Benjamin - Funerals to die for: the craziest, creepiest, and most bizarre funeral traditions and practices ever

W hile you would think burying your dead would be pretty self-explanatory (dig a hole and then cry over it for a bit), history proves that there is no limit to the human imagination, especially when it comes to getting rid of dead bodies. Ever since humanity came up with the idea of mourning their dead they have been trying to perfect the process, and stumbling on some pretty bizarre rituals along the way. While some of the things that started out as crazy and slightly gross ways of dealing with corpses have now become commonplace, like cremation, other fads, like taking formal portraits of dead people, are hopefully best left to history. And while eating your relatives out of love may seem weird, do you really think what goes into embalming a corpse is any less gross? (The answer is no, not really.)

Ritual burial practices tell archaeologists a lot about humanity. In fact, burying people in symbolic ways, as opposed to just dumping the body because it smells bad, is considered by most paleoanthropologists to be directly tied to many other important developments in human behavior. As Homo sapiens began to develop language and religious beliefs they also started coming up with ideas about death and the afterlife, at which point we get well thought-out graves.

Humans are not the only animals to have some sort of burial practice, but we are by far the most complex about it. While elephants may return to their elephant graveyards to die, it can be argued that humans started becoming human the first time they added items to a grave for no other reason than so the corpse, or at least their spirit, would still have access to those things. While there is evidence that some prehuman prodigies may have started adding a flint knife or two to graves as many as 320,000 years ago, it was only about 100,000 years ago that ritual burial really took off. Once humans developed language they could explain their ideas about life and death to others, and one tribe could then explain those beliefs to other people as well. Soon humans were all digging graves and adding burial items in the hopes that the spirit of the dead would be happy in the afterlife. Suddenly people had a connection to their dead; they were no longer just bodies, but something to be respected with funeral rites.

Still it took a long time until every culture had a set religion and the burial rituals to go with them. By about 12,000 years ago every culture had their own special way of disposing of their dead, but these techniques changed drastically over the next twelve millennia and continue to change significantly today. Emerging technologies allow us to dispose of bodies in ways our ancestors could not possibly have dreamed of. In fact, it was only about 100 years ago that cremation became acceptable in the Western world, and today, the funeral business is a billion-dollar-a-year industry. While people may have huge differences in what we do and dont believe, one thing unites us all as humans: When those corpses show up we are going to dispose of them based on 100,000 years of increasingly complex rituals. Simple right? Read and be amazed my friends, read on.

H E IS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO WOULD BE ENORMOUSLY IMPROVED BY DEATH.
H. H. M UNRO (S AKI ), AUTHOR ( DIED 1916)

For as long as people have been burying their dead, there have been other people coming along and digging them right back up. While some stole the bodies themselves, most were after the sweet loot buried with the deceased. Almost every Egyptian kings pyramid or tomb was robbed numerous times within decades of their death in order to get at all the treasure held within. The graves of Chinese aristocrats were robbed so often that for centuries archaeologists thought the jade burial suits ancient chroniclers went on about were just a legend.

One of the strangest grave robbing sprees occurred over a three-year period during the 1860s in Salt Lake City, Utah. While you can probably at least understand why people in need of some extra dough or some slightly weird professional criminals would dig up graves in order to find valuables to resell, Jean Baptistea local gravediggerdid it for the love of fashion. And also because he was pretty bonkers.

Baptistes crimes might never have been discovered, but in 1862 a police officer shot and killed three criminals. The families of two of the men took care of their relatives burials, but the third body went unclaimed. A charitable local offered to pay for appropriate burial attire for the man and the criminal was interred in the Salt Lake City cemetery. A few months later his brother heard what happened and asked the body be dug up and moved to a different cemetery. Everyone involved was shocked when they opened the coffin and the corpse was completely naked. Not even a bowtie or a sombrero.