When you hear the word “mummy” you likely think of Egypt. Those mummies are what you might call the traditional kind. They were mummified intentionally, the organs removed, the flesh wrapped, and they were stored away as per custom and ritual. There is another kind of mummy, however. Natural mummification occurs when temperature and humidity are just right to preserve a corpse. Every so often we stumble onto these mummies, most of them natural but not always, in the most unusual places.
10. Elmer McCurdy’s Mummified Body Was in a Sideshow for Decades
Most of us only understand what things like explosions or dead bodies look like through the lens of pop culture. TV and movies show us these things, so when something doesn’t look the way we expect it to, we think it’s fake. And in the past, if people never saw a dead body anywhere, you can imagine they’d be hard-pressed to know they’d seen a real mummified one. And all of that leads us to the Six Million Dollar Man, which was being filmed at an amusement park in 1976.
The crew was setting up a scene in the park and decided to move a fake mummy located in a funhouse. Unfortunately, the mummy’s arm came off when the crewmember moved it. Likely there was a moment of confusion as the man looked at the arm and saw that there was bone inside of it and dried-up muscle tissue, all beneath layers of papery, dry flesh.
The body was not the most accurately made wax dummy of all time. It was the corpse of Elmer McCurdy and it had been hanging in that funhouse as a prop for four years. He’d been dead for 65 years, however.
McCurdy was a bit of a bandit in life and died in a gunfight with police after a robbery. When no one claimed his body, the mortician embalmed it and charged people money to have a look. Five years later a man who ran a carnival claimed he was a relative, took the body, then put it on display in a sideshow. It remained in sideshows and carnivals for the next 60 years, with people unaware that it was ever a real body.
Police were able to determine his true identity, and he was buried in Oklahoma.
9. Anatoly Moskvin Robbed Graves to Make Mummified Dolls
Russian historian Anatoly Moskvin was known for two things. He was the foremost expert on the cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod, and he had a very remarkable doll collection. No one knew how both of those things crossed over until things were well out of hand.
For some time, police in the town had been investigating the desecration of graves. Moskvin had been robbing the graves of girls and young women, taking the corpses back to his home and mummifying them before dressing them up as dolls. He’d amassed a collection that was first reported as 29 bodies but later amended to 26. They were decked out in dresses, boots, scarves, and even makeup.
Bizarrely, Moskvin actually lived with both of his parents. However, while they admitted knowing that their son had dolls, they claimed to legitimately believe they were dolls and had no idea they were corpses.
Moskvin was deemed unfit to stand trial and was sent to a psychiatric hospital instead.
8. A German Man’s Mummified Corpse Was Found on His Yacht
German Manfred Fritz Bajorat was a man who loved the sea. He’d been sailing the world on his yacht for 20 years. When he was discovered in 2016 in the Philippines, he hadn’t been seen by anyone in 9 years, though word is he’d spoken over the radio to a friend the year before he was found, which made what happened afterward even weirder. Two fishermen came aboard the drifting vessel and discovered Bajorat’s mummified body slumped over a table by the radio, head resting on his arm. Pictures of the body were published in papers and it barely looked like a real person. His body is shriveled and grayish-white and looks like a relic of decades past.
Amazingly, despite the condition of the body, which looked positively ancient and encrusted with salt, it was determined that he had only been dead for a week. The cause of death was determined to have been a heart attack. The state of the body was blamed on dry salt air and a breeze allowing for natural mummification to occur.
7. A Mummified DJ Was Found in the Wall of a Canadian Club
If you ever wanted another reason why smoking is bad news, here’s one reason that the Surgeon General never bothered to print on those warning labels. In 2003, officials in Canada discovered the mummified body of a DJ behind the walls of a nightclub in Winnipeg.
The man had gone missing about a year earlier and was discovered between an old wall and a new wall. Police believe he wedged himself in there on his own for unknown reasons. It’s possible he might have remained in the wall for years if not for the fact that smoking had recently been banned indoors. With no one smoking in the club anymore, the smell of the body became apparent, which led authorities to the remains.
6. Drag Performer Dorian Corey Has a Mummy in the Closet
Dorian Corey was a New York drag performer who rose to prominence in that world in the ’80s, culminating in an appearance in the documentary Paris is Burning. Corey died in 1993 and after her death, a friend was selling some of her extensive wardrobe. In going through the closet, they discovered a garment bag with something heavy inside. Cutting it open revealed the mummified body of Robert Worley, also known as Robert Wells.
Police determined Worley, who had done time for rape, had been shot in the back of the head at least 15 to 20 years earlier. Why he was killed and by whom, though Corey seems the likeliest suspect, was never determined, nor was the reason his body was stored in a closet instead of dumped somewhere else.
5. A 1,000-Year-Old Buddha Statue Had a Mummy Inside
Some people really get into Buddhism, but not as much as they did 1,000 years ago. How do we know? From the 1,000-year-old mummified monk that was found inside a Buddha statue. That’s a real dedication to your beliefs right there.
The statue was being restored in the Netherlands and CT scans revealed a monk within, sitting in the lotus position. Even more surprising than the monk himself was what had been done to him. His organs were all removed and replaced with pieces of paper that featured ancient Chinese characters. As far as anyone knows, this was the only time a monk was ever mummified and then placed inside a Buddha statue.
4. A Woman was Found in Her Car Five Years After She Died
Sometimes being responsible can turn around and bite you, just as it did with Pia Farrenkopf. The self-employed woman lived alone and had all her bills paid automatically through her bank. That’s how no one discovered she’d been dead in the back of her own Jeep in her garage for five years.
Her account had $54,000 in it, out of which all her bills were paid. A friendly neighbor mowed her lawn. Her mail was collected by the post office. And because she traveled frequently for work, no one paid attention to the fact they never saw her around.
It was only when the money ran out that the bank foreclosed on the home and sent someone in to repair the roof who then found the body. It’s unknown how she died.
3. The Mummified Cult Leader
A group calling itself Love Has Won doesn’t sound terrible, does it? That was probably the point of the name for this particular cult. Run by a woman named Mother God, whose real name was Amy Carlson, the New Age cult was plagued with abuse allegations. Their leader was allegedly 19 billion years old. For those keeping count, that’s older than the universe. She was the mother of all creation and had lived over 500 previous lives, including as Jesus, Joan of Arc, and Marilyn Monroe. In her most recent life, she managed a McDonald’s for a while and then decided to run a cult.
The group members were remarkably devoted to Carlson, but their beliefs were clearly a little squirrelly. At some point, Carlson was said to have been diagnosed with cancer and was paralyzed from the waist down. She is believed to have died sometime in April 2021.
On April 28, her body was discovered in a house after a cult member tipped off police. She was mummified, wrapped in a sleeping bag, adorned with Christmas lights, and missing her eyes. Seven people were taken in on charges relating to the abuse of a corpse.
2. A Mummified Monkey Was in the Ducts of a Minnesota Department Store
In movies, people travel through ductwork all the time to sneak through buildings. Real ducts are often not big enough for humans to travel through, probably for just this reason. You don’t need burglars scurrying about your walls like rats. But even if a place has small, normal-sized ducts, there can be some serious dangers if things find their way into them. Like monkeys, for instance.
In 2018, the mummified corpse of a monkey was discovered in the ducts of Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis. The building had been there for 100 years, but the monkey likely dates back to 1968.
Minnesota Mark Dayton’s family owned the store, and he actually worked there back in 1968. So when he was asked if he knew anything about the mystery monkey, he did recall a plausible, if very 60s explanation. Back in ‘68, they transformed the store’s 8th floor into a rainforest display. That was the kind of thing stores put effort into once upon a time, back when stores literally had eight floors. And to keep it authentic, they had living birds and monkeys in the building.
No one at the time knew anything about monkeys, including the fact they were carnivorous, so they started eating the birds. In the process of trying to separate the two species, one monkey made a break for it, never to be seen again.
1. A Woman Died in Her Own Home and Wasn’t Found for Decades
Hedviga Golik’s death was a lonely event. The Croatian woman was alone in her home when she passed away, possibly of natural causes. When her body was discovered, it had long since withered away to a dried, mummified husk. That was because she had been dead for literally decades.
Details of the story are a little sketchy. One source says she died in 1966 while another estimates 1973. But she wasn’t discovered until 2008. So it was either 35 or 42 years before someone found her.
You may be wondering how a person can go that long, in their own home, with no one knowing. Again, the details are a little sketchy. Housing was state-owned at the time the woman died, so it’s possible the government just continued paying any bills for the entire time since obviously no paperwork or anything else relating to the address would have ever been filed.
The windows of the home were open, again for at least 35 years, and that would have contributed to ameliorating any smells. It’s said that some neighbors did wonder where she’d gone but no one ever checked. They assumed she’d moved away. There’s even word she was reported missing at the time but no one looked in the apartment.
The body was only discovered when someone broke in because they wanted the apartment for themselves and obviously had not seen anyone ever coming or going. They called the police when the body was found.