There are many dignified ways to be disposed of after you die, from cremation or aquamation to being fired from a catapult at your enemies. However, for some unfortunate souls, being buried isn’t the last that will be seen of them, thanks to their caskets exploding out their contents. In her “Ask a Mortician” YouTube series, mortician Caitlin Doughty explains that it happens when bodies are sealed a little too well into their final resting place.
“A rotting body should have access to some form of air so that it can dehydrate. However, if the corpse is in one of those super-sealed protective caskets, there’s no way for all of that gas and fluid to escape, and the body can devolve into a bog. In the manner of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Gas builds up inside the coffin or mausoleum, unable to escape until it explodes or breaks, splattering your mulch over the lid.
“It can even remove the marble face of the crypt if it’s a powerful enough impact,” Doughty adds in her video. She then displays an image of a front that had been blasted off in this manner. William the Conqueror, the first Norman monarch of England, met a nasty death comparable to this. While riding in combat, William was injured, and his intestines were perforated. As he deteriorated, the people in his life—the majority of whom he had mistreated, as well as his son, with whom he was at odds—decided not to take on the task of planning his burial. His body was left to decompose on a stone slab after he died, waiting for someone to volunteer.
As the body began to rot, a knight took it upon himself to transfer the body 112 kilometers (70 miles) to Caen, where it was interred. The king, no longer preoccupied with issues of state, spent his time gathering gas through decomposition. Upon arriving, a city fire warmed the body even more, causing the vapors to grow. It was too swollen to fit into the sarcophagus by the day of the burial.
The gravediggers, undeterred by simple physics, tried to force him in anyhow, like a youngster attempting to drive a square toy through a circle-shaped hole. The body blew up at this point, and “the enlarged bowels erupted, and an awful odor assaulted the bystanders’ nostrils and the whole throng.” The mourners were drenched in the blood of the deceased monarch.
