the visit dead bodies

‘The Visit’ Ending Explained: Family Reunions Can Be Torture

What's wrong with Grandma?

The Big Picture

• In M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit , the main characters discover that the grandparents they are staying with are actually dangerous imposters.
• The twist is revealed when the children's mother realizes that the people claiming to be their grandparents are strangers who have assumed their identities.
• The climax of the film involves a tense and dangerous confrontation between the children and the imposters, resulting in the reveal of the true identities of the grandparents.

M. Night Shyamalan is considered a master at delivering drop-your-popcorn-level twisty conclusions to his haunting films. People still talk about the end of The Sixth Sense as perhaps one of the greatest twists in the history of modern cinema. The jaw-dropper at the end of Unbreakable ranks close to the top as well. But there is another pretty decent curveball that the director tosses up in a lesser-known movie that is currently streaming on Max. In 2016's The Visit (which is currently streaming on Max ) he plays on the hallowed relationship between children and their doting grandparents. How could Shyamalan toy with the innocence of this? It is an excellent film that deftly blends found footage with the director's signature slow-burning tension to leave audiences with yet another "WTF?" moment . Let's dig into what exactly happens at the end of his underrated movie, The Visit .

Two siblings become increasingly frightened by their grandparents' disturbing behavior while visiting them on vacation.

What is 'The Visit' About?

Young Becca Jamison ( Olivia DeJonge ) and little brother Tyler ( Ed Oxenbould ) are sent away by their divorced mother Loretta ( Kathryn Hahn ) to finally meet and spend some time with their grandparents , Frederick, or Pop Pop ( Peter McRobbie ), and Maria, better known as Nana ( Deanna Dunagan ). They have a nice rural estate away from the hustle and bustle of the city, and it feels like this is going to be a heartwarming story of two generations of the Jamisons getting to know each other. It seems a bit odd that these two preteens have yet to meet their maternal grandparents, but Shyamalan explains that nicely in the first few scenes: Loretta has had a years-long falling out with her parents after leaving the family farm at the age of 19.

M. Night Shyamalan’s Eerie Found Footage Horror Movie Deserves Another Look

Loretta is still estranged from her parents but she wants her children to have a relationship with them — she only wants to go on a cruise with her new boyfriend and needs someone to watch the kids. So, the children have no idea what their Nana and Pop Pop actually look like. And you can feel something amiss from the very beginning of the film as the two precocious but excited kids set off to meet their grandparents. The entire film is told through the kids' (mainly Becca, an aspiring filmmaker) camcorder, as they have decided to document their trip. It's clear right away that Becca resents her father as a result of his abandonment, as she refuses to include any footage of her dad in her film.

Shyamalan Expertly Builds Tension in 'The Visit'

Upon the kids' arrival, Nana and Pop Pop seem like regular grandparents with regular questions like, "Do you like sports?" and "Why are your pants so low?" Nana tends to the chores like cooking and cleaning while Pop Pop handles the more rugged work outdoors like cutting wood. Naturally, Shyamalan tightens the screws immediately when the audience discovers that there is little to no cell phone reception, so he can isolate our four players into a single space. The Grandparents seem fairly easygoing but they have one strict rule — the kids must not come out of their bedroom after 9:30 pm. The very first night, Nana exhibits some bizarre behavior, walking aimlessly through the downstairs portion of the house and vomiting on the floor. However, the next morning she seems to be just fine.

Pop Pop explains to Becca and Tyler that she suffers from "sundowning" which is a very real diagnosis that usually affects the elderly . He tells them that at night Nana gets this feeling that something is in her body and just wants to get out. Pop Pop is clear and coherent, and yet again, we, along with our two young lead characters, assume the grandparents, while odd, are nothing to fear. A Zoom call with Loretta further assuages their fear by explaining away all the strange behavior as part of getting older. It's a back-and-forth that Shyamalan expertly navigates by pushing the audience only so far before reeling it back in with a logical explanation. But soon, things become inexplicably dire and dangerous.

"What's in the shed?" Tyler asks as he looks into the camera while contributing to Becca's documentary . "Is it dead bodies?" What he discovers is a pile of used, discarded adult diapers filled with Pop Pop's excrement. The smell sends Tyler reeling, and he falls out of the shed onto the snowy ground. This time, it's Nana who explains away Pop Pop's odd behavior. She tells her grandson that Pop Pop has incontinence and is so proud that he hides his waste in the shed. At this point, everything seems very odd to say the least, but there is nothing to suggest anything sinister is afoot . Not yet anyway. Even after he attacks a random stranger who he believes is watching him out on the streets on a trip into town, you still just think that maybe Pop Pop may just have a loose screw. However, the sense that these elderly people are something more than doting parents is intensified when Nana leaves Becca inside the oven for several seconds.

What Is the Twist at the End of 'The Visit'?

"Those aren't your grandparents?" Get the heck out of here! What?! Loretta finally sees the two people claiming to be her parents and tells Becca and Tyler via Skype that they aren't their beloved Nana and Pop Pop, but two complete strangers who have assumed their identities. Loretta immediately calls the police, but it will take hours for help to arrive at the remote farmhouse. Becca and Tyler are going to have to play along with these dangerous imposters. After the most tense and awkward game of Yahtzee in the history of board games, things get really, really ugly. Nana and Pop Pop haven't laid a hand on either of the kids in the movie so far. You can feel the slow and excruciating tension that Shyamalan is building . He knows that the audience is waiting for that "point of no return" moment when it is crystal clear that Becca and Tyler's lives are in danger. Becca manages to escape to the basement to discover the dead bodies of two elderly people murdered. Nana and Pop Pop are escaped mental patients from the nearby psychiatric hospital and have killed the real Jamison grandparents.

What Happens at the End of 'The Visit'?

Pop Pop realizes their cover is blown and becomes physical with Becca. He's upset that Becca is ruining Nana's perfect week as a grandmother. He tells her, "We're all dying today, Becca!" pushing her into a pitch-black upstairs room. Meanwhile, he grabs Tyler and takes him into the kitchen, and does one of the most foul and stomach-turning things ever in a Shyamalan film . He takes his used diaper and shoves it in the boy's face. He knows that Tyler is a germaphobe, and it is the most diabolical and traumatizing thing he could do to the boy. Becca is trapped upstairs with the sundowning Nana, fighting for her own life. After a struggle, Becca grasps a shard of glass from the broken mirror and is able to stab Nana multiple times in the gut.

She breaks the lock on the door and runs downstairs to help Tyler. She pulls "Pop Pop" off her traumatized younger brother. Suddenly, Tyler snaps out of his stupor and releases the pent-up anger of his football tackling lessons with his estranged father. He knocks Pop Pop to the ground and slams the refrigerator door on his head over and over . This is significant because earlier in the movie, Becca ribs Tyler about how he froze up during a big play in a youth football game, and this time he comes through to save Becca in the final kitchen scene conquering his biggest fears.

Loretta and the police arrive and the kids run frantically out of the house. The final scene has Loretta setting the record straight for the documentary about the traumatic moments surrounding her running away from home. 15 years before the events of the film, before Becca was born, Loretta fell out with her parents over her decision to marry her teacher. The argument led to Loretta and her parents getting physical with each other, and she left home that night and never responded to their attempts and pleas to reconnect. It's the most emotional scene in the film as Loretta is feeling a huge amount of guilt at never getting to say she was sorry for the strained relationship between her and her parents or getting to possibly hear an apology for the wrongs they also committed. Loretta tells Becca "Don't hold on to anger! You hear me?" The two then share a meaningful embrace. And the final shot is of the two kids with their dad on a birthday when they were much younger.

The Visit is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

Watch on Max

M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit Ending, Explained

M. Night Shyamalan's horror movies often include a fun twist, and his 2016 release The Visit has a compelling ending with one of the coolest reveals.

M. Night Shyamalan's twist endings are the hallmark of his career, and his 2015 movie The Visit has one of the most exciting ones. Olivia DeJonge, beloved for playing Ashley in the twisted Christmas horror film Better Watch Out, stars as Becca, a teenage girl who stays with her grandparents alongside her brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould). What should be a fun and peaceful family vacation becomes a perplexing and mysterious nightmare and the teenagers must scramble to discover the dark and haunting truth.

The M. Night Shyamalan horror movie has an exciting ending that shifts the audience's perception of the story, proving once again that the filmmaker is great at providing surprising moments that no one sees coming. The final scenes of The Visit make this one of the most unnerving horror movies of the 2010s.

RELATED: Signs: Joaquin Phoenix’s Character is a Perfect Metaphor for M. Night Shyamalan's Filmmaking

What Happens At The End Of The Visit, And What Is The Twist Ending?

Becca falls into the final girl horror movie trope when she makes an important discovery that is key to the ending of The Visit . When she discovers the dead bodies of her and Ed's grandparents, she also sees uniforms from the hospital where they were employed. This helps her see that "Nana" and "Pop Pop" were patients who ran away, killed their grandparents, and pretended to be them. This is a huge plot twist that was hard to see coming.

The satisfying horror movie ending has the siblings fighting back, but the final scenes are tense and scary, and their survival never feels like a guarantee. Pop Pop locks Becca in her room and hurts Tyler, but Tyler kills Pop Pop and Becca kills Nana. The teenagers are able to get away and talk to the police about what just happened.

The Visit ending works on two levels: a fast-paced, thrilling example of a good horror movie plot twist and also an emotional story about family bonds and problems. Becca and her mom Loretta (Kathryn Hayn) have a tough conversation about how Loretta never talked to her parents after a fight 15 years prior. Loretta wants Becca to stop feeling anger about her own dad's decision to leave the family behind, and the two characters share a sweet moment that helps Becca move forward.

This adds an extra layer to the movie and makes Becca a more fully formed character. It also makes both Becca and Ed feel real since they may be dealing with this out-of-this-world situation, but they are also regular teenagers who feel the pain of a parent who doesn't show them the love that they deserve. While Shyamalan's movie Old is a bad adaptation , The Visit shares that sometimes, it can be difficult to get along with family and it can be tough to move on from past hurts. The movie may have a fun and flashy twist, but it has some deep moments as well that can't be ignored.

How Does This Twist Compare To Others In M. Night Shyamalan Horror Movies?

The Visit ending has one of the best and most unpredictable horror movie plot twists , which makes sense given M. Night Shyamalan's reputation for having shocking moments in most of his films. When comparing the reveal of the identity of "Nana" and "Pop Pop," it's fun to think about the other big reveals in the filmmaker's career. Of course, the standard will always be the twist in the important horror movie The Sixth Sense when it turns out that Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is actually dead and that's one reason for his sweet bond with Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment).

The twist at the end of The Visit might not be quite as stunning as the one in The Sixth Sense , which will always be one of the best horror movie plot twists as it creates such a compelling atmosphere of shock and awe.

However, The Visit still has a fresh and different ending and the final scenes prove the strong character development of the movie. At first, Pop Pop and Nana seem perfectly normal and innocent, and no one would think that grandparents would be evil. And even when Becca and Ed start noticing weird things, it's hard to think that these characters might not be who they are claiming to be. That would mean that they are truly evil and diabolical, and they seem so naive.

The Visit twist ending also works because it's so creepy. Like Pearl (Mia Goth) and Howard (Stephen Ure) in X and Pearl , the patients lying about their identities are definitely unsettling. The movies make sure that the characters are odd and mysterious, but they never seem like they could be killers until audiences finally see them causing havoc.

NEXT: 5 Nonsensical Plot Twists In Horror Movies

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Two siblings become increasingly frightened by their grandparents' disturbing behavior while visiting them on vacation. Two siblings become increasingly frightened by their grandparents' disturbing behavior while visiting them on vacation. Two siblings become increasingly frightened by their grandparents' disturbing behavior while visiting them on vacation.

• M. Night Shyamalan
• Olivia DeJonge
• Ed Oxenbould
• Deanna Dunagan
• 785 User reviews
• 437 Critic reviews
• 55 Metascore
• 1 win & 14 nominations

• Man on the Street

• Young Becca

• Young Tyler

• Train Passenger
• (uncredited)

• Street Walker
• Police Officer
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia According to statements made on Twitter, director M. Night Shyamalan prepared three different cuts of the film: one that was "pure comedy," another that was "pure horror," and a final one that "fell somewhere in between."
• Goofs The amount of snow covering the landscape varies dramatically from day to day and even between scenes taking place on the same day.

Grandma : Would you mind getting inside the oven to clean it?

• Alternate versions In the FX broadcast, to keep the TV-14 rating, the defecation featured in the movie are censored. In addition, two scenes involving nudity is blurred out.
• Connections Featured in Late Night with Seth Meyers: Andy Samberg/Kevin Love/M. Night Shyamalan/Abe Laboriel Jr. (2015)
• Soundtracks Possession Written by Harry Revel Performed by Les Baxter and His Orchestra and Chorus [Theremin - Dr. Samuel Hoffman ] Courtesy of RCA Records By arrangement with Sony Music Licensing

User reviews 785

• moviewizguy
• Sep 2, 2015
• September 11, 2015 (United States)
• United States
• Untitled Blumhouse Horror 1
• 3049 Merlin Road, Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, USA (Exterior House)
• Blinding Edge Pictures
• Blumhouse Productions
• Neighborhood Film Co.
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $5,000,000 (estimated)
• $65,206,105
• $25,427,560
• Sep 13, 2015
• $98,450,062

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 34 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Netflix’s Bodies Timelines and Time Travel, Fully Explained

Netflix’s ‘ Bodies ’ creates a complex mystery when one dead body shows up in four different years at the same time in the same place, with which the show establishes itself as a sci-fi time travel series, bracing the audience for a journey full of many twists and turns. As in any time travel story, things get rather complicated, with the four timelines getting mixed up with each other as the actions of one impact the events in another. Over eight episodes, the show does disentangle a lot of it, explaining how it’s all happening, but it can still get a bit convoluted to place the events when they happen so out of order. Here, we break down the nature of time travel and timelines created by it in ‘Bodies.’ SPOILERS AHEAD

The Throat and the Deutsch Particle Create Time Travel

In 2053, scientist Gabriel Defoe dedicates his life to studying the Deutsch Particle (which is most likely a reference to physicist David Deutsch and his theories regarding the grandfather paradox in time travel). During a lecture, he tells his students about a theory where the Deutsch particle could split into two, with each particle moving in the opposite direction in time. One particle spins towards the past, while the other towards the future, with both situations being equally likely. This means that you could end up in the past or the future, and most likely, in both at the same time!

During his research, Defeo comes across “an abnormal neutrino trace,” which leads to the temporal displacement of any object or person whenever they get too close to it. The closer you get, the more its field impacts you, and the farther you can see in time. This is the basis of the time machine, known as the Throat, using which a Deutsch particle can be split, opening the door for a person to enter it and travel in time. This is what Elias Mannix uses to go to 1889.

When Defeo tries to go through it, he is shot by Iris Maplewood, and the shot reverberates through the machine, further splitting the timelines and throwing Defeo into four different years: 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053. Let’s take a look at the impact that Elias and Defeo’s entry into these timelines makes on the lives of several people.

1889: Elias Becomes Julian Harker

Traveling from 2053, Elias Mannix ends up in 1889 in a back alley of Longharvest Lane. He takes a bullet in his leg before entering the machine, but the bullet is gone, and he ends up with the wound, which gives him a limp for the rest of his life. He is taken to the hospital, where he discovers that the Harker family has dedicated a wing to the name of Julian Harker, who died in the war. He claims to be Julian, and as expected, Julian’s mother, Agatha, doesn’t exactly dispute him.

When Agatha finally questions Elias about taking over the identity of her dead son, he reveals everything to her. He confesses that he is not her son, and neither did he ever cross paths with him. But he is from the future, and becoming Julian Harker is an important step in his journey to create the world that he eventually ends up creating. In return for taking over the identity of her son, Julian promises to love Agatha like his own mother while also using his knowledge from the future to make her a lot of money.

1890: Alfred Hillinghead Finds the Dead Body

In 2053, after Elias jumped into the time machine, Defeo knew he had to play his part too. He knew about the predestined path laid out for him, even if it meant his death, and he chose to walk it. As expected, he is shot in the eye and ends up in four different timelines. In 1890, Elias, aka Julian, waits for Defeo to show up and confirm that everything is going as planned. This one-year difference is created due to the mere minutes of difference between their jumps. Soon after Defeo’s arrival, Henry Ashe finds the body, and Alfred Hillinghead finds his case.

While Hillinghead tries to solve the case, he is told by his superiors to shut it down, especially when Julian Harker appears in one of the photos. Alfred leaves a mark on the wall in Longharvest Lane, which is found by Iris Maplewood when she arrives in 1890, several days after Defeo. By then, Alfred had already signed his confession and sealed his fate. The case of the mysterious dead body that appeared out of nowhere is closed. Defeo’s death is labeled a suicide. Julian Harker marries Alfred’s daughter, Polly, and lives the life he had been looking forward to all this time.

1941: Charles Whiteman Finds the Dead Body

In 1941, a corrupt Charles Whiteman is told to pick up a dead body from Longharvest Lane and have it delivered at the docks. By now, Julian Harker has created a cult of people who are highly dedicated to his cause. While Julian is in his 90s and can barely get out of bed, his wife, Polly, has taken over operations and handles Charles. For the most part, the cop does what is asked of him, but when he is told to kill an 11-year-old girl who witnessed him throwing the corpse in his car trunk, he makes a different choice.

He remains unaware of the dead body’s importance and is solely driven by the safety of the girl and then revenge for her death. He ends up killing Polly and Julian and eventually gets hanged for the crime. His only contribution is the fact that he handled the case until the timeline is tinkered with, and Julian gives him a tape talking about his regrets and tells his future self not to make the same choices. Charles leaves the tape for Shahara Hasan, who eventually returns for it in 2023.

2008: Elias Mannix is Born (Happens Off-screen)

A young Sarah Mannix meets a charming man named Daniel Barber. They have a fling, and two months later, Sarah discovers she is pregnant. When she tells Daniel about this, she discovers that he actually belongs to a superrich family, which claims that she was trying to get money off of him. Sarah gives birth to a boy named Elias, but she is unable to keep him for long. She has drug problems, due to which social services take away the child. After living in a home for young boys, he is adopted by Andrew and Elaine Morley at the age of 12.

Unbeknownst to Sarah, this was all a part of Julian Harker’s cult’s plan. Daniel was actually a Harker and had knowingly seduced her to conceive Elias. The whole thing about the baby being taken away by social services, being placed in foster and then being adopted was a part of their plan. They needed to give Elias a difficult upbringing as it would change him into the man he eventually became. The Morleys were also a part of the cult and educated Elias on the whole thing, including his role in the world’s future.

2023: Shahara Hasan Finds the Dead Body

Version 1: The show begins with Shahara Hasan in 2023 when she is led into an alley by a 17-year-old boy named Syed Taher, where she discovers the mysterious dead body. This leads her on the search for answers, making her cross paths with a 15-year-old Elias. After a lot of back and forth, she discovers that Elias is meant to detonate a bomb that would destroy the entire London, leading to chaos and destruction. Despite trying to stop Elias, Shahara ends up doing things exactly as they were predicted. The boy, despite not wanting to be that person, detonates the bomb and paves the path for himself to become Julian Harker.

Version 2: In an alternate timeline, Hasan from 2053 arrives in 2023 on the day the bomb is supposed to go off. She had received Charles’ message from 1941, which led her to the hidden tape from Julian. She uses it to get to Elias and convince him that the path he’s about to choose will lead to nothing but pain and heartbreak for him. Her efforts succeed, and Elias chooses not to detonate the bomb this time around. With this, he nullifies the entire point of his existence and is erased from the timeline, restoring things to a peaceful version.

Version 3: With Elias removed from existence, his family and cult are torn away as well. The world returns to the way it used to be, and Shahara Hasan finds herself on the day she found the dead body, but without a dead body. She goes about her day, never crossing paths with Syed and never ending up in Longharvest Lane. Her family and the entire London are safe and sound, without any threat of a nuclear blast looming over them. But there’s still Iris Maplewood here, which means something’s still amiss.

2053: Iris Maplewood Finds the Dead Body

In the original timeline, after Elias has destroyed the world and then rebuilt it, Iris Maplewood is a detective who ends up in Longharvest Lane and finds the dead body of a man who is identified as Gabriel Defoe. She is shocked to discover that Defeo is still alive, and he, too, has no idea what’s happening. Iris is dedicated to the new world under Elias’ leadership and helps him uncover the Chapel Perilous network, created by Shahara Hasan from the first version of her timeline. By now, she is well-versed in Elias, aka Julian’s story, and wants to stop him from going back to 1890 and starting everything all over again.

Shahara tries to get Iris to work for their cause, but the detective leads Elias and his men to them. Most of the people in Chapel Perilous are killed, and Elias uses the time machine to travel to 1890, as he was expected to. Gabriel Defeo follows him soon after, triggering the murder investigations in four timelines. Iris is shaken by the whole chain of events, but then, she realizes that the Deutsch Particle is meant to go as far in the future as it is in the past, like a mirror image. When she shot Defeo, he traveled four days into the past, which is when she found his dead body. This means he should reappear in the same place four days later.

Four Days Later

As expected, Gabriel Defeo shows up in 2053, four days after he walked into the Throat with a bullet wound caused by Iris Maplewood. This time, she comes prepared and saves him. This fuels her to do something about Elias, even though Defeo and Shahara seem to have given up. She jumps into the Throat and lands in 1890, where she meets Alfred Hillinghead and convinces him to talk to Julian Harker, sowing doubt in his mind.

Iris’ entry into the past leads things to change over the years, and Shahara realizes that her memories have changed, especially when she notices the message left by Charles Whiteman. She realizes that he hid a tape for her at the Silk, which was destroyed in 2023 in the bomb blast. She uses the machine to go back to 2023, where she finds the tape and stops Elias from detonating the bomb, changing the timeline. It’s unclear what 2053 looks like in this rectified chain of events, but the fact that Iris Maplewood is in 2023 means that Defeo created his time machine, which she (and most probably others, too) used to go back and forth in time.

Read More:  Is Gabriel Defoe Dead or Alive at the End of Bodies?

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The Horrifying Discovery of Dachau Concentration Camp—And Its Liberation by US Troops

By: Dave Roos

Updated: August 3, 2023 | Original: November 6, 2020

When the men of the 42nd “Rainbow” Division rolled into the Bavarian town of Dachau at the tail end of World War II , they expected to find an abandoned training facility for Adolf Hitler ’s elite SS forces , or maybe a POW camp.

What they discovered instead would be seared into their memories for as long as they lived—piles of emaciated corpses, dozens of train cars filled with badly decomposed human remains, and perhaps most difficult to process, the thousands of “walking skeletons” who had managed to survive the horrors of Dachau , the Nazi’s first and longest-operating concentration camp.

“Almost none of the soldiers, from generals down to privates, had any concept of what a concentration camp really was, the kind of condition people would be in when they got there, and the level of slavery and oppression and atrocities that the Nazis had perpetrated,” says John McManus, a professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and author of Hell Before Their Very Eyes: US Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945 . 

“It was stunning.”

The liberation of Dachau by American troops on April 29, 1945, wasn’t the first such deliverance by Allied troops. The Soviets had found and freed what remained of Auschwitz and other death camps months earlier. But the wrenching images and first-hand testimonies recorded by Dachau’s shocked liberators brought the horrors of the Holocaust home to America.

Dachau Became a Model for Nazi Concentration Camps

When Dachau opened in 1933, the notorious Nazi war criminal Heinrich Himmler christened it “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” And that’s what Dachau was in its early years, a forced labor detention camp for those judged as “enemies” of the National Socialist (Nazi) party: trade unionists, communists, and Democratic Socialists at first, but eventually Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and of course, Jews.

The cruelly efficient operation of Dachau was largely the brainchild of SS officer Theodor Eike, who instituted a “doctrine of dehumanization” based on slave labor, corporal punishment, flogging, withholding food and summary executions of anyone who tried to escape. The Dachau prisoners labored under brutal conditions tearing down a massive WWI-era munitions factory and then constructing the barracks and offices that would serve as the chief training ground for the SS.

The prisoners even built their own “protective custody camp,” the euphemistically named concentration camp within the sprawling Dachau complex, composed of 32 squalid barracks surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence, a ditch and seven guard towers. Prisoners were subjected to medical experiments, including injections of malaria and tuberculosis, and the untold thousands that died from hard labor or torture were routinely burned in the on-site crematorium.

Forged into the iron gate separating the concentration camp from the rest of Dachau were the taunting words, Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work sets you free”). Dachau was such a success for the Nazis that Eike was promoted to inspector general of all German concentration camps, for which Dachau became the model.

After the events of Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”), in which Jewish synagogues, businesses and homes were destroyed by Nazi mobs across Germany, a greater and greater number of Jews were held at Dachau. On the eve of the American liberation of Dachau, there were 67,665 registered prisoners at the concentration camp and roughly a third of them were Jewish.

First the Smell, Then the Death Train

For the unwitting U.S. infantrymen who marched into Dachau in late April 1945, the first clue that something was terribly wrong was the smell. Some soldiers thought they were downwind from a chemical factory, while others compared the acrid odor to the sickening smell of feathers being burned off a plucked chicken. None of their prior combat experiences prepared them for what lay ahead.

Weeks earlier, Nazi commanders at Buchenwald, another notorious German concentration camp, packed at least 3,000 prisoners into 40 train cars in order to hide them from the approaching Allied armies. The train was supposed to arrive in Dachau a few days later, but the tortuous odyssey ended up lasting three weeks. All but a quarter of the train’s 3,000 passengers died from starvation, dehydration, asphyxiation and disease. The survivors were herded into the concentration camp while thousands of fallen corpses were left to rot on the railway cars.

“If you’re a U.S. soldier arriving at Dachau, you’d almost certainly see the ‘death train’ first,” says McManus.

Bodies ‘Stacked Like Cordwood’

The abhorrent sights and smells of the death train left many American soldiers physically sick and emotionally shell-shocked, but it was only a taste of the horrors awaiting them inside the actual camp. In the weeks leading up to the liberation, the Nazis had shipped in prisoners from across Germany and as far away as Auschwitz . Like the survivors of the Buchenwald death train, these new arrivals were starving and riddled with diseases like typhus.

The Dachau prison guards packed the new arrivals into the already overcrowded barracks, cramming up to 1,600 men into buildings designed for 250. Starvation and disease tore through the camp, claiming the lives of thousands of prisoners just days before the liberation. The Nazis tried to cremate as many of these bodies as they could before abandoning Dachau, but there were too many. Another 7,000 Dachau prisoners, mostly Jews, were sent on a death march to Tegernsee in the south, during which stragglers were shot and thousands of others died from exhaustion.

When the American GIs entered the concentration camp, they found piles of naked corpses, their skin stretched tight across impossibly malnourished bodies. In interview after interview, the soldiers described the dead bodies being “stacked like cordwood,” a metaphor that unintentionally robbed the fallen prisoners of their remaining humanity. But for the soldiers to think of those bodies as fully human at that moment would have been too much to bear.

“Everywhere you turn is just this horror of bodies, and people near death or in a state of complete decrepitude that you can’t even process it,” says McManus.

In a Fit of Rage, Soldiers Gun Down Nazi Prisoners

When the American soldiers of the 45th “Thunderbird” Division stumbled upon the death train, it was like lighting a fuse that couldn’t be snuffed out. The men of the 45th had been in combat for 500 days and thought they had witnessed every grisly atrocity that war could throw at them. But then there was this train filled with innocent bodies, their eyes and mouths open as if crying out for mercy. Many of the American soldiers broke down in sobs. Others seethed with red-hot rage.

When four German officers emerged from the woods holding up a white handkerchief, Lt. William Walsh marched them into one of the box cars littered with corpses and shot them with his pistol. When the mortally wounded Germans cried out in agony, other American GIs finished the job.

Inside Dachau, it only got worse. An estimated 50 to 125 SS officers and assorted German military, including hospital personnel, were rounded up in a coal yard. Walsh called for a machine gun, rifles and a Tommy gunner. When the soldiers began loading a belt of bullets into the machine gun, the German prisoners stood up and began to move toward their American captors. That’s when Walsh allegedly took out his pistol and yelled, “Let them have it!”

After a 30-second flurry of gunfire, at least 17 German prisoners lay dead in the Dachau coal yard.

“I will tell you, as someone who has studied this in a great deal of depth, that this is pretty much the only time that American soldiers do this among many, many liberations in many places,” says McManus. “The separating factor is leadership because you have a company commander who is so deeply upset at what he’s seen that he just loses it. And when a leader loses it, soldiers are going to lose it, too.”

Unequipped to Help the Survivors

Chief among the many traumatic experiences that awaited the liberators at Dachau was encountering the surviving prisoners who numbered around 32,000. “Walking skeletons” was the only way to describe their condition of extreme malnourishment and illness. Ridden with typhus and lice, the overwhelmed prisoners grabbed at their liberators’ uniforms in disbelief that their tortuous ordeal was finally over.

Unprepared and ignorant of how to care for people in such advanced stages of starvation, the soldiers pulled out their C-rations and Hershey bars and gave everything over to the skeletal prisoners, who gorged themselves on the food. Tragically, their digestive systems simply couldn’t handle solid food.

“Decades later, some of these soldiers were racked with guilt over the revulsion they first felt when seeing the prisoners, and then for overfeeding them,” says McManus. “They were killing them with kindness.”

Further compounding the guilt was the fact that the American soldiers couldn't let the liberated prisoners actually leave Dachau. They had to be nursed to health first, which would take months, and then they would need a place to go. Tragically, some of the Jewish prisoners liberated from Dachau languished in displaced persons camps for years before being allowed to emigrate to places like the United States, the UK and Palestine.

From Liberators to Witnesses

Most of the American GIs who liberated Dachau only stayed for a few days before moving on to other missions. The care of the survivors was entrusted to combat medical units, while teams of engineers were charged with burying bodies and cleaning up the camp.

Word of what happened at places like Dachau and Buchenwald spread quickly through the Allied ranks, and many soldiers and officers came to the concentration camps in the days and weeks following liberation to bear witness to the Nazi atrocities. Adolf Hitler committed suicide a day after Dachau was liberated and German defeat was all but assured, but for many soldiers, seeing Dachau for themselves gave the war a new meaning. They weren’t just fighting an enemy; they were fighting evil itself.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower , along with Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley, visited the Ohrdurf concentration camp on April 12, 1945, a week after it was liberated. It was as if Eisenhower knew that the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust would one day be dismissed as “exaggerations” or denied outright.

“The things I saw beggar description,” said Eisenhower. “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick... I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

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“It's Hasbro, not Milton Bradley that makes Yahtze now, Grandpa .” Olivia DeJonge - Becca

“Would you mind getting inside the oven to clean it?” Deanna Dunagan - Nana

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“I can't sleep . I need Nana's cookies. I'm gonna turn a personal addiction into a positive cinematic moment.” Olivia DeJonge - Becca

“Don't hold on to anger Becca!” Kathryn Hahn - Mom

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Helping suddenly bereaved people

• Viewing the body

Note: This guidance is general only, and may be affected by COVID-19 rules at the time, prohibiting people from viewing a body.

Seeing a body immediately

Some people who are suddenly bereaved have no choice over whether they ever see the body or not, because they see the body at a very early stage due to circumstance.

Some witness the death. For example, people who witness the death of someone close to them in a road crash or a drowning or a sudden medically-caused death.

Other people arrive at the scene of the death just after that death. For example, someone discovers a loved one’s suicide, or is alerted by someone else to the death of a loved one nearby that has only just happened.

When recounting this experience later to researchers of sudden bereavement, suddenly bereaved people who witnessed a death or arrived at the scene shortly afterwards said they had an overwhelming desire to be beside the dead person; to hug and touch them and comfort them. They did not want the dead person to be alone and they wanted the dead person to be with someone who loves them. In other words, the bereaved person still felt their dead loved one had a “social identity” and needed nurturing [1]. Often suddenly bereaved people at this time will resist strongly any attempt by professionals or other carers to keep them away from their loved one’s body.

The bereaved person’s experience of seeing their loved one’s body at this time will be different to seeing their loved one’s body later. There will be no control at this early stage over whether or not they see any visible injuries or physical damage to their dead loved one’s body. There will be no ability to prepare for the situation they find themselves in. In the case of violent disasters, it is often a chaotic, fast moving experience.

Seeing a body later

After a sudden death there are usually opportunities to see the body in a more formal and usually much calmer setting, such as when it is laid out in a mortuary or funeral parlour. There are often many people who were close to the person who died, including children, who may wish to consider seeing the body at this stage, and who did not see the body at the time of the death.

The decision to view the body of a loved one is a big decision. It results in a suddenly bereaved person experiencing something that usually creates a strong memory, central to the experience of the bereavement. This can be a memory viewed positively or negatively, or both. However, the feelings that result from that memory may change over time.

The decision not to view a body is also a big decision. It can result in feelings of regret at not seeing the reality of the death with “my own eyes”. Arguably this is something that may be felt more often in cases of sudden death, due to the unexpected and unanticipated nature of the death, and therefore the feeling of unreality often associated with it.

Research by Oxford University published in the British Medical Journal [1] interviewed people suddenly bereaved about their experience of viewing or not viewing the body of their loved one.

It concluded:

• Many people bereaved by a sudden and traumatic death think it is important to see the body of their loved one.
• However, within a family there will be different attitudes; some bereaved relatives may want to view, but others will not, and some will find viewing helpful, but others may find it distressing.
• Seeing a damaged body is inevitably distressing, but in the research was often not regretted. Clinicians should not assume that relatives will be harmed by seeing a bruised or damaged body.
• Those who had mixed feelings or regretted seeing the body felt they had lacked choice or preparation.
• The way that relatives refer to the body can be a strong indication for professionals about whether the person who died retains a social identity for the bereaved.

Therefore, while many suddenly bereaved people may find the experience helpful, it is inadvisable to encourage a suddenly bereaved person to view a body. To enable a bereaved person to make the choice that is best for them, you can help by asking them relevant questions and providing them with relevant information. The below guidance helps you to do this.

A body may be different in death than in life

Some people who have been suddenly bereaved may want to view the body of their loved one because they have had a positive experience of viewing a body previously, for example a grandparent who died in old age. If someone dies of old age then their body in death often looks fairly similar to their body in life. However, when someone dies suddenly in childhood or in mid life their body may look very different to how the person looked when alive. This is particularly the case if their death was violent, or they had urgent medical intervention such as a major operation prior to death.

A body may be different in death to life because:

• injuries or surgical procedures have damaged the body. For example, skin has changed colour due to internal bleeding, or the body’s facial appearance has changed due to a broken jaw, or cuts, etc.
• a mortician or funeral director has changed a body’s appearance through clothing, or hair arrangement, or cosmetics. Such “dressing” of the body may be very different to how the person in life would have done it.
• the body smells different. For example, due to embalming processes, or antiseptics used during an operation.

Maggie says: “I had seen the body of my grandmother so I wasn’t worried about seeing my husband’s body. I knew that seeing my grandmother’s body had helped me come to terms with her death so I thought it would be the same when I saw Gary’s body. I just didn’t think how different it would be. Gary’s body was destroyed by the car crash. When he was in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital the staff had wired up his broken jaw and not bothered to tell me it was broken because he had so many internal injuries and other broken bones so they felt his jaw was unimportant information; a minor detail. But when he died and I went to see the body I was utterly shocked that his face looked so collapsed. I thought he would look about the same in death as he had when he was on the life support machine. I remember screaming “That’s not my husband” and running out. It was horrible. I felt terrible, and I felt I had behaved terribly, with no self control. This left me with feelings of misery and some embarrassment.”

As someone helping a bereaved person, it is therefore useful to know what changes have occurred to a body, and, firstly, to tell a bereaved person that there have been changes, then, secondly, ask the bereaved person if they wish to know the details of those changes in order to assist them to make the decision to view a body or not.

Some bereaved people may not want to be told about any changes to the body and may not want to view the body. They may wish to remember the person how they were in life, and not have this memory intruded upon in any way, either by being told what the body looks like or by seeing the body.

Some bereaved people may want to be told the changes, but then choose not to see the body.

Some bereaved people may want to be told the changes and then choose to see the body.

Some bereaved people may want to discover the changes for themselves and not be receptive to being given information second hand.

The viewing experience

Charlotte arrived to view the body of her sister. She was taken into an empty room with no explanation. With no warning, a curtain was swept back and she found herself within a metre of her sister’s body, on a table behind the curtain

Charlotte says: “It was like a magician’s trick and a terrible shock. It made me want to run out of there straight away. I burst into tears and only stayed a few minutes. I really regret the way this made me feel and the whole experience.”

John went to view the body of his son in a hospital mortuary. He was taken into a small intimate room containing only his son’s body. While he was in the room a member of the mortuary staff stood solemnly in the corner. “It was very strange. I had been anticipating this time with my son’s body and wanted it to be special and private. Yet this man was in the corner the whole time. I remember it made me feel very self-conscious and left me feeling like he was a prison warden; there to check I didn’t do anything silly, such as run off with the body. It didn’t give me a good feeling. It was such a vivid experience that I remember every single detail. I remember that the man was wearing a white coat with a small enamel badge on it of a steam engine. I have no idea why; I presume he was a train enthusiast. But I remember thinking “Why are you interfering with my private experience of grief by being there and making me think about steam trains when I want to be thinking about my son?” It made me feel unreasonably angry towards the man at a very difficult time.”

Every detail about the viewing experience matters and every detail can be explained to a person who is going to view a body, before they view a body. As someone caring for the suddenly bereaved person, you can help by:

• Talking to the bereaved person about what they want the experience to be like. Do they have any requests, for example they may want to be left alone, or only see the body at a distance or through glass.
• Talking to the mortuary staff about what the experience will be like. For example, will it be possible for a bereaved person to touch the body? Sometimes this is not possible for forensic reasons. Will parts of the body be covered because they are too damaged? Are there any parts that the bereaved person is not advised to touch because they are fragile? What will the room look like and will anyone else be there?

Every word matters

Jane was only five when her father died. Her mother told her that “Daddy isn’t here anymore. His body is here, but the rest of him had gone away to heaven.” Jane, who is now an adult, remembers being shocked when she saw her dad’s body because it had a head, arms and legs. She had thought the word “body” meant his torso, so she thought she was only going to see his chest and stomach areas and that his head and limbs had gone up “into the sky to another planet”.

If you are giving information to someone who is considering whether to view a body it is important to ensure that your information is understood. This is particularly important to check when talking to children, or people who are communicating in a second language or have hearing difficulties.

Concentration is difficult when suddenly bereaved so important details may need repeating.

One way to ensure your information is understood is to seek consideration through continued conversation and repetition. For example, “I’ve told you a few things that I’m just going to list again now. I’ve told you that you won’t be able to touch your dad’s chest area, and that only his head and hands will be exposed, and that his eyes will be shut and his skin colour will be purple due to internal bleeding. I’ve told you that a mortician will be present. Do you have any thoughts about what this experience may be like for you if you decide to see him?”

Managing the experience

If more than one person wants to view the same body, have conversations with these people about whether they want to do the viewing on their own or together. Sometimes viewing rooms may be small and get crowded easily, reducing the quality of the experience. Children’s experiences have to be managed with particular care, ensuring they are accompanied by an adult helper who will assist them appropriately to understand what they are seeing.

It is also important for bereaved people to consider what they are going to do after viewing a body. Will they be able to sit somewhere safe and quiet and have a few minutes to themselves and an offer of a hot drink before facing the world again? What will their plans be for the rest of the day; will it be possible to do something relaxing, with people they trust and know, that doesn’t require extensive travel?

Religious rules and rituals

When managing the experience, it is important to be aware of, and consider the implications, of any religious rules or rituals that wish to be followed by a person viewing the body, such as touching and preparing a body through procedures such as washing and wrapping, or only allowing certain people to visit at certain times.

The importance of such rules or rituals to loved ones should be considered sensitively alongside any needs for post-mortem examination by pathologists and forensic scientists. Some families may object to the touching of the body by a non-faith member, but there is no rule for this in Hinduism, Islam or Sikhism in emergency situations. In Islam an invasive post-mortem examination (involving cutting open the body) is forbidden and it may, in some circumstances and in some countries, be possible to agree a non-invasive post mortem examination.

It is important to be receptive to cultural and religious differences and consult with the family to identify their particular needs. Although there are some general rules, it is important not to make assumptions based on a religious or cultural background. However, knowledge of other backgrounds may make communication and understanding easier.

Identification

Often, the police require identification of a body; however sometimes no-one wants to view the body. In this case, some countries allow identification through a photograph, or through glass.

Author note

This information was prepared by Mary Williams OBE, chief executive of Sudden and Brake, the road safety charity, with advice on religious rules and rituals by Yunus Dudhwala, Head of Chaplaincy & Bereavement Services, Newham University Hospital NHS Trust, UK

1. Viewing the body after bereavement due to a traumatic death: qualitative study in the UK, A Chapple, S Ziebland, 2010, BMJ

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The Lady Anatomist Who Brought Dead Bodies to Light

Anna Morandi was the brains and the skilled hand of an unusual husband-wife partnership

Leila McNeill

Anna Morandi stands in the middle of her home laboratory, wielding a curved knife. Dressed in a long cowl to fend off the stench of putrefying flesh, the 18th century teacher and anatomist scrapes clean the bones of the human corpse before her; she will soon animate its likeness in soft wax. She works swiftly and skillfully, surrounded by both the surgical instruments of an anatomist and the tools of an artist. 

In Morandi’s 18th-century Bologna, it would have been unusual, to say the least, to watch a woman so unflinchingly peel back the skin of a human body. Yet Morandi did just that, even drawing the praise of the Bolognese Pope’s for her efforts to reveal the secrets of vitality and sensation concealed beneath the skin. Working at the delicate intersection of empirical science and the artistic rendering of the human body, Morandi helped elevate her city as a hub of science and culture.

As an anatomist, Morandi went where no woman had gone before, helping to usher in a new understanding of the male body and developing new techniques for examining organs. She also served as the public face of an unusual scientific partnership with her husband, a sculptor and anatomist. Yet in one way, she was no exception to what has become a common narrative of historical women in science: Despite her achievement and acclaim during her lifetime, her role was ultimately written out of history.

A husband-wife partnership

When the 26-year-old Morandi married artist and wax sculptor Giovanni Manzolini in 1740, Bologna was undergoing a resurgence of intellectual ascendancy. Bolognese politicians and nobleman—namely Pope Benedict XIV—worked to restore the city to its former glory. With the gradual decline of the city’s university and intellectual culture, it had fallen into disrepute in the eyes of the Western world. 

The way to reverse the decline of the city, Pope Benedict believed, was to invest in medical science, particularly the then-“new” empirical science of anatomy. Before the Renaissance, anatomy largely meant philosophizing and relying on ancient texts like those of Roman physician Galen—rather than the measurable and observable evidence of hands-on human dissection. By the 18th century, there was still much to discover of the human body. 

Morandi and Manzolini helped lead this resurgence in Bologna. Together, the two dissected hundreds of corpses and created hundreds more anatomical wax sculptures. They also pioneered a novel method: Instead of approaching the whole body for dissection and study as other anatomists did, the pair systematically extracted organ systems for further bisection and isolated study. This meticulous method allowed them to create detailed wax models of individual organ systems ideal for teaching students of anatomy. 

The couple’s home served both as a dissection lab and public classroom. Morandi taught hundreds of students of anatomy with her wax models and from her own Anatomical Notebook , which contained 250 handwritten pages of instruction, notes and descriptions of corresponding wax models. Because of her extensive collection of wax models, she could teach anatomy lessons year round without worrying about the decay of dissected corpses in the heat of an Italian summer. 

Unlike other husband-wife scientific partnerships, Morandi was the public face of their operation. As a woman who effortlessly handled dead bodies and skillfully re-created life with wax, she was an object of great intrigue in Bologna and abroad. Morandi attracted international tourists visiting her studio to see and hear the Lady Anatomist, and she even caught the attention of Empress Catherine the Great, who asked Morandi to be part of her court (a request Morandi declined, for reasons unknown).

Morandi also received praise and recognition from her Bolognese Pope. The Pope was likely interested in matters besides  anatomical science and medicine: By creating the public and artistic display of the exposed inner workings of a body’s muscles and tissue, organs and arteries, anatomists and sculptors like the Morandi-Manzolini team brought prestige to the city and lifted up its international reputation.

This work required scientific expertise, but it also required something else: artistic imagination, the ability to recreate bodies and bring them to life.

Where no woman had gone 

Morandi had a special interest in the mechanisms of sensory experience: She sought to understand and capture how the eyes, ears and nose each experienced its particular sense. In her series on the eye, she deconstructs the visual organ completely and then systematically reimagines it in wax in five separate panels. Starting from the surface, she shows an isolated eye of a nameless face looking in six different directions, and each panel gradually reveals a new component layer behind the skin. 

This meticulous method of deconstructing and reconstructing sensory experience led her to discover that the oblique eye muscle attaches to the lachrymal sac as well as the maxillary bone, which ran against what other anatomical experts said at the time.  Her observations were correct, a triumph that spoke to her meticulous methodology.  “This was discovered by me in my observations and I have found it always to be constant,” she wrote in her notebook. 

Morandi’s other special interest was the male reproductive system, to which she devotes a full 45 pages in her notebook. This was unusual because, at the time, most anatomists were more interested in the female anatomy. In Secrets of Women: Gender Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection , writer Katherine Park shows that the womb was of particular fascination to anatomists as it became a “privileged object of dissection in medical images and texts … the uterus acquired a special, symbolic weight as the organ that only dissection could truly reveal.” 

But while most anatomists, predominantly men, extensively studied the female reproductive system as a mysterious cauldron of life , Morandi turned her gaze to the male role in reproduction. Though her wax models of the male reproductive system have been lost, historian and Morandi biographer Rebecca Messbarger  says that Morandi’s notebook shows the depth and detail of her study—even down to the microscopic substances of the reproductive system. 

Unsurprisingly, some objected to a woman gazing so unabashedly at the mysteries of life that had previously been reserved for men. Messbarger specifically calls out anatomist Petronio Ignazio Zecchini, who believed Morandi and other women intellectuals to an interloper in his profession and who sought to undermine their authority through gendered attacks. In his book Genial Days: On the Dialectic of Women Reduced to Its True Principle , he claims that women are ruled by their uterus, not their brains and intellect like men, and tells women to “[w]illingly subject yourselves to men, who, by their counsel, can curb your instability and concupiscence.”

Despite the international recognition and the notoriety in Bologna, Morandi was not exempt from the gender realities of the time. Like other women scientists in her era, she made significantly less money than male scientists for the same work. She struggled financially, even to the point of giving up her eldest son to an orphanage. Although she continued to sell her wax models and received a small stipend from the city Senate, she was unable to sustain financial independence. 

Written out of history

Despite Morandi’s publicity and celebrity, she has been lost to history. Messbarger has a theory as to why. 

Contemporary writer Francesco Maria Zanotti described Morandi in gendered terms to underscore her femininity: “A very beautiful and very ingenious woman deals in a novel manner with cadavers and already decaying limbs … this woman embellished the house of the human body … And most eloquently does she explain them to those who flock to her…” Other contemporary writers like Luigi Crespi explain Morandi’s scientific skills, however, as result of devotion to her husband, describing her as "his wise and pious wife."

Messbarger says that these contemporary descriptions of Morandi as first a woman assistant and devoted wife “have influenced her place in history to her detriment. She was essentially erased from history,” Messbarger says, “Morandi had an international reputation. But even later biographical sketches represent [Manzolini] as the brains, and she was the gifted hand. In her lifetime, that wasn’t true.”

In her book on Morandi, The Lady Anatomist , Messbarger looks to Morandi’s Anatomical Notebook and letters where she finds that Morandi was not merely the assistant or eloquent teacher of Manzolini’s genius; she believes that they were genuine partners. The work that Morandi continued to produce after Manzolini’s death in 1755 shows that Morandi’s scientific knowledge and artistic skill with wax even surpassed that of her late husband and partner.

Morandi’s response to such attacks on her is best encompassed in her own wax self-portrait. Messbarger identifies three 18th century trends in anatomized images of women: a seductive, intimate Venus, a shamed downward-looking Eve or a dead female cadaver. In her self-portrait, Morandi sees herself as none of these. Instead she looks straight and steady, wearing feminine aristocratic dress, as she wields a scalpel over a human brain: the manifestation of male intellect.

Alongside her self-portrait, Morandi memorialized her late husband in wax, who she cast in a more feminine posture, looking down to the side, with his hand on a human heart—the symbol of female emotion. Messbarger says that Morandi’s subversion of gender norms in her and her husband’s wax portraits was consciously executed.

“That a woman would be dissecting a human brain in her self-portrait, there is no way that would not be a provocation,” she says. “And then to show her husband dissecting the seat of sentiment.” Morandi was pushing back against the gender biases that associated women with sentiment and men with intelligence—showing once and for all that she was both the brains and the skilled hand in this unusual wife-husband endeavor. 

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Leila McNeill | | READ MORE

Leila McNeill is an American writer, editor, and historian of science. She is an Affiliate Fellow in the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma and the co-founder and co-editor in chief of Lady Science magazine. She has been a columnist for Smithsonian magazine and BBC Future, and she has been published by The Atlantic , The Baffler , JSTOR Daily , among others.

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The Exhibit That Challenged Our Understanding of Death and the Human Body

John troyer on the controversial exhibition, the cycle of life.

In every major city in the world there are countless museums that exhibit the products of human culture, sometimes featuring highly unusual themes. However, there is not a single museum about humans themselves—an institution that exhibits the anatomy of healthy and unhealthy human bodies in an aesthetically pleasing way using authentic specimens.

–Gunther von Hagens, Donating Your Body for Plastination  

In an interview with National Public Radio’s All Things Considered entitled “Cadaver Exhibits Are Part Science, Part Sideshow,” Body Worlds creator Gunther von Hagens discussed his new millennium plans for a future dead body exhibition. The program’s reporter explained that in 2006 von Hagens sent questionnaires to approximately 6,500 people who wanted to donate their bodies to Body Worlds after they died.

Von Hagens asked some “provocative questions,” according to the radio story: “For example, would they consent to their body parts being mixed with an animal’s, to create a mythological creature? Would they agree to be ‘transformed into an act of love with a woman or a man?’ Von Hagens says that on the sex question, the majority of men liked the idea, while the women did not.”

Von Hagens’s questionnaire should hardly come as a surprise. Since opening in the mid-1990s, the Body Worlds exhibitions have generated equally large ticket sales and audience numbers—44 million visitors and counting as of 2019. What von Hagens has done over the years is produce a portfolio of work that consistently poses dead human bodies in technologically novel ways, even though many of his exhibitions suggest a connection (however tenuous) with centuries-old anatomical displays.

His Body Worlds exhibitions succeed by explicitly using anatomical science’s history and language to produce popular culture narratives about the dead body. His methods always involve plastination, a kind of dead body embalming technology that he defines as “an aesthetically sensitive method of preserving meticulously dissected anatomical specimens and even entire bodies as permanent, life-like materials for anatomical instruction.” Even for the always-industrious von Hagens, however, the exhibition of dead human bodies mixed with animal parts and dead bodies posed in sexual positions sounded far-fetched.  

That is, until May 7th, 2009, when Gunther von Hagens opened a new Body Worlds exhibition in Berlin, Germany, called The Cycle of Life ( Der Zyklus des Lebens ). In one section of the exhibition he and his team posed two different pairs of bodies in sexual positions. Von Hagens released a statement in which he explained that the exhibit “offers a deep understanding of the human body, the biology of reproduction, and the nature of sexuality.” He also made it clear on the Body Worlds website that he wanted to bring the copulating corpses to other cities, such as London.

Each couple consisted of a man and a woman engaged in heterosexual sex. Von Hagens posed the first couple in a sitting position and then sliced their bodies into a thin cross-section that showed the male penetrating the female. The other display involved two, fully formed bodies in which the female corpse was sitting astride the male’s body and the female’s back was to the male’s face. Both couples were in a separate room from the rest of the exhibition, and only viewers ages 16 and up could enter.

Unfortunately, the May 2009 exhibition neither presented human and animal body parts fused together to create mythological creatures, nor has Gunther von Hagens apparently attempted to create these fantastical bodies.

During Body Worlds ’s over 20 years of existence, it has continually turned the dead body into something new. It is this quest for “newness” (and novelty) that von Hagens is arguably embracing with both The Cycle of Life exhibition and his “provocative questions.” The most productive aspects of those questions have little to do, however, with the controversies that surround von Hagens and Body Worlds . Rather, it is more interesting to ask why positioning the dead body in human sex acts or fusing it with animal parts is itself provocative?

Without too much exaggeration, the bodies in Body Worlds do everything but have sex. Posing dead bodies in sexual positions, perverse as it sounds, is one of the few, common human activities not regularly displayed by von Hagens. Posing dead bodies mixed with animal parts is also not entirely different from the current exhibitions.

One of von Hagens’s more famous plastinates is of a man riding a horse. This exhibit piece is a prime example of the merger between human and animal bodies. Von Hagens has simply proposed to eliminate the demarcation line between rider and horse in order to create a centaur. Displaying dead bodies having sex is certainly more provocative than fusing dead bodies with dead horses, but both these proposals simply encompass the next logical step (and perhaps conclusion) for the Body Worlds exhibitions.  

The entirety of Body Worlds is itself a provocation, a dare, a direct challenge to look at the plastinated dead bodies. It is no small coincidence that in America, von Hagens exhibits his work most often with science and natural history museums. By placing plastinated corpses in science museums, von Hagens indulges popular culture’s fascination with the shocking dead body but he also suggests to the viewer that it is perfectly acceptable to look at abject bodies. Add the prospect of dead bodies having sex to the mix, and a science museum’s stamp of approval will only guarantee that the so-called provocation is entirely educational.

In a most peculiar way, Gunther von Hagens has given many museums new financial hope by tapping into an older form of cultural shock, that is, the long-running morbid fascination with the human corpse. To reject von Hagen’s questionnaire out of hand because it seems too perverse, voyeuristic, or gratuitous misses a fascinating series of arguments. Discussing dead bodies posed in sexual positions and the creation of human-animal mythological creatures offers an opportunity to position von Hagens’s overall work among debates in cadaveric anatomy, human taxonomy, and death. It is also far more productive to embrace von Hagens’s provocative questionnaire and its possibilities for the technologies of the corpse.  

The history of anatomical display, such as von Hagens’s, is hardly new and reaches back several centuries. The display of human sexual anatomy, as an educational tool, is very much a part of that history. In A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America , Michael Sappol gives this example: “Anatomical discourse provided a vocabulary in which bourgeois women could speak of their embodiedness, including the sexual body, in a refined, dignified manner, without resorting to overly delicate euphemisms, elaborately indirect allusions, or vulgarity.”

These displays often involved wax models, drawings, or medical textbooks. Based on von Hagens’s recounting of his questionnaire’s results, the female respondents clearly did not support the sexual displays, but it is unclear what they found objectionable. The male respondents had no apparent problems with displaying postmortem sex acts, although the numbers on heterosexual versus gay sex would be interesting to see. No further discussion is given at all as to whether or not the respondents objected to fusion with dead animals.

Von Hagens’s survey group is presumably already inclined to donate its bodies for his use, so it seems fairly reasonable that they are not bothered by Body Worlds ’s display practices. Even if the underlying presentational concept behind Body Worlds remains acceptable, it is the use of cadaveric anatomy in overtly sexual positions that many people find especially objectionable.  

When The Cycle of Life exhibition opened in 2009, for example, a number of German politicians responded with disgust, shock, and moral outrage. Social Democrats MP Fritz Felgentreu stated, “Love and death are obvious topics for art, but I find it quite disgusting to use them in this way.” Green Party MP Alice Ströver proclaimed, “This couple is simply over the top, and it shouldn’t be shown.” Christian Democratic Union MP Kai Wegner presented a somewhat more pragmatic critique: “I am firmly convinced that [Gunther von Hagens] just breaks taboos again and again in order to make money. It is not about medicine or scientific progress. It is marketing and money-making pure and simple.”

Michael Braun from the conservative Christian Democratic Union stated that the dead bodies posed in sexual positions were “revolting. Hagens rides on a wave of taboo-breaking and the couple plumbs the depths of tastelessness.” To put a dead body on display (even with its anatomy in full view) is one thing. To put a dead body on display with its anatomy sexually positioned in/around/and near another body radically alters that visual tableau. It reduces dead bodies, as von Hagens’s German critics assert, to something vulgar, less human; the corpses become a great deal more animalistic.  

Humans are an anomaly, however, in the animal kingdom, and that is the underlying historical dilemma that Von Hagens’s entire Body Worlds project confronts. Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century inventor of modern zoological taxonomy, explicitly fashioned our animal existence around a bold presumption: We humans know that we are human. Not only do we recognize our own humanity, we also recognize that the other animals are not human . What we lacked at the time was a proper scientific name. In the tenth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1758), he finally gives human primates a full binomial designation: Homo sapiens .

Yet Linnaeus’s designation for human primates is a methodological paradox. Giorgio Agamben uses Linnaeus’s central argument in the Systema’s introduction to explain: “[M]an has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself. Yet to define the human not through any nota characteristica [a physical trait], but rather through his self-knowledge, means that man is the being which recognizes itself as such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human .”

Being human, then, is based not upon any physical characteristic, such as the binomial designation for our extinct hominid cousin Homo erectus , but rather upon our superior cognitive skills. Our genus is Homo , just like our closest primate relatives, but our species is sapiens , that is, the ones who are self-aware. We Homo sapiens are hence defined not by our anatomical structures but by our intellect. When any human being dies, however, intellectual ability (as located in the brain) eventually stops functioning and the “person” attached to that body ceases to physically live. The death of the person also produces a corpse, and that dead body is composed of physical, human anatomy that will begin decomposing if left unpreserved.

Death remains a persistent physical transformation for Homo sapiens that, as animals in the animal kingdom, we cannot currently escape. Per Linnaeus’s suggestion, we humans do recognize ourselves, both in life and death, but only so far as this recognition avoids the unsightly presence of the dead body’s decomposition. Homo sapiens are therefore confronted by the following taxonomical, postmortem dilemma: the unaware human corpse biologically decomposes, and through that process of breakdown it becomes an animal body composed entirely of anatomical nota characteristica .  

Death physically reduces Homo sapiens to that one thing we are supposedly taxonomically superior to: anatomy. This is both a physiological and an ontological dilemma. If in life humans are defined by their cognitive skills, then how is it possible that death so quickly reduces the human being to an animal state? Von Hagens takes this physiological and ontological dilemma an entire leap forward by combining it with the possibility of post-mortem human sexuality. In an unintentionally ironic critique of Linnaeus, von Hagens is making a less-than-subtle argument about human-animal taxonomy. He is taking human anatomy and using it in acts that seem to absurdly demonstrate Homo sapiens ’ cognitive superiority: Even when dead, human beings can still figure out how to have sex .

But von Hagens is also reducing human sexuality to something that is neither procreative nor purely pleasurable. These dead bodies will have sex without ever knowing that they are physically capable of such a hyperstimulated, Bisga Man-esque activity. Postmortem sex is sex without purpose, function, or evolutionary importance. However, it is something for audiences to stare at and think about in the most fantastical kinds of ways.

Von Hagens is inviting the viewer to look at and take total control of an utterly impossible situation—but a situation his questionnaires suggested men strongly supported and women wanted no part in. Even then, the female body is still subjected to a postmortem objectification and sexualization that parallels the everyday lived experiences of many women.  

Trying to exert total, technological control over the dead body’s decomposition has become a labor-intensive project for the modern First World. What that constant labor produces, however, comes with its own limitations. A possibility that leads to this question—How far are people willing to go to prevent this postmortem human-animal slippage? To what didactic extremes can the dead body be taken to appear still alive, laboring, and, most importantly, human?

One of the best examples of these didactic borderlands (for both educational and entertainment reasons) is the work done by Gunther von Hagens in the Body Worlds exhibitions. But even the ever-imaginative Gunther von Hagens faces a potential limit when making dead bodies look alive, more human than animal, and anatomically active. That limit is human sexuality. Rethinking what constitutes the apparent pathologization of human sexual anatomy is the most productive way to circumvent this same limit.

__________________________________

Excerpt from Technologies of the Human Corpse by John Troyer, © 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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By Deidre Olsen

Social Media Sleuths, Armed With AI, Are Identifying Dead Bodies

Content Warning: This story includes references to suicide. If you need help, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for your region.

In 2021, an unidentified Black woman died by suicide after jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. She was wearing hot-pink nail polish, and had a pink left eyebrow piercing and several tattoos—all distinguishing features that should have made it easier to identify her. Two years later, her identity is still unknown.

The tragedy of unidentified cadavers is something that Rionna Lee has been thinking about for years. Her mother used to transport human remains for New York’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and would bring home morbid stories. One, Lee remembers, was of a man who had been hit by an MTA train. “One of the things that stuck out to me was the condition of his remains, which were scattered across the train tracks,” says Lee, 24, who now lives in Kingston, Pennsylvania. It distressed her to think of the families who would have to identify their loved ones—even more so, later, when she learned that some human remains would never be identified.

There are an average of 4,400 unidentified new cadavers per year in the US , and a total of 600,000 missing people across the country. Some of these cases are collected on databases, such as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), which helps medical examiners, coroners, law enforcement officers, and members of the public solve missing, unidentified, and unclaimed cases across the country. The true scale of the problem is unknown , as the data available for the average number of unidentified cadavers comes from a 2004 census. Just 10 states have laws requiring that cases be entered into NamUs, meaning that many reports are voluntary.

As she looked into cases—including the woman with the pink nail polish—Lee noticed a pattern in which cases were solved and which weren’t. The decisive factor was often money. Funding from private donors, sponsorship, and public support meant that law enforcement agencies were able to access cutting-edge technology, such as Othram , a forensic genetics company, which has been pivotal in cracking several high-profile cases . Those that weren’t solved didn’t have resources behind them. Often, they were from marginalized groups. Lee, who identifies as Black and LGBTQ+, felt the need to raise awareness among overlooked members of society, those whose deaths often go unnoticed: transient individuals, racial minorities, substance users, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Lee set up a TikTok to try to raise awareness. After a few false starts, she went viral, attracting a following of 128,000. She set up a Facebook group— Thee Unidentified & Unsolved —which now has 39,000 members, many of whom work together to solve unidentified and unsolved cases. Thee Unidentified & Unsolved is one of several volunteer social media communities that are filling a gap left by the US state, a gap that is getting worse due to the overlapping crises of poverty, fentanyl, and shortfalls in public funding. Now, with AI image recognition more readily available, volunteers have new tools to help them identify the deceased. This brings with it new issues around privacy and consent, but those in the communities say their work brings closure to families. “I believe everyone starts off with a name,” says Lee. “I believe everyone should be able to leave this earth peacefully with their name.”

Jeremy White

Karen Williams

Lee started her TikTok campaign in October 2021. There were already several popular accounts that focused on locating missing people, but few, if any, were working to identify the deceased. She created her own page, but TikTok doesn’t allow graphic content such as morgue photos, and she struggled for traction.

She focused on cases where the decedent had been found with items that might help their friends and relatives identify them. “One of the videos I posted that gained exposure was a man with an undetermined race. He was found with a Salvatore Ferragamo gold buckle belt,” says Lee. Her audience was curious how a person with such an expensive piece of clothing could go unidentified. Her engagement grew, and finally, on November 9, 2022, one of her TikTok videos—the case of a 2022 Union County Jane Doe, a Black woman who died after being struck by multiple vehicles on US Route 22 in Hillside, New Jersey—went viral, racking up 652,000 views. A couple of days later, another video hit a million views. She created the Facebook group later that month, because the platform allows graphic content, like morgue pictures, which TikTok doesn’t.

There are around a dozen posts each day in the group, often unsolved cases from NamUs with pictures. Members scour the internet, looking for other images, comparing images with missing person sketches or social media profiles.

Some of the identification groups work globally; others are region- or country-specific or dedicated to unique circumstances, such as missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Online detective groups often tread a delicate line between altruistic investigation and mob obsession.

Thee Unidentified has had to tread that line carefully. Earlier this year, the group helped identify Adonis Beck, a TikTok star also known as Pope the Barber. Beck was found dead on August 10. The news spread quickly, causing an influx of new members to the Facebook group. Kenyetta Burks, one of the group’s admins who had first posted Beck’s image in the group, removed the morgue photos as they were posted, but was inundated with requests from people trying to see them, many from fake accounts pretending to be relatives. Sometimes, the admins will notice comments from members who seem more intrigued by the circumstances of death than those who are empathetic to the topic of unidentified cases. In situations that appear voyeuristic, the person is suspended, and if the behavior is repeated, they are banned, Lee says.

These social media groups have helped some families find closure. In 2022, a teenage boy stumbled upon Lee’s TikTok page and identified his mother, a 2017 Jane Doe case, via her tattoos. She was hit by a vehicle while crossing a street in Pasadena, California, and succumbed to her injuries in hospital. In May 2023, Burks posted a sketch, images, and information from NamUs in the Facebook group, which led to the identification of Dytavious Sanders, an MMA fighter from South Carolina, whose body was discovered earlier that month on May 9. Sander’s aunt identified him in the group and his mother asked for assistance in claiming his body.

One member of Thee Unidentified has recently began using a new tool, PimEyes, a controversial facial recognition search engine , as a means to identify the deceased via morgue photos. A quick upload produces search results in a matter of seconds. Photos from across the internet are organized in a single view, mugshots frequently among them. While this technology can accelerate the process of identifying the dead, it brings with it serious privacy concerns. In many cases, informed consent is obtained for neither the image uploaded nor the results that the technology returns, which can include the biometric data of private individuals. Thus far, a few members of the group have utilized this tool.

“While some individuals might be well meaning, online sleuths are using dangerous surveillance tools,” says Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at Big Brother Watch, a privacy campaign group. “By selling this technology, facial recognition companies risk violating the dignity of deceased individuals, but moreover are violating the privacy rights of the billions of people whose photos they have taken, processed, and exploited without consent.”

PimEyes has been criticized by privacy advocates for scraping the internet for images and giving users access to highly personal information about private individuals. PimEyes CEO Giorgi Gobronidze says that these threats are exaggerated, and that PimEyes doesn’t hold images but just directs users to the URLs where images are hosted. “The tool is designed to help people to find the sources that publish photos, and if they shouldn't be there, apply to the website and initiate takedown.” Gobronidze says that PimEyes has many use cases, such as searching for missing people, including women and children in conflict areas, and actively cooperates with human rights organizations.

Lee says that the Thee Unidentified & Unsolved Facebook group “is not focused on the use of PimEyes … But I respect those who do use the tool and actually have successful outcomes.”

In other social media groups, PimEyes is slowly being introduced as an investigative tool for cases related to missing persons, cold cases, and human trafficking.

Experts also worry that this technology is not necessarily accurate, meaning that amateur sleuths could make mistakes with heartbreaking consequences. “This a noble goal, but a terrible approach,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, an organization that litigates and advocates for privacy and fighting excessive local- and state-level surveillance. “This technology is biased and error prone, and I worry that a lot of worried families will be wrongly told their missing loved one is dead.”

For all of the challenges presented by volunteer online communities, the reality is that they exist in a vacuum left by the authorities.

In 2021, 106,699 Americans died of an overdose. In Seattle, the fentanyl crisis is so bad that the number of overdose deaths has doubled in the past three years, causing the morgues to overflow. The “fourth wave” of the crisis recently descended upon the US, an ongoing mass-overdose event that has consumed law enforcement agencies, stretching the resources necessary for identifying the dead. For medical examiners, the “tsunami” of bodies has resulted in staff burnout, exhausted resources, and the jeopardizing of many offices’ accreditation due to the necessity to conduct more autopsies than industry guidelines permit.

“Unfortunately, the opioid crisis has meant more individuals are coming into the Medical Examiner’s Office for examination,” says Constance DiAngelo, Philadelphia’s chief medical examiner. “Many of these folks are not initially identified.”

The authorities just don’t have the resources to investigate every case thoroughly. “Our challenges are related to funding,” DiAngelo says. “Exhumations, reinterment, DNA extraction and processing, and genealogy comparisons are expensive. A case could cost between $2,500 and $10,000, and that doesn’t include the need for staff who can be dedicated to this type of work.”

In King County, where Seattle is located, there are currently 57 unidentified people that the Medical Examiner’s Office is working to identify. This dire situation is a reality across major American metropolitan areas. In situations where people are found without identification, it can take weeks , if not months , to locate next of kin.

That waiting, and not knowing, can be agony for people whose loved ones have disappeared—like the family of Kallie Catron. Catron’s mother, Crystal Newman, last spoke with her on October 14, 2022. Catron said she missed her two children and wanted to come home. “When Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s passed, my sister knew something was wrong and called to report a missing person,” says Sarah Forister, Catron’s aunt. “I guess you can say a mother knows when something is wrong with her baby.”

On January 22, 2023, Newman was sent a link to a post on Thee Unidentified’s TikTok page. Morgue photos, and images of her tattoos, confirmed it was Catron. “At first, we were so mad that’s how we found out,” says Forister. “But Kallie’s mom, me, and her cousins watched the video showing her morgue photo and all her identifying tattoos multiple times a day.”

Eventually, Lee asked the family whether she could take down the video, as Catron had been identified. “I said yes, but please send me the video so I can watch it whenever I want to,” says Forister. Lee obliged. The community shared the family’s GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for Catron’s funeral and to support her children. “We realized that if it wasn’t for Thee Unidentified community and Rionna, we could still be looking for Kallie,” Forister says.

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Icy Sedgwick

Fantasy fiction & folklore!

Pay a visit to the Dead House!

October 31, 2020 by Icy Sedgwick 7 Comments

The name ‘dead house’ conjures up all kinds of ideas, doesn’t it? Is it a house occupied by the dead? Is it a rotten house that no one lives in anymore?

Some beliefs posit the idea that the spirit can’t move on until the body is finally at peace. Others explore the notion that the spirit can only move on once justice has been done.

But what happens to spirits when a body hasn’t been buried yet? Do they congregate wherever their bodies are kept? If so, this would have dire consequences for the dead house.

Let’s find out what the dead house is, and what strange folklore lurks in its shadowy corners. Hit play to hear the podcast episode or keep reading!

What is the dead house?

I first discovered the dead house in The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts by Owen Davies (2007). In the late 18th century, Britain experienced a population boom. More people meant more deaths. Coroners needed somewhere to store bodies before an inquest. Because these bodies weren’t buried in the traditional way soon after death, their ghosts remained earthbound until burial could take place.

According to Davies, bookseller and memoir writer James Lackington reported a haunting in a London hospital. The authorities converted a ward in the lower part of the building into a dead house, “where a continual tapping on the windows was heard” (2007: 61). The nurses assumed the tapping must be the work of an unquiet spirit since the dead house was close by. After all, how else could they account for noises? The nurses refused to enter the haunted part of the building.

It inspired my short story, ‘The Dead-house’, which you can hear in audio form here .

Yet Jonathan Andrews points out that the dead house was not simply a storage space for the dead. Nor were they solely used for research. When located within asylums, they acted as a space for funeral services. If an asylum didn’t have a chapel, families might have their last moments with their dead in the dead house (2012).

The first dead house at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum was apparently rather small, “constructed with scant mind to the practicalities of pathological enquiry, and even less attention to patients’ and relatives’ sensibilities” (Andrews 2012). This demonstrates the lack of value attached to these human beings. Even in death, they weren’t afforded much dignity.

Early Morgues

In the UK, the dead house fulfilled two functions. The name could refer to the building that often stood in or near a cemetery. They housed bodies prior to burial. Jesmond Old Cemetery had its ‘dead house’ beneath the chapels flanking its Jesmond Road entrance (Historic England 2020). Coffins were held in these vaults overnight before burial the following day. I’ve been in one of these so-called crypts, which is now used as storage by the offices above.

However, other dead houses were the forerunner to the hospital morgue or mortuary. It was their job to house the dead until the bodies could be claimed. The authorities kept bodies there until investigations could be carried out.

There was at least one dead house in Byker, in Newcastle upon Tyne. It stood beside the River Police Station at the mouth of the Ouseburn. The police used this dead house to lay out bodies fished from the river. The dead house was demolished in 1906 (Prison History 2020). The 1883 Kelly’s Directory also lists a Tyne Water Police Station at St Lawrence, which also had a dead house.

In A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof , Roger Clarke relates the story of a body fished from the Thames in Bermondsey in August 1886. After authorities took it to the dead-house near St James’ Church, rumours started “that the dead body was up and about and walking the churchyard at night” (2013: 171). Around 2000 people turned up every night to see this necromantic miracle.

A Royal Dead House

There’s even a dead house under Somerset House. Charles I’s wife, Henrietta Maria, lived in an earlier building on the site, Denmark House. The house boasted a separate chapel and burial ground within its walls. After all, she and her staff were Roman Catholic in a Protestant nation. This gave them somewhere to pray in peace.

It also provided a final resting place for Henrietta Maria’s Catholic staff. Following the demolition of Denmark House, the builders re-used five of the gravestones in the walls of the new Somerset House. The area is known as the Deadhouse.

This space lies below the famous courtyard. I should stress there are no longer any bodies beneath the yard. But the gravestones certainly add an eerie ambience to an already strange location.

Can you find a dead house outside of the UK?

Dead houses are common elsewhere in the world, often in colder climates where the ground was too hard to dig graves during the winter. The bodies would be kept in the dead house until spring (Lacy 2018). In Ontario, there was even a fad for building dead houses in octagonal shapes.

A Parisian Morgue

Indeed, the Paris morgue near the Seine is arguably one of the more famous dead houses. Situated on Île de la Cité, it first opened in 1804. Many of the dead bodies that passed through its doors came from the streets or out of the Seine.

The mortuary staff even allowed the public in to help identify these anonymous bodies. Sadly, humans can be completely shameless, and so the morgue became the place to be seen. Between dawn and 6 pm, it was a hive of activity for tourists and locals alike (Cain 2015). At one point, the more ‘famous’ bodies drew up to 40,000 visitors a day.

One of its unfortunate occupants ended up being immortalised in a most unusual way. Known as L’Inconnue de la Seine, the woman had been fished out of the river. One of the assistants found her peaceful expression so entrancing that he took a cast of her face.

This in turn became a death mask that many Parisians displayed in their homes. According to legend, she even inspired the face of Resusci Anne, the first CPR dummy. Doubt stretches its long fingers across this particular legend. Those who work with dead bodies say the mask looks like it came from a living woman (Cain 2015). Still, the legend offers a slightly more hopeful end for an anonymous suicide victim put on display in the Paris morgue.

A Civil War Dead House

The University of Mississippi dead house predated the Civil War. It stood on the site of what is now Farley Hall. The previous building acted as a morgue to house war dead before burial at the Civil War Cemetery across the campus. Demolished in 1958, Farley Hall and its journalism school now stand on the site.

Christina Steube notes local anecdotes in which people claim to encounter ghostly presences in the area. Are they Civil War victims or long dead students? (2014)

But no matter where they are, the dead house seems to inspire fear.

There’s always a ‘but’…

I’ve looked online and the ‘evidence’ for haunted morgues or mortuaries seems anecdotal at best. People report weird noises, strange feelings of dread, or flickering shadows seen out of the corner of the eye. These come from people visiting historic spaces rather than working mortuaries. Some of the ‘haunted mortuaries’ I’ve found are essentially tourist attractions!

I can’t help thinking that there’s a more rational explanation. People who don’t work with the dead for a living can’t help feeling uneasy in these spaces. But those feelings of unease in a morgue have less to do with the presence of the dead and more to do with the low temperature and pre-conditioning. After all, pop culture tells us they’re creepy spaces.

So there is actually very little in the way of concrete folklore about the dead house. People fear the spaces because they’re unused to being in close confines with the dead. This applied to the very first mortuaries when hospital staff weren’t yet used to them. But there’s little lore due to the lack of real experiences.

The concept of a haunted dead house owes more to the revulsion provoked by corpses and the general eeriness of the place. Yet the way the Paris morgue became a tourist attraction also demonstrates our compulsive fascination with such spaces.

Perhaps the idea becomes more frightening than the place itself…

Do you think there’s any truth in the tales about the dead house? Let me know in the comments!

Andrews, Jonathan (2012), ‘Death and the dead-house in Victorian asylums: necroscopy versus mourning at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, c. 1832–1901’, Hist Psychiatry , https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4112573/ .

Cain, Taryn (2015), ‘Paris Morgue and a public spectacle of death’, Wellcome Collection , https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/W-RTBBEAAO5mfQ3M .

Clarke, Roger (2013), A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof , London: Penguin.

Davies, Owen (2007), The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts , London: Palgrave.

Historic England (2020), ‘Newcastle General Cemetery’, Historic England , https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1001181 .

Lacy, Robyn (2018), ‘Winter Corpses: What to do with Dead Bodies in colonial Canada’, Spade and the Grave , https://spadeandthegrave.com/2018/02/18/winter-corpses-what-to-do-with-dead-bodies-in-colonial-canada/#more-2416 .

Prison History (2020), ‘Tyne Water Police Station, Newcastle’, 19th Century Prison History , https://www.prisonhistory.org/lockup/tyne-water-police-station-newcastle/ .

Steube, Christina (2014), ‘Haunted History: Some older areas of campus have a spooky past’, Ole Miss , https://news.olemiss.edu/haunted-history/ .

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Reader interactions.

June 12, 2016 at 10:29 pm

I didn’t know you were doing a PhD about haunted house films! I live near this famous haunted house in Pontefract! en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Lights_Went_Out don’t know if you have seen the film… They do events at the house and sleepovers! http://www.hauntedhappenings.co.uk/ I might have to check it out although I don’t really believe in hauntings or haunted houses! I work on a hospital ward where the nurses ‘cleanse’ the ward regularly with genuine holy water! I don’t work the night shift but they always have interesting tales about it.x

June 12, 2016 at 10:49 pm

Yeah, I watched that film on TV a while ago – that’s so cool it’s near you!! I’ve been to a lot of ‘haunted houses’ and I’ve had some weird stuff happen but never enough to freak me out.

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Folklore blogger and host of the Fabulous Folklore podcast. Writer of dark fantasy novellas, Gothic short stories and the occasional weird Western. Once described as a cross between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Working on a PhD about haunted house films!

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Discovery of dead baby on 405 Freeway in Culver City linked to other murder, deadly crash

A series of violent and deadly incidents that happened across Los Angeles County Monday morning was being investigated as being connected.

Multiple law enforcement sources told NBC Los Angeles’ I-Team that the discovery of two children on the 405 Freeway in Culver City is linked to a murder investigation in Woodland Hills and a deadly crash in Redondo Beach.

The first incident was reported at around 4:30 a.m. when first responders arrived on the northbound lanes of the freeway near the Howard Hughes Parkway and Sepulveda Boulevard exit to discover an infant and a child.

The baby girl, who may be between 5 and 6 months old, was declared dead at the scene while another 9-year-old girl, was taken to a hospital for “moderate injuries,” according to the California Highway Patrol.

Then about 30 minutes later, a deadly crash was reported on Pacific Coast Highway near Vincent Street in Redondo Beach.

“Emergency services responded and located the unresponsive female driver, who was pronounced deceased by paramedics from the Redondo Beach Fire Department,’’ Redondo Beach police said.

Then at around 7:35 a.m. more than 30 miles away from the crash site, the Los Angeles Police Department got a call about a “possible victim down” at the Montecito Apartments on the 6200 block of Variel Avenue in Woodland Hills. 

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“I woke up in the middle of the night around 3:40 to screaming and commotion, it lasted about a minute and I was really groggy and I just went back to sleep,” one neighbor, who did not want to be identified, said.

The neighbor said there was fighting the night before. She said a man and woman lived next door to her for about a year with their two children.

“This morning I was getting up to go to work and I left and I walk out front door and they are immediately to the left of us and I see their front door wide open and blood coming from their apartment all the way into the hallway to the elevator and I see blood on the walls,” the neighbor said.

Neighbors say the family kept to themselves, but at night, especially in the past few months, fighting, screaming, and commotion could be heard coming from their unit.

Responding officers discovered one person dead at the location.

“While conducting their investigation homicide detectives learned of two additional incidents that occurred earlier in the morning, one on the 405 Freeway involving two young children and a second in Redondo Beach involving a traffic collision,” the LAPD said in a social media post.  

“At this time, Valley Bureau Homicide detectives are working with the California Highway Patrol on the incident involving the two children and believe it is connected to the Topanga homicide scene.”

The LAPD also confirmed it’s working with the CHP as well as Redondo Beach Police Department and the LA County Coroner’s Office to determine how the deadly incidents are related. 

Eric Leonard is an investigative reporter and joins NBC4 with more than 20 years of experience in the news business.

Andrew Blankstein is an investigative reporter for NBC News. He covers the Western U.S., specializing in crime, courts and homeland security. 

Woman’s body found in garbage can. Columbia police are investigating

Columbia police are investigating after the body of a woman was found in a garbage can.

Police said the woman’s body was found shortly before 10 a.m. Thursday morning behind the Q-Mart at the intersection of Academy Street and Colonial Drive. That’s a few blocks north of Farrow Road and a couple blocks east of Prisma Health Richland Hospital.

The Columbia Police Department account on X posted a short video of its crime scene van parked on the curb beside a parking lot surrounded by police tape.

The woman had not been identified as of midday Thursday. The Richland County Coroner’s Office is investigating the woman’s death.

Police said in a follow-up post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that a male person of interest was being questioned for information regarding the death.

This is a breaking news story. It will be updated as more information becomes available.

©2024 The State. Visit thestate.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam

A mexican drug cartel is targeting seniors and their timeshares..

Hosted by Katrin Bennhold

Produced by Asthaa Chaturvedi and Will Reid

With Clare Toeniskoetter and Lynsea Garrison

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Engineered by Chris Wood

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Warning: this episode contains descriptions of violence.

A massive scam targeting older Americans who own timeshare properties has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars sent to Mexico.

Maria Abi-Habib, an investigative correspondent for The Times, tells the story of a victim who lost everything, and of the criminal group making the scam calls — Jalisco New Generation, one of Mexico’s most violent cartels.

On today’s episode

Maria Abi-Habib , an investigative correspondent for The New York Times based in Mexico City.

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How a brutal Mexican drug cartel came to target seniors and their timeshares .

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