5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (23 page)

[Twelve Famous Body Parts]

dried-up object.” It failed to measure up to the reserve price and was withdrawn, but was bought five years later by an American urologist for $3,800.

4

ADOLF HITLER’S TEETH Discovered by Soviet soldiers in a shallow grave outside his Berlin bunker in 1945 and used to positively identify his charred remains, they have remained locked away in an archive in Moscow ever since.

5

ELVIS PRESLEY’S WART The ultimate in Elvis memorabilia, removed from his right wrist in 1958; it is currently owned by Joni Mabe of Athens, Georgia.

6

JOSEPH HAYDN’S HEAD The great composer was buried headless when two of his best friends bribed the gravedigger to let them have it as a keepsake. For nearly sixty years it was stored in a cupboard in the Museum of the Vienna Academy of Music, but it was reunited with the rest of his remains in 1954.

7

SIR WALTER RALEIGH’S HEAD After Raleigh’s execution in 1618, his head became a family heirloom.

His widow, Elizabeth, kept it for twenty-nine years before willing it to their son Carew, who looked after it until 1666, when it went with him to his grave.

8

KING CHARLES XII OF SWEDEN’S SKULL Now

on permanent public display in Stockholm, the skull reveals the large bullet hole that made the exhibition possible in 1718.

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[Twelve Famous Body Parts]

9

BOB MARLEY’S HAIR In May 2003 a ten-inch lock of hair from the reggae legend was sold at auction for $5,000. The seller was a fan who had asked the singer for a souvenir dreadlock backstage in 1980.

10

KING CHARLES I’S FOURTH CERVICAL

VERTEBRA The novelist Sir Walter Scott broke the ice at parties by introducing dinner guests to his novelty salt shaker, made from a relic stolen by a surgeon during an autopsy on the royal corpse after Charles’s long-lost coffin was rediscovered at Windsor Castle in 1813. Scott kept it on his dining table for thirty years until Queen Victoria heard about it. She was quite unamused and ordered that it be returned to St. George’s chapel.

11

CHARLES BABBAGE’S BRAIN The nineteenth-

century mathematician known as the “Father of Computing” died in 1871, mostly forgotten and unloved, his groundbreaking work on computers gathering dust in the Museum of King’s College, Cambridge. In 1908, after being preserved for thirty-seven years in alcohol, Babbage’s brain was dissected by Sir Victor Horsley of the Royal Society. Horsley was obliged to remind his colleagues that Charles Babbage had once been a “very profound thinker.”

12

CANCEROUS TISSUE FROM THE JAW OF U.S.

PRESIDENT GROVER CLEVELAND This resides in the Mutter Museum of Philadelphia, which specializes in bizarre medical curiosities, in the company of the B. C.

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[Twelve Famous Body Parts]

Hirot Pelvis Collection, the Sappey Collection of mercury-filled lymphaticus, the Chevalier Johnson collection of foreign bodies removed from lungs, and the joined liver of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins.

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Ten Gr 10

eat Grave Robberies

1

Benito Mussolini’s corpse is stolen from its supposedly secret, unmarked grave in a municipal cemetery by Fascists intent on a publicity stunt and nostalgic for his regime. A message left in the grave read: “Finally, O

Duce, you are with us. We will cover you with roses, but the smell of your virtue will overpower those roses.” Four months later, what remained of Il Duce was found in a small trunk just outside Milan, and two Franciscan monks were charged with hiding his body. In the intervening months the corpse had been kept on the move, variously hidden in a villa, a monastery, and a convent. Il Duce was buried a second time in an undisclosed location, only to be dug up yet again eleven years later and returned to his widow, Rachele, who buried him yet again in Predappio in 1957.

2

The tomb of King Richard I at Westminster Abbey once had a hole in it, through which visitors could actually touch his skull. In 1776, a schoolboy stole the king’s jawbone; it was kept as a family heirloom until it was finally returned to the abbey in 1906.

3

When King Henry VIII was interred in the royal vault at Windsor, a workman removed one of his finger bones and used it to make a knife handle.

4

Oliver Cromwell’s skull has changed hands many times since the Lord Protector lost exclusive use of it in 1658.

After the restoration of the monarchy, Cromwell’s corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn. It was then taken down from the scaffold and
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[Ten Great Grave Robberies]

decapitated. The body was thrown into a pit beneath the gallows, the head set on a spike above Westminster Hall.

The head remained there for forty-three years until it was dislodged in a violent storm and was found lying on the ground by a sentry. He took it home and kept it hidden in his chimney, and on his death he left it to his daughter. In 1710 the head reappeared, this time in a freak show. By 1775 it had been sold to an actor named Russell, who in turn sold it in 1787 to James Fox, an antique dealer. Fox sold it for £230 (about $440) to three men who put it on display in Old Bond Street, London, and charged half a crown per viewing. By 1865, it had passed into the possession of a Mr. Williamson of Beckenham. His family donated it to Sydney Sussex College in the 1960s. At one time there were even two

“authentic” Cromwell skulls on sale in London simultaneously. The owner of the second, smaller skull explained that his version was obviously that of Cromwell when he was a boy.

5

While Galileo’s corpse was being moved to its final resting place in a mausoleum in Santa Croce, Florence, in 1737, the antiquary Anton Francesco Gori helped himself to the middle finger of the great astronomer’s right hand.

The digit is now displayed in the Museum of the History of Science in Florence in a glass egg on top of a plinth.

The inscription below states that the famous digit

“
nunquam visos mortalibus orbes / Monstravit
”—

“pointed out bodies never seen by mortals before.”

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[Ten Great Grave Robberies]

6

In 1790, the remains of the poet John Milton were raided by souvenir hunters at St. Giles Cripplegate. A woman gravedigger, Elizabeth Grant, was later found to be charging visitors sixpence apiece for viewings of Milton’s teeth and part of his leg.

7

In 1876, an American gang was apprehended while attempting to steal the remains of Abraham Lincoln.

They were going to hold the body for ransom in return for the release of a convicted forger, Ben Boyd. To deter any more raids, Lincoln’s coffin was embedded in steel and concrete.

8

In 1895, General Horatio Herbert Kitchener was sent to avenge the death of the British war hero General

“Chinese” Gordon, who was killed at Khartoum by the troops of the Sudanese leader, known as the Mahdi. As the Mahdi was already dead, however, Kitchener had to content himself with gratuitous desecration by blowing up the Mahdi’s tomb at Omdurman and throwing his bones into the Nile. Kitchener also planned to keep the Mahdi’s skull as an inkwell; Queen Victoria heard about Kitchener’s trophy and ordered him to return it immediately.

9

The hands of the Argentinean president General Juan Perón were amputated in 1987 and subject to a $9 million ransom demand. Fortunately Perón had no further use for them, as he had already been dead for thirteen years.

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[Ten Great Grave Robberies]

10

In March 1978, the body of Charlie Chaplin was stolen from its grave in Vevey, Switzerland, and held for a 600,000-franc ransom by a Pole, Roman Wardas, and a Bulgarian, Gantcho Ganev. The body snatchers were finally arrested, and Chaplin’s remains were retrieved from a cornfield a few miles away. They said they needed the money to start a garage business.

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Ten 10

Failed Suicides

63 b.c.: King Mithradates VI, who rules in Asia Minor, deliberately takes small doses of poison in the hope that he will build up enough resistance to survive a possible assassination by poisoning. He finally gets an opportunity to see if his regimen has worked when, in an attempt to take his own life rather than fall into the hands of invading Romans, he tries to poison himself.

His body is so full of toxins, however, that the poison has no effect at all, and the king has to order a slave to finish him off with his sword.

1744:

Robert, Lord Clive “of India” (1725–74) twice fails to shoot himself. After the second attempt, he declares,

“It appears I am destined for something. I will live.”

1826:

While in the care of his guardian uncle, Ludwig, the depressed Karl von Beethoven pulls out a gun and fires two shots at his own head. One shot misses completely, the other grazes his temple.

1848:

Edgar Allan Poe attempts suicide by taking an ounce of opium, which is rejected by his stomach.

1854:

Robert Schumann leaves a house full of visitors in his nightgown and throws himself into the Rhine River, but is rescued by some boatmen. His wife Clara places him in an insane asylum.

1877:

Two weeks after his wedding, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky stands in the Neva River up to his armpits, hoping to catch a fatal bout of pneumonia. He is rescued by his
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[Ten Failed Suicides]

brother, who takes him home suffering from a slight chill.

1878:

Joseph Conrad, plagued by financial problems, shoots himself in the chest but misses all vital organs.

1898:

Paul Gauguin, suffering from syphilis and living in poverty, attempts suicide after completing his painting

“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” He takes arsenic, but swallows too much and immediately vomits it back up.

1932:

While living at the Algonquin Hotel, Dorothy Parker, distraught over a breakup with her young boyfriend and suffering from writer’s block, makes her fourth suicide bid by swallowing barbiturates, which only results in vomiting and stomach cramps. Three previous failed attempts involved slashing her wrists, overdosing on the sedative Veronal, and drinking a bottle of shoe polish.

1982:

Salvador Dalí, distraught at the death of his wife, Gala, attempts suicide by deliberately dehydrating himself. He fails, although it does help speed up his subsequent cremation when he eventually dies from heart failure.

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Ten

10

Instant Dismissals

1

The fifteenth-century German emperor Wenceslas had his cook roasted on a spit when the cook’s normally exemplary meals fell below standard. On another occasion, Wenceslas was out hunting when he came across a passing monk and shot him dead: The emperor explained that monks had better things to do than wander about in woods.

2

Henry VIII invented a new method of execution for Richard Rosse, cook to the Bishop of Rochester, who had poisoned the soup at a formal banquet and killed seventeen people. The king had him boiled to death in one of his own stockpots.

3

King Gustavus I of Sweden hacked his royal goldsmith to death because the man had taken a day off without permission.

4

King George II suffered terribly from hemorrhoids and an anal fistula but was very vain and notoriously touchy about his ailments, which were supposed to be a secret.

When one of his lords of the bedchamber tactlessly inquired after the king’s health, George fired him on the spot.

5

In 1994, a twenty-six-year-old stripper, Lisa Evans, claimed unfair dismissal against the owners of a nightclub in Edmonton, Alberta, where she had worked in a nude peep-show booth. Management said customers had complained because the 270-pound stripper was difficult to fantasize about.

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[Ten Instant Dismissals]

6

In 1996, a Madras train announcer, Rajiv Kamir, was fired for making farting noises over the PA system to the tune of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. A railroad spokesman noted, “It was a disgusting deviation from the timetable.”

7

In 1996, the county coroner in Tacoma, Washington, was removed from his post following complaints that he had encouraged his employees to make sexually explicit jokes about corpses and that he allowed them to circulate photographs of the private parts of deceased prominent local people.

8

In 1994, the U.S. neurosurgeon Dr. Raymond Sattle was removed from his post after he left a patient alone on the operating table with his brain exposed for half an hour while he went out for his lunch break in the middle of aneurysm surgery. The North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners heard that Dr. Sattle also frequently forgot the names of his surgical equipment during operations, allowed an untrained nurse to drill holes in a patient’s head, and had fluids pumped into his own veins while he was operating to help him stay on his feet.

9

Forty-one-year-old Milton Ross was fired from his desk job in St. Joseph, Montana, in 1994 after a video camera recorded him urinating into the office coffeepot. The video trap was set after his colleagues noted that their morning coffee seemed “off.”

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[Ten Instant Dismissals]

10

In 1993, Susan Franano, the general manager of the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra, fired oboist Ken Lawrence after he made a “facetious response” to a complaint about him. During a rehearsal for
The
Nutcracker
, Lawrence had farted loudly, “creating an overpowering smell.”

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Ten

10

Ex-Hypochondriacs

1

ARISTIDES (AD 117–180) Greek orator and

bedridden disciple of the healing god Asclepius. Died of natural causes at age sixty-three.

2

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–84) Often begged his wife to lock him in his room and shackle his legs, convinced he was going mad. Died of natural causes at age seventy-five.