Various creatures sacred to the ancient Egyptians—from cats and crocodiles to baboons and ibises—were interred with the same care and ceremony lavished on human beings. Among the Chiribaya people of pre-Columbian Peru, dogs were not only laid to rest in their own cemeteries but also provided with warm blankets and food for the afterlife. And horses have received special posthumous treatment throughout the millennia, from Roman times (when champion chariot teams were accorded stately funerals) to the era of Buffalo Bill (one of whose favorite steeds, Old Charlie, was buried at sea with full honors).
Pet cemeteries themselves have existed since at least the 1800s. One of the oldest, founded in 1899, is the famed Cimetière des Chiens, located on the Île des Ravageurs, a small island in a northwestern suburb of Paris. Despite its name—which means “Cemetery of the Dogs”—this renowned “zoological necropolis” contains the graves of a large assortment of creatures: cats, birds, rabbits, horses, hamsters, turtles, and fish, as well as a scattering of more exotic beasts, including a lion, a gazelle, a desert fox, and a monkey.
Among its most famous occupants is the original Rin Tin Tin, canine star of several dozen wildly popular Hollywood adventure movies in the 1920s. (“Rinty,” as he was nicknamed, was born in France and, in the waning months of World War I, adopted as a pup by an American doughboy who brought him back to Los Angeles. Upon his death in 1931, the celebrity pooch was returned to his native soil.) The cemetery also features an impressive monument to an authentic canine hero—a St. Bernard rescue dog named Barry, who saved forty snow-stranded hikers in the Alps before being killed by the forty-first, who mistook the big shaggy dog for a bear.
Across the Channel stands another famed animal burial ground dating back to the Victorian era—the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery. Between 1880 (when a dog belonging to the Duke of Cambridge was interred in the garden behind the gatekeeper’s lodge) and 1915 (when the plot was full and further burials prohibited), three hundred dogs—along with the occasional cat—were laid to rest there. In keeping with the aristocratic pedigree of its original occupant, only upper-crust pets were permitted. Their neatly laid-out graves are marked with miniature tombstones inscribed with simple, heartfelt epitaphs, including (inevitably) an occasional quote from Shakespeare: “In memory of Ginger Blyth of Westbourne Terrace. His ‘little life was rounded with a sleep.’”
PET CEMETERY ALERT!
Warning! If you are a cat owner living in a small New England town and your beloved feline has just died, you might want to check out Stephen King’s 1983 novel, Pet Sematary (or the very faithful 1989 movie version), before deciding on how to dispose of the remains. A reworking of W. W. Jacobs’s classic story “The Monkey’s Paw,” Pet Sematary not only stands as one of the spookiest books ever to issue from the pen of America’s favorite horrormeister but also offers a very useful rule of thumb for every animal lover: namely, never bury your departed pet in a neighborhood cemetery located next to an ancient Indian burial ground, particularly if the latter is somehow endowed with the power to bring corpses to life.
The oldest pet cemetery in our own country is the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in Westchester County New York. It began life as an apple orchard, part of the country retreat of Dr. Samuel Johnson, a prominent Manhattan veterinarian. In 1896, Dr. Johnson permitted a bereaved friend to bury her pet dog on his property. When newspapers got wind of the story, he was besieged with requests from other New Yorkers, looking for a tranquil spot to inter their departed pets. Johnson set aside a three-acre section of his hillside orchard as a burial plot and it was soon dotted with tiny tombstones and other commemorative markers. Today, the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery is the permanent resting place of more than seventy thousand animals, including the pets of many one-time celebrities, from tough-guy movie star George Raft to former New York City mayor Jimmy Walker and the legendary jazz drummer Gene Krupa.
In the hundred-plus years since Dr. Johnson first allowed a friend’s dog to be buried on his property pet cemeteries have proliferated across the country. According to the International Association of Pet Cemeteries and Crematories, there are currently more than six hundred active pet cemeteries in the United States. Some are connected to other pet-related businesses (kennels, veterinary hospitals, animal shelters, etc.) and some are full-time operations dedicated specifically to animal disposal, while others are specially designated sections of human burying grounds.
A large number of ancillary businesses have also sprung up to serve the needs of bereaved pet owners: everything from memorial stones (www.rainbowbridgepetmemorials.com) and condolence gifts (www.doglovergiftbaskets.com) to online counseling services for grieving pet owners (www.grievingyourpet.com).
RECOMMENDED READING
Tom Weil’s engaging guide, The Cemetery Book: Graveyards, Catacombs, and Other Travel Haunts Around the World (Barnes & Noble, 1993), contains a long and informative chapter on international pet cemeteries. For those who like to adorn their coffee tables with lavishly illustrated gift books on animal burial, there is Edward C. Martin’s Dr. Johnson’s Apple Orchard: The Story of America’s First Pet Cemetery, available directly from the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery (www.petcem.com/books.htm).
Gladstone, Michigan:
Pet Casket Capital
of the World
No fun-filled family vacation involving death-related destinations can be considered complete without a trip to the Hoegh Pet Casket Company in Gladstone, Michigan, where visitors can take a guided tour of the factory, the world’s largest of its kind.
Founded in 1966, Hoegh (pronounced “Hoig”) produces caskets made of high-impact styrene. Eight different sizes are available for creatures ranging from parakeets to St. Bernards (they are also ideal for human arms and legs and are occasionally purchased by amputees who wish to give their severed limbs a decent burial). During the tour, visitors learn how the caskets are molded, trimmed, and finished. Other highlights include a simulated pet funeral and a detailed scale-model pet cemetery.
All in all, a highly educational experience and easily the number one tourist attraction in all of Gladstone (though the local walleye fishing runs a close second).
The Hoegh Pet Casket Company is located at 337 Delta Avenue, just east of Fourth Avenue, east of downtown Gladstone. Call 906-428-2151 to arrange a tour, available year-round, weekdays 8 A.M.–4 P.M.
In Memoriam: Fluffy
Pet obituaries, which began to appear in small-town newspapers a number of years ago under such titles as “Pet Passings” and “Pause to Remember” (Get it?), have become increasingly popular in recent years. Weirdly, they are often more heart-wrenching than the ones composed for humans. It would take a pretty callous person not to choke up at tributes such as this one, to a faithful pooch named Hoops: “My beloved Hoops passed away today. Watching him suffer was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to deal with. He was helpless—and I couldn’t do anything. There is a stillness in my home that is indescribable. In the time I had him, he provided me with a love that I never experienced. I thank God for bringing him to me. He loved me unconditionally and I hope that in his final hours he knew just how much I loved him.”
Pet-loss condolence card. Courtesy of Dr. Wallace Sife and the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement.
Not every pet obituary, of course, is this moving. Some have a charmingly childlike quality (“Bubbles was a loving hamster full of life and he never even bit anyone”); others are sweetly amusing (“To my beloved chicken, Milo—may you R.I.P. in chicken heaven”). And a few are just, well, strange: “Thoughts flicker in my mind like faint stars. I glint like a drop of dew in the morning sun and vanish. This space into which I now dissolve and disappear is the eternal color of your eyes.” This actually seems rather poetic until you realize it was written for a deceased rat named Dale.
Besides newspapers, various websites now offer a handy way to post obituaries for beloved pets. Three of the most popular are www.thefuneraldirectory.com, www.ilovedmypet.com, and www.heavenlypawson
line.com.
ASK DR. DEATH
Dear Dr. Death:
I’ve owned dogs my whole life and like to think I know just about everything regarding the canine species. One thing puzzles me, though. What exactly is the difference between a dog cadaver and a cadaver dog?
A Puzzled Pet Lover
Dear Puzzled:
Simply put, a dog cadaver is the dead body of a dog. Preserved dog cadavers are commonly used to teach basic canine anatomy in veterinary schools, which obtain specimens in various ways—from biological supply companies, breeders, animal shelters, and, increasingly, from ordinary pet owners who donate their deceased pets to educational institutions.
Cadaver dogs are a whole other kettle of fish (or bowl of kibble, ha ha). These remarkable police canines are similar to their bomb-and narcotics-sniffing cousins, only instead of the telltale scents of explosives or drugs, they have been taught to detect the odor of human remains.
Endowed with amazing olfactory organs—thousands of times more sensitive than a human’s—these dogs undergo an extensive training period during which they are exposed either to chemicals that simulate the smells of human cadavers at different stages of decomposition or to actual body parts. Once this phase of their conditioning is complete, they are taught how to track the source of the odor and to signal the location either by barking or lying down.
A well-trained cadaver dog can perform feats that seem positively supernatural, distinguishing the faintest whiff of human decomposition in places suffused with other powerful smells. In one demonstration, a cadaver dog was able to locate a small piece of human pinky finger that had been sealed inside a plastic bag and stuck in a garbage-filled Dumpster. This ability makes them invaluable tools in the area of HRD (human remains detection). They have proven highly effective not only in locating the corpses of long-buried murder victims but also in recovering remains from disaster sites such as the rubble of the World Trade Center.
Corpse-Napping:
Ransoming the Dead
Since the business of kidnapping relies on a simple, straightforward threat—“Pay up or you’ll never see this person alive again”—you wouldn’t think that abducting someone who’s already dead makes sound financial sense. Still, that hasn’t stopped certain criminals from digging up corpses and holding them for ransom. Few of these crimes have panned out for the perpetrators. In 1876, for example, an Illinois gang hatched a plot to steal Abraham Lincoln’s corpse and ransom it for $200,000 in gold. Breaking into the martyred president’s vault at the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, they pried off the lid of his marble sarcophagus and were in the process of removing the remains when Secret Service agents—who had gotten wind of the nefarious plot—swarmed inside and arrested the culprits.
Five years later, British body snatchers attempted to extort £6,000 by stealing the body of Alexander William Crawford Lindsay, 25th Earl of Crawford and 8th Earl of Balcarres. Relatives refused to fork over the ransom, however, and the body was eventually recovered. Equally unsuccessful were the pair of enterprising corpse-nappers who in 1976 snuck into the Swiss cemetery where the great silent-film comedian Charlie Chaplin was buried, dug up the heavy oak casket containing his remains, and carted it away. Announcing that “my husband lives on in my heart and mind, and it really doesn’t matter where his remains are,” his widow, Lady Oona O’Neill Chaplin, steadfastly refused to pay any ransom, even as the thieves kept lowering their demands from $600,000 to $250,000. Eventually, the two culprits were arrested and the Little Tramp’s unopened casket—after being recovered in a farmer’s cornfield—was reinterred. This time, however, it was sealed in concrete for good measure.
One of the few cases of successful corpse-napping occured in post-Civil War New York City when the body of Alexander T. Stewart (1803–1876) was abducted from what was supposed to be its final resting place. An Irish immigrant who settled in America at the age of eighteen, Stewart—dubbed the “Merchant Prince” of Manhattan—built a dry goods empire that eventually included two of the most imposing retail stores in New York. At the time of his death at the age of seventy-three, his personal fortune was estimated to be between $40 million and $50 million—equivalent to about $50 billion in today’s currency.
In November 1878, two and a half years after his death, Stewart’s unembalmed remains were stolen from his tomb in the cemetery of St. Mark’s Church in lower Manhattan. The stench issuing from the ransacked tomb was so intense that police were confident that the crime would be solved within days. After all, they reasoned, the thieves couldn’t possibly conceal such reeking plunder for long. In the event, Stewart’s corpse—or what remained of it—was not recovered until 1882, when his widow reportedly paid $20,000 for a bag of bones that were supposedly her husband’s. This time, his remains were interred beneath a Long Island cathedral in a crypt that—according to legend—is rigged with a security device that will cause the church bells to ring in the event of another break-in.
RECOMMENDED READING
The definitive account of the Stewart affair is Wayne Fanebust’s The Missing Corpse: Grave Robbing a Gilded Age Tycoon (Praeger, 2005), which supplements the story with lots of information on the Lincoln corpse-napping plot as well as the business of nineteenth-century body snatching in general.
Burke and Hare:
Making a Killing
from Corpses
Prior to the 1830s, British laws placed severe restrictions on human dissections, making it exceptionally difficult for doctors and medical students to obtain cadavers for anatomical study. As a result, aspiring surgeons and their teachers were often forced to turn to grave robbers—or “resurrection men,” as they were called—to supply them with raw material.
Though the names of William Burke and William Hare would become synonymous with this ghoulish breed of entrepreneur—the loathsome body snatcher who would sneak into a graveyard at night, dig up a freshly buried corpse, and sell it for a few pounds to an anatomy school—they were not, in fact, grave robbers but financially motivated serial killers. In 1827, Hare and his common-law wife were running a squalid boardinghouse in the Edinburgh slums when an elderly lodger died, owing them £4. To cover the debt, Hare hit upon the idea of selling the old man’s corpse to an anatomist. With the help of his friend Burke, he conveyed the cadaver to a medical school run by a celebrated surgeon, Dr. Robert Knox, who paid them £7 10s—an enormous sum to two poor Irish immigrants who normally made a pittance as laborers.
The body snatchers, William Burke (left) and William Hare.
Impressed with the monetary potential of dead bodies but disinclined to engage in the difficult, dirty, and dangerous business of grave robbing, Burke and Hare opted for an easier method of obtaining marketable corpses: they decided to produce their own. Not long afterward, when another of Hare’s lodgers fell ill, the two men eased him into a coma by feeding him whiskey, then suffocated him by pinching his nose and sealing his mouth. This time, they got £10 from Dr. Knox. Another ailing inmate of Hare’s hostelry soon met the same end.
Having exhausted the supply of sick lodgers at Hare’s boardinghouse, the two men began preying on neighborhood beggars, local prostitutes, and other street people. Luring them to Hare’s place with the promise of liquor and food, the two men would suddenly pounce upon the unwary victims and suffocate them. Fifteen people—twelve women, two handicapped boys, and an old man—were murdered this way before the two killers were caught.
To save his own skin, Hare turned king’s evidence. In January 1829, Burke was hanged before a cheering crowd of twenty-five thousand spectators and his body publicly dissected. His name would enter the English language, the verb burke meaning to murder someone for the purpose of dissection.
Two excellent books on the subject of body snatching are Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (Penguin, 1988) and Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2002).
; Digging Up the Goods
In the 1961 fright film, Mr. Sardonicus, the title character learns that a lottery ticket—purchased by his father prior to the old man’s death—has won the jackpot. But where’s the ticket? After a frantic search, he realizes to his horror that it is in the breast pocket of his father’s burial suit! Goaded by his shrewish wife, he sneaks into the cemetery at night, digs up the grave, and pries open the coffin—with highly traumatic results (when he sees his father’s hideous death-contorted features, his own face becomes frozen in a grotesque, skull-like rictus).
Mr. Sardonicus is, of course, pure Gothic fantasy. But something similar happened in real life to the Pre-Raphaelite painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1860, Rossetti wed the beautiful Elizabeth Siddal, his primary muse and model and a talented artist in her own right. Just two years later, Siddal died, apparently of a self-administered overdose of laudanum. At her funeral, the grief-stricken Rossetti placed a small notebook containing his latest, handwritten love poems into her coffin, slipping it under her flowing copper-red hair.
Seven years after her burial, Rossetti decided that it was time to publish the poems. Unfortunately, he had failed to keep copies. At the urging of his publisher, Rossetti agreed to have his wife’s coffin exhumed. The job was done at midnight. The box was opened and the book slipped from beneath the body, a few strands of corpse hair still clinging to it. Rossetti, who refused to attend and spent the night in an agony of horror, was told by those present that the years in the ground had not altered his wife’s appearance at all, except for her flowing red hair, which had grown so luxuriantly that it filled up the coffin.
The Whole Death Catalog Page 26