Ask a Mortician- Episode 13

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Ask a Mortician, Episode 13

Ask A Mortician- Hawaiian Episode

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Talk to your Children about Death

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In is part of the cycle of life, and in the world today, something that children should be aware of. Age appropriate conversations should be had.

Ask a Mortician- Episode Eleven

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Ask a Mortician- Episode Ten

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Ask a Mortician, Episode 9

Ask A Mortician - Episode 8

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The History of beheading and decapitation

The History of beheading.
Beheading with a sword or axe goes back a very long way in history, because like hanging, it was a cheap and practical method of execution in early times when a sword or an axe was always readily available.
The Greeks and the Romans considered beheading a less dishonorable (and less painful) form of execution than other methods in use at the time. The Roman Empire used beheading for its own citizens whilst crucifying others.
Beheading was widely used in Europe and Asia until the 20th century, but now is confined to Saudi Arabia, and Iran. One man was reportedly beheaded in Iran in 2003 – the first for many years. It remains a lawful method in Qatar and Yemen, although no executions by this method have been reported.
Beheading was used in Britain up to 1747 (see below) and was the standard method in Norway (abolished 1905), Sweden (up to 1903) and Denmark (last in 1892) and was used for some classes of prisoners in France (up until the introduction of the guillotine in 1792) and in Germany up to 1938. China also used it widely, until the communists came to power and replaced it with shooting in the 20th century. Japan too used beheading up to the end of the 19th century prior to turning to hanging.
Equipment for beheading.

There were two distinct forms of beheading - by the sword and by the axe. Where a person was to be decapitated with a sword, a block is not used and they are generally made to kneel down although they could, if short, be executed standing up, or even sitting in a chair. A typical European execution sword was 36-48 inches (900-1200 mm) long and 2 to 2-1/2 inches (50-65mm) wide with the handle being long enough for the executioner to use both hands to give maximum leverage. It weighed around 4 lbs. (2 Kg.)
Where an axe was the chosen implement, a wooden block, often shaped to accept the neck, was required. Two patterns of block were used, the high block, 18-24 inches (450-600 mm) high, where the prisoner knelt behind it and lent forward so that their neck rested on the top or lay on a low bench with their neck over the block. The neck on a high block presented an easier target due to the head pointing slightly downwards, thus bringing the neck into prominence. It also meant that the axe was at a better angle at that point in the arc of the stroke to meet the neck full on.
The high block was favored in later times in Britain and was standard in Germany up to the 1930's.
Some countries used a low block where the person lies full length and puts there neck over the small wooden block which is just a few inches high. This arrangement was used in Sweden. The low block presented the executioner with certain difficulties. The arc prescribed by the axe as he brought it down meant that the blade was at quite an angle to the prisoner's neck making it more difficult to sever the head with a single blow. Two patterns of axe were also used - the pattern used in Britain, which was developed from the traditional woodsman's axe, has a blade about one foot 8 inches (500 mm) high by 10 inches (250 mm) wide with a 5 foot (1525 mm) long handle. In Germany, the axe was like a larger version of a butcher's cleaver, again the handle was long enough for the headsman to use both hands.




Beheading in Britain.

In Britain, beheading was used in Anglo Saxon times as a punishment for certain types of serious theft. It was re-introduced during the reign of William the Conqueror for the execution of Waltheof, Earl of Northumberland on the 31st of May 1076 on St. Giles Hill, near Winchester. Waltheof had been convicted of treason for taking part in the Revolt of the Earls against the King and was beheaded with a sword.
Beheading was confined to those of noble birth who were convicted of treason and was an alternative to the normal punishments for this crime. Men convicted of High Treason were condemned to hanged drawn and quartered and women to be burned at the stake. In the case of the nobility the monarch could vary these punishments to death by beheading. Beheading was both far less painful and considered far less dishonorable than the normal methods. Several members of Royalty were beheaded, including Charles 1st, Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Grey. Many other Earls, Lords and Knights, including Sir Walter Raleigh. Even some Bishops were beheaded.
The majority of English beheadings took place at the Tower of London. Seven were carried out in private within the grounds, of which 5 were of women and just over 100 on Tower Hill outside the walls of the Tower, where there stood a permanent scaffold from 1485. Only a very small number of beheadings were carried out elsewhere, as the Tower was the principal prison for traitors of high birth. It should be noted that treason often meant displeasing the monarch, rather than in any way betraying the country.
The spot indicated as "The site of the scaffold" on Tower Green which visitors can see today was not used for all of the 7 private beheadings although the plaque implies this.
Those beheaded in private on Tower Green were Lord Hastings in 1483, Anne Boleyn on the 19th of May 1536, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury on the 28th of May 1541, Catherine Howard and her Lady in Waiting, Jane, Viscountess Rochford on the 13th of February 1542, Lady Jane Grey on the 15th of February 1554 and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex on the 25th of February 1601.
At various times both the low block and the high block have been used. The axe was the normal implement of execution in Britain, although Anne Boleyn was beheaded with a sword (see below).
A replica of the scaffold used for the 1601 execution of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex has been constructed for exhibition in the Tower. The original was set up in the middle of the Parade Ground and was made of oak, some 4 feet high and having a 9 feet square platform (1.2 m high x 2.75 m square) with a waist high rail round it. The prisoner mounted it by a short flight of stairs and was not restrained throughout the execution as it was expected that people of noble birth would know how to behave at their executions! Devereux lay full length on the platform and placed his neck on the low block with his arms outstretched. It is recorded that three strokes of the axe were required to decapitate him. Straw was spread on the scaffold to absorb the blood.The last female execution by beheading was that of 67 year old Lady Alice Lisle who was beheaded for treason at Winchester on the 2nd of September having been convicted of sheltering two traitors.
Beheading in public on Tower Hill was used when the government of the day wished to make an example of the traitor (or traitors). Double beheadings were rare, although not unknown, and were carried out in order of precedence of the victims, as occurred with the Jacobite Earls, Kilmarnock and Balmerino, executed in 1746 for treason after the battle of Culloden.
Simon Lord Lovatt became the last person to be beheaded on Tower Hill when he was executed for treason on April the 9th, 1747. The high block used for Lord Lovatt together with the axe were on display in the Tower. (see photo). It was normal for the executioner to pick up the severed head and display to the crowd proclaiming, "Behold the head of a traitor!"
The cause of death.

Beheading is as "humane" as any modern method of execution if carried out correctly and a single blow is sufficient to decapitate the prisoner. Consciousness is probably lost within 2-3 seconds, due to a rapid fall of the “intracranial perfusion of blood" (blood supply to the brain). The person dies from shock and anoxia due to hemorrhage and loss of blood pressure within less than 60 seconds. However, because the muscles and vertebrae of the neck are tough, decapitation may require more than one blow. Death occurs due to separation of the brain and spinal cord, after the transection (cutting through) of the surrounding tissues, together with massive hemorrhage.
It has often been reported that the eyes and mouths of the decapitated have shown signs of movement. It has been calculated that the human brain has enough oxygen stored for metabolism to persist for about 7 seconds after the head is cut off.

The problem with beheading.

Beheading requires a skilled headsman if it is to be at all "humane" and not infrequently, several blows were required to sever the head. It took three blows to remove Mary Queen of Scot's head at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587. In Britain, beheadings were carried out by the “common hangman” and were relatively rare so he had very little practice or experience, which often led to unfortunate consequences.
Saudi executioners pride themselves on their skill and efficiency with the scimitar.
The prisoner is usually blindfolded so that they do not see the sword or axe coming and move at the crucial moment. Again, this is why in both beheading and guillotining it was not unusual for an assistant to hold the prisoner's hair to prevent them moving.
In any event, the results are gory in the extreme as blood spurts from the severed arteries and veins of the neck including the aorta and the jugular vein.
All the European countries that previously used beheading have now totally abolished the death penalty.

Ask a Mortician, Episode 7

Photography- Motohiko Odani

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These outstandingly beautiful macabre photos are by Motohiko Odani

More wonderful photos HERE

The Woman in Black

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I have been posting about this film on the GTS Facebook for quite a spell now. I thought to post the trailer here just in case it was not yet known to all. The house, sets and costumes are fabulous!

Our parents warned us to stay far away.
When the tide fills in, she comes out to play.

She searches the land, for a lost one.
Wailing and calling, until the dawning sun.

She enters the village, before the first frost.
Searching for children, to replace her long lost.

One by one, she takes them away,
Back to the marsh, Where forever they'll stay.

She'll never give up until she gets him back
No one can stop, the woman in black.


............


Have you seen her?
The Woman in Black
She once lost a boy
Now she's come back.

Our parents are worried
They make such a fuss.
For if she can't find him
She'll take one of us.

During afternoon tea,
There's a shift in the air
A bone-trembling chill,
That tells you she's there.

There are those who believe
The whole town is cursed.
But the house in the marsh
is by far the worst.

What she wants is unknown,
but she always comes back.
The specter of darkness,
The Woman in Black.

Daniel Radcliff is looking like quite the gentleman these days.

Crazy Coffin Show

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A vibrant collection of bespoke coffins from the famous Pa Joe workshop in Ghana and Crazy Coffins in Nottingham.
Coffins in many unexpected designs - from a Mercedes, to a giant cocoa bean, to flying kite come - together to tell the story of the growing number of individuals around the world who choose to celebrate their life and death in the form of a uniquely designed coffin.

You can visit Crazy Coffins HERE

More on Paa Joe HERE

Ask a Mortician- Episode 5

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Ask a Mortician- Episode 4

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Ask a Mortician- Episode 3

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Körperwelten or Body Worlds

The Gothic Tea Society

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People around the world have flocked to see this amazing exhibit. I hope to see it myself the next time it comes to Los Angeles. Have you seen it? What did you think? Leave a comment and tell us all about it!

Wiki- Body Worlds (German title: Körperwelten) is a traveling exhibition of preserved human bodies and body parts that are prepared using a technique called plastination to reveal inner anatomical structures. The exhibition's developer and promoter is German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who invented the plastination technique in the late 1970s at the University of Heidelberg.

Read more on this fascinating exhibit HERE

Woman comes to life during autopsy

Funeral workers in Colombia got a bit of a surprise when a supposedly dead woman they were preparing for burial started breathing and moving.

Surgeons surgery doctors Doctors repeatedly failed to resuscitate the woman before she started breathing again in the funeral home

The woman had been pronounced dead hours earlier at a hospital in Cali, in western Colombia, after she suffered multiple organ failure due to complications related to multiple sclerosis.

After multiple resuscitation attempts had apparently failed, the doctors pronounced the woman dead and sent her to the funeral home.

But as the workers began to apply formaldehyde to her body, she started breathing again and began making movements.

Doctors identified it as a case of 'Lazarus syndrome', an extremely rare phenomenon in which the circulation spontaneously restarts after failed resuscitations.

The woman was returned to the hospital, where she remains in a coma.

* This is a re- post due to html issues

Guatemalan Funeral Homes Compete for Corpses

They're called "calaqueros" -- skullmongers -- and they make a living off Guatemala City's infamously high murder rate.

They chase ambulances, wait outside morgues or speed to crime scenes, trying to be the first to reach family members of the dead and sell their coffin-wake-funeral packages for as little as $150.

These mobile morticians constitute a completely unregulated -- and growing -- business that caters to inner city poor.

Competition is fierce. Some even pay police and firefighters to tip them off when a murder happens.

They offer everything from embalming to help with the red tape of acquiring a death certificate or burial permit.

And they operate from any location.

One funeral home is run out of a former mechanics garage. Caskets are sold in the front of the garage. In the back, among the old gaskets and engine blocks, the corpses are disemboweled, cleaned, embalmed and dressed for burial.

With its gang warfare and drug trafficking, Guatemala has one of the world's highest murder rates. The capital, Guatemala City, often makes the top 10 in various rankings of the world's most dangerous cities.

Unburied bodies tell the tale of Detroit

The abandoned corpses, in white body bags with number tags tied to each toe, lie one above the other on steel racks inside a giant freezer in Detroit’s central mortuary, like discarded shoes in the back of a wardrobe.

Some have lain here for years, but in recent months the number of unclaimed bodies has reached a record high. For in this city that once symbolised the American Dream many cannot even afford to bury their dead.

“I have not seen this many unclaimed bodies in 13 years on the job,” said Albert Samuels, chief investigator at the mortuary. “It started happening when the economy went south last year. I have never seen this many people struggling to give people their last resting place.”

Unburied bodies piling up in the city mortuary — it reached 70 earlier this year — is the latest and perhaps most appalling indignity to be heaped on the people of Detroit. The motor city that once boasted the highest median income and home ownership rate in the US is today in the midst of a long and agonising death spiral.

After years of gross mismanagement by the city’s leaders and the big three car manufacturers of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, who continued to make vehicles that Americans no longer wanted to buy, Detroit today has an unemployment rate of 28 per cent, higher even than the worst years of the Great Depression.

The murder rate is soaring. The school system is in receivership. The city treasury is $300 million (£182m) short of the funds needed to provide the most basic services such as rubbish collection. In its postwar heyday, when Detroit helped the US to dominate the world’s car market, it had 1.85 million people. Today, just over 900,000 remain. It was once America’s fourth-largest city. Today, it ranks eleventh, and will continue to fall.

Thousands of houses are abandoned, roofs ripped off, windows smashed. Block after block of shopping districts lie boarded up. Former manufacturing plants, such as the giant Fisher body plant that made Buicks and Cadillacs, but which was abandoned in 1991, are rotting.

Even Detroit’s NFL football team, the Lions, are one of the worst in the country. Last season they lost all 16 games. This year they have lost eight, and won just a single game.

Michigan’s Central Station, designed by the same people who gave New York its Grand Central Station, was abandoned 20 years ago. One photographer who produced a series of images forTime magazine said that he often felt, as he moved around parts of Detroit, as though he was in a post-apocalyptic disaster.

Then in June, the $21,000 annual county budget to bury Detroit’s unclaimed bodies ran out. Until then, if a family confirmed that they could not afford to lay a loved one to rest, Wayne County — in which Detroit sits — would, for $700, bury the body in a rough pine casket at a nearby cemetery, under a marker.

Darrell Vickers had to identify his aunt at the mortuary in September but he could not afford to bury her as he was unemployed. When his grandmother recently died, Mr Vickers’s father paid for her cremation, but with a credit card at 21 per cent interest. He said at the time it was “devastating” to not be able to bury his aunt.

What has alarmed medical examiners at the mortuary is that most of the dead died of natural causes. It is evidence, they believe, of people who could not afford medical insurance and medicines and whose families can now not afford to bury them.

Yet in recent weeks there have been signs of hope for Mr Samuels that he can reduce the backlog of bodies. Local philanthropists have donated $8,000 to help to bury the dead. In the past month, Mr Samuels has been able to bury 11 people. The number of unburied is now down to 55.

(Source)

"Did You Know?" Part 2 - fact or fiction?

Did you know... In Czechoslovakia, there is a church that has a chandelier made out of human bones. 

The sound of bells drives away demons because they're afraid of the loud noise. When a bell rings, a new angel has received his wings.

 A bird in the house is a sign of a death. If a robin flies into a room through a window, death will shortly follow.

 If you get a chill up your back or goosebumps, it means that someone is walking over your grave. Light candles on the night after November 1. One for each deceased relative should be placed in the window in the room where death occurred. 

You must hold your breath while going past a cemetery or you will breathe in the spirit of someone who has recently died. If a clock which has not been working suddenly chimes, there will be a death in the family. You will have bad luck if you do not stop the clock in the room where someone dies.

 If a woman is buried in black, she will return to haunt the family. If a dead person's eyes are left open, he'll find someone to take with him. Mirrors in a house with a corpse should be covered or the person who sees himself will die next.

 If you dream of death it's a sign of a birth, if you dream of birth, it's a sign of death.

 If you touch a loved one who has died, you won't have dreams about them A person who dies on Good Friday will go right to heaven. A person who dies at midnight on Christmas Eve will go straight to heaven because the gates of heaven are open at that time. All windows should be opened at the moment of death so that the soul can leave. The soul of a dying person can't escape the body and go to heaven if any locks are locked in the house. If the left eye twitches there will soon be a death in the family. If a dead person's eyes are left open, he'll find someone to take with him.

 Funerals on Friday portend another death in the family during the year. It's bad luck to count the cars in a funeral cortege. It's bad luck to meet a funeral procession head on. Thunder following a funeral means that the dead person's soul has reached heaven. Nothing new should be worn to a funeral, especially new shoes. Pointing at a funeral procession will cause you to die within the month Pregnant women should not attend funerals.

 If the person buried lived a good life, flowers will grow on the grave. If the person was evil, weeds will grow.

 If a mirror in the house falls and breaks by itself, someone in the house will die soon. 

 A white moth inside the house or trying to enter the house means death.

 If 3 people are photographed together, the one in the middle will die first.

 If 13 people sit down at a table to eat, one of them will die before the year is over.

 Dropping an umbrella on the floor means that there will be a murder in the house.