Sometimes we humans do some pretty grisly things. A couple of hundred years ago it was discovered electricity would make muscles contract and some sideshow artists would carry corpses around with them and then attach electrodes to them and make them jump around. This was called entertainment in those days. One can only wonder how somebody could do this and not only that, why people would pay to see it. You never know what you might find and a researcher at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History got a shock when they discovered a manikin they were using in a display which had a complete human head. For years the museum had believed they were using a manikin which had human teeth implanted in it. What they really had was a manikin with the head of an ancient Roman who seemed to have had his tongue cut out for reasons unknown. The manikin dates back to the early or mid-1800s. It had been moved around quite a bit and had even made it to the New York Museum of Natural History at one time.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has come up with a new way of finding where bodies are buried. It consists of a long slender rod which is stuck into the ground and can even be put under concrete if a hole is drilled. The probe can detect trace amounts of ninhydrin-reactive nitrogen which collects in air pockets around a grave site. Before this probe was invented testing of air samples had to be done in a lab.

If one is going to buy a home they should never do it sight unseen and the reason for this is not only to inspect the structure and make sure it is not falling apart, but also to check out what is inside the house. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. A man in Florida bought a home at an auction. He knew what kind of home he was going to get. I presume the home was foreclosed but nobody went inside to check and make sure the owner was okay. The buyer, probably all excited because he got a bargain price, went to the home to check it out. He started to take a tour when he went inside he found a terrible mess. The home was fairly new having been built in 2007. The odor inside the house was almost unbearable and he found mail and bills dating back over three years, but that wasn’t the biggest surprise he found. In the bedroom was the corpse of the owner lying in bed. No one had gone inside to see if she was all right. There is a possibility they might have been able to save her life if she was found in time.

Pokémon GO had become extremely popular at the time and a teenager was trying to track down monsters. She said she was trying to get a Pokémon at the edge of the river. She climbed over a fence and was looking around for her prize when she noticed something in the water. It was the corpse of a man floating face down. She immediately called the police.

A twelve-year-old boy decided to go exploring through an abandoned house. I know when I was young I love to do stuff like this also and to be honest still do, I just choose not to. The boy was going through the house checking out everything. He was opening doors and looking in dark places. The neighbors thought the house was unoccupied but the boy found out differently. As he opened the closet door a mummified corpse fell out onto the floor. It was the former owner of the house. He had committed suicide many years before. He had been estranged from his family and friends so there was no one to report him missing. The boy ran home and told his mother who then went to the house with him and couldn’t believe what she saw. She called the authorities immediately.

Just when you think things can’t get any more macabre and disgusting you find out it can as illustrated by the fact of what happened in Budapest, Hungary. Workers were hired to renovate a home. When they got there they found a very large barrel full of rum. As they were working they were helping themselves to the contents of the barrel. Eventually all the rum was emptied out of the barrel, but when the workers went to move it still felt very heavy. They decided to open the barrel and see what was going on and to their horror they found they had been drinking rum which had a body soaking in it for over twenty years. The story of why the body was in the barrel sounds incredible, but it was said a woman was in Jamaica and her husband died. In order to avoid the paperwork and cost of shipping the body back she had him put into the barrel of rum and the barrel shipped back and just left him in it. It sounds more to me like she bumped this guy off.
A man in Philadelphia was running an unlicensed funeral home. When police investigated they found decaying bodies all over the place. The man was charged with the crime called abuse of bodies and sentenced to two years in prison. Along with the bodies officials found two bags full of human organs.

It had been twenty years since a woman’s son had moved out of her home and disappeared. The woman was blind and she was a hoarder and there was so much stuff around the house you couldn’t see the floor, they were just piles all over. One day the woman got sick and a relative took her to the hospital. While she was in the hospital the relative decided she would try and straighten the mess out. As she was sorting things and moving them around, she found the twenty year old body of the woman son. He hadn’t moved out it all, he had died and was covered with the hoarder’s debris.

No one wants to find a dead body, but unfortunately every once in a while one turns up. There are just so many of us on this planet it is bound to happen.