The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  Though perfectly intact (apart from a worm hole or two), the little volume carried an “evil smell” and had to be disinfected page by page. Eventually, the poems were published—to generally unfavorable reviews. Though Rossetti had not witnessed the unearthing of his wife’s remains, he was haunted by thoughts of the exhumation for the rest of his life.

  The moral? When burying a loved one, take care not to place anything in the coffin that you might want to retrieve at a later date.

  Necrophilia

  In his classic study of aberrant behavior, Psychopathia Sexualis, the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing describes necrophilia as the most “repugnant” of all perversions. Considering that his case histories include a man who paid prostitutes to “tear out the eyes and entrails” of live bunnies while he masturbated and another who could only become aroused by having women “spit, urinate, and defecate in his mouth,” that’s saying quite a lot.

  In an oft-cited essay on the subject, “Sexual Attraction to Corpses: A Psychiatric Review of Necrophilia,” Drs. Jonathan P. Rosman and Phillip J. Resnick distinguish between “necrophiliac homicide,” in which a psychopath deliberately murders someone to have sex with the corpse, and what the good doctors somewhat oxymoronically label “regular necrophilia,” by which they apparently mean people who have sex with corpses in a more socially acceptable way. (The example they give is a female embalmer who “had sexual intercourse with 20–40 male corpses.” Exactly how she achieved this feat, Rosman and Resnick do not say.) They also identify two other categories: “necrophiliac fantasy,” in which a person regularly indulges in masturbatory daydreams about sex with the dead, and something the authors call “pseudo-necrophilia.” The example they cite for the latter is a “37-year-old single white man [who] went out drinking with his 49-year-old girlfriend” and “on the way home shot her in the head by accident.” He then “became sexually excited and had anal intercourse with the corpse” (which, to a layman, sounds a lot like actual necrophilia but apparently doesn’t count because it wasn’t premeditated and therefore qualifies as pseudo-necrophilia).

  In Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing describes a number of particularly appalling cases, including a French soldier named Bertrand, who would sneak into cemeteries, exhume female corpses, and violate them “with a madman’s frenzy;” a feebleminded gravedigger named Viktor Ardisson, who would sneak cadavers back to his rooms and have sex with them until they were too rotten even for his own depraved tastes; and a pervert named Henri Blot, who achieved a certain immortality in the annals of psychopathology when, at his trial, he blithely declared: “Everyone to his own taste. Mine is for corpses.”

  While degenerates such as these arouse only revulsion, there have been a number of other well-known cases in which necrophiliac acts have been motivated by what can only be described as desperate romantic love. A notorious case is that of Carl Tanzler, aka Carl von Cosel, a middle-aged radiologist who worked at a sanitarium in Key West, Florida, where in the early 1930s he became obsessed with a beautiful twenty-two-year-old patient named Maria Elena de Hoyos. When she died of tuberculosis, he smuggled her body back home and slept with it for seven years, jury-rigging it with piano wire, plaster of Paris, rags, glass eyes, and a wig as it gradually decomposed. (He also reportedly inserted a tube of some sort between her legs so that he could continue to enjoy sex with his ghastly bride.)

  In analyzing the causes of this perversion, Rosman and Resnick identify a number of “psychodynamic events that could lead to necrophilia,” including “poor self-esteem,” a “desire for a sexual object who is incapable of rejecting” the lover, and a tendency to indulge in “exciting fantasies of sex with a corpse.” Frankly, none of these explanations is very persuasive (lots of people who don’t sleep with corpses have low self-esteem and a fear of rejection, and anyone who fantasizes about sex with a cadaver is already in the grip of necrophiliac tendencies). More intriguing is their notion that at the root of necrophila is an inordinate terror of death, which—through the defense mechanism Freudians call a “reaction formation”—is transformed into its opposite, a pathological desire for the dead.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Rosman and Resnick’s essay can be found in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, vol. 17, no. 2, 1989, pp. 153–63. Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 classic has appeared in many editions, including a relatively recent paperback published by Bloat Books (1999). For a thorough retelling of the ghoulish tale of Carl Tanzler, see Ben Harrison, Undying Love: The True Story of a Passion That Defied Death (New Horizon Press, 1996).

  A very comprehensive discussion of necrophila by crime writer Katherine Ramsland can be found online at www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/necrophiles/ necro_4.html.

  “The Unquiet Grave”

  Though Carl Tanzler was clearly in a class by himself, the loss of a true love can be so overpowering that it drives even less obsessed men to necrophiliac extremes. No less a figure than Ralph Waldo Emerson—one of America’s greatest writers—is a case in point. Still devastated by grief a year after the death of his beloved first wife, Ellen, Emerson—as we know from his journal—snuck off to the cemetery one night and violated her grave (“I visited Ellen’s tomb and opened the coffin”).

  The same impulse is recorded in one of the most famous of all English ballads, “The Unquiet Grave”:

  “The wind doth blow today, my love,

  And a few small drops of rain;

  I never had but one true-love,

  In cold grave she was lain.

  “I’ll do as much for my true-love

  As any young man may;

  I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave

  For twelvemonth and a day.”

  The twelvemonth and a day being up,

  The dead began to speak

  “Oh who sits weeping on my grave,

  And will not let me sleep?”

  “Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,

  And will not let you sleep;

  For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,

  And that is all I seek.”

  “You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,

  But my breath smells earthy strong;

  If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,

  Your time will not be long.

  “Tis down in yonder garden green,

  Love, where we used to walk,

  The finest flower that e’er was seen

  Is withered to a stalk.

  “The stalk is withered dry, my love,

  So will our hearts decay;

  So make yourself content, my love,

  Till God calls you away.”

  To Burn or Not to Burn?

  Archaeological evidence makes it clear that cremation has been around since the Stone Age, though—viewing humanity as a whole—there has always been a certain amount of ambivalence about the practice. In some cultures, it was regarded as the only way to go. As Stephen Prothero writes in his highly informative book Purified by Fire (University of California Press, 2001):

  We know cremation was widely practiced in ancient India. The Vedas, Hinduism’s earliest scriptures, contain cremation hymns from the late second millennium BCE. The priests who sang those hymns expected the soul to survive its fiery ordeal, then to fly birdlike to the world of the ancestors or the world of the gods. Later Hindu scriptures, principally the Upanishads (texts from the middle of the first millennium BCE that popularized concepts such as reincarnation and karma), describe cremation as a purification process in which burning the body cleans the soul, preparing it for rebirth.

  In ancient Greece, cremation was the preferred method of corpse disposal. Homer provides a vivid picture of an elaborate cremation ceremony in Book 23 of the Iliad, when the grief-stricken Achilles stages a spectacular funeral for his fallen friend Patroclus. After gathering immense quantities of timber, the Achaeans construct an enormous pyre, each side a hundred feet long, and place the corpse atop the highest po
int. The body is covered with fat from sacrificed sheep and cattle and surrounded by two-handled jars of oil and honey. The flayed carcasses of the animals are added to the pyre, along with several butchered stallions, a pair of freshly killed dogs, and a dozen captive Trojans. When the fire won’t light, Achilles appeals to the gods, who send a roaring wind that sets the pyre ablaze. The next morning, Achilles and his comrades douse the flames with wine, then collect the bones and place them in a golden urn, protected by a double layer of animal fat.

  The ancient Romans also embraced cremation, at least for wealthier citizens. Julius Caesar, Brutus, Nero, and Caligula were among the luminaries whose corpses were cremated. Uncoffined bodies were placed atop pyres with vessels of aromatic gum and other sweet-smelling substances (according to Dr. Kenneth Iserson, the ever-excessive Nero “reportedly used more myrrh, incense, and fragrant oils to cremate one of his wives than was produced in all of Arabia that year”). After the corpse had been reduced to ashes, the bone fragments would be collected, bathed in milk, and placed in perfumed urns.

  Victorian cremation urn.

  In contrast, the ancient Israelites forbade cremation, which—like embalming—was viewed as a desecration of the body. Early Christians likewise repudiated the practice, which they associated with the paganism of the Greco-Roman world. By the fifth century, cremation had virtually vanished from Europe and was officially criminalized by the emperor Charlemagne in 789. For the next thousand-plus years, earth burial was essentially the only acceptable form of body disposal in the Christian West.

  It was not until the late nineteenth century that the situation began to change. A turning point occurred in 1869, when a group of medical experts at an international conference in Florence attacked earth burial as a threat to public health and endorsed cremation as a more sanitary alternative. In 1873, an Italian professor named Brunetti displayed a prototype cremation furnace, along with a glass box holding four pounds of incinerated human remains, at the Vienna Exposition. Accompanied by a sign that read “Vermibus erepti, puro consumimur igni” (“Saved from the worms, we are consumed by the flames”), Brunetti’s exhibit created a sensation. Before long, societies to promote cremation had sprung up in a number of major European cities, including London, where in 1874 Queen Victoria’s personal surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson, published what Stephen Prothero calls “the most influential pro-cremation book of the century,” The Treatment of the Body After Death.

  Two years later, in December 1876, a landmark event in the history of modern cremation took place in the United States. Amid increasing concerns that graveyards were a source of disease-bearing “miasmas,” the corpse of a gentleman named Charles De Palm was incinerated with much fanfare by a pro-cremation activist, Francis Julius LeMoyne, who constructed America’s first crematory on his estate in rural Pennsylvania. Newspapers all over the country covered the event. Other highly publicized cremations soon followed, including that of Mrs. Benjamin Pitman of Cincinnati, the second person to be consigned to LeMoyne’s flames and the first female to be cremated in the United States.

  In the following years, a debate raged between burial traditionalists and reform-minded “cremationists.” Resistance to the practice among religious leaders—who argued that the eventual resurrection of the body required an intact corpse—was forcefully answered by various freethinking clerics. In a sermon delivered to a standing-room-only crowd at New York City’s Lyric Hall, for example, the Reverend O. B. Frothingham insisted that an omnipotent God could just as easily “recover a shape from a heap of ashes” as “from a mound of dust.”

  Despite the arguments of Frothingham and other advocates who touted the sanitary financial, and even spiritual benefits of cremation, the American public failed to embrace the practice. For nearly a decade, LeMoyne’s crematory remained the only one in operation in this country. In 1884, the cremation movement received a much-needed boost from Samuel D. Gross, one of the nation’s leading surgeons (and the subject of Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece “The Gross Clinic”). After decades of dissecting corpses, Gross knew exactly what happens to human bodies when they decay, and he recoiled from the thought of earth burial. When he died in 1884, his cremation was big news and legitimized the practice in the eyes of many people.

  By the turn of the century, the controversy that had raged over cremation had largely gone away. In 1913, the Cremation Association of America was created by Hugo Erichsen, author of The Cremation of the Dead Considered from an Aesthetic, Sanitary, Religious, Historical, Medico-legal, and Economical Standpoint, “the first great pro-cremation work written by an American,” according to Stephen Prothero. Six years after its founding, its membership totaled seventy U.S. crematories. Over the next half century, public acceptance of cremation continued to grow at a slow but steady pace. By the outbreak of World War II, there were two hundred crematories in the United States.

  In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, interest in cremation declined, partly because it evoked associations with the horrors of the Nazi death camps, partly because of the country’s plunge into postwar conspicuous consumption, reflected as much in its taste for gaudy funerals as for the tail-finned automotive behemoths coming out of Detroit. That trend began to be reversed with the publication of Jessica Mitford’s anti-funeral-industry diatribe, The American Way of Death, in 1963. The sixties counterculture, which was in full swing by 1967, also saw cremation as a hip alternative to the stodgy funeral customs of the “establishment.” By the dawn of the new millennium, fully one-quarter of all corpses in the United States were disposed of by cremation, and the future looks even brighter. With a range of new and exciting postincineration options available to aging baby boomers—having their cremains shot into space, turned into synthetic diamond jewelry, incorporated into a coral reef, or stored in a one-of-a-kind objet d’art—cremation is hotter than ever!

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Stephen Prothero’s book is a highly readable chronicle of U.S. cremation history from its Gilded Age beginnings to the customized, consumer-conscious send-offs of today. Its bibliography lists most of the key works on the subject, dating back to the post-Civil War era.

  DEATH FUN FACT

  Did you know that when you see a bunch of carefree college students disporting themselves around a beach bonfire while on spring break, you are actually watching the unwitting performance of an archaic mortuary ritual? Etymologically, the word bonfire derives from bone fire, referring to a blaze on which the bones of corpses were consumed. In later centuries, bonfires continued to retain their association with human incineration since they were commonly employed to immolate heretics, martyrs, and those accused of witchcraft. Thankfully, we now live in an age where the only thing likely to get roasted on a bonfire is a hot dog.

  Cremation: Then and Now

  Cremation has come a long way since 1876, when Francis LeMoyne built America’s first crematory on his estate in rural Pennsylvania. LeMoyne’s facility was a plain, one-story red-brick affair that (according to one scandalized contemporary) had all the architectural appeal of a “large cigar box.” Its public space consisted of two bare chambers: a haphazardly furnished “reception room” with a few mismatched pieces of furniture and a “makeshift columbarium which looked no more sacred than an ordinary bookcase” (in the words of historian Stephen Prothero). The furnace room was equally unsightly, striking one observer as “loathsomely cheap and plain for its purpose”—“as unaesthetic as a bake-oven.”

  The inaugural cremation to be held at LeMoyne’s facility took place on December 6, 1876, when an émigré Austrian nobleman named Charles De Palm earned his place in American mortuary history by becoming the first person in the country to undergo what one newspaper called “scientific roasting”—“the careful and inodorous baking of a human being in an oven.” Preparatory to this landmark incineration, De Palm’s corpse was sprinkled with aromatic herbs and spices and covered with flowers and evergreen branches. From the initial firing of the furnace to
the final collection of the ashes, the entire process took nearly two days to complete. De Palm’s cremains were then sprinkled with perfume, placed in a Hindu-style urn, and transported to New York City—all, that is, except for a few bone fragments that were kept as a memento by LeMoyne or given away to curiosity seekers as souvenirs of the occasion.

  Early postcards of the LeMoyne Crematory. Courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society.

  Things happen much more expeditiously nowadays—and (for the most part) in far more attractive settings. Modern crematories often resemble chapels and feature comfortably appointed viewing rooms where family members can observe—and even participate in—the process. The body, enclosed in anything from a linen shroud to a cardboard container to a wood casket, is conveyed by motorized trolley from the viewing room to the cremator, a high-tech, computer-controlled furnace fired by one of several fuels, generally natural gas, propane, or oil.

  The actual chamber in which the incineration takes place is known as a retort and is capable of reaching temperatures high enough—between 1,400° and 2,100° F—to vaporize the internal organs, muscle tissue, and flesh, amounting to about 95 percent of the body. After an hour or two, all that’s left is about five to seven pounds of bone fragments, which are swept out of the retort by the operator and pulverized in a rotating drum known as a cremulator.

  DEATH FUN FACT

  The highly publicized incineration of Charles De Palm on December 6, 1876, was a milestone event in U.S. mortuary history—"the first cremation in modern America,” as it was widely billed. De Palm, however, was not the first Caucasian to be cremated in this country. That distinction belongs to Colonel Henry Laurens, described by Stephen Prothero as “a prominent merchant-planter from South Carolina and president of the Continental Congress” who had learned about cremation from his studies of Greek and Roman culture. In his will, Laurens directed his survivors to cremate his corpse in the open air, a wish that was carried out on his Charleston estate following his death in 1792.