Horse-drawn and motorized hearses that show city and rural funeral services
Embalming equipment and instruments
Caskets and coffins that represent changing tastes and designs
Portable funeral equipment
Chapel equipment and furnishings
Examples of postmortem photography
Full-size reproduction of Abraham Lincoln’s coffin
Scale model of Lincoln’s tomb
Articles of mourning clothing, jewelry, and adornment
Fraternal mourning badges
Rare books on embalming, dating back to as early as the sixteenth century
Funeral trade catalogues and publications
Gift shop featuring such items as Christmas tree ornaments adorned with silhouettes of hearses and miniature milk chocolate coffins (the perfect treat for the kiddies!)
ADDRESS: 1440 Monument Avenue
Springfield, IL 62702
HOURS: Tues.-Sat., 10 A.M.–4 P.M., Sun.,
1 P.M.–4 P.M. (closed on Mondays and holidays)
TEL.: 217-544-3480
If you can’t make it to Springfield, you can take a virtual tour at www.funeralmuseum.org/museumonline6.html.
3. THE MUSEUM OF DEATH
In 1995, artists J. D. Healy and Cathee Schultz opened their original Museum of Death in the basement of a former mortuary in San Diego’s Gaslamp District. Displaying a variety of ghoulish relics—everything from vintage embalming tables to the badly stained T-shirt of a prisoner put to death in the electric chair—along with grisly accident photos and original serial killer artwork, the museum generated the sort of publicity that, in the view of the building’s owners, did little to enhance its market value. Evicted after their four-year lease expired, Healy and Schultz moved their operation to the heart of Hollywood, where its ever-growing collection of bizarre memorabilia—a baseball signed by Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy’s “Pogo the Clown” paintings, a working guillotine, hand-carved Tibetan funerary skulls, among its many macabre curiosities—was housed in a defunct Mexican restaurant. The current museum is the third incarnation of this worthy establishment and, with its expanded collection and enlarged exhibition space, is bigger and better than ever. Definitely a must-see experience, especially if you’ve always dreamed of watching actual video footage of people getting run over by trains, jumping from burning buildings, or having their arms ripped off by jeeps.
ADDRESS: 6031
Hollywood Boulevard
Hollywood, CA 90028
HOURS: 12 P.M.-8 P.M. daily, except
Christmas and New Year’s Day
TEL. 323-466-8011
4. THE MUSEUM OF MOURNING ART AT ARLINGTON
Situated in Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania (not to be confused with the national cemetery in Washington, D.C.), this fascinating assemblage of mortuary memorabilia is housed in an exact replica of Mount Vernon, the beloved Virginia home of the father of our country. Devoted to early America’s “culture of grief,” it includes a wide variety of memorial objects—books, clocks, bells, iron gates, ceramics, and more—adorned with traditional death emblems (skulls, skeletons, crossed bones, angels, lambs, wreaths, urns, etc.). It also features a magnificent horse-drawn hearse,
seventy pieces of mourning jewelry made between 1610 and 1810, and—the single weirdest object in the collection—a booby-trapped “cemetery gun,” designed to discourage body snatchers by going off when someone tripped over it in a graveyard.
ADDRESS: 2900 State Road, Drexel Hill, PA
HOURS: Mon.–Fri., 8 A.M.–4:30 P.M. by
appointment only (prospective visitors
should call at least a week in advance to
make arrangements for a guided tour)
TEL.: 215-259-5800
5. THE MÜTTER MUSEUM
Though not a death museum per se, this venerable Philadelphia institution contains a veritable treasure trove of ghoulish goodies for the morbidly inclined. Housed in the College of Physicians, it dates back to 1858, when one Thomas Dent Mütter, a retired professor of surgery, donated his impressive collection of anatomical specimens, including seventeen hundred human bones and preserved body parts, to the medical school. Since then, the original holdings have been supplemented by a dizzying array of grotesque acquisitions, including the world’s largest distended colon, the cancerous tumor secretly removed from the jaw of President Grover Cleveland, the thorax of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, the actual liver shared by conjoined twins Chang and Eng, and scores of hideously deformed fetuses neatly shelved in preservative-filled jars. Death devotees will particularly appreciate the museum’s one-of-a-kind “Soap Woman,” an exhumed nineteenth-century female corpse that—owing to the peculiar chemical properties of the soil in which it was interred—underwent the highly revolting process known as saponification, which transformed her fatty tissue into the waxy substance adipocere.
ADDRESS: 19 S. 22nd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
HOURS: 10 A.M.–5 P.M., daily except
Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New
Year’s Day
TEL.: 215-563-3737
6. THE MUSEUM OF MOURNING PHOTOGRAPHY AND MEMORIAL PRACTICE
Though the name is perhaps a tad grandiose (the “museum” is basically an alcove in the proprietors’ living room), this outstanding collection of memorial photographs and related mortuary ephemera is one of the best in the country, perhaps second only to that of the estimable Stanley Burns. Assembled by Chicago architect and photographer Anthony Vizzari and his wife, Andrea, it consists of about fifteen hundred pieces, circa 1840 to the present. At present, the collection, housed in the Vizzaris’ apartment in Chicago’s historic Logan Square neighborhood, can be viewed only by appointment. To arrange a visit, contact the museum director at [email protected]. Some of the Vizzaris’ holdings can also be seen online by going to the museum’s home page at mourningphotography.com and clicking on “Gallery.”
THE VIRTUAL AUTOPSY
Always had a hankering to dissect a cadaver but didn’t want to take the time and trouble to attend med school? Thanks to the folks at the Australian Museum website, anyone can now find out exactly what goes on during an autopsy. Just go to www.deathonline.net/movies/index.cfm and follow the menu to “Interactive Autopsy.” Have fun!
Death Ed
For many years now, classes in human sexual behavior have been a regular (if often controversial) feature of the U.S. educational system. As Sigmund Freud pointed out long ago, however, sex isn’t the only primal force that shapes human existence. The other is death. The recognition of this fact has begun to filter into the academic world. To be sure, courses in death and dying aren’t exactly a standard part of the liberal arts curriculum. But at least death education has become a recognized area of teaching and study.
Scholars and researchers involved in this field acknowledge Herman Feifel as one of its great pioneers. Chief psychologist at the Los Angeles Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic and a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, Feifel was the editor of the groundbreaking book The Meaning of Death (McGraw-Hill, 1959), a collection of essays by twenty-one theologians and scientists that is universally credited with jump-starting the modern “death awareness” movement. By the mid-1960s, death-related courses were beginning to pop up in universities across the country. Before long, the field of death education had legitimized itself with all the requisite academic trappings: its very own journal (Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying), think tank (the Center for Death Education and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse), professional organization (the Association for Death Education and Counseling), and regular national and regional conferences.
Nowadays, most colleges and universities offer courses on death and dying, many of which take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on faculty from various departments: psychology, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, literature, and the arts
. A few educational institutions even offer special programs allowing students to earn degrees with a concentration in thanatology.
A typical survey course—Death and Dying 101—might cover such areas as cross-cultural perspectives on death, the dying process, worldwide funeral practices and rituals, grief and bereavement, medical ethics and euthanasia, near-death experiences, and the afterlife. Readings might range from such seminal works as Geoffrey Gorer’s 1955 essay “The Pornography of Death” and Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death to pop best sellers such as Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie and literary classics including Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”
While this type of elective offers a nice change of pace from the monotony of the usual humanities seminar, there is also a more practical, vocational side to death education: programs for people who wish to pursue a hands-on career in the death industry as a funeral director and licensed embalmer. This branch of learning is the specialty of the country’s many accredited schools of mortuary science. While requirements differ by state, college degrees in this field usually take two to four years and consist of both general education classes in such core areas as writing, math, and science and specialized courses in all the areas necessary to operate a successful funeral home: embalming techniques, restorative art, mortuary administration, grief counseling, and so on. The American Board of Funeral Service Education (ABFSE), whose roots go back to the 1940s, is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the sole accrediting agency for academic programs that prepare funeral service directors. A state-by-state directory of these programs can be found at the organization’s website, www.abfse.org.
RECOMMENDED READING
For a very thorough survey of this subject, see the entry on “Death Education” by Charles A. Corr and Donna M. Corr in vol. 1 of The Handbook of Death and Dying (Sage, 2003), edited by Clifton D. Bryant. Another illuminating essay is J. E. Knott’s “Death Education for All” in the collection Dying: Facing the Facts (McGraw-Hill, 1979), edited by Hannelore Wass.
And Following Our
Midafternoon Séance,
There’ll Be Lanyard
Braiding at the Arts and
Crafts Center
As each school year draws to a close, millions of American parents confront a dilemma. Should they send their kids to summer camp? And if so, what kind—art camp, science camp, baseball camp, drama camp, weight-loss camp? Obviously, the final decision will depend on the child’s particular desires, skills, and needs. If you happen to have a child like the one in the hit 1999 movie The Sixth Sense—that is, the kind who sees dead people—the choice is pretty obvious. You’ll want to send him to the Wonewoc Spiritualist Camp in Wonewoc, Wisconsin.
Actually, you don’t have to be a child to enjoy the delights of Wonewoc—just a believer in spiritualism, the movement that started in upstate New York in the mid-1800s when a trio of sisters, Margaret, Kate, and Leah Fox, began communicating with the dead via mediumistic trances. Before long, a séance craze had swept the country and spread to England, where it peaked in the aftermath of World War I, when millions of bereaved parents tried desperately to make contact with the spirits of their slaughtered sons.
Nowadays, spiritualism isn’t quite the sensation it used to be when people flocked to darkened auditoriums to see self-professed mediums speak to departed souls and conjure up ectoplasmic phantoms. But it’s still a vital movement that, among other activities, operates thirteen camps throughout the United States.
Wonewoc, established in 1893, occupies thirty-seven rustic acres in western Wisconsin. Consisting of three dozen cabins, a dining hall, and a derelict chapel, it is attended by mediums, clairvoyants, and psychics from around the Midwest and offers a variety of fun-filled activities, including classes on past-life regression and workshops on how to see auras, along with ice cream socials and campfires. For prices ranging from $20 to $40, visitors to the camp can receive messages from the Great Beyond as transmitted through resident mediums such as Judy Ulrich, who claims to be able to see dead people “so close, I see the stubble on their face.” (Evidently, razors are in short supply in the afterlife.)
For more information about spiritualist camps around the United States, go to www.nsac.org/camps.htm.
Cemetery Fun
Sure, a cemetery is a death-haunted place full of moldering human remains. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the perfect spot for a fun-filled weekend visit, offering all kinds of entertaining and educational activities suitable for kids of all ages.
That, at any rate, is the message of Sharon DeBartolo Carmack’s oversize trade paperback book, Your Guide to Cemetery Research (Betterway Books, 2002). A certified genealogist and self-confessed cemetery enthusiast who developed a lifelong fascination with old graveyards in childhood, Carmack shows readers how to fill in the gaps in their family history by locating their ancestors’ burial places, analyzing the information on headstones, tracking down death records, and so on.
Her book, however, is aimed not only at amateur genealogists trying to chart the family tree but also at anyone who is looking to spend a carefree day among the long-buried dead. To that end, Carmack offers lively how-to advice on all kinds of delightful activities, from cemetery picnics and family reunions to assorted arts-and-crafts projects such as cemetery scrapbooks, quilts, and samplers. She also teaches aspiring hobbyists how to make gravestone rubbings and plaster-cast replicas of old tombstones—perfect projects that Junior can bring to school for his next show-and-tell.
In short, Carmack’s book is a delightful addition to the library of any taphophile from eight to eighty.
Love and Death
In the age of AIDS, we’ve become all too familiar with the fact that sex can have fatal consequences. But the connection between sex and death actually extends back many centuries.
In France, the phrase la petit mort—“the little death”—has long been used to describe an orgasm. Similarly, in Elizabethan England, “to die” meant to have a sexual climax—the equivalent of our slang expression “to come.” When one of Shakespeare’s characters tells his girlfriend that he wants to “die in [her] lap,” or when another remarks that he will “die bravely, like a smug bridegroom,” they’re talking about sex.
And the Bard isn’t just being metaphorical. Back then, it was a common folk belief that every man was born with a limited supply of “vital fluid” and that every orgasm deprived him of a day of life.
Still, it was a trade-off Shakespeare seemed willing to make. As he puns in one of his sonnets: “Happy to have thy love, happy to die!”
The Bride Wore Black
Every starry-eyed young bride-and groom-to-be wants to consecrate their love with a perfect wedding ceremony. If you’re looking to tie the knot in a very special way—one that’s sure to make a deep and lasting (not to say potentially traumatic) impression on your family and friends—you might want to consider one of America’s fastest-growing trends: the cemetery wedding.
Well, okay, it’s not exactly one of America’s fastest-growing trends. Actually, as far as we can tell, only one young couple has actually gone ahead and gotten married in a graveyard—though the story received so much attention in the national press that you’d think cemetery weddings really are sweeping the country.
The lovebirds in question are named Scott Amsler and Miranda Patterson, both residents of Troy, Illinois, a St. Louis suburb. Amsler works with computers by day and devotes his evenings to his true passion: restoring old hearses. After meeting and falling for his future fiancée, he proposed in a way guaranteed to win any young woman’s heart: by affixing an engraved metal sign to the side of his prized 1965 funeral coach. The message read: “Will You Marry Me?” How could a girl refuse?
Driving home to share the happy news with her family, Patterson spotted a perfect location for an outdoor ceremony: a beautiful gazebo perched atop a grassy hill. That the gazebo was part of the city cemetery and surrounded by hundreds of tombstones, some dating
back to the Civil War, only made the site more appealing to this real-life Morticia and Gomez.
After contacting the city clerk’s office, the couple learned that they would need the permission of the town cemetery committee. At least one alderman, seventy-one-year-old William Hohman, had his doubts, fearing that the graveyard nuptials would set a dangerous precedent. “Once you let that horse out of the barn, people could ask to do anything out there,” Hohman told reporters. “You’ve got various cults running around, and we don’t want to get into that nonsense.”
There was also some concern that a burial might take place on the same day, casting a literal pall on the festivities. In the end, however, everything apparently worked out well. Permission was granted, no one was inconsiderate enough to require interment while the wedding was taking place, and the bride and groom were able to exchange vows on their charming hilltop setting while surrounded by family, friends, and a few hundred spectral witnesses—what the Bible calls “the congregation of the dead.”
The Last Word
Since I’ve spent the whole book urging readers to take responsibility and not leave final matters to either chance or the questionable judgment of their survivors, it seems only appropriate that I specify my own wishes for an epitaph. Here is how I devoutly wish my tombstone to read:
Here Lies
HAROLD
SCHECHTER
1948, 2048
AUTHOR OF THE
#1 NEW YORK TIMES
BEST SELLER,
The Whole Death Catalog Page 40
