deformutilations:

This is early mummification with drying of the hands and feet. Note the dark discoloration of the fingers with indentation from dehydration. Portions of the body with larger surface areas relative to underlying tissue mass with mummify more rapidly.

Outside of Prague, in the Czech Republic, is a small Roman Catholic Church that looks normal on the outside but holds 40,000 to 70,000 skeletons on the inside. Officially called the Sedlec Ossuary, it is often just referred to as Bone Church. Around 1400, thousands of skeletons were dug up so that the church could be built in the middle of the cemetery. The lower chapel was to be an ossuary for the mass graves unearthed during construction. Around 1870, a wood carver was commissioned to make order from all the bones. The dead were arranged in macabre art to form four bell towers, a huge bone chandelier that contains at least one of every bone in the human body, garlands of skulls draping the vault, bones around the altar, a large Schwarzenberg coat-of-arms, the signature of the artist Rint, and many more bizarre artworks. The chapel, and underneath the church and cemetery, are all decorated with bones. People who died in war or a gruesome death which marred the bones were not used too much for decoration. Instead, those skeletal remains are locked away behind gates or form bone tunnels.

Elmer McCurdy (The above photo is a post-mortem photo of Elmer McCurdy)

Born in Oklahoma to a 17 year old girl in 1880, Elmer was soon adopted by his uncle who later died of TB. After three years in the U.S. Army, McCurdy  turned to a life of crime. He commited his first burglary when he was 30, traveling to Oklahoma to join a gang of bank and train robbers. During one robbery, McCurdy, believing the train contained a safe which held thousands of dollars in government tribal payments, planned on robbing it with the help of his gang. They actually robbed a passenger train, getting away with $46 and a few bottles of liquor. Soon afterward he was killed in a gunfight in the Osage Hills in north-central Oklahoma, shot in the chest by a .32-20 caliber bullet. A contemporary newspaper account gave McCurdy’s last words as “You’ll never take me alive!”

Embalmed in Arsenic, McCurdy’s body decomposed at a rather slow rate, causing him to mummify. His body was never claimed by family, and was sold to a sideshow owner as part of their show. He eventually ended up in the “Laugh in the dark Funhouse” in Long Beach, California where his body was later found in 1976 by a crew member while shooting the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man. The crew member, thinking McCurdy was a wax mannequin hanging from the gallows of the funhouse, went to move him by grabbing a hold of his arm, breaking off the bottom half. When seeing the hint of human bone sticking out, the man notified authorities.

Clyde Snow, the Forensic Anthropologist on hand, determined the death of Elmer as well as his age using sections of bone and dental records. He was buried in the Boot Hill section of the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma on April 22, 1977. The state medical examiner ordered that two cubic yards of concrete was to be poured over McCurdy’s casket, so that his remains would never be disturbed again.

The Skull of a child with their adult teeth growing in

fuckyeahanthropologymajorfox:

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