The dead have always been useful. Medical schools needed them, churches venerated pieces of them, and collectors paid for them. These stories follow bodies after death, which is often where the historical record becomes strangest.
Every story in Bodies, relics & medicine
- Lemba · 1976The Woman from Lemb: The Truth About the Goddess of DeathFour aristocratic families are said to have been wiped out by a cursed Cypriot statue. The statue is real. The families are not.
- Jerusalem · 1185The Leper King's Story No Film Would ShowKingdom of Heaven gave him a dignified death behind a silver mask, the truth was far crueller.
- Whitechapel, London · 1890The Truth Behind The Elephant ManThe real man behind the famous film was quieter, stranger and far more heartbreaking than any screenplay.
Correggio · 1940The Soap-Maker Who Murdered For LoveAn Italian woman murdered three neighbours and turned their bodies into soap and teacakes, believing she was saving her son.
Paris · 1778Voltaire's Final Battle With The ChurchThe Church tried to deny him a grave, but revolutionaries would carry his body to a hero's tomb thirteen years later.
Plainfield · 1957The Farmhouse That Inspired Modern HorrorA quiet Wisconsin handyman's crimes were so grotesque they invented Norman Bates, Leatherface and Buffalo Bill.
Geneva · 1816The Tragic Life Behind FrankensteinThe real 1818 novel is nothing like the lumbering movie monster — and the woman who wrote it lived a life as tragic as her fiction.
London · 1381The Archbishop's Head That Still SurvivesA raging mob hacked the Archbishop of Canterbury to death, and his mummified head still sits in a Suffolk church today.- Mount Yudono · 1800The Monks Who Mummified Themselves AliveFor a decade Buddhist monks starved and poisoned themselves in pursuit of one goal: becoming a living Buddha.
Washington, D.C. · 1941The Lobotomy That Silenced A KennedyDoctors kept cutting into her brain until a conscious young woman stopped making sense.
Oxford · 1650The Woman Who Woke Up In Her Own CoffinHanged, sealed in a coffin, and delivered to anatomists with knives ready, she was found alive when they opened the lid.- Longwood House, Saint Helena · 1821The Poison In Napoleon's WallpaperA dying emperor believed he was being murdered, and centuries later his own wallpaper became a suspect.
Edinburgh · 1828The Body Snatchers Behind A Grim PhraseThe phrase is older than the crimes it is blamed on, and the men blamed for it never robbed a grave. They murdered sixteen people instead.
New York City · 1836The Showman Who Sold Tickets To A DissectionP.T. Barnum built his fortune exhibiting an enslaved woman alive, then sold tickets to watch her autopsy.- London · 1485The Disease That Killed By NightfallTudor England lived in terror of a plague so fast it could kill a healthy person before sundown.
Stockport · 1829The Poison Behind The Mad HatterGenerations of hatters were slowly poisoned by mercury, giving English a phrase before Lewis Carroll ever used it.
Sardinia · 500 BCThe Poison Plant Behind The Word SardonicAn everyday word for bitter humour traces back to an ancient island poison that twisted its victims' faces into a deadly grin.
Newark, New Jersey · 1868The Real Story Behind Saved By The BellThe bell-string coffin myth is fake, but the Victorian fear of being buried alive was real enough to spawn actual escape coffins.
Sistine Chapel, Vatican City · 1541Michelangelo's Hidden Face In The Sistine ChapelHidden in his most famous fresco, the master painted his own tormented face on a flayed, empty human skin.
Harlem, New York City · 1947The Hoarders Who Died Buried In Their Own MansionTwo wealthy, brilliant brothers sealed themselves inside a mansion with 140 tons of hoarded junk, and died trapped in it.
Sutton Hoo, Suffolk · 625The King Who Vanished Into A Body-Shaped VoidA ship burial fit for a king held a fortune in gold, but the king's own body had completely dissolved away.
Westminster, London · 1481The Child Bride Whose Coffin Vanished For 500 YearsShe died before she was nine, a pawn of kings, and her tiny coffin was lost until a digging machine tore it open centuries later.
Repton, Derbyshire · 873The Viking Whose Bones May Have Been FoundA legendary Viking believed his bones would magically protect the land, and centuries later a mass grave may have proven it true.
Baghdad · 1258The Day The Mongols Drowned A LibraryThe Mongols sacked the greatest city on Earth, and the Tigris ran black with ink from a thousand years of lost knowledge.
Paris · 1898The Glowing Laboratory That Still KillsMarie Curie's radium-soaked notebooks and furniture remain dangerously radioactive more than a century after her death.
Paris · 1794The Woman Who Cast Faces From The GuillotineA wax modeller who once taught princesses at Versailles ended up pressing plaster into the still-warm faces of the guillotined.
Deir el-Medina · 1150 BCThe Tomb Robber's Charge SheetA 3,200-year-old papyrus names the women a powerful Egyptian craftsman was accused of assaulting, and his own tomb still stands as evidence.- Thebes · 1155 BCThe Pharaoh Murdered By His Own HaremA CT scan finally revealed the hidden throat wound that ended the reign of Egypt's last great pharaoh.
- Florence · 1348The Bones That Remembered The Black DeathTrade ships carried plague into Italy, and within months whole families vanished into forgotten charnel chapels.
- Santa Croce, Florence · 1642The Fingers Hidden In A Reliquary For CenturiesCondemned by the Inquisition and buried quietly, pieces of the man who moved the Earth resurfaced at an auction two centuries later.
- Prague · 1601The Nobleman Who Charted Stars With A Metal NoseA duel over a maths dispute cost him part of his face — and centuries later scientists opened his tomb to learn how he really died.
Vienna · 1809The Composer Buried Without His Own HeadEight days after his funeral, phrenology obsessives dug up a beloved composer and made off with his skull.
Paris · 1849The Heart Smuggled Home In A Jar Of BrandyTerrified of being buried alive, a dying composer asked for his heart to be cut out — and it made a secret journey home.- Bordeaux · 1828The Painter Whose Skeleton Came Home Without A HeadExiled and deaf, Spain's greatest painter died abroad — and when they finally brought him home, his skull was missing.
- Cavendish, Vermont · 1848The Iron Rod That Rewrote A Man's PersonalityA tamping iron shot through his skull and left the steady, capable foreman a changed man — and changed science forever.
Coney Island, New York · 1920The Ordinary Woman Billed As The World's UgliestA tumour transformed a nurse and mother's face beyond recognition, and a circus turned her survival into a sideshow act.
Silkeborg · 375 BCThe Bog Body So Fresh The Finders Called PoliceTwo brothers cutting peat found a face so peaceful and recent-looking they were certain they'd stumbled on a murder.
St Marx Cemetery, Vienna · 1791The Composer Buried In An Unmarked GraveThe man who wrote The Magic Flute and an unfinished Requiem was given the cheapest funeral money could buy.
Orange, New Jersey · 1922The Dial Painter Whose Bones Still GlowedA false diagnosis blamed her death on syphilis — the truth was the radium paint she'd been told to point with her lips.
Caen · 1087The Conqueror Whose Funeral Fell ApartThe king who took England died alone, stripped of his valuables, and his funeral turned into a grotesque disaster.
Valley of the Kings, Luxor · 1922The Curse That Followed The Boy King's TombWithin months of opening a pharaoh's sealed tomb, the people connected to the discovery began dying in ways that felt like a ledger being settled.- Rome · 80The Vanished Statue That Named The ColosseumRome's greatest arena was never named for itself — it borrowed its name from a giant bronze statue that vanished.
- Rome · 1198The Wheel In The Wall That Took Unwanted BabiesA pope looked at drowned infants in the Tiber and ordered a spinning wooden cylinder built into church walls instead.
Köping · 1775The Beautiful Colour That Poisoned EveryoneA chemist invents a brilliant new green pigment that Victorians put in everything from wallpaper to sweets, and it's slowly poisoning them all.
London · 1750The Paint Made From Ground-Up MummiesFor four centuries European artists painted with a warm brown pigment made from the powdered flesh and wrappings of the embalmed dead.
London · 1665The Plague Pits Still Under London's StreetsLondon's plague dead are real, documented and mostly shallow. Almost everything sensational said about them comes from a novel.
Rome · 897The Trial Of A Dead Pope's CorpseA newly elected pope has his predecessor's rotting body dug up, dressed in full vestments, and seated on a throne to stand trial.
Florence · 1500The Secret Dissections Behind The Mona LisaBy night, alone in the morgues of Florence and Milan, the painter of the Mona Lisa was cutting open at least thirty human corpses.- Giza · 2500 BCThe Workers' Town Buried Under The MythFor centuries the story was whipped slaves dragging stone for god-kings, but archaeologists found a planned, paid workers' town instead.
Braunschweig · 1798The Bells Rigged For The Not-Quite-DeadBefore the stethoscope existed, doctors couldn't reliably tell the dead from the merely unconscious, so inventors built coffins with bells attached.
Hiroshima · 1945The Shadow Burned Into The StepsIn less than a second, a bank's granite steps bleach white everywhere except where one person happened to be sitting.
Vienna · 1827The Composer Whose Skull Was StolenA genius conceals his encroaching deafness for years, and even after death, souvenir hunters aren't done taking pieces of him.
Vienna · 1847The Doctor Who Discovered Handwashing Too LateA Vienna doctor works out why women are dying of childbed fever in droves, and nobody in power wants to believe him.- Edinburgh · 1828The Landlord Who Turned To Murder For ProfitA simple scheme to sell a dead lodger's body to an anatomy school turns into a ten-month killing spree in Edinburgh.
- London · 1485The Disease That Killed In Hours And Then VanishedA mystery illness swept England five times in seventy years, killing within a day of the first symptom, then disappeared forever.
- Venice · 1423The Islands That Invented Forty Days Of IsolationTo hold back the plague, Venice invented a word and a system the whole world still uses: quarantine.
The Solent, Portsmouth · 1545The Warship That Sank Before The King's EyesHenry VIII watched his flagship heel over and vanish beneath the waves in under a minute, taking hundreds of trapped men with her.
Paris · 1794The Chemist The Revolution Had No Time ForThe man who discovered oxygen was guillotined not for his science, but for a tax company he once belonged to.
London · 1832The Philosopher Who Attends His Own MeetingsHe carried glass eyes in his pocket for years, waiting to have his own preserved skeleton put on permanent display.- Kutná Hora · 1318The Cemetery That Became A ChandelierA handful of holy soil made one graveyard so coveted that its overflow of bones became a chapel's decoration.
Pont-Saint-Esprit · 1951The Night A French Town Lost Its MindA whole town began hallucinating after eating bread from one bakery, and people started jumping from windows.
Arguin Bank, off Mauritania · 1816The Raft That Inspired A Masterpiece147 people were abandoned on a raft in the Atlantic — starvation, madness and cannibalism followed before rescue.
Lindow Moss, Wilmslow · 60The Bog Body With Three Ways To DieA 2,000-year-old body pulled from a Cheshire bog bore a smashed skull, a garrotte, and a slit throat.
Paris · 1780The Cemetery That Rose Above The StreetsCenturies of bodies raised a Paris graveyard eight feet above the surrounding streets before it finally gave way.- Palermo · 1920The Sleeping Beauty Who Never DecayedA grieving father had his two-year-old daughter embalmed with a secret formula — a century later she still looks asleep.
Herculaneum · 79The Boathouses of HerculaneumThree hundred people sheltered from Vesuvius in stone boathouses, and superheated gas killed them all in an instant.
Bethnal Green, London · 1831The Body Snatchers of Nova Scotia GardensA veteran grave robber stopped digging and started killing when he realized freshly murdered bodies paid better.
Greenwich, London · 1553The Boy King's Hidden CollapseBehind closed doors, the nine-year-old king who inherited a dynasty rotted from a lung disease his advisors desperately hid.- Windsor · 1547The Rotting Death of Henry VIIIEngland's most feared king died fat, diseased, and stinking of infection in a bed few dared approach.
- London · 1543The Portrait That Became a Death WarrantA court painter's flattering portrait of a bride-to-be enraged a king desperate for the truth.
- Tower of London, London · 1503The Queen Whose Death Broke a KingA desperate late pregnancy killed a beloved queen and drove her husband into total madness.
- London · 1562The Lady Who Caught the Queen's SmallpoxShe nursed a dying queen back to health and paid for it with her own face.
- Greenwich Palace, London · 1553The Boy King Whose Lungs Rotted Inside HimHis skin turned green and his legs swelled as he coughed up pieces of his own blackened lungs.
- Burgh by Sands · 1307The King Who Wanted His Bones Carried Into BattleDying of dysentery on the border, he ordered his flesh boiled away so his skeleton could lead the army.
- Teba · 1330The Heart Thrown Into Battle Against The EnemySurrounded and facing certain death, the knight hurled his dead king's heart into the enemy line and followed it.
- Windsor Castle · 1811The Mad King Chained Inside His Own PalaceBlind, deaf and screaming for hours, he was restrained by his own doctors while his family hid from him.
- Syon House, London · 1547The King's Corpse The Dogs Got To FirstSealed in lead and left overnight, his body leaked and swelled until stray dogs found their way inside the room.
- Kimbolton Castle · 1536The Queen Whose Heart Turned BlackEmbalmers found every organ healthy except one — shrivelled, black, and hideous to look at.
- London · 1797The Feminist Philosopher Killed by ChildbirthShe wrote one of history's first feminist manifestos, then died days after giving birth to the daughter who wrote Frankenstein.
- North Brother Island, New York · 1938The Cook Who Refused to Believe She Was Typhoid MaryShe infected dozens as an asymptomatic carrier and spent 26 years in forced isolation, still insisting she was innocent.