In 1844, John W. Jones escaped a plantation in Virginia and walked to New York, dodging slave catchers, with four other men. He settled in Elmira, traded work for an education, and became a sexton caring for his church's...

People have long held a morbid curiosity about dea...  ...world turned to respecting cultural beliefs about burial , with spotty results. Why do we continue to displ...

Belief in the ability of the dead to rise up and v...  ...s about the beliefs that lay behind some of these burial rituals.Polcyn’s work describes one female...  ...avations in other countries like Slovakia before, burials with sickles across the throat are rare during th...  ...ng the dead would have horr...

We've read about how San Francisco city officials...  ...ce organization built a new coffin and provided a burial for the child. But who was she? Her gravestone ca...  ...ty was finally discovered. See, before her second burial , researchers extracted DNA from the corpse, first...

Mississippi's first insane asylum was established...  ...Center’s grounds.What to do with all these burials ? Exhuming and reburying each body would cost an e...

We've read about excavations in Ireland and other places where precautions were taken to ensure the corpse didn't reanimate as a vampire or zombie. It turns out that England may have been afraid of the same thing. An arc...

Researchers from the University of Utah took seven calf carcasses out to the desert to see what would happen. They were going to record, count, and identify the vultures, coyotes, and other animals that tend to feed off...

In the mid-19th century, Alexander Stewart ran a vast business of factories and stores selling clothing and dry goods in New York City. When he died, he left a fortune worth $46 billion dollars in today's money. He died...

An ancient burial site in northwest Chin ahas yielded some surprisi...  ...dating of the tomb's contents indicates that the burial occurred approximately 2,400 to 2,800 years ago.T...  ...ian steppe thousands of years ago, says Jiang.The burial site is at the Turpan oasis, which...

City workers digging to improve water mains beneat...  ...ly made a historical find when they uncovered two burial sites that date back to the 19th century. The fir...  ...k to ascertain the historical significance of the burial place. Read more on this story at The New York Po...