David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

The world’s most famous animal actor, Trigger co-starred with Roy Rogers in 88 films and 100 television shows. An unusually intelligent horse, Trigger was able to untie knots with his teeth and count to 20. Upon his death in 1965 at the age of 33, Trigger was stuffed and mounted. He is on display at the Roy Rogers Museum in Victorville, California, as are Dale Evans’ horse, Buttermilk, and their German shepherd dog Bullet.

After Mao, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, died at 82 on September 9, 1976, he was embalmed. His corpse was placed in a crystal sarcophagus to be displayed permanently to the public in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. At night, after visitors have gone home, Mao is lowered into an earthquake-proof chamber below the square.

In 1858, at the age of 14, Bernadette Soubirous saw several visions of the Virgin Mary at a spring in Lourdes, France. Bernadette later joined the Sisters of Notre Dame of Nevers, and today the site of the apparitions is one of the most famous Catholic shrines. After her death at the age of 35, Bernadette’s body was buried and exhumed three separate times in the next 45 years in attempts to verify the incorruptibility of her corpse (according to Catholic tradition, a sign of sainthood). Although there has been some decomposition, owing in part to numerous examinations, Bernadette’s remains are remarkably intact. Her body has been on display in the chapel of the Convent of St Gildard at Nevers since August 3, 1925.

During the six years that followed his death in 1921, the great Italian tenor surely qualified for the ‘best-dressed corpse’ list. Each year solicitous friends ordered a new outfit for Caruso’s body, which lay on public display in a crystal casket. In 1927 his widow decided enough was enough and had a white granite slab placed over the casket. It now remains sealed and undisturbed with Caruso in old clothes at Del Planto Cemetery near Naples, Italy.

More than 3 million people viewed the huge, chest-thumping gorilla in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo over a period of 20 years. While alive, Bushman often became moody when zoo-goers ignored him. In death, his stuffed and mounted carcass continues to awe visitors at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where he glares from a sealed glass case filled with insecticidal gases.

When Vu, a Buddhist monk, was nearing death in 1639, he asked his followers to leave him alone for 100 days so he could meditate. When his disciples eventually returned, they reportedly found his perfectly preserved body still in the lotus position. Believing that he had reached nirvana, they preserved his remains with red lacquer. In 2002 monks at his pagoda began restoring the cracked lacquer. X-rays showed that the body was still intact after more than three centuries. Thich Tranh Nhung, the head monk at the pagoda, said that Vu’s incorruption ‘illustrates the ability of the body to acquire a new level of grace through Buddhist teachings’.

‘El Negro’ was the name given to an anonymous Bushman stolen from his grave in 1830 by two French taxidermists, Jules and Edouard Verraux. The body was displayed in a Parisian shop for 50 years before being given to a museum in the town of Banyoles in Spain. The presence of ‘El Negro’ in Spain led several African nations to threaten a boycott of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. In 2000 the embalmed body was returned to Gabarone, Botswana, and given a burial with military honours.

Morstoel died of heart failure at the age of 89 in his native Norway in 1989. His grandson, Trygve Brauge, had the body frozen at a cryogenics facility in California, then had it stored in a shed at Brauge’s unfinished house in Nederland, Colorado. In 1994 Brauge lost a battle with immigration authorities and was deported to Norway. He arranged to pay $674 per month to locals to deliver dry ice to keep Morstoel from thawing out. Four years later, Morstoel became the subject of a short film, Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed , directed by Robin Beeck. Tom Plant, Nederland’s representative in the state legislature, tried in 2002 to have March 9 declared ‘Frozen Dead Guy Day’, pointing out that ‘Grandpa Bredo’ had been ‘a model citizen, never giving the cold shoulder to anyone’. Many representatives were not amused and the motion lost, 35 votes to 27. Despite this setback, Nederland held a festival honouring Morstoel on the weekend of March 9–10. The main events were a showing of Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed and a coffin race. A longer sequel, Grandpa’s Still in the Tuff Shed , was released in 2003.

After the Hall of Fame baseball player died at the age of 83 in 2002, he was taken to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s cryogenics facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. The decision was challenged by Williams’ eldest daughter, Bobby Jo, since his will stated that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered off the coast of Florida. Williams’ son, John Henry, produced a note in which he, Ted, and Ted’s daughter Claudia entered into a pact to freeze themselves after death. The handwritten pact, signed by all three, read, ‘JHW, Claudia and Dad all agree to be put in Bio-stasis after we die. This is what we want, to be able to be together in the future, even if it is only a chance.’ The suit was settled in December of 2002 and Ted Williams will remain indefinitely in one of Alcor’s liquid nitrogen-filled cryogenic tanks.

The sheep was famous as the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult. Her birth in 1996 was heralded as a scientific breakthrough but also triggered heated debate about the ethics of cloning. Dolly was put to sleep on February 13, 2003, after developing a fatal lung disease. Her preserved remains were placed on display at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In 1993 convicted murderer Joseph Paul Jernigan was executed in Texas. Because Jernigan donated his body to science, his body was frozen and shipped to the University of Colorado, where it was ‘sliced’ into 1,800 cross-sections. Two years later, a 59-year-old Maryland woman was similarly sliced, but into 5,000 segments. These two became the subjects of the Visible Human Project, the first computerised library of human anatomy to be made available to medical researchers around the world.

Baartman was born in the Cape Colony (part of modern-day South Africa) in 1789. Around 1810 she was taken to London by a British navy doctor, who exhibited her in Britain and France as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. People paid to gawk at her unusually large buttocks and elongated labia. Baartman was also studied by racial theorists seeking to support notions of the inherent superiority of European races. After she died in poverty at the age of 27, her brain and sexual organs were preserved and put on display at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris. After the ending of apartheid, the government of South Africa began requesting the return of Baartman’s remains. In April 2002 the preserved organs, Baartman’s skeleton and a plaster cast of Baartman’s body that had been on display were handed over at the South African embassy. ‘She has recovered her dignity, albeit after many years, with a ceremony that has celebrated her as a true person, and I am very happy about it,’ announced Bernard Chevassus-au-Louis, director of the French Museum of Natural History.