WILLIAM SHATNER: Sacred practices
that transition the dead
into the afterlife,
special coffins that prevent,
people from being buried alive,
and substances that can bring the deceased
back from the grave.
For over 100,000 years, humans have practiced
surprisingly similar methods for laying the dead to rest.
Graves, tombs, cremations
are all considered respectful ways to provide
the deceased with a final resting place.
But, is it possible, as many people believe,
that some of these practices can preserve the soul
for eternity?
Or perhaps, even bring the dead back to life?
Well, that is what we’ll try and find out.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: It’s an inescapable truth of human experience
that we’re all born, we all live, and then one day
we all eventually die.
For many cultures, the proper way to honor the deceased
is to provide their body with a permanent resting place
by using the sacred practice of burial.
65 million people die every year.
And depending on where they die, depending on what they believe,
different cultures, different religions,
bury people in different ways.
However, all of these burials,
regardless of where they occur, have a few things in common.
Perhaps the most important is you don’t mess with the dead.
Whether you believe in Heaven and Hell or not,
whether you believe in a god or not, there’s something about
honoring the deceased, that is common throughout history.
Our earliest burials are about 100,000 years old.
Probably some of the initial reasons for burying the dead
weren’t about ritual religion, but practicality.
We find a lot of early humans buried in caves,
places where people were actually living.
So, burying them as a way to mark territory.
This is where my ancestors are buried.
JOSEPH LAYCOCK: A lot of burial traditions revolve around the idea
that this is not just decaying flesh.
This is a person. This is someone whose life mattered.
And this goes all the way back to the Stone Age,
where basically cave people have been bound
in the fetal position and buried
with tools that they would’ve used in life.
So, these traditions are really as old as humankind.
SHATNER: Over the course of tens of thousands of years,
burial practices started to reflect
the principles of organized religion.
Ancient cultures around the world believed
that a proper burial involved showing respect,
not just for a dead person’s body,
but also for their soul.
In antiquity, there were very specific rites
that were used to help the deceased’s soul
navigate its way into the afterlife.
For instance, in ancient Egypt, there was the famous
Book of the Dead, which is essentially
a set of CliffsNotes
that helps the deceased’s soul navigate
this series of tests and gates and booby traps
that are set to try to keep the soul
from entering into the afterlife.
The ancient Greeks believed that the spirit
left the body as a breath of air.
And it was important to get the body itself
to the afterlife as quickly as possible
to reunite with the spirit.
To that end, they were often buried with a coin in the mouth
as payment to Charon,
the ferryman over the river Styx,
to aid them on their journey
and help them locate their spirit.
SHATNER: Although many ancient European societies
like the Greeks believed in burying the dead,
oftentimes, they did not lay out individual graves with nice,
neat headstones for each body, like we do today.
KEITH EGGENER: Historically speaking, in Europe,
people of all classes were typically buried in,
uh, mass graves.
It was really only the people of the highest levels
of the aristocracy,
who would receive any kind of individual burial
and individual marker of their death.
However, eventually, as we enter into the early modern age,
the 1400s-1500s and forward, increasingly, people
want to be remembered.
Permanent burial for individuals
of even the non-aristocratic classes
becomes increasingly common,
and we see the rise of gravestones.
SHATNER: As individual graves became more common for the masses
European and American communities in the 19th century
created new, elaborate burial places
that were located far away from churches and residential areas.
They were referred to as garden cemeteries.
Garden cemeteries are an interesting development.
They come in, at least in the American context,
in about the 1830s.
They were a different place, a place outside of the city.
They have their own necropolis
that we can visit through big elaborate gates.
EGGENER: These cemeteries, such as Mount Auburn in Cambridge,
Laurel Hill in Philadelphia,
Greenwood in Brooklyn, and many others,
were much larger than the church burial grounds.
They were also landscaped, um, in a picturesque fashion,
with winding paths and hills
and all sorts of varied plantings.
So, you’re not thinking of the oblivion of the grave,
but rather, you’re thinking of the departed
as resting peacefully,
surrounded by beautiful flowers and those who love them.
Death became widely seen as a gentle sleep.
SHATNER: Today, it is estimated that there are 144,000
cemeteries in the United States,
in which over one million people are buried every single year.
Since the practice of burial is thousands of years old,
perhaps it’s not surprising that we have inherited
a number of superstitions about
how this ritual should be performed.
There is a superstition of carrying the body
out of the house feet first.
And the idea was that, if you carry the body out headfirst,
the corpse gets this backward glance,
and that glance could maybe invite someone
to come with the deceased into the afterlife.
Another is you can’t take the body
in the family car, you have to hire a hearse.
The hearse can’t stop on the way to the cemetery,
because if it stops, the house where it stops
could perhaps get some of that death energy.
There’s a superstition of having pallbearers wear gloves.
And this is the same logic that there could be some sort of
lingering death energy on the casket,
and, if you have gloves,
that will give you some protection from it.
All people are driven to ritualize
the process of death.
So, when we think about what are these rites and rituals
doing for us,
making sure that certain rules are observed
gives us some element of control
in a realm that is, by definition, uncontrollable.
(crowd chanting)
SHATNER: Billions of people all over the world believe
that sacred rites and traditions
are the proper way to prepare a person’s soul for the afterlife.
But on the other hand, throughout history,
there have also been customs that were intended,
not to benefit the soul of the deceased,
but rather to harm it.
These practices are referred to as deviant burials.
The word "deviant burial" comes from archaeology.
When archaeologists look at dead people,
if someone has been buried in a way
that is different from everyone else,
that’s known as a deviant burial.
For example, in this village in Poland,
archaeologists discovered about six buried corpses
where there were sickles that had been placed
over the neck or over the pelvis
with the logic seeming to be, if this corpse tries to get up,
it will be cut with iron.
And one possibility is that these people
did something really bad while they were alive.
They practiced black magic or murder.
And the idea is that, if we can basically mutilate their body,
this will stop them from entering into the afterlife.
It’s a little unnerving to think that an improper burial
could actually prevent someone’s soul
from reaching the afterlife.
But perhaps even more concerning is a burial that’s gone wrong
because the deceased was actually buried alive.
SHATNER: All over the world,
human beings clearly go to great lengths
to ensure that the dead are buried in a respectful manner.
But on the other hand, throughout history,
people also took steps to determine whether or not someone
was actually ready to be laid to rest
in order to prevent people from being
buried alive.
DONNELLY: The fear of being buried alive was a fairly common fear
up until 20th century medical practices meant
fewer people were, in fact, buried alive.
It was most common in 18th and 19th century
Europe and America,
mostly due to the medical practices
and the burial practices at the time.
This was when medical diagnoses could get things wrong,
and people were, in fact, buried alive,
and stories of that became sensationalized,
and therefore, the panic would spread.
LAYCOCK: In the 19th century, the great fear
of being buried alive
was partly because this was the age of cholera.
Cholera causes severe diarrhea,
which can deplete all the electrolytes in your body
and, in extreme cases, can induce a coma.
So, sometimes people appear dead,
and they’re actually in this sort of vegetative state,
and they can come out of it.
But if you bury them, then you’ve buried them alive,
and that is a terrible death.
SHATNER: Historically, the thought of being trapped
in a wooden box, beneath thousands of pounds of dirt,
with no possibility of escape, was so widespread,
that this fear was actually given a name.
It’s called taphophobia.
Taphophobia is the idea of simply just the fear
of being buried alive.
Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote about
premature burial was terrified of being buried alive.
Frédéric Chopin, the composer,
wanted to be stabbed in the heart and bled out
to make sure that he was dead
when doctors believed that he was.
And even George Washington was so afraid of being buried alive
that he had written in his will that his body had to remain
in bed for three days after they thought he was dead
to make sure that he didn’t come back.
EGGENER: It was estimated by the 1890s
that some two percent of people being buried were buried alive.
Now, this is a gross exaggeration, no doubt.
But it was believed at the time,
enough so that organizations like
the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial
was founded in 1896.
And they lobbied parliament for greater diligence
on the part of doctors to make sure
that doctors were verifying death.
SHATNER: Despite doctors’ best efforts,
it was simply difficult at the time
to determine whether a person was alive or dead.
And so, in order to ease people’s minds,
authorities in Europe were forced to take drastic measures.
Within this storied city lies the Vienna Central Cemetery,
the second largest cemetery in the entire world.
In the heart of the cemetery, stands a small building
that, today, houses a museum.
But, in the 19th century, it was referred to
as a Leichenhaus.
The Leichenhaus was a kind of mortuary where
corpses were kept for a period, typically about three days,
and watched over by attendants
to make sure that a person was truly dead
and wouldn’t be buried alive in a state of coma or catalepsy.
SHATNER: In modern times, it may sound a little disturbing
to hear that doctors once stabbed their patients
in order to determine whether they were alive or dead.
But the truth is that the hysteria
about being buried alive was so prevalent
that an entire industry sprang up to help calm such fears
by producing bizarre contraptions
that were known as safety coffins.
LAYCOCK: If you were afraid of being buried alive,
the solution was the safety coffin.
And this began very simply with a bell
tied to a string that went down under the earth into the coffin.
And, if you were buried alive, and you woke up in a coffin,
you could pull that string, the bell would ring, and
hopefully, somebody would hear it and come dig you out.
And this tradition is where we get
the expression "saved by the bell."
And if you had more money, safety coffins
could get more elaborate.
They could add air tubes,
they could add windows, so you would have some lights
inside the-the coffin.
And there were even cases of people buried
with a key in their pocket, so they could unlock
the casket from the inside if-if this happens.
EGGENER: There were loads of patents taken up
for these safety coffins.
And they would include devices like
little flags that could be raised.
Sometimes safety coffins included
food or water, they would have breathing tubes,
they might even include periscopes.
One of the best-known ones really
belonged to a doctor named Timothy Clark from Vermont.
He came up with his own safety coffin device.
He had a-a set of stone stairs installed
next to his grave that could be opened up
by a concrete block that was sitting beside it.
That way anyone could get down to rescue him
if he needed to be rescued.
But the real kicker to the whole thing
was that he had a glass window installed
directly over his face, set into the stone.
However, he died in 1893,
and the doctors did not make a mistake.
He really was dead.
SHATNER: Safety coffins may seem like a quaint fad
from a bygone era that has no relevance in our world today.
But believe it or not,
there have been some recent cases in which people
appear to have been mistakenly buried alive.
Being buried alive is very, very rare, uh,
at least in our own time,
but it does still occasionally happen.
As recently as 2018, there was a case in Brazil
where a woman woke up in her grave and is thought
to have survived for 11 days there.
TAYLOR: Being buried alive doesn’t happen nearly as often
as it used to, but,
if you think about it, waking up in a coffin
would be probably one of the most terrifying things
that could ever happen to you.
The thought of being buried alive is like
something out of a nightmare.
But there’s another scenario that many might find
just as disturbing.
It’s a method of preserving the deceased
that takes embalming to the extreme.
SHATNER: On the morning after the bloodiest battle
of the Civil War, thousands of dead soldiers
lay strewn across the blood-soaked battlefield.
The Union Army brings the remains of the deceased
back to their field hospital at Camp Letterman.
But curiously, there is one tent in which bodies are
not prepared for burial, but rather
injected with chemicals to stop them from decaying,
a process that is known as embalming.
MONICA TORRES: The history of modern embalming
began during the Civil War when
surgeons at the time were able to embalm soldiers to
be able to have them delivered back to their families.
The process of embalming
requires the embalmer to arterially
inject a preservative, such as formaldehyde.
So, the bodies were embalmed and sent home for their loved ones.
SHATNER: All told, it is estimated that some
40,000 soldiers were embalmed during the Civil War.
The practice became so widespread,
that it caught the attention of U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln.
TORRES: President Lincoln was so impressed
by the embalming process that
he himself chose and wanted to be embalmed
and was actually embalmed
and taken on a tour across the United States on a train.
And he is actually the one who made it
pretty popular here in America,
created a whole American tradition
that is still being practiced today.
SHATNER: Today, experts estimate that 50% of all corpses
in the United States undergo some sort of embalming
so that the body can be viewed
during mourning rituals.
And it begs the question,
why do human beings take these steps to preserve
the remains of the dead?
The fact that we pump the body full of chemicals
and paint it with makeup and act like they’re just asleep,
not actually dead is about processing grief
and creating social, emotional space
that’s deemed appropriate
for people to have outward expressions of that grief.
It’s celebrating life.
SHATNER: Most people are familiar
with commonly used embalming practices.
But what’s less well-known, is that there have been
some strange cases in recent history
in which embalming was used to preserve the deceased,
not for days or weeks, but rather
for decades.
At 8:25 p.m., activity throughout this bustling city
came to an abrupt halt
when government officials interrupted radio broadcasts
to announce the death of
Argentina’s First Lady, Eva Perón.
Or, as she was more affectionately known,
Evita.
SHATNER: Evita’s casket drew so many mourners,
that the funeral lasted for an astonishing 16 days.
But what’s even more remarkable, is that Evita’s corpse
maintained an uncanny, lifelike appearance the entire time
because her husband, President Juan Perón,
had gone to extraordinary lengths
to keep her beauty intact
by hiring a renowned embalmer
known as Dr. Pedro Ara.
SHATNER: Evita’s burial monument was never built because
on September 19th, 1955
Juan Perón was overthrown in a military coup,
and Argentina’s new government chose
to hide Evita’s embalmed body from the public.
The location of Evita’s remains was a mystery for 16 years,
until it was revealed in 1971 that the Argentinian government
had secretly buried Evita in Milan, Italy in 1955.
After this discovery, Evita’s remains were exhumed
and brought to Spain, where Juan Perón was living in exile.
SHATNER: Juan Perón eventually returned to Argentina,
and at long last, on October 22, 1976,
more than 20 years after her death,
Evita Perón was finally laid to rest in a family crypt
at Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.
While the saga of Evita’s embalming
is certainly a bizarre and unusual tale,
in recent years, a number of people have undergone
a similarly radical form of preservation
that is referred to as extreme embalming.
Extreme embalming is like it sounds like,
embalming individuals, but taking it to a place
beyond just having them lay in repose in a coffin
and actually recreating the sort of poses
they might have found themselves in in life.
And this allows their family members
and loved ones to actually take photos with them
and act like they’re people who are still alive.
TAYLOR: Extreme embalming could be a lot of different things.
It’s as varied as the person who died.
They will put them in a situation
of-of what they loved during life.
They might be reading a book, playing music, driving a car.
And when their loved ones come to see them for the last time,
they remember them how they were.
Extreme embalming is trying to preserve
that last moment in time before that person was gone forever.
The art of extreme embalming offers the living
a way to hold on to their deceased loved ones
a while longer.
But is there a way to, not just preserve the body,
but actually bring the dead back to life?
Well, according to the practices of Haitian voodoo,
there may be a way to do it, but there’s a catch.
It will cost you
your soul.
SHATNER: In this small village,
Angelina Narcisse was going about her day,
when she was approached by a man claiming to be her brother,
Clairvius.
It may sound like a heartwarming tale of reunion,
but there was just one problem.
Clairvius Narcisse had been dead and buried
for nearly 20 years.
DONNELLY: Clairvius was a Haitian man born in 1922.
In the year 1962,
he went to, uh, a hospital.
His symptoms had been a severe fever,
fatigue, and he’d been coughing up blood.
His heart stopped, and he stopped breathing,
and was declared dead and buried.
20 years later, a man claiming to be Clairvius
showed up at his village and approached his family.
In many respects, his story did check out.
He bared a physical resemblance to the deceased.
He went by a nickname that was only known to him
and his sister when they were very little kids.
And so, he was able to relate certain details
of his former life that seemed to add up.
SHATNER: But if Clairvius Narcisse died and was buried,
then how on earth was he alive and able to track down
his sister almost 20 years later?
Well, according to Clairvius, the reason he was not lying dead
in his grave, was that a voodoo priest
had transformed him into a zombie.
In Haiti, a zombie is an individual
who’s had their soul stolen by sorcery
causing them to be sort of flung into a perpetual, uh, place
of purgatory through this incredible transition
of death, rebirth, and return to the living,
induced by the folk poison known as a Pudzombie.
It was a plethora of ingredients,
including various plants
and the toxin from a fish.
It selectively blocks sodium channels and nerves,
bringing on paralysis until the moment of death.
And yet, critically, if you get through that,
you have nothing to worry about.
This fascinating poison
had made people appear to be dead.
According to Clairvius, um,
he had been paralyzed by a voodoo priest.
This was a result of being drugged, um,
and this paste mixture that he was forced to consume
kept him in this death-like toper.
Narcisse is buried,
and the priest then dug him up from his grave
and enslaved him on a sugarcane plantation for 20 years.
DAVIS: From the Haitian point of view, the fate of a zombie is said
to become an indentured servant.
And losing your soul, losing your identity,
your personal autonomy,
combined to make this a fate worse than death.
SHATNER: The story of Clairvius Narcisse being buried and then revived
as an un-dead zombie made headlines
around the world.
Numerous experts investigated the case
in hopes of shedding light on what exactly took place.
The first question on everyone’s mind was whether Clairvius
had only appeared to be dead because he was drugged,
or if there was some truth
to the idea that he actually died
and was then revived by the power of voodoo.
What made the case of Narcisse unique
was one single thing, he had been pronounced dead
in an American-directed philanthropic institution,
the Schweitzer Hospital.
And his family members had witnessed the death
and authenticated it at the time.
So, all these lines of evidence led scientists to go public
in the 1980s,
saying they felt they had found the first
medically verifiable instance of zombification.
SHATNER: There are many theories as to what caused Clairvius Narcisse
to be declared dead and then seemingly brought back to life.
Ultimately, what happened to him remains a mystery,
but many Haitians are convinced
that Clairvius did, in fact, rise from the grave.
And for some, his story is a reminder
that the distinction between the living and the dead
may not be as clear-cut as we commonly think.
Narcisse never doubted that he’d become a zombie.
In Haiti, a zombie is a complete pariah
who walks the edge between life and death
and will do so for the rest of their existence.
And so, this idea that a person
could be brought back to life
fills all of us with mystery and trepidation and dread.
Can a combination of fish toxin and poisonous plants
actually transform the recently deceased into an undead slave?
(scoffs) It may sound far-fetched,
but the truth is that, for centuries,
some people have believed in the possibility
of what is known as reanimation.
And there are many experts who claim that, someday soon,
modern medicine will finally figure out
how to bring back the dead.
SHATNER: Scientists at the University of Utah
publish a study in the journal Nature
announcing the results of an extraordinary experiment.
The team took eye cells from a deceased person
and then, using electrical stimulation,
they reanimated the dead cells
and brought them back to life.
Experiments like this highlight the fact that, uh, death
is not always absolute when it comes to understanding
what is happening in this field of the biology of death.
Death is still defined,
per what is known as the Harvard ad hoc brain death definition,
as irreversible coma.
But will death be irreversible for the foreseeable future?
Not at all.
SHATNER: It seems that, after centuries of using
sacred rites to show reverence for the deceased,
humanity may be on the cusp of harnessing modern technology
to make death itself a thing of the past.
While that may seem like a bizarre possibility to consider,
the truth is that, since the 19th century, many people
have tried to use science to reanimate the dead,
rather than perform rituals to honor them.
One of the first of these scientists
was an Italian doctor named Giovanni Aldini.
Giovanni Aldini used a-a battery to make frog legs twitch
and then moved on to, um, sheep and pig and cow and ox.
But, naturally, he wanted to see
what it would do to human tissue.
He managed to acquire a body, and he hooked up his battery
and was able to make, uh, the facial muscles contort.
The left eye opened, and it even took a deep breath.
As it happens, a friend of Aldini’s
had a daughter by the name of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,
who remembered the story and was inspired by it.
And years later, she would write the novel Frankenstein
under her married name, Mary Shelley.
SHATNER: Published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s seminal novel
tells the story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein,
who develops a method to restore life to dead matter.
He assembles a human from various body parts,
but, after bringing it to life, he’s horrified by his creation.
McNEILL: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
does a very interesting thing because
we get our first incarnation of a mad scientist,
someone going too far,
trying to act as a god
in ways that maybe shouldn’t be done,
and we get this resulting monster.
SHATNER: You would think that the notoriety
of Dr. Frankenstein and his monstrous creation
would dissuade scientists
from trying to tamper with corpses,
but in the 1920s and ’30s,
a Soviet scientist named Sergei Brukhonenko
conducted a series of grisly experiments
that seemed to ignore the warnings
of Mary Shelley’s novel.
Sergei Brukhonenko is maybe most famous for
the process by which dogs,
those are the main experimental animals,
were drained of blood,
all the blood was taken out, and they died.
Then, the autojektor put the oxygenated blood
back into the dog, and it came back to life.
PASTOR: Sergei Brukhonenko set the stage for what
we know as modern-day heart and lung machines
that we use nowadays, and which potentially
will use in the future for doing more ambitious research.
There’s a lot of cutting-edge research out there
that may have a bit of a unpalatable feel to many.
We’re talking about the ability to regrow limbs,
regrow major parts of the heart, and, of course,
significant parts of the brain, as a way to reanimate life.
SHATNER: But if and when humanity is finally able
to reverse death, what will be the consequences?
Is it really a good idea to break
with thousands of years of tradition,
by not allowing the dead to rest in peace?
We have entered an era where the questions
of what science can do versus what science should do
is especially poignant.
Funerary rites are explicitly stated
to be about shepherding the soul
from life into death.
But if a body is reanimated,
where does the soul go?
It changes how we understand
the real pragmatics of death.
Is it possible that science will one day allow us
to create living people out of dead people’s body parts?
The notion of millions of actual Frankenstein monsters
roaming the streets is certainly difficult to fathom.
But, as it turns out, cemeteries are getting so full,
they’re actually running out of space,
and this has led to a host of new and strange methods
for interring the dead.
SHATNER: The South Korean government passes a controversial law
declaring that people can remain buried
for only 60 years.
After 60 years,
their body must be exhumed and disposed of
in an environmentally friendly manner.
The idea of so-called "temporary burials"
may sound shocking, but the fact is
graveyard space has been dwindling
all around the world for decades.
Today, in most countries in the world
where burial is still practiced,
people are buried for a-a temporary period.
You, in effect, lease a grave site,
and then, eventually, your remains are removed.
This is, in large part, a response to
the fact that there’s a lot of people on Earth--
over seven billion now--
and we’re still dying, as we always have.
Eventually, we run out of land,
and there’s no more space for burial.
And so, burial is becoming less and less common.
Cremation has become more and more popular, uh,
in many parts of the world.
SHATNER: In the last 65 years,
cremations have risen in the United States
by over 1,000%.
In fact, since 2015, more than half of all Americans
who passed away chose to have their remains cremated.
And many people are experimenting with new ways
to handle their ashes.
In the past, when someone was cremated,
you put all of the ashes in the urn.
And yet, today, there are all kinds of alternatives.
People want to have their ashes spread
at all their favorite places.
So, the body is spread out.
LAYCOCK: More recently, as far as what people can do
with those cremains,
you can have your ashes turned into a diamond.
In Korea, there is a company that turns your cremains
into a jar of pellets that look a bit like caviar.
There have been people having their ashes
mixed with concrete and dumped in the ocean
where they can become part of a coral reef.
There’s so many things that you can do with cremains.
One of the strangest things that I’ve seen
in my career as an embalmer and mortician
is I did have someone request
that I put their loved one’s
cremated remains into buckshot,
like shells, and they wanted to be shot.
SHATNER: Being shot from a gun certainly makes the notion
of a traditional burial feel rather mundane.
However, one thing most experts agree on is that,
in the final analysis, it ultimately doesn’t matter
how we say farewell to a person and their remains.
Rather, it’s what we say
that is of far greater importance.
These are moments that would happen biologically
without human interference,
but we cluster our rituals and our beliefs around them.
And following these guidelines
tells us one very important thing,
this person’s still here.
If they weren’t still here, if some element of them,
their soul, their spirit weren’t still here,
we wouldn’t need to do these things.
So, the fact that we do them
helps remind us that there’s still something of that person.
So, would you like your body to be transformed
into a piece of jewelry?
Or planted with a tree?
It may sound unusual, but then again,
how can we really say for certain
what is or is not a proper burial?
There’s no doubt technology will play a role
in how we are laid to rest in the future,
or perhaps it’ll be hard drives and holograms
that will allow us to live forever.
It’s an interesting notion, but, for now, it remains
unexplained.
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