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Sewing Shrouds: 19th-century Burial Clothing
Chris Woodyard has always been interested in what the well-dressed corpse is wearing: a netted beadwork shroud, as worn by an Egyptian mummy; the beautiful brocades found in the royal tombs at Las...
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Tears become ideas
In some places, the ability to sing or recite ritual laments was part of a feminine portfolio of skills, along with cooking, spinning, mending and cleaning. Here, author Sarah Murray explores this in...
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Lost Souls
As time goes by, photographs are lost. They’re tossed aside, in boxes, in attics and basements. They’re forgotten, only to revealed generations later, to modern eyes with a modern sense of death and...
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Transformative Powers through Making
I put the weight of my body into rolling the huge wet roll that was to become the shroud; back and forth for hours and days, because of course the first shroud was not right, nor the second. I sang...
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Proboscis Tongues and Demonic Queefing
In examining the reasons why pregnant women and young infants have traditionally been seen as particularly vulnerable to demonic influences, it may be necessary to look at popular views concerning soul...
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Female Professional Embalmer, 1900
Miss Katie Smith, daughter of the late Gran W. Smith, the only lady embalmer in the South, has made a long and successful study of the subject of embalming, and today she is recognized as one of the...
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Recording the Diseased & the Deceased
“I bet you didn’t think you’d be doing a job like this when you did your photography degree did you?” A comment I hear far too much in my line of work. Actually yes, as odd as it may seem, I have...
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Mrs Blunden of Basingstoke
“And now surveying her body they found it most lamentably beaten, which they concluded to proceed from the violence she did herself in that deplorable and astonishment that she had the last breath of...
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Midwives, Layers-Out, and Lady Pole
I recently finished Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty’s macabre, delightful memoir on her experience (past and current) in the death industry. Her story is...
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A Lady Undertaker: 1912
In 1912 an American "Lady Undertaker" addresses the question of why women are especially suited to work with the dead.
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Katabira no Tsuji – The Crossroad of Corpses
When the Empress died at the age of 64—still beautiful—her last will and testament was opened, and shocked the entire royal family. Instead of a state funeral and proper internment, the Empress...
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Is Taxidermy a “Girl Thing”?
I get called a lot of things by taxidermy enthusiasts, animal-rights activists, and the media. I’m apparently an instructor, an expert, a hipster, an animal hater, a sicko, a stuffer…but one of the...
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Monsters
“Be home when the street lights come on!” Was a common directive during many of our childhoods, as we anxiously ran out into the world to play. However, in my neighborhood and for many of us who lived...
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Beauty Secrets of The Martyrs
Definitions of beauty vary wildly, of course, but there’s an obvious human need for the presence of the dead, and for the dead to communicate with us, symbolically or literally. By arranging them...
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Life Of Pie
The colors are a deep burnt umber and it becomes increasingly brown as it spreads from the center to the tawny crispy crust that holds it all together. And when I close my eyes, I can hear my mom,...
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Widows and Virgins: The Curse of Being a Single Woman
Contrary to many death rituals I’ve read about previously, the widow bore the burden of “exaggerated observance of mourning customs” not out of respect for her deceased husband, but so that she did not...
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Best Of 2015
Women and death, particularly the role women are currently playing in the death positive movement and as death professionals made frequent headlines this year. Here is a recap of what 2015 had to...
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Death and the Birth of Feminism
Spiritualism was now at its height. With its guiding principals of equality — regardless of gender, race or economic status — for the first time, it provided a platform for women to speak out. So what...
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Drawn at the Tower
To enter the Tower of London after dark was a beautifully haunting experience. When I cast my mind back to the low lit bed chamber with rich red and gold fabrics, grad fore place and four poster bed I...
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Rest In Pieces
To celebrate the paperback release of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses, author Bess Lovejoy is giving away a signed copy of her book! Rest in Pieces catalogs stories from the age of...
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