Insane Mummies
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These are two ladies
you have to meet! West Virginia's mummified couple have been
on tour with P.T. Barnum, stored under a bed and survived a
couple of floods. They are now permanent residents of Barbour
County Historical Museum. In the late 1800's Graham Hamrick
bought the bodies of two ladies from a local mental institution
and mummified them!
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West Virginia's Frankenstein
Graham
Hamrick, West Virginia's Dr. Frankenstein, kept the head of
a man in a jar. When he died, his assistants were to squeamish
to mummify him . He took his secrets to the graveyard with him.
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One of the insane mummies
in West Virginia that has survived two
floods and the green mold that grew on her after drying out.
A little sun in the front yard dried her and her friend out
very nicely and helped stop the mold from growing.
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Older than Otzi
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Older than Otzi is
the 8400 year old skeleton found in Washington State. Although
he is not a mummy,it is the oldest human remains ever found.
The fellow is the center of a big controversy. His remains are
claimed by anthropologists and five tribes of Indians. DNA tests
will have to help this guy to find where to run to.
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Lenin
Would you believe that Lenin,
former leader of the old United Soviet Socialist Republic, is a mummy?
After his death he was sealed in wax using a top secret process. Then
he was put on public display in a glass showcase. He started a fad and
other communist world leaders demanded the same treatment after death.
Already preserved and on public display are China's Mayo Redoing and
Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh. He has now become the center of controversy in
Russia because Boris Yeltsin wants to give him a Christian burial.
The Oldest Mummy
A mummy found in 1940 was recently
dated to 7420 B.C. Found in Carson City, Nevada, is the oldest mummy
discovered in North America. The mummy is an approximately forty-five
year old male and is in excellent condition.
He was found in a cave during
a mining project, he was lying on fur blanket dressed in a twisted skin
robe with a twine mat thrown over his head and shoulders. The mummy
and the fifty-eight artifacts found with him have gone unnoticed for
sixty years while being stored at the Nevada State Museum!
The Aluet People
In one Aleutian cave, archaeologists
found more than 50 mummies dating
back 250 years.
Embalming methods varied
from culture to culture. According to Nova online,
“The Aleut people, who lived on the Aleutian Islands off the coast of
Alaska,
mummified their dead by:
 
Step 1
First, they removed
the organs and stuffed the cavity with dry grass.
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Step 2
Next they laid the
body in a stream, where the running water dissolved the body’s
fat and washed it away, leaving only muscle and skin.
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Step 3
The body was then
tied in a squatting position and dried in the open air.
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Step 4
Once it was dry,
the mummy was wrapped in several layers of waterproof leather
and woven clothing and placed in a warm cave, either hanging
from the ceiling or lying on a platform to keep it off the damp
floor.
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"In Papu New Guinea,
embalmers smoke-cured the dead, covered them in a protective layer of
clay and propped them up on scaffolding that overlooked their villages.”
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