The doctor eventually stored the mummy in an old grandfather clock, whose face he would open once a year to check on the patient, and when he died Miss Beswick was actually put on display in the entrance hall of the Manchester Natural History Museum, from which, wrote Edith Sitwell, the “cold dark shadow of her mummy hung over Manchester in the middle of the eighteenth century.”

Only in 1868, 110 years after her death, did the secretary of state issue an order for Hannah’s burial, and she was interred in an unmarked grave. Perhaps by that time she was glad of the rest.

See also My Dearly Departed.