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Michelle and Charles talk mummies! Twentieth-century mummies! Ancient cannibal Chinchorro mummies! Smoked mummies of Papua New Guinea! Victorians eating mummies! Join us for tales like Elmer McCurdy: the bandit that wouldn't give up, Evita Perón's wandering mummy, and Karl Tänzler, who lived (and danced) with a mummy for years! Good lord, it gets creepy! So many mummies wound up in this episode, we ran out of time!
Mummies Dearest
Show notes
Viking funerals and Mummification for sale
Michelle spills the beans on Charles idea for a viking funeral, and proposes mummification, available through a company called Summum.Business: Summom, n.d.
Mummies of Papua New Guinea
An Aseki tribe is still purported to create mummies in the modern day, in the rain forests of Papua New Guinea, by smoking the body for days over a forest.Article: Tia Ghose, Smoked Mummy Helps Villagers Connect with 'Ghost World' (livescience.com), May 22, 2015
Article: Daniel Stone, The Modern Mummies of Papua New Guinea (National Geographic), October 5, 2016
Video: The Mysterious Mummies of Papua New Guinea (The Incredible Journey), 2018
Famous mummified dictators
Several dictators and communists seem to love being mummified after death: Vladimir Lenin is a popular mummy, Kim Jong Il, Mau Zedong and Hugo Chavez are all mummies. (Ok -- we might've gotten Napoleon wrong.)Website: Mao Zedong - Mummipedia entry (Mummipedia Wiki), Sun 11 Sep 2016
Article: Preserving Chairman Mao: embalming a body to maintain a legacy (The Guardian), n.d.
Website: Lenin's Mausoleum - Embalmed remains of the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (Atlas Obscura), n.d.
Article: Bess Lovejoy, Here Lies Our Not-So-Departed Leader (Wall Street Journal), March 15, 2013 6:12
The mummified Monk of Mongolia
Article: Mummified monk in Mongolia 'not dead', say Buddhists (BBC), 4 February 2015
Article: Steven Lee Myers, A Russian Lama's Body, and His Faith, Defy Time (New York Times), October 1, 2002
The Chinese movable mummy, Xin Zhui, aka "Lady Dai"
Charles digs into the story of a stunning discovery in the 1970s: A mummy so immaculately complete that eyelashes were present and so were blood cells. An autopsy was even possible on the body.Article: Wang, Fanqing, Ancient body of Lady Dai to visit Santa Barbara (Digital Journal), September 17, 2009
Rauer, Julie, The Last Feast of Lady Dai (www.asianart.com), November 02, 2006
Article: Prüch, Margarete, Dining in the Afterlife (Dig, Carus Publishing ), pp 20–21,, Vol. 9 Issue 1, January 2007
Elmer McCurdy - The outlaw that wouldn't give up
Michelle gives us the strange tale of Elmer McCurdy's long post-life adventure that took him from Oklahoma, all the way to Hollywood and the set of the Million Dollar Man! He even worked at a ticket booth, sort of.Book: Anderson, Dan, One Hundred Oklahoma Outlaws, Gangsters, and Lawmen, 1839–1939 (Pelican Publishing), 2007
Book: Snow, Clyde C.; Theodore Allen, Reyman, The Life and Afterlife of Elmer J. McCurdy: A Melodrama in Two Acts. (Paleopathology Association), 1977
Ancient mummies of the Chinchorro people
In the arid Atacama desert, there lie thousands of mummified bodies. They are the Chinchorro people, and there is a possibility they consumed part of the bodies of their dead.Article: Johanson, Mark, Surprise! The world's oldest mummies are not in Egypt (CNN), 1st May 2019
Article: Daley, Jason, What Have the World’s Oldest Mummies Kept Under Wraps? (Smithsonian Magazine), December 29, 2016
Book: Arriaza, Bernardo T., Beyond Death. The Chinchorro Mummies of Ancient Chile (Smithsonian Books), September 17, 1995
Victorian royalty consumed mummies
Article: Dolan, Maria, The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine (Smithsonian Magazine), May 6, 2012
Book: Sugg, Richard, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: the History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (Taylor & Francis), Apr 27, 2012
Dannenfeldt, Karl H., Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate (The Sixteenth Century Journal), pp pp. 163-180, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1985)
Article: Disrespect and Desecration at Victorian Mummy Unwrapping Parties (Ancient Origins), May 30, 2018
The weird adventures of Eva Perón's mummy
Article: Conger, Cristen, Why did it take more than 20 years to bury Eva Peron? (HowStuffWorks), n.d.
Article: Robinson, Eugene, Travels of Peron’s mummy (IOL), January 25, 2012
Karl Tänzler and Elena Milagro De Hoyos. the young lady he mummified
Book: Harrison, Ben, Undying Love: The True Story Of A Passion That Defied Death ( St. Martin's Press), 2001
Book: Sloan, David L., Ghosts of Key West (Phantom Press), 1998
Show gallery
Head of a mummy from the Chinchorro culture, found in Northern Chile.
Pablo Trincado - originally posted to Flickr as cultura chinchorro año 3000 AC. https://www.flickr.com/photos/99903552@N00/2890650679
Elmer McCurdy's body in his coffin
W. G. Boag / Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Mummy at the site museum "colon 10" in Arica
Luis Lobos Rivadeneira / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)
Carl Tanzler (aka Carl Von Cosel) in 1940. From the Stetson Kennedy Collection.
Florida Keys--Public Libraries / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
Count Carl Tanzler von Cosel walking outside of his laboratory on Flagler Av. C 1940. From the DeWolfe and Wood Collection in the Otto Hirzel Scrapbook.
From the DeWolfe and Wood Collection in the Otto Hirzel Scrapbook. / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
Eva Perón's embalmed corpse is inspected by Dr. Pedro Ara.
Francisco Bolsíco, E.F.C.A. / Public domain
Xin Zhui (Chinese: 辛追), also known as lady Dai, royalty during the Han Dynasty. Her corpse was found in 1971 near the city of Changsha.
Huangdan2060 / Public domain