Tuesday, February 13, 2007

I will return, so don't bury me! / McDonald's Big Mac Sauce

Note: My LJ Nightmare blogquiz, by Kristen.


Today's Mummified Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A dead woman dressed in white was positioned in a chair in front of a television set for 2 1/2 years because she told her caregiver that she didn't want to be buried and planned to return, the coroner said. "Don't show my body when I'm dead," Hamilton County Coroner Dr. Odell Owens said Monday in describing Johanna Pope's wishes. "Don't bury me. I'm coming back." Pope, 61, died Aug. 29, 2003. Her caretaker and friend, whose name has not been released, left the woman upstairs in the home with the television and air conditioning on while the body slowly decayed and mummified.

Some family members continued to live downstairs in the house since her death. Police went to the house after a relative who hadn't seen Pope in 2 1/2 years called them. They found a staircase behind a door blocked by a basket and climbed to the second floor where they found the body. "Standing outside, one could smell death," Owens said. Owens said he had not determined the cause of death, but found no signs of abuse or foul play.

Culled from: Boston.Com
Generously submitted by: Dorisaurus

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"Standing outside, one could smell death" - you don't hear poetry like that coming from most coroners!

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Morbid Trinket Du Jour!

The Adipocere shop now has some black T-shirts! A great way to shock and horrify your non-morbid friends and family!

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Morbid Sightseeing!

Bluemeanie42 has a tragic recommendation for us the next time we're meandering our way through New Zealand:

"I wanted to let you know about the Asylum Lodge hostel, 36 Russell Road, Seacliff (tel: 03 4658123). Designed by Robert Lawson, it used to be the biggest building in NZ and possibly the largest in the Southern hemisphere. It was demolished in the 1950s because of 'dangerous instability' (very appropriate for a lunatic asylum) but in its heyday in the late nineteenth century, it housed over 1,400 patients. The pictures of the intact buildings are very impressive: it's really a massive castle-like edifice with turrets and towers.

"And the whole damn thing is almost totally gone! There are just a few buildings, crumbling and stuffed with rotting old cars and furniture, and a sheep paddock. We went for a stroll on the old grounds -- just a sweeping drive up through what used to be massive cultivated formal gardens and now is wild forest, and then a blank grassy field with here or there a bit of brick or a cracked wall or a bit of mossy cement floor. With the wind whistling along the plain and the ducks calling plaintively and the grey drizzle, it was satisfyingly eerie.

"Apparently, it was once featured on a television show about ghost hauntings, and there is a ghost called The Eye. One of the biggest fires in NZ history happened here, in a women's wing -- 37 of 39 patients died. I found a random blurb on a hostel ranking site intoning 'It was colder inside the hostel than outside. Bodies buried outside bedroom windows,' but it was quite toasty even in the winter and I don't know how they'd know, really, without a good spade.

"I am amazed at how little information there is on this place -- for such a young country with very little history, it seems a little silly to take something like this, raze most of it to the ground, and pass the remnants along to a couple of uninterested hostel owners. The hostel itself is set in the administration buildings, which still stand. There are also the boiler house (now a weekend home) and the workshops. It was worthwhile to stay at the hostel for the location, but we didn't care hugely for the owners -- though they did give us some good advice about sightseeing in the area, generally we found them to be surprisingly suspicious and unfriendly. If they wanted to go out, all the guests had to leave the hostel so it could be locked, and campers -- paying $15 a night for use of facilities -- weren't allowed in to use the bathroom between about 11 PM and 8 AM.

"We were also depressed to see the buildings boarded up and used as storehouses for garbage -- it doesn't have to be Disneyland, people, but it would have been nice to have a bit more information provided, and to be able to walk through the rooms that are left.

"Here are our holiday pictures. There are seven of the buildings and grounds -- unfortunately, we didn't have the film to really go crazy, and a lot of the buildings are boarded up."


McDonald's Big Mac Sauce

Yield: 2 Cups

1 cup Miracle Whip
1/3 cups sweet relish
1/4 cups French dressing (orange, not red)
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon minced onion

Mix ingredients well.

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