Okay, I realise that like 90% of missing-corpse mysteries are really just a case of “unscrupulous funeral director cut the body up and sold it for parts, then buried an empty casket” and have nothing to do with vampires, but imagine if both of those things happened at once? Some poor med students being terrorised by a disembodied spleen, all hopping around and out for blood.
I think my favourite thing about this post is all the folks in the notes who until this moment had no idea that burial fraud is a thing.
I think Tumblr might be generally too young to remember Alistair Cooke, the British journalist who presented Masterpiece Theater on PBS. That’s what Cookie Monster (as Alistair Cookie) was parodying with Monsterpiece Theater on Sesame Street, if this looks familiar:
Anyway, when Alistair Cooke died of cancer in 2004, aged 95, his remains were a victim of burial fraud! His bones were stolen and sold!! His elderly, cancer-affected bones! Which is awful because:
grave-robbing is generally frowned upon, and
NOBODY WANTS A CANCER-RIDDLED BONE IMPLANT.
That part was particularly upsetting for his family – Cooke would have been completely ineligible for donation. They had to live with the knowledge that the tissue of their elderly, sick father had been stolen, but then, worse, sold for use in patients who really needed it, and who were presumably paying for clean, healthy, young-ish, consensual tissue. (But, Cooke’s daughter said, “at the same time, he would have appreciated the Dickensian nature of it.”)
Michael Mastromarino was the “Body-Snatcher” convicted of this and over 1,000 other counts of burial fraud, corpse-robbing, and other hideously medieval-sounding naughty behaviors.
Mastromarino died in 2013 at the age of 49.
Of liver and bone cancer.
Obviously the trade continues to this day but without such a bizarre narrative shape (that we know of. Yet.)
The reason I know this is because my husband was commenting on the cricketing career of one Alastair Cook, spelled differently, and I was like “Oh, like Monsterpiece Theatre!” and … well, one Wikipedia journey later I knew far too much about burial fraud.
They replace the stolen leg bones with bits of PVC for the viewing/burial, apparently!
Well this went to a lot of places relevant to my interests.
“I’ve been trying to fix a humming in my home stereo – it’s in the right speaker. David Bowie’s album Aladdin Sane has been sitting on the turntable so I’ve been playing Time –the first song on the second side – whenever I’ve tried to solve the problem. I must have heard that song thousands of times this week… I’ll never be able to listen to it again.”
sunflower: radiant, dreams of living in italy, hates being cold, keeps clementines in her purse, her laugh can make anybody smile
rose: loves silk,believes in soul mates, always blushes when receiving a compliment, listens to billie holiday and cries, buys lingerie for herself, takes bubble baths
hydrangea: wants a sugar daddy but doesn’t want to talk to him, mysterious, romanticizes everything, can tell you your horoscope, gets weird at night, loves being naked
daisy: walks barefoot on grass, calls her succulents her children, can quote extensive amounts of vines, has a small group of friends who she’d do anything for
violet: wears dark lipstick, loves 70s horror films, doesn’t take shit from anybody, owns tarot cards but has never used them, still listens to mcr, just wants to be alone
orchid: delicate, gets scared easily, loves antiques, collects sheet masks, wears fuzzy sweaters in summer, always gets sick, is basically a grandma
peony: loves being called princess, smells good, bakes sweets for people she loves, wears dresses and skirts, has seen every disney movie, wants to be a ballerina
lavender: has a classic style, collects teas, listens to 60s french music, always wants to be kissed on the hands, dream job is owning a boutique
If you had five billion you could hop from job to job, calling entitled customers idiots all across your city, putting the fear of You into every shithead in town until people become afraid to be rude to servers and cashiers, lest you emerge from the back room like some kind of manners-enforcing specter
suchasinistergame 