An 80-year-old South African man was reported dead by his family and taken to the morgue where the undertaker checked his vitals and verified the death. The body was then locked up in a morgue fridge for 21 hours when he suddenly woke up and started banging on the fridge door screaming to be let out. The morgue owner and employees first thoughts were “ghost” – even though everybody knows ghosts can just ooze right through walls. So they called the cops and once the cops came with guns, they bravely entered the morgue and luckily did not kill the man again.

The real kicker is how the morgue owner, Ayanda Maqolo, reacted to the poor old man screaming to freed. Especially after his employees seemed so sure it was a ghost:

“I couldn’t believe it!” Maqolo said. “I was also scared. But they are my employees and I had to show them I wasn’t scared, so I called the police.”

After police arrived, the group entered the morgue together.

“I was glad they had their firearms, in case something wanted to fight with us,” Maqolo said.

[Gizmodo]

In 1875 a body was dug up while building a new train depot in Philadelphia. Thought to have been buried originally in 1800, the entire body has been turned into soap.

“This unusual preservation occurred because water seeped into the casket and brought alkaline soil with it, turning the fats in his body to soap through a type of hydrolysis known as saponification.”

[Smithsonian]

“From a distance it resembled a rather large man in a fur coat, leaning tenderly over the grave of a loved one. But when the two women in the Russian village of Vezhnya Tchova came closer they realised there was a bear in the cemetery eating a body.”

Daniel Scott Lasky final wish was to be buried at sea. Unfortunately he accidentally set of a murder investigation when those hired to lay him to rest in a watery grave did not properly weigh down his corpse.

…Lasky’s body resurfaced Saturday. About 9:30 that morning, a fisherman reported a man’s body floating about four miles offshore. Its wrappings had come undone. Sheriff’s marine deputies raced to the scene, along with the Coast Guard. Homicide detectives waited onshore.

Investigators later found Lasky’s intended resting place in his obituary in the Hickory Daily Record: “Burial will be at sea.”

No word yet on if burial regulations were followed.

[Sun-Sentinel]

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Cadillac of dead body retrieval technology…

The system involves a small aluminum pipette that can detect trace amounts of a chemical called ninhydrin-reactive nitrogen, which collects in air pockets around a grave site. It’s the only known example of testing the chemical in its vapor phase, NIST says. As an added bonus, the system works at ambient temperatures instead of freezing cold, which could make it easy to transport.

Chemists Thomas J. Bruno and Tara M. Lovestead tested it on dead rats, burying some in 3 inches of soil and laying others on top of the soil. For comparison, they also tested boxes with no dead rats in them. The NRN compound was still detectable after nearly five months, the researchers say. A paper on their findings was published in the journal Forensic Science International.

Cross that one off your Christmas wish list.

[PhysOrg via Pop Sci]

Flower, for my dearest?

A rare behemoth flower — dubbed the “corpse flower” for its rotting-meat smell — is set to bloom at Western Illinois University this week. It’s one of a small group of these flowers that have bloomed in cultivation since the 1880s.

As of Monday, the mega flower (one of four in the university’s greenhouse), was 44.5 inches (113 centimeters) tall, having grown nearly 4 inches (about 5.7 cm) in 24 hours. In the wild, the plant can grow as big as 20 feet (6 meters) tall and 15 feet (4.5 meters) across.

“The Titans in the WIU Botany Greenhouse will only get about half that in size,” said Jeff Hillyer, greenhouse gardner at WIU.

This one might be kind of redundant to leave on a grave stone…

[Live Science]