Morbid Fact Du Jour For July 13, 2011

Today’s Imaginary Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The “Lady with the Ring” is a story about premature burial from European folklore. Versions of the story were popular throughout Europe in the 14th through the 19th centuries. The central feature of the story is that a woman is buried or entombed while wearing a valuable ring. Shortly after the burial, a grave robber (often a corrupt sexton) disinters the body with the intent of stealing the ring. The robber is unable to slide the ring off the woman’s finger, so he prepares to cut off the finger with a knife. However, upon making the initial incision, the woman awakes, surprising the grave robber. The woman had not been dead at all, but had been the victim of premature burial.

The following details are included in some versions of the story:
the grave robber instantly dies of fright after the woman awakes;
the woman walks a considerable distance from her burial spot to her home;
the woman’s husband or other people at her house think that she is a ghost and refuse her entry into the house;
the person refusing entry to the woman tells the woman that it would be as impossible for her to return from the dead as it would be for horses to leave their stable and run up the stairs in the house; immediately after making this comparison, two neighing horses are heard and seen with their heads emerging from the second-storey windows of the house; when this occurs, the person refusing entry realises that the woman is not a ghost
the woman lives for many more years and gives birth to numerous children.

Culled from: Wikipedia

I mention this story because I was just looking at this awful book I have called Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History Of Burial by Penny Colman and I see that Penny typically mislabels this legend as fact in her text:

“In the early 1600s in Scotland, Marjorie Elphinstone was supposedly dead until she groaned when grave robbers broke into her newly buried coffin to steal jewelry from her recently buried body. Forgetting about the jewelry, the robbers fled. Elphinstone climbed out of her coffin and walked home.”

Not that things that like couldn’t have happened back in the day – people were occasionally buried alive – but any author who quotes folklore as fact oughtta be ashamed. (And before you say that the same thing could be said of any Comtesse who uses Wikipedia as a source… well… um… This isn’t a book so it’s different.)

Here’s my original savage review of this book, if you’re interested. What a load of dung.

Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History Of Burial
By Penny Colman
Henry Holt & Company

Okay, it would be very unusual for me to give a poor review to a book that features photographs of gravestones and a history of burial customs, but I must say that I disagree with the Amazon.Com reviewers who gave this book a ****1/2 rating. I’m thinking that this rating is from people who aren’t used to reading morbid subject matter, because this book does provide a good general overview of different aspects of death – from decomposition and autopsies to burial and mourning customs. If you’ve never read a book about death before, yes, I suppose you would enjoy this book. However, for those of us who have researched the topic for a long time, this book seems amateurish and dull. It’s filled with many personal anecdotes from the author, some of which are interesting (the discussion of her brother’s death and decomposition, for example) but many of which seem to only serve to fill up space. There really is so much to research and discuss about death that it doesn’t seem necessary to talk about your friend’s conversation at a funeral. I guess Penny figures she’s adding a dose of human reality to the proceedings, and that’s fine. It just didn’t interest me that much…

The other thing that I found annoying about this tome was the sloppy research. For example, a photograph of mummified monks has this confident caption: “Mummies were stored in many ways, and some, like these that were probably photographed in Mexico, were carefully placed on shelves.” PROBABLY??? Gee, couldn’t she have done a wee bit more research for us? Thanks a whole hell of a lot… Anyway, I think the photo is actually from the Capuchin Monk catacombs in Palermo, Italy. How can you trust a book like that?

On the bright side, there are a handful of interesting photographs of historic and eccentric gravestones, mortuary practices (such as this famous photo of civil war embalming), and post-mortem photography. However, the handful of exceptional photos are countered by a number of dull and amateurish photographs as well. On the whole, a very disappointing work that only rates two skulls out of five.

2/5 – Strictly For Newbies!

All photographs are culled from “Corpses, Coffins And Crypts” and may not be reprinted without permission of the publisher… you know, the usual…