Victor’s meemaw is like everyone else’s grandma in that she tells the same ten stories every time we see her. One time Victor got his head stuck in the fence at Disneyland (when he was trying to cut in line) and Goofy had to put butter on his ears to get him out. I have heard this story so often I can lip sync it. Well, just the first part really because then I stop listening and just nod the rest of the time. But then one time meemaw told us that one Easter when she was a kid she and her brothers were rock hunting and dug up a dead body from an Indian graveyard and brought it home to show her parents. Then they decided to store it under her dad’s bed and somehow over the years it got lost. I was all “YOU DUG UP A BODY FOR EASTER?” and she was totally nonchalant and tried to change to the subject to tell me for the 8 billionth time how Victor ate 12 milkshakes when he was 14 and I was all “LEAD WITH THE DEAD BODY STORY” but she didn’t think it was important because “it wasn’t anyone we knew“. I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up except that I was just thinking that one day I’ll be the same way, except that my grandkids will be all “Yeah yeah, we read it in the book” and I never even dug up a human corpse. How am I supposed to top that? I’ll just be rambling about how hard blogging was back in the day and my grandkids will be tuning me out as they create porn holograms with their built in brain-computers. The future is bleak, y’all.
PS. My sister just reminded me that our grampa also dug up a corpse when he was a kid so maybe we shouldn’t be so judgmental, but the corpse was a relative and then he buried her again so I’m pretty sure we win. Plus, he was doing it to solve a crime. Sort of. My grampa was like the Hardy Boys except that there was just one of him and no one cared what he found out. Probably because no one wanted to talk to the kid who just dug up his dead aunt. There are laws against that sort of shit, grampa.
PPS. I’m really tempted to call my only living grandma to ask if she ever dug up a corpse. Was this just what people did in the roaring 30’s? No one ever talks about that.
PPPS. Sorry. This isn’t a real post. It’s just me rambling. Much like the me of the future. It’s a sneak-peek at how I’m going to be when I’m elderly. I’ll be very concerned about digging up corpses, obviously. Also, is it weird that I feel like I missed out on not digging up a human corpse when I was little enough to not go to jail for it? It seems strange to feel like a missing part of your childhood didn’t involve grave-robbing. Maybe it’s just me.
PPPPS. Next time you see your grandparents ask them if they ever dug up a body. I’m doing a poll. In fact, call them now. They’d probably appreciate a call from you anyway.
I think my mom would be too snooty to do it*, but I’d totally believe this of my grandmother.
*I swear that woman’s favorite saying was, “Have some cooth, Claris.”
Wow – not even sure where to go with this one…
My father has….he helped relocat a family graveyard on their farm in South Carolina…or some such nonsense…
Weird huh?
Who wouldn’t start off with “one day I dug up a body.” If I did that, I’d tell everyone and their brother I did something like that. Dang.
I would love to ask my grandparents but they are all dead.
I dug up a headless doll once. Does that count? As far as I know my grandparents didn’t dig up any corpses, but I could be deluding myself. My grandfather did set pumpkins on fire and roll them down the mountainside from the village cemetery. Apparently setting things on fire near corpses and freaking the villagers out was the IT thing to do.
Ah MAN I’m jealous. I grew up directly beside an old grave yard and we never even dug up a human hand. Alas Poor Yorik
I am incredibly sad because my 104 year old grandpa just passed away yesterday morning, and I never got the chance to ask him this question. And he had LOTS of great stories, so it is entirely possible we missed out on a “dug up a dead body” story. 🙁
At least we still have the “found out my dad was shot in a jail break by reading it in the newspaper story”.
Yes, really.
My grandparents shot each other, so I’m guessing corpse-exhuming wasn’t much of a leap for them.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE! My FATHER (who is 84) told me that one time there was a man who beat his wife, and the woman’s brothers went and picked him up from the local watering hole and took him into the woods and beat the whey out of him, then threw him in a hole with a rotting corpse and said if you hit our sister again you will be like this guy.
OMG all maggot ridden corpse I wouldn’t even kill a mosquito if that was done to me!
Okay, I am way more perplexed by the fact that they stored the body under her dad’s bed and then lost it. WTF?
They stored the dead body under a bed? That would never have occurred to me. I’d be too busy brushing the dog’s teeth. This is why I have cats.
I dug up a dead cat once, but it was on accident and I’m not a grandparent. Does that count?
Normally your posts make my insides explode with glitter and rainbows, but this time I’m just scared of zombies. Also I don’t think I should call Nana now, it’s 4AM here.
victor ate 12 milkshakes when he was 14?!!
Chalk one up for the zero dead bodies in the grandparent’s proverbial closet. And correct me if i’m wrong, but isn’t the more fascinating part how she LOST a dead body…?
Wait are the porn/brain computers happening in our lifetime?!?!?
None of my grandparents have ever shared any exhumation stories. Alas, they are no longer with us to ask. Their stories will remain with them in the grave.
OR WILL THEY!!!???
Well, they didn’t have video games or zombie tv shows. So really the only logical thing to do is dig up corpses. Just for kicks.
Dammit! All my grandparents are dead. I am going to have to find someone else to ask.
I need to start saving your blog for when I’m at home & not at work.
I’m sitting here laughing with tears in my eyes & a coworker just asked what’s so funny. I replied, “This woman & all her relatives who have dug up dead bodies.”
I think I’m on some kind of HR watch list now.
All my grandparents are dead, but I can confirm that my maternal grandfather did, in fact, dig up two corpses. So apparently, this is a Thing. I just always assumed it was a Southern Thing, rather than a universal one.
Twelfth!
Hello, Jenny the Bloggess.
My Mom grew up in the 30’s.. I’m going to have to check with her and see if there’s anything she needs to tell me. Thanks for the tip!
My grandparents were the ones who made the corpses. The 30’s were rough.
I would have to dig up 4 dead bodies to call my grandparents, considering they’re all dead. Thanks to you, dear Bloggess, it actually sounds like a damn good idea. 😀
You made me think of a story I heard from my Grams when I was little. Now I need to give her a shout. Thanks for the blog idea as well. I was running low. Yeah, not sure how you’d top a “dug up a dead body” story either. Yeah I’m useless. sorry.
Damn. You gotta be quick around here.
well, my dad managed a cemetery for 17 yrs so ya, pretty sure he’s done that 😉
I don’t remember if it was my grandparents or my great-grandparents, but back in the early 1900’s, they did this. An uncle was buried on a plot of land which was later sold. The new owners wanted to put a fence through the uncle’s grave, so they had to dig him up. He’d been there about 25-30 years at this point, and so when they got down to him, all they found was a few of the larger bones. But they got all that they could and reburied him. I guess it was a thing to dig up people back then. Why’d they have all the fun?
I’d have to dig them up to ask them. And at that point the question wouldn’t really matter so much, would it?
my godmother’s grandpa used to recycle the wood of the coffins. He didn’t dig up corpses *on purpose*, but I figured that would happen too, from time to time. Strange thing, the children of this men wanted to be cremated. Who knows why.
It could be worse, my husbands grandmother has a really funny story about this time she blew a guy on a hill. I mean I guess it’s funny, I mostly focused on how it felt to die inside while she told us.
Where did they find these dead bodies? I mean, were they going to graveyards to get them or did they live some place where people just got buried where ever they dropped? This is disturbing.
I find out all sorts of cool things about my parents and extended family all the time, but most of them live overseas so it’s hard to find out what sort of stuff they’ve been concealing about their past.
Wow, there must be a lot of random dead bodies in TX. I still have two live grannies, and they live in AZ, maybe I can get them to dig someone up before its too late. Gotta be plenty of misc. dead bodies buried in the desert.
i dug up a dead monkey once in college, does that count? i think i have picture around here somewhere….
My family’s more about the secrets and the lies, so I’m not sure they’d tell me and, if they did, whether I’d believe it or not. Something to think about, though . . .
I wish my grandparents were still around to call. I feel pretty sure the ones on my dad’s side would have had an “I Dug Up A Corpse” story.
My grandparents are all dead, but I inherited my Grandmother’s insane road-trip genes. Also baking. If you have a party to tell your kids and grandkids the stories of your youth, I’ll be beside you pulling out another coffee cake from the deep-freeze and warming it up to serve with the other 19 baked goods we pulled out of the deep-freeze.
…you could use Old Lady Me’s deep freeze to store your dead body!
Wow. I’ll never look at grandparents the same way again..
Wow. All my grandparents are dead or I would so be in the phone right now. Wonder if they would answer a wee gee (no idea how to spell this and auto correct keeps changing it to wedgie so going phonetically k) board? My family has lots of ghost stories, maybe the ghosts were ppl your family dug up?
My great grandma not only buried her husband, but dug him up again when she decided to move. Is that true love, or just creepy??
I have no living grandparents, but I can’t imagine my grandma doing anything of the sort. She did tell a great story about how when she was a sorority pledge, she left all of the dishes in a sink full of water during a New York winter, knowing the water would freeze it all solid. And then she killed all her sorority sisters with an ax.
Oh wow. That would not go over well in social circles where I’m from. Especially the “over the years it got lost” part.
Though, I think a good story should be saved for last. I always close the night with my story of “ask the pharmacy to help you take care of your dead husband, who is in the van, outside”.
Even I haven’t ever dug up a corpse, and my father is an actual grave digger. I spent so much time in graveyards as a kid that I am practically an Addams.
…though, I suppose it would be much easier to dig up corpses in the 30’s…or corpses that were buried in the 30’s. Without heavy equipment the graves tended to be shallower, and there were no concrete burial vaults.
Now that I think about it, I feel cheated. I got an easter basket out of a crypt once, but it didn’t have a hand attached or anything. I conclude that your Meemaw-in-law is officially more interesting than my father.
My grandparents definitely never dug up any dead bodies. I, however, do it for a living. (Mostly long-dead people, sometimes the more recently dead. Always for research, though.)
The danger in digging up a dead body and hiding it under a bed is that if, for any reason, law enforcement has to come through and search the premises…ya know, just for like, looking around, and stuff, well….finding that ol’ dead body could get a little…..awkward.
I’ve never dug up a corpse, but a cousin of mine and I did stumble upon a huge stash of stolen goods this one time while out playing in the woods. (I’m talking some serious stuff here – like stereos and television sets) My uncle happen to be a police officer, so we weren’t able to keep anything, but since this was the 80’s, the stuff was all a little too large for us to cart away ourselves anyway… Probably why it was left there in the first place!
I don’t even have my grandmother’s phone numbers. I think this makes me the worlds worst grandchild.
However, in my defense, one is crazy (like “wrote us 12 doomsday letters explaining how the world was going to end and ended up writing so many of them they started being numbered” crazy) and the other is just kind of a bitch.
I clearly also don’t respect my elders.
My grandma and her three sisters lived on a farm and did various crazy things.
One of them actually did put her eye out, and now has a fake one.
I’m willing to bet that they dug up a body, maybe not human, though.
My grandpa, however, is incredibly boring, so probably not.
Focus on the important part of the story. Somewhere in your grandmother’s house is a really old LOST corpse! Aweseome!!!
Why do I feel like I should probably make a list now of things that will impress my future grandchildren and try to cram them into one crazy weekend? It’ll be like Hangover but ….wait did either of the Hangover movies involve digging up corpses? Everything tends to blur for me these days.
Btw what are you doing next weekend? 😉
I wish any of my grandparents were alive so I could ask if they dug up a dead body… maybe that was A Thing To Do back then. In Vogue or something.
Just emailed my gandma if she ever dug up a corpse and she replied “Oh! You read the Bloggess too!?!”. I <3 my Grandma.
That is so classic grandma. One time, my family and my grandma were at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and some guy stopped by our table to say hello. My grandma explained he was our cousin or some such and went on about how and through whom we were related, then, without missing a beat: “…he killed someone with a shotgun once.” Then, didn’t find any of the details important or interesting enough to discuss with us.
Damn. My grandparents never have cool stories like that. Can I borrow yours?
That headline begs the question: What kind of corpses HAVE you dug up?
Sadly, I would have to dig up my grandparents to ask them. Wait….then I could tell that story when I older!! FTW!
You know… I’ve never done this but somehow I suspect if anyone in MY family did it… it’ll be my kids. And they won’t be able to understand why I’m upset that they did it. My youngest would do it just to dress it up again in something better… something pink. I live in fear of her being in charge of me when I’M elderly.
My kids bury their dead pets (fish, hampsters, birds) and then make plans to dig them up. I call it “learning”. Bones are cool, right?
Since I am adopted, I will just make up my own grave-robbing stories.
While I don’t think my grandmother ever dug up a corpse, she did steal her dad’s car to race it for pink slips at one point. She also got angry at a boyfriend when he wouldn’t quit complaining about her driving, so she ripped the steering wheel off the column (at the time it was only held on by two little bolts) and handed it to him… while they were driving… they crashed, but she totally walked away unscathed. And then there was the time in her youth that she and one of her friends built a series of rope bridges and stashed away guns and ammo in the trees around town… You know, in case the Russians tried to invade Fairbanks, Alaska…
My grandma was kind of a badass back in the day…
Since I trust you, I called my Grandparents right away. I asked them and they got all defensive and totally denied anything. Clearly they are hiding something. They think I have a problem and should maybe see someone about that. I suspect they want to shut me up.
Grandpa doesn’t want to talk about it. He did tell me he accidentally wrecked “a small boat” while he was in the Navy. “I sank it while I was out picking up the mail.” What?!
If my Dad’s grandparents were alive I would ask them cuz they most likely did something like this. My living grandma would say “No, but we did stick our bare feet in cow pies. Its healing you know.”
I would have to dig them up to ask them… does that count?
My grandparents are all dead so I sadly cannot ask if they’ve ever dug up corpses. Actually I’m glad I can’t ask because, given my grandparents, I’d be more concerned that they’d done the burying.
I’d love to talk to my grandparents, but to do that I’d have to dig them up, so….hey! Maybe I can be Crazy Aunt Vee with the grave-robbing story. There’s one for the Life List.
Man, I wish I’d thought to ask them all that before they died. They were a wily lot and probably did. At least, (great) Uncle Sam would have. This is the man who kept a sawed off shotgun by the door after getting the police chief to saw it off for him.
The closest I can come to that is I now have a Facebook friend who found out her mother died by reading my blog.
(There was a short period of “Don’t shoot the messenger” there for a while.)
My grandfather pulled one out of a river… but none were underground.
I would have to dig up my grandparents to ask them but I guess that’s a win for me because then I can have my very own fun digging up a corpse story.
My dad told me in great detail how when he was a kid he and a neighbor had to drown out and shoot badgers in a nearby cemetery. Apparently the badgers were tunneling and busting up coffins so something had to be done. Not sure why ‘something’ had to include a skinny 10 yr old with a .22, but I guess the Sixties out on the prairie was another world. At any rate a badger came at him and he tripped backwards over the skulls of long dead relatives.
he still gets funny about badgers.
I’d ask, but I’m a little afraid that the answer would be no. They just buried them to begin with.
I’m glad to have found a kindred spirit. About 15 years ago, we were digging post holes for a new fence. When the auger came up on one hole, out popped a large bone. I was so excited thinking that we’d discovered a buried body that I’m sure was from an unsolved murder. I was very let down to find out that our house had been built on farmland and it was just a piece of long dead cow. Pft… what a rip off… I can see THAT on our barbecue any old day.
Maybe I should put this in my memory banks to retrieve as my old lady story… But my senility will turn it into something a lot better. A brand new dinosaur maybe? The steakosaurus… Mmmm…
Well, obviously there is still time for you to dig up a corpse if you need it for your memoir or autobiography. It sounds like a family tradition, and I, personally, am big on family tradition. I don’t know if Easter is a good time though. You might just think about having someone stuffed and you could stick them on the shelf with Juanita. Just a thought…
I just love the fact that they dug up the dead body ON EASTER. That fact alone is completely awesome.
See, now you have to be the first human to make contact with aliens, just to one-up your mother-in-law. Then your future grandchildren will be like: Fuck! How the hell are we supposed to top that? And you’ll laugh all the way to the grave/cryogenic chamber/floating head jar.
The End.
Ouija? Really? I was so far off.
I *need* to know how they got this corpse home. Call her.
So THAT’S why people always focus more on the 20s than the 30s. Next time I hear a story about my great-aunt’s flapper days, I’m going to be all, “Yes, yes, but what was she up to the 30s? Did she dig up dead bodies? I hear that was all the rage back then.”
Ack- just remembered the story my father used to tell us about when he was younger that I mostly tuned out. Apparently my father used to go out with his art class and dig up old skulls or hands because according to his teacher this was the best way to learn how to draw the human form.
Lesson: art lessons were ten times more exciting in the old days then they are now.
WTF is a meemaw? It’s like what you’d hear from a donkey with a speech impediment.
Do animals count? When I was 18, my family and I moved to a new house. My mother freaked out at the thought of leaving the corpse of our dead rabbit, Muffin. My dad, the good sport that is, dug her up and moved her to the new house!
Well, shit… that came out of left field!
Well who knows what the future holds? Maybe we did something as kids that won’t exist a few decades from now? But I’ve def never dug up dead things, jesus.
Sadly, all of my grandparents are dead. But I could dig them up and … well, two of them were cremated and scattered into the Pacific….
I touched my grandpa when he was dead. It felt like chicken. I guess I should say “he” felt like chicken. Not a fluffy, clucking chicken walking around the barnyard…the kind you buy in grocery store. It was weird. Okay…now I sound like a total weirdo.
The husband and I have noticed that after YEARS of hearing the same damn stories from his dad, he’s suddenly started dropping truth bombs like, “Oh, yeah, I have a half-sister.”
No one’s dug up a corpse in my family, that they’ve told me. But they are farmers, so the odds are good that something happened and they’re just not talking.
Any particular reason she/they did it on Easter?
I never dug one up either. Somehow I think we both missed out.
I spent quite a bit of time in cemeteries and once my brother played a trick on me that made me think a grave was talking to me. That’s probably why I never had the balls to take a shovel near a cemetery.
All mine are dead but I am willing to bet that the ones on my mom’s side dug up or buried a corpse or two. Hell, one time my grandpa tried to shove my grandma under the car to run over her. To be fair she did try to crack his skull open with a frying pan.
They probably also wore onions on their belts. “Which was the style at the time.”
Oh, Grandma! You and your bone-digging always makes me laugh, and laugh!
Ok, so this is not the same as digging up a corpse, but I can totally see you running with this idea and making something way more fun and story-licious: http://pinterest.com/pin/209206345160290213/
I’m pretty sure that my grandfather regularly did that, but then, that was his job, so, yeah… Bonus: one of my family members also worked as a mortician – I don’t think this actually gets me anything other than a slightly creepier than average family history though…
Man, all my grandmother tells me about is bingo…
Then again, she did tell me that the ladies were cheating last week. They kept making the caller repeat the numbers. I’m not really sure how you cheat in bingo, and I’m pretty sure the little old ladies simply couldn’t hear, but you never know. Grandma could be the person that breaks up the evil old lady candy stealing bingo ring!
I called and asked good old grandma… she told me to go back to work.
So either she is not ready to share stories of dead body hunting, or she thinks I am crazy.
Most likely both.
I’ve never dug up a body but my great grandmother accidentally stole a car. She was terribly embarrassed but her keys worked and she thought it was hers.
Now her brothers.. those are great stories. Her brother was tied to some train tracks and ran over and killed. They could only identify the body because of his clothes. There are a couple of theories why and who.. one is that he was involved in the mob (they did have a stronghold in that area at the time), another was that he was a womanizer and got involved with the sherriffs wife. Another theory is that he was a counterfeiter and got caught by someone he scammed. My favorite theory is that his brother-in-law did it. They say the BIL never came to the family house anymore after the brother died. Another of my grandma’s brothers died when he fell down an elevator shaft in an abandoned hotel.
Another guy died when his brother-in-laws still blew up. Another died when the radiator in his car blew up.
This is why people do genealogy. Make those skeletons dance!
Both sets of grandparents are long gone, but I’m fairly certain no one in my family has EVER dug up a corpse. Victor’s Meemaw wins, hands down.
Although, when we decided to build an addition on the old family homestead, my nephew found an animal jawbone and was playing with it. “Look, Dad. It’s an old animal jaw! Probably from the Jurassic era or something.” Ah, kids. They’re so gullible. I looked it over and said, “It appears to be mid-20th Century beagle.” My brother gasped in horror and screamed like a girl–“It’s LADY!?!” We had dug up our old dog, or at least her jawbone. He was mortified. I tossed it back to the kid, who ran off merrily to show his friends.
At least they didn’t reanimate the corpses Mary Shelley style.
How about bodies washing up on your waterfront property? Our Uncle Leo loved to scare the Bejeesus out of us with tales of dead men (generally fallen overboard, not Mafia hits) who washed up along the shoreline of their Chesapeake Bay community. “You’ve gotta pop ’em or else they explode” comes to mind… OY!!!
I work with people who have dug graves. But they’re archeologists, so it’s cool.
My Mum casually mentioned one day that she remembers my Grampy and Uncles burying a burnt out VW bug in the garden, but no one remembers why they had to do this, it is still there to this day. I call shennanigans!
Don’t know that any of my grandparents ever dug up a corpse, but I wouldn’t put it past ANY of them. I do know that it’s very likely that my father stole HIS grandmother’s ashes & buried/distributed them someplace they’d discussed…can’t ask him though, since HIS ashes are in my brother’s basement. The funeral home doesn’t remember who they released my great-grandma’s ashes to several years after she died, they just brought ’em to my grandparents’ store & handed ’em over to “one of the boys.”
My dads side if the family were Funeral Home Directors. So yeah, my dad, uncles, and grandfather all dug up and/or drained bodies. My dad helped move an old graveyard to another location to make room for an expansion on the local high School. Growing up he would come home with the best stories and tell them around the dinner table. Like the one time there was air left in the body after embalming it. During the calling hours the body “burped” up the air. the family, of course, freaked the F out. He also used to steal my mothers makeup sometimes and use it on the bodies. And then bring it back and not tell her. She figured that one out and my dad had a fork thrown at his head. it missed. Our wall had 4 tine marks in it for years though.
I really need to know more about the dead body and hiding it under the bed.
Unfortunately I only have one living grandparent and she has Alzheimer’s and has no idea who I am so calling the nursing home to ask her if she ever dug up a body might not be the best idea.
All my grandparents are dead. Maybe I’ll dig ’em up. Probably not. With my luck I’ll end up with 100 ghosts after me. Or the Police. Or I’ll end up in the grave with the corps. And I’m afraid of the dark and graveyard digging probably works best in the dark hours.
OMG! I was sitting here with tears rolling down my cheeks from laughing, thinking why can’t I have cool grandparents who dig up bodies? That’s when it suddenly hit me. My grandma dug up her husband and moved him to another cemetery when he’d been dead for ten years. Maybe it was revenge… And then she had the stones to ask the men who did the work for her how gramps looked. After ten years, he looked like bones in a suit, gram. Did you expect him to still be smiling?
One of the creepy maintenance guys dug up some bones from a nearby graveyard when I was a camp counselor. I’m not related to him, except when I was a camper and he was the nephew of the maintenance guy, he was my boyfriend.
Anything you post is a real post Jenny. I cannot ask my grandparents if they had ever dug up a corpse (w/o a medium that is) b/c they are also corpses and if I dug them up, I don’t think they would talk. If they did…..I’m just not gonna try, just to be safe.
I can only imagine what my gramma would think if I called her and asked her if she ever dug up a dead body.
Since all my grandparents are dead, I can’t ask them. But I am tempted to dig them up so I can at least join the club. I don’t wanna be an uncool gramma, so I’d better start preparing now.
Yeah sort of, a story with a Grandpa and a dead body! When I was a kid my Grandpa told us that Grandma was buried now but soon she would grow wings and fly away out of the ground. So when our sweet cat died, we buried her, but we kept digging her up to see if she was still there and if she was, had her wings started to grow? Well things were growing but not wings, “ahh gross that’s just putrid” we would say but we’d be back later to dig her up again! We probably could have clarified things a bit more with Grandpa, but we never thought of that.
My dog dug up the corpse of the neighbor’s guinea pig once. Not quite as exciting, but I’m pretty sure it traumatized little Stevie when he saw that Mr Nibbles wasn’t really relocated to a guinea pig farm in the country.
You said “digging up a corpse” like it is a bad thing.
Perhaps I’ve said too much.
I dug up a worm once…or twice…or, oh hell! multiple times!! I haven’t dug up a corpse though. No one in my family has either. We are pretty much just boring people. *sigh*
My Grandparents are all dead but I am sure if I mention it to my 82 year old mother she may make something up. Or go dig someone up. I think I will keep it to myself. I let you know if I ever dig one up.
I don’t think my family ever dug up any bodies, but I think some might have buried a few. And I have to read your blog when I am alone so I can laugh and cry. I have tried to explain it to my co workers and family but they just don’t seem to get you like I do. Of course starting with the giant metal chicken that says “knock knock motherfucker” was probably not the best way to go. I will probably have to read your book in the closet so I can laugh till I cry and not have to try to explain what is so funny to any one…of course I will have to try and explain why I am in the closet laughing and crying….Well crap it will all work out somehow.
When you say dead body, in regard to the Indian one, I do hope you meant skeleton… otherwise sort of stinky. So gross lol
Correct me if I’m wrong…. but didn’t you dig up a family member of the furry variety?
Also.. I just get stories from my gram about the time when she had 2 fiances and a boyfriend… she’s my idol.
Nope. I just checked with my one grandpa that is still alive and there was no digging up bodies. According to my dad, my other grandparents didn’t dig up corpses either. I guess my family is pretty boring.
I am a grandma and have never dug up a corpse. You’ve given me something to look forward to.
I don’t think my grandparents would understand me asking, but I’ve dug up (parts of) dead bodies before. Then again, I was the one who buried them. K9 Search-and-Rescue training doesn’t work unless you have actual human cadaver scent, so we usually used some old bones (old as in 150+ years) or popsicle sticks soaked in the same chemical that makes decomposing bodies smell bad. I also called up an ex-boyfriend once to help me excavate a deer – we reassembled the skeleton in my parents’ garage and then I left to go back to college and eventually my mom had to go put all the bones in a bucket because she wanted her parking space back. I think she’s still got a bucket of deer bones in her garage somewhere.
–>All of my grandparents are dead so the only way I could ask is to dig them up first.
My grandmother never dug up a dead body, but she spent a lot of her childhood on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The water table is really high there–the land is not exactly what you’d call “stable”–and she told me this story about how when she was a kid and was out at a relative’s place after a really high tide/flood, there was the corner of this wooden box that the water had pushed up out of the ground in the lawn. So she asked what it was, and her relatives were all like, “Oh, that’s just a coffin.” Apparently, this was A Thing on the Eastern Shore–there wasn’t much land to bury people, so they tended to plant their dead relatives near the house, where the ground was at least somewhat okay…but every time the water rose higher than usual, well, the coffins did, too. I kind of love this.
I did call my two living grandparents and asked them if they’d ever dug up a corpse. Both answered in the negative. I’m not sure if I should be disturbed by how nonchalant they were about my line of question. But, then, my dad – their eldest child – and I did have an in-depth discussion once on the best way dispose of a body. It was then that Dad informed me that if you bury a body more than ten feet underground a cadaver dog can’t sniff it out.
I’m not sure why my dad knows that, or if I particularly want to know why.
Thanks for the belly-laugh! I really needed one of those today!
The most disconcerting part of this story is that they stored the dead body under their dad’s bed…and apparently lost it. (a) why are you storing a dead body under a bed? This is terrifying! (b) how do you lose a dead body?
I’d have to dig up my grandparents to ask them. It’s far from the1930’s, so I don’t think it would be kosher. Plus, I really don’t want to do it.
you mean everyone doesn’t dig up bodies for Easter? Grandma lied, it’s not “just like Jesus”?
The one grandparent I’d suspect is also dead, so I can’t ask her. Alas. She was a street racer in high school, so I could totally see her digging up a corpse.
We did once have dead kittens in our freezer. So there’s that.
once my grandmother piped up with “we used to own the island of jamaica”… no explanation…
and how she was engaged to three men before she met grandpa.
my other grandma just tells me she prays for me. 😉
My father woke up on a corpse once. It was during WWII and he had dug a fox hole for the night, didn’t discover he was on a corpse until morning, he had a fear of being buried alive for the rest of his life and wanted to be cremated when he died. He’s not, but that’s on my brothers, he made them promise to cremate him, my mom wanted him in the ground where she could visit him and be with him someday.
Well, maternal Grandma is gone, so I can’t ask her, but she was a character…I bet she did. Step-grandmother was a seriously mean, hard-a&& B. She probably buried at least on body!
H
My crazy grandmother had my grandfather exhumed. Does that count?
I only have one living grandparent. On my Dad’s side, well, they were Blue Collar British, I think that answers that. My grandfather on my Mom’s side probably didn’t dig up a body, but I wouldn’t rule him out of digging to put a body In the ground. Only an adult who deserved it of course, we aren’tanimals! My grandmother on that side is still alive but senile and prior tosenility was an alcoholic, so I am sure lots of goid stories would arise should I question her …
When my mom was little, her dad cut the head off a snake, only it didn’t slice all the way through, so she carried it around on he person for the rest of the day. Nowadays that would be cool because you could make a Nearly Headless Snake reference, and people would think you were clever. And totally not a sociopath.
You may not have a good grave robbing story to tell your grandkids but you could help create a good story for them to tell….when you die have yourself stuffed (preferably in some sort of fighting ninja action figure pose) and bequeath your body to your kids who can play funny pranks on your grandkids….say maybe hiding your posed body in their closets for them to find!
I’d ask my grandma, except she gets really confused and easily panics, which is a terrible combination when you think about it. I’d get halfway through the question and she’d be yelling, “You’re going to bury me with the Easter bunny back in the roaring 30’s??? Nurse, nurse!” Then I’d have to explain to her that she doesn’t have a nurse and the whole afternoon would be shot while I tried to convince her that we’re not going to bury her in the yard just because we make her sleep in the yard. It’s a space issue, Grandma. We don’t have enough bedrooms for you.
As an archaeologist, it’s not that strange for me to dig up a dead corpse…in fact, it’s sort of old hat. I have about 80 sitting in my office right now. I’m not sure how I got to the point in my life when I am okay with sitting in a room full of dead people, but there you have it.
It’s never too late ya know. Digging up a body shouldn’t be hard, just grab some shovels, a fiend who doesn’t talk too much, and clear an evening on your calendar.
If your worried about the so called “legality” of the act just wait until you are super old and make shit up. If they ask about why you didn’t tell them anything before just say, “I figure the statute of limitations has run out by now…” or “Well, the last witness died last year…”.
Why is nobody being supportive here? Hey, there’s still plenty of time to dig up your own corpse. Your next book can lead with that. And by then, you’ll be so famous that the authorities will be like, “Oh, sorry about the questioning. We thought you were, like, someone average. Please don’t beat us.”
Old people are the best. When i get old, i plan to turn off the filter between my brain and my mouth completely and just shout whatever crosses my mind. If people reprimand me, i’ll pretend to be deaf. If they still reprimand me, i’ll mumble a string of disconnected words (watermelon Labrador purple bracelet racetrack?) so that they think i’m senile and won’t even try to shut me up. My boyfriend plans to spend all of his time groping me in public and pretending that HE is too senile to know what he is doing or to realize that it is inappropriate. Our grandkids will be so proud of us. God, i can’t wait to be old.
My grandparents are all dead, so it’s too late to ask, but I doubt they dug up any corpses. Except maybe I the war. They had to make their own fun back then.
One of my great uncles got arrested on suspicion of being a nazi spy, though, and another used to defuse unexploded bombs. It’s not as good as corpses, but you have to go with what you’ve got.
My dad has a truly ridiculous story of burying a body against his will (Not against the BODY’s will, that would be wrong. Against my dad’s will. But since he was like 10 or something, it was probably wrong too.) … but no unburying stories that I’m aware of.
Totally have to check now.
This story gives a whole new meaning to the term “He is risen” doesn’t it? *badumpbump*
How do you lose a corpse that you stored under your bed?
Why would you even decide to keep it, let alone in the house, UNDER YOUR BED?!
Did her parents say, “That’s nice honey, just put it under our bed.”? Or did she just decide this was a good place for it? (I once kept toads in my dad’s workboots, so if it was your grandma’s decision, that makes more sense.)
I love when you ramble. Isn’t that sort of what you always do?
My family’s probably done something like this. File it under “Crazy-ass stuff small-town Midwesterners did and then never discussed it. Evuh.”
I once buried a neighbor’s dog for her when I was a kid. Under her house. Had to dig the grave underneath the crawl space. She got the dog all vacuum sealed inside its plastic coffin. I had to make sure its head was facing towards the East. It was quite creepy. And I had to be careful digging not to dig up her other dogs that had been buried underneath.
I’ve always wondered whether the real estate agent who sold the house eventually ever knew about the pet cemetery under the house, and if they had to disclose it..
My grandfather dug all the graves for everyone who died in his family, so I’m sure at some point he accidentally dug a little too close to someone else’s grave and had to scooch over a little bit and start digging again.
I’d have to dig them up to ask them! :Q
My dad was a gravedigger in college. Does that count?
I can’t ask now… and while I know one of my grandfathers was quite the character, no such story about or from him…
HOWEVER, the great grands on one side had purchased a “family plot” in the larger local cemetery for their sons and their wives, so a plot for 8 or so people if I recall properly… at some point a random cousin had been buried their (having claimed the spot) even though she wasn’t part of the planned family plot, the cousin was disinterred, and I’m not sure what happened after that. Apparently it involved taking the cousin’s family to court and getting a court order for her family to put her elsewhere. Eventually that spot was taken up by the Aunt it was intended for, but zeesh. Apparently, there was some bad feelings for a long time, since I don’t know that branch of the family at ALL.
I am puerto rican, so if they did dig up a grave, they would never say. Cause we would apparently be hoodlums. And good christians can’t be hoodlums
My grandparents are dead. Maybe I should dig them up and ask them.
This is actually making me look forward to being a grandparent. Who knew they had this kind of twisted fun?
I don’t think my Granddaddy ever dug up a body, but he had a thumb in a jar in his work shed. Wasn’t his. I counted his fingers multiple times and they were all there. Whose was it?! I will never know. Also, there was talk that there was a mummy in the basement of a house around the block from us. I’m doubtful. I grew up in TX and there really weren’t any basements. And I never saw it. And those kids were pretty much known fibbers. We had one other neighbor who had a certified crazy son. It was reported widely that he hanged his mother in the house. Needless to say I didn’t go in there to see. Now that I’m reading all this – how the hell did I ever grow up in that neighborhood and why was I not scared?! I’m one mean bitch. 🙂
My grandparents are all dead, so I wouldn’t know. But my boss has a box of human bones in her office. I work at a church, and one time we had a really bad storm–I think it was Gaston, and the wall around our grave yard gave way, and the bones just came sliding out. Here’s what I know: bones are extremely light, so calling someone “big boned” is no consolation.
My grandparents are all dead, but I’m considering digging them up to celebrate their lives, you know, they way they might have in the 20s and 30s.
My grandpa was a hobo in the 1930s. It’s highly possible.
Oh, just great Jenny! I don’t have any grandparents left. NOW I’LL NEVER KNOW IF THEY DUG UP A CORPSE EITHER!
They were hunting rocks for Easter?!?! Is that like the Christmas equivalent of getting coal in your stocking?
I just dug up my dead grandpa to ask him if he ever dug up dead bodies when he was a boy, but he didn’t answer because he was cremated. I just spelled it “creamated” first because that makes more sense to me.
Just asked Mom and she said, “No, but we used to drive over them all the time because the state highway in [our small TX hometown] was built over the graveyard that was adjacent to the mission.” Apparently, sometime in the ’80s, they had to do major construction on the highway and finally dug up and relocated the bodies.
And earlier she told me a story about how her dad (a TX cowboy) used to carry a pistol in his jacket pocket into town with him in the ’40s. Her mom would nag him not to do it, but he was stubborn.
The only part of my grandfather’s skeleton story I got was “He came back with a skull he found out in the desert.” Not in the ’30s though, this would have been ’50s or ’60s that he ‘found’ it. My mother still has it. She tried to give it to the bone lab at my college and they explained that they needed provenance before accepting body parts.
Do you think you could list that digging up corpses thing on a resume under “Master Gardener”? It seems like that would be a nice way to sum up the experience of digging up something recently deceased so that other animals would get into it’s final resting place.
When I was little I was convinced that everybody had skeletons in their closets because I would hear grown ups say things like “Everybody has skeletons in their cupboards” I was never tempted to look inside any unknown closets incase a skeleton would come tumbling out.
I’m going to head out to our neighborhood pioneer graveyard and make some memories. The modern cemeteries make things difficult with lead lined cement encasements. Breaking a vault open makes the story for posterity too complicated.
I just want to know when they’re coming out with those brain computers with the porn holograms. Can you send me a brochure?
TheRealBarman
One of the ten stories my Great-Grandmother used to tell involved her stealing the pennies that were keeping her dead brother’s eyes shut.
Sadly, my grandparents are all gone, so can’t help you there. I did hear that, as a boy, my grandfather hitched a joy ride on the cow’s tail (I picture it as something like waterskiing without the water), ripped the poor cow’s tail off and was sentenced by his mother to shooing the flies away from the cow’s behind that summer. Sorry, best I can do for a tale of rural east Texas.
I always lament about the things I never thought to ask my grandparents. I’ll have to add “did you ever dig up a body?” to the list. At least I did hear the story about how my mom’s parents met.
My friend and I found a rib cage from some kind of animal once. We crouched over it, poking it with sticks, trying to determine from what wild beast the carcass derived. It was all very CSI.
My grandparents are all dead and I don’t want to dig them up to ask them. But I have two dead guinea pig bodies in my garden and I’m afraid to plant flowers anywhere near them
um… no digging up as far as I know but I do have a great-grandfather who was a miner. He worked down a coal pit and wanted his mother-in-law to leave so he stole dynamite and blew the gable end of his house off to get her out!
Does that help?????
All of my grandparents are dead. I could dig them up and ask them if they ever dug someone up if it means that much to you. I’m not sure how much information they’ll provide, though. I’m not exactly psychic. Not about important things like, “DID YOU DIG UP A CORPSE WHEN YOU WERE ALIVE?” type of questions, so maybe this plan hasn’t been thought all the way through. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it hasn’t.
Whew! Luckily I stopped myself before I went to jail for digging up corpses and then yelling at them because they wouldn’t tell me if they ever did the same when they were kids.
One of these days, missy, you are going to get a call from me asking for bail money and it will be all your fault.
All. your. fault.
I’d ask all 6 of my grandparents about this, but they’re all dead now. Maybe I could dig THEM up … I know which grandfather to start with, too, because he was a BAD ASS and probably had something to do with dead folks back when he was young and spry. And alive.
I dug up a dead mole when I was a kid… does it mean that I’ll make a decent grandparent someday?
The only interesting thing my grandparents ever did was apparently when my grandma was little her father would run alcohol across the border from Canada and hide it at her feet under a blanket. My dad told me this but my grandma denies it ever happened.
My mother buries animals she runs over with her school bus.
I would not put this past my grandmother-although I can’t ask her, she’s already long gone. In her lifetime, she went to jail for cattle rustlin’, got hooked on heroin, could throw back a bottle of bourbon a day, got in bar fights with grown men and smoked weed until the day she died. Hell, she makes the rest of your grandparents look like freaking saints!…..wow, I sound like I’m bragging.
I guess if you can’t be proud of your white trash grandma; who can you be proud of? Wait, don’t answer that.
In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I totally asked all three of my living grandparents if they ever dug up a dead body. ALL OF THEM SAID YES. WTF?!
Grandma #1: “It was a relative and we needed to move the grave for more farm land. He would have understood.” I like your qualifier Grandma, points for trying to make it a little less disturbing by saying the guy would have understood why you dug his ass up to plant some corn.
Grandpa #1: “In the Air Force, I did recovery on downed planes sometimes…impact buries those fuckers deep. Oh, and I helped move battlefield graves in Germany to the WWII cemetery in Normandy when I first joined up” Okay, well that’s kinda bad-ass…
Grandpa #2: “Well, not really dug up, but when I was in the Navy we buried a guy at sea and then had to retrieve him because we ‘buried’ the wrong body…” The wrong…Holy fuck, how many bodies did you usually have on board?!
Thanks for making me curious enough to find out stuff about my grandparents that I didn’t need to know…
Only living grandparent is my Japanese Grandmother, and I don’t speak Japanese. I am pretty sure that digging up corpses is somehow more frowned upon in Japan than it is in Texas or Oklahoma (where all my other grandparents were from). As far as I know the other three never dug up any corpses, though my maternal grandmother was shot by one of her brothers, hit in the forehead with an axe by another brother, stabbed with a butcher knife thrown at her by another brother, and got hanged while playing cops and robbers by yet another brother. No corpse exhumations though.
When I was in high school some people came and dug up an entire family of corpses out of our schools main courtyard over the summer, if that counts for anything. They claimed they were part of some historical preservation society or what not. Something about needing to move the corpses someplace more appropriate than where thousands of teenagers tromped about over them. I still can’t figure out how they built the high school without digging them up in the first place.
Jill’s comment is hilarious. LOL how do you really explain this and NOT sound crazy.
If Victor Loved you he’d have himself burried so you could dig him up! But don’t forget to dig him up before the air runs out, promise, promise
This just got me thinking of an Episode of Family Guy. The one where Peter is digging a pool and come across the skull of an indian chief. Then all sorts of bad stuff starts happening to Griffins. It was their version of Poltergeist. I wonder if there are any ghost stories attached to your meemaw’s dead body?
P.S. It also reminds me of the end of the first Addams Family movie.
Thanks for sharing!
My grandparents never dug anyone up, both sets dead now, maybe I’ll dig them up to see them again. My dad, being one of 16 – lots of sex in the 50’s, played cowboys and indians with his brothers and sisters and hanged a his brother and sister until they were cut down and resusitated by the eldest sister. Why? They were cattle rustlers, and that’s what you did to cattle rustlers.
That type of imagination rubbed off on the three of use boys too. Not sure how we survived into adulthood.
My grandad did often and my gramma played with the bombs in world war two. She was in competition with her co-worker to see who got to knock over the most. (they were working in a bomb production line.)
Your story is just one of the reasons I’m going into the big Easy Bake oven when it’s over.
LMAO, Oh My Goodness Diana Lark’s comment. Dang, I wish I knew if these people had Tweeter accounts. They are too freakin funny.
Does helping to bury 8+ cats and dogs over the years in the garden count? I swear if the people who bought my parents house ever excavate the garden that house will be on the news.
Poll Answers: I only had two I could ask (one does not speak to me, the rest are dead… I think. I don’t really know):
Maternal Grandfather: Yes, when is was 11. He was playing army & they dug up an infant. They learned later it was the previous landowner’s baby.
Maternal Grandmother: No idea. She started talking about elephants & how her other daughter-not-my-mum is a whore.
OMG I would definitely not gloss over a story like that!
When I was 4 I dug up a bird corpse that I had previously buried in a shoebox. I wanted to see what it looked like. Maggots EVERYWHERE. I remember saying “eeww” and re-burying it.
Thanks for the memories. I had forgotten all about that dead bird. Ha ha.
My grandparents have all passed, but my grandma lived in Poland during WWII and there were things that she never talked about. I’d like to believe that digging up corpses was one of them.
Also, I know my neighbors behind us accidentally dug up one of the family dogs when they put in their swingset.
My grandparents, alas, are also dead…but the stories my Portuguese grandfather didn’t tell must have been pretty wild. I know this because of the time my mother turned to me and said, “You do know why your grandfather joined the Merchant Marines, don’t you?” When I said no, she told me that when he was in his 20s (1915-ish) and working as a lumberjack in Washington, he got in a fight and killed someone…then had to basically disappear for a few years. You can’t make this stuff up.
To reach my grandparents, I would have to dig them up. Ew. I just weirded myself out. Justin’s grandma is 96 though, so I might ask her the next time I talk to her. She’s still got confederate money “just in case.” I’d bet there are a few bodies in her past…
I tried to dig up my sisters dead turtle, I never found it though, must have went to turtle heaven!
well my grandpa was a pastor so he spent a lot of time burying corpses and being paid for it so I’m thinking he would have found it terribly counter-productive to dig them up again… I mean would he have had to give the money back? “I’m sorry Mrs. Jones, I dug Mr. Jones up again so here’s your $25 back. Thanks anyway.” and then Mrs. Jones would’ve been crying all over the place and the church would’ve fired my grandpa for making Mrs.Jones cry and then he’d be out of a job AND the $25 and then my grandma would have been all like “ERVIN! You go right back out and bury Mr. Jones right NOW!” and that would be humiliating and all the fun of digging up a corpse would have been lost in all the chaos he had created. My grandma was British. She would never have put up with nonsense like that. We British like to keep our dead bodies good and buried you know. What will the neighbours think?
I don’t know my grandparents on the other side because my father is a total deadbeat but I’ve heard rumours that in his early years he was a thug for Vancouver’s version of the mafia so I would say that yes- he has probably helped to bury and dig up several dead bodies that he himself helped to create… but no, he won’t be talking about it anytime soon because then he would have to kill you. That is all rumours of course. You never heard anything. Keep walking. There’s nothing to see here.
Luckily if he did kill you my grandpa would have been able to bury you for a fee. Win win.
My grandparents have all passed, so have my parents – they aren’t even dead bodies, ’cause we cremate and put them in a lake. I don’t swim in the lake any more…
Wow, well you have to remember, our grandparents have lived an entire lifetime of stories. I think sometimes we forget how much they’ve experienced.
I think I have commented before just to share my two cents, but to be able to comment to THIS post because I can relate specifically is a little disturbing.
My family is from Ohio in an area inhabited for thousands of years by native peoples. We sledded on burial mounds (until they were discovered to be burial mounds and were gated off). My dad and his buddy would explore the hills and woods all the time. The discovered a dig going on and completed the exhumation of a Native American. They took the bones to their history teacher. From what my dad says, he wasn’t all that into school, but I think it is a mark in his favor that he connected his find and thought to show and tell it. The teacher made them put it back. They did return him or her in the dead of night. The theft made it to the local newspaper. But the bones got back where they belonged and there was no intentional disrespect.
My grandparents are all dead. So I’d have to dig them up to ask, and that would skew your results. Damn.
My grandparents are gone so I can’t ask. I have heard the story of my mom and her brothers and sister burying a dead chicken so they could dig it up later and be famous for finding a dinosaur. They didn’t wait nearly long enough and all they got was stinky rotten chicken.
And my cousin used to bury my barbies in my grandpa’s garden where I couldn’t find them. It made for a pretty macabre scene the next spring when he would till and there would be barbie parts everywhere. I can still hear grandpa cussing to this day about heads and arms and how was he supposed to garden with all this barbie hair everywhere.
My sister once dug up a bird in a shoebox casket. Well, first she found the dead bird in the yard, and kept it in her shoebox for a while where she snuck it cheese and grapes. And then my parents found it, and made her have a funeral for it in the yard, where we all stood around and buried this random dead bird that we had never known as a live bird. Then a few weeks later when the room I shared with her started to stink like dead birds and old cheese, I found the shoebox under our bunk bed, complete with an even deader bird (is it possible to be even deader? is deader even a word?) covered in maggots.
This story just got real vivid. But it will definitely be one I tell to my grandkids someday. I’m not sure my sister will tell it to hers though.
She’s still upset she didn’t get to keep the dead bird forever.
People sure do listen when you talk about digging up corpses. I started a sentence once with ‘Speaking of corpses…’ I am not even sure we were, but it sure got everyone’s attention! Try it sometime…
When you think about it, “Stand By Me” was about a dead body, too. Maybe this was just a thing that kids did back in the fifties and sixties. Walked on train tracks, smoked stolen cigarettes, and played with corpses.
Of course, it was a less cynical time then …
My husband had this pet snapping turtle that died. He buried it out at his parents farm. After we got married told me he buried this turtle and that one day he wanted to dig it up and put it on display. I thought this was just random rambling of my husband, but one day he did go out to his folks farm and dig up the corps of his snapping turtle. As he was explaining what he found I shook my head in disgust that he thought I should hear this story. He was so disapointed that the shell and bones had degenerated and were no good for display. I looked at him and said “well what did you expect you did put it in the ground. At our farm when you wanted to keep a bull skull you stuck it in the creek. That way the fish and other creaters of the creek eat everything off and leave the bones intacked.”
You never know what you are going to think is normal in a conversation 🙂
I never knew my Dad’s parents – but they never look happy in photos so I’m guessing something was up there.
My Mom’s parents never did that sort of thing. Gramma is still around and laughed when I asked the question. She saw corpses, but never after they had been buried. Then the stories got weird so I suggested she have another brandy and water. The subject was officially changed.
My maternal great-grandfather was a con-artist and my paternal ancestors were sheep stealers. I’m thinking that grave-robbing would not be all that out of bounds for them. Hey! Maybe this is why I enjoy graveyards so much! Someone should study the trickle-down effect of ancestors with questionable morals.
My grandparents are dead…but I could dug them up. For science, justice, or simple morbid curiosity.
Why did the corpse not rot while under the bed? Was it a mummy? Did anyone get in trouble? QUESTIONS, Jenny, I have questions!!!
Grandparent stories are like that…same old, same old, and then out of no where, they hit you with a dead body, or a previous marriage never mentioned. I think it is just to make sure we are paying attention 🙂
What if asking your grandparents if they ever dug up a corpse would involve digging up a corpse? Existential questions…
My four kids and I accidentally disinterred some human cremains from a small stone cairn while geocacheing a few years ago. I realized what the box really was just as one of my sons started shaking it and trying to pry it open! Fortunately, Carl (as identified by the label on the box) didn’t get spilled or scattered, and we quickly put him back and rebuilt his rock pile! On the way home, we drove by a cemetery, and our friend exclaimed “Ooh, look at all the geocaches!” Good times.
My grandparents have all passed away, so asking them would take a good seance, which I have no time to organize at the moment. I do, however, think my paternal grandfather had it in him to do something like that. I’m sure he had a story.
In other news, I used to be an administrative assistant for a cemetery vault company and one of my daily jobs was to do 1-2 cremations a day, in between filing paperwork and being on the phone. I can’t wait until I have grandkids so I can tell them about the time I cremated people all the time.
I don’t think my grandma ever dug anybody up, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if she buried somebody. She was feisty like that.
I once accidently dug up a horse corpse when I was a kid. That’s about the time I started thinking our farm was haunted and there was a hellhole in my closet.
Isn’t that how curses get started? I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to the family on Poltergeist. Digging up Indian graveyards or building houses on them or something. And the body got lost? Maybe Meemaw was just checking to see if you were listening since you always tune out the Disney and milkshake stories!
What a pack of lies
No way Victor ate 12 milkshakes without puking.
My grandma did tell me that, for fun, she and her brothers used to catch lizards and put them (while still alive) through the old, rusty meat grinder that her mom had left out in the rain one day… it’s not quite on the same level as digging up a corpse, but still pretty gross…
My grandmother stuck a fork in a grave. Does that count?
I SURE hope so.
Libby Lu
Um, my Grandpa isn’t around to tell me if he dug up a body, but I’m going to assume he did, I mean this is the Grandpa who as a kid would go into the movie theatre and climb up on the balcony in the back, wait till the movie got going and the couples in the back row were all necking, then whip it out and pee over the balcony onto the couples below….
And on the other side of the family tree there’s the great grandfather whose son-in-law started abusing his daughter (and back then you didn’t/couldn’t get divorced there), and one night there was a big storm and the son-in-law’s horse came back rider-less. I’m going to assume that if you put bodies in the ground you occassionaly dig them up too…..
My Dad dug up a hibernating stray pet Turtle – does that count? (we don’t have native turtles here so it was definitely someones pet gone ferel)
Now I’m sad that I don’t have any grandparents left alive to ask…I would bet that at least one of them either buried or dug up a body.
My children are definitely getting shovels for Christmas now. Dammit, how can I be a proper mother of the year if I don’t at least allow my boys the opportunity to dig up a dead body?
I do believe that you technically qualify for corpse un-burying, albeit not human.
Not the instance to say BTDT.
After reading so many of these comments, I really want to know what kind of stories I will have to tell my grandchildren. I have lived SUCH a sad life…
I’m just glad I know who to ask for butter when my kid gets their head stuck in the fence at Disneyland this fall.
I had a roommate in college that would tell the SAME TEN STORIES over again and again. We all knew them, by heart. Still do.
I am also perplexed as to how one loses a *dead body* under a bed. The ‘pack rat’ gene runs in my family, and I inherited it, so I totally get moving something from one stow away place to another, but dead body parts? I feel like that is something that just doesn’t get misplaced. Why do stories from grandparents always miss a few key details?!
Why did they hide it under the bed? Thats a little odd to me. My grandparents never dug up a dead body that I know of…but my grandfather treked all over Alaska and apparently looked like Jesus when he met my Grandmother up in way high areas of Alaska…and then they got married and he went to war and she followed him around. So maybe they did…but sadly they are dead now and I can’t ask them. I knew we dug him up when my grandmother died *but he was ashes* so we could put them in the same box and bury them again. Does that count?
My grandmother would be thrilled if I called her right now. I can imagine their responses though:
Grandmother: Jennifer! I can’t believe you would ask something like that. Of course not.
Grandfather: Nah, nothing like that.
THIS isn’t a real post? Man, my blog sucks more than I thought.
That is it! I need to do some seriously crazy shit now so when I have Grandchildren I have good stories to tell. Someone needs to start a list for me. Like a bucket list only not at all like a bucket list. A crazy fucked up shit list that makes good stories.
No dead bodies, just canine corpses… You see, by brother dug up our first dog (Poopsie) while he was digging the grave for my Mom’s dog (Nigel). Mom called me all crying and sobbing that Nigel died and Butch (my brother, not yet another dog) dug up Poopsie trying to bury Nigel because it was dark and he forgot that was where Poopsie was buried first. So…we’re not as normal as most folk, but certainly less fucked-up than others. That’s got to be a win, right?
I would have to dig up my grandparents to ask them about this. Please hold….
Hmmmm…wish my MawMaw was around to ask – she would totally dig up a body and then bury it properly yo. does it count if I had a friend in highschool that was so “goth” that they banned him from the cemeteries becuase they tought he *would* dig up a body? It’s amazing what folks think about you when you wear dark clothes and only come out at night. Sheesh.
Neither did I. But I will ease the question into any conversations I can… “Oh, speaking of red velvet cake, did you ever did up a human corpse?” Etc. I’ll report anything pertinent.
Well, our family motto is “Never Convicted” so I’ve got a few stories. My mom shot her first husband, to which the local law enforcement official responded “Too bad we aren’t here to remove a body…aim higher next time.” He was not well regarded.
All my grandparents are dead. None of them ever dug up a dead body.
My Dad still has his mother’s ashes (in the box he was given form the crematorium) in his closet.
I could be the one to dig up a body for my grand kids some day.
You know what? I don’t get you. You have a kid, and I’m sure there’s a graveyard around you. Get her out there and live vicariously through her. Stand over her as she toils away shoveling, smell the sweat and the dirt, feast your eyes as your flashlight glints off of the scrape that her spade put in the coffin lid. Then when the cops come, you run like hell and pick her up at the po-po station.
Are you in for the seance to contact my grandparents?
I wouldn’t be too surprised if at least one of my grandfathers didn’t bury a body, but imagine they wanted it to stay put and not be found.
Indian burial ground? Missing corpse? Am I the only one thinking Pet Cemetery??
Of course they did. Nebraska hasn’t had laws for all that long. Everytime you sink a spade your courting trouble.
Scarier; however, is the time I went to plant flowers on the grave of my horse who had died just months before duing the winter and I sunk crotch deep into a void with one foot. You know frozen dirt don’t pack all that well. Dad said he burried him a good 7 feet deep, but I still can’t shake the thought that I kicked my poor dead horse.
so….. are you going to tell us the story about your grandpa-the-harvey-boy, or what??? I’m on a really bad wifi connection right now, so I’m not 100% sure you didn’t explain it in the comments, but I’m filled with curiosity!
This just made me miss my late grandma terribly. And, I agree, everyone, call your nana and listen to her 10 same stories because years later, you’re going to miss them. Believe me.
But you decorated your house with corpses! And decorated the corpses with tiny aprons and vampire coffins and the skulls if other tiny corpses and I am pretty sure you once wore a corpse to the movies. You win.
My kids have a current obsession with burying things . Does that count? The other day they told me they buried their sand shovel from the beach b/c the handle broke . So they buried it . And the other day at the baseball field my daughter was digging around in the dirt and when I asked her what she was doing she said “Burying a sticker”. They have also buried their homework and the remains of a bird. The last one makes the most sense. I’m not sure what the other stuff is about 🙂
Of, not if. iPod.
My grandfather had the same 10 stories thing too, and then one day he told the story of being 14 and building a souped up car with his brother and being involved in a car chase. A lady ran out of gas on the highway, and he didn’t want to walk, so he drove the car to rescue her, but since he lived in small town Saskatchewan, everyone knew he was 14 and didn’t have a license so the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) came out to stop him. His car could go 20 km and the RCMP could go 25 km/h so he got away, but, everyone knew who he was, so he still got arrested later. I love this story because I’m pretty sure I can ride my bike faster than 25 km/h, or that even a horse might have caught him, so I imagine this slow speed car chase.
No dead bodies though. Maybe things were simpler in Saskatchewan.
I dug up a dead body once. Well, part of one. No lie. Ironically, this story starts out in EXACTLY the opposite way.
4th grade. I’m hanging out with my friend Grace (yes, my friends when I was a kid were girls. You gonna make something of it?), and we find this dead squirrel in the gutter or something. Relatively fresh. So we figure we have to bury it, right?
We find a shovel, and a spot in her yard. Neither of us wants to touch the squirrel, so we awkwardly lift it up on a couple of sticks (why the hell didn’t we just use the damn shovel? Kids…) and carry it over. We start digging, and pull out a human vertibra. It’s all brown and dirty and we don’t know what it is, except that it’s some kind of bone.
So we took it to school the next day for show-and-tell. Our teacher was all, “Oh, that’s… Interesting.”
Then there was a cop, who looked at it and asked us where we found it and all that. He decided it was obviously really old. Probably Native American, hence, no case. (It was the 70s, and back then White Arizona cops didn’t give a shit about brown Arizona citizens. Hm. Kind of like now…)
Anyway, that was about it. I don’t know what happened to the bone. I don’t even remember if we ever finished in-huming the squirrel who led to this inadvertent partial ex-humation in the first place.
But at least I can tell my grandkids about the time I dug up (part of) a human corpse.
Well, my Grandma has 10 or 11 siblings, so the odds are in my favor that someone’s found a dead body before. My uncle probably has, but he’s a cop so that doesn’t really count.
I’ll have to DIG UP my grandparents to ask them if they DUG UP corpses in the past.
Takes way too much effort, I’m already tired.
I’ll just presume they did and fell extremely cool, if you don’t mind.
Lazy Elisa
There are no dead body stories (that I know of) and it’s way too late to ask my grandparents, but my mother and her older brother once buried a sick rooster. Does that count?
And years ago I was helping to clean my boss’s office, and I found part of a skull. Apparently my boss’s mother gave it to her.
Digging up a corpse? Who does this? The biggest scandal in my family was when my Grandpa got caught smoking when he was in college and when my cousin went to jail for dealing meth. Oh, and that time my Grandma mentioned that she was married at 16 and it was quickly annulled, because she thought we ought to know, but she didn’t actually want to give us any details, like her previous husband’s name. None of this is nearly as interesting as digging up a corpse.
You know you still have plenty of time to dig up a corpse and then your story would be way cooler than meemaw’s because you would have done it as an adult fully aware of the consequences whilst laughing in the face of authority! Although, don’t leave it too long… corpse digging requires quite a bit of energy.
My grandparents are dead and I never knew them.
Should I dig them up?
Then you would have a cool story about how your fans dug up their grandparents to make you happy 😀
aw heck. I don’t even know where they’re buried, tho.
That’s why i’m being cremated. then the ashes can be dumped somewhere (i have no kids)
I am thinking that there is no body recovery going on in my ancestry but now that you brought it up, I might just have to ask…have a grandfather on one side and a grandmother on the other that I can ask…LOL.
I am also totally hung up on the fact that they put it under the bed and LOST IT. Was it a tiny corpse or what?
Does it count if you find a human skull when cleaning out your grandparent’s house and barns/storage buildings. Because that totally happened to my family. I missed seeing the skull and don’t know what happened to it.
I was there when my mother and I found an old pistol wrapped in a paper bag in a table in my grandmother’s sewing room. Good times.
As far as I know, none of my grandparents ever dug up a body. But the rumor is that my mom’s mom’s family ran whiskey during Prohibition, so they might have hidden one or two.
Mother did LOSE Daddy’s ashes for a couple of days though. After she brought him home, she put him in the laundry room (I KNOW! What the heck, Mom?). Then she called me at work one day, super upset, and accusing me of burying him without telling her. Apparently, she moved the box at some point and then forgot. She eventually found him, but I don’t remember where.
Now that I think of it, the funeral home misplaced him for a bit too. The man never got lost when he was alive, so I can only imagine he was quite miffed to be lost TWICE after he was dead.
Sometimes the comments are as good as the post. This is one of those times
It just goes to show, everyone’s got at least one skeleton in their closet. Or in this case, under the bed.
My great grandfather was shot to death in 1905 when my grandmother was 7; she passed away in 2001. How does that into your story? You did mention grandparents, right? Living in 3 centuries should be worth something; maybe we won’t have to dig her up……..
My grandma is pretty prim so I can’t imagine her getting her hands dirty, but then it is always the quiet ones….
Also just on a side note, if you’d hidden a corpse under the bed, would it not begin to smell after a while?
Back in about 1990 or so? A friend of a friend (along with a couple of other guys) dug up a grave and took a body. Then they tried to get rid of it, and some hands and feet washed up along the Mississippi river, and they thought it was a missing boy, but it wasn’t. They found the guys out, and I think they went to jail.
Only thing I’ve dug up would be cats that the old homeowners buried in the backyard.
I’m pretty sure Grandma never did, but all my other grandparents are dead and I can’t ask them. But there’s this story of this time Grandma jumped off the top of a double decker bus before she came to the States with an umbrella like Mary Poppins. I asked her about it but she says all she did was trip on a step or something, but I don’t believe her. She’s secretly way more badass than she likes me to know.
Half of my grandparents are dead and have been for a good while now. The other half, well, I’m kinda afraid what i’d find out if I called and asked that. Sorry to ruin the poll. 😀
None of my parents dug up a body that we know of, but my Granny worked on the Manhattan Project.
My daughter and her friends buried a beloved pet goldfish in the yard once in a beautiful blue velvet jewelry box. Several kids from the neighborhood were not as impressed with the story until she dug it up a week later so they could investigation the decomposition.
I’m so proud.
My grandfather just tried to fuck me. He’s dead now.
I don’t think my gram ever dug up a corpse. But, she had been a widow…….FIVE TIMES!!
So, maybe she has some how contributed to the supply of corpses available to be dug up!?
Nope. Nothing my grandparents woulda done. And honestly, I would be afraid to ask my father-in-law. I’d be more concerned about him telling me about the bodies he’s buried.
creepy, creepy, creepy!
I just emailed my parents. My grandparents are dead.
My PaPa helped dig several dead bodies out of the rubble left from the Waco tornado of 1953.
I CAN NOT WAIT to read what you post when you’re 70.
I am fortunate enough to be the heiress to Utah’s oldest family-owned business, which is also a mortuary. When we bought our first cemetery in Salt Lake City, it was loaded with unmarked graves. The poor grave diggers (my older brothers claim to be included) would sometimes just smack an old coffin with their shovels when digging what they believed was a fresh grave and it was all gooey like a zombie soup. I have no idea what they did with remains afterwards, but it reminds me of one of my dad’s favourite jokes: Q: What do you name a leper in a hot tub? A: Stu.
But, we LOVE it when you ramble! That’s the best part, because it’s all informal and wacky best friend talk.
I have dug up corpses for a living, and I can tell you that it was VERY common in the earlier part of the last century (and is STILL common in this century in some parts of the country even though it is mostly illegal and immoral). I did it with Native American monitors, and it still makes me uncomfortable. Especially when you bring home their ghosts because you distrurbed their graves without their permission. That shit pisses them off somethin’ fierce I can tell you. Takes a lot of sage burning to persuade them to leave, too.
I would be happy to have my grandparents participate in this poll – except that to do so, I will have to dig up their dead bodies, and I am pretty sure I am too old to get away with that… *sigh*
My brother’s a undertaker, so he normally plants them, but on occasion they do have to dig the odd one up but not sure if he got this job urge from our grand parents, will have to give my mom a call and ask
My co-worker and I want to know one thing… Where did Goofy get the butter from in Disneyland?
My Father-in-Law put a cat in acid to reconstruct his skeleton. Does that count?
Hmmm, no grandparents left to ask, but my mom’s mom is the one I’d suspect if any of them had done so.
I did find a fossilized ‘possum under our playhouse many years ago. I should’ve put it in a dress and sent it to you. I was gonna keep it, but my brother tossed it over the fence, telling me emphatically that there was no way the airlines would let me take it on my flight (back to college).
*sings* When I die, don’t bury me
in a box in a cold, dark cemetary.
Out in the garden would be much better
’cause I could be pushin’ up some home-grown to-may-tas . . .
None of my relatives have dug up a corpse, but there was (and still is) a graveyard at my elementary school with real bodies in it, right next to the cafeteria. You can imagine what we all thought was in the mystery meat.
I never dug up a corpse, but I found one in the woods when I was eight. I may or may not have poked it with a stick. Death be not proud.
As far as I know none of my Grandparents dug up any corpses. They’re all dead now or I would ask. It’s possible that my Dad’s Dad made corpses though. From what I understand he was a pretty bad man but I’m not sure if that was because he was an ass or if it was more criminal in nature. I do know he went to prison and was pardoned but I don’t know why. He died when my Dad was 9. Apparently he was awful enough that my Grandma peed on his grave after they buried him.
My grandpa had lots of stories. Don’t remember any about digging up a body, but he LOVED to tell the story of the time he ran into a dead body. Literally. With his car. While it was hanging from an overpass. Oh, and it was his friend. You have to understand black Irish humor to get how someone could tell a tragic story about a friend who commits suicide as a humorous anecdote. It’s right up there with the hilarity of potato famines.
Is it weird that you posted this and all I could wonder as I read it was “Really?! She *REALLY* hasn’t dug up any dead bodies?”
My grandparents never dug up dead bodies…as far as I know. However, my Nana found civil war quilts in a cave hideout that belong to our ancestors. It’s not a dead body, but there will be some when she leaves us and my dad, my sister, my aunt, my cousin and I all fight over who gets to keep the quilts.
I wouldn’t put it past my grandmother, but sadly I can’t ask her anymore. My mom used to stick potatos in people tailpipes (automobile tailpipes – get your head out of the gutter) to watch them blow up though. My mother in law just talks bout her poop a lot, which sort of makes me wish I was dead instead of listening to it, so maybe that’s a partial credit?
maybe it’s a texas thing? my friend’s uncles found a skeleton in a small-town texas bank basement (???) and brought it home (although this was probably in the ’60s, not the ’30s). it’s actually still in the barn on their ranch. lesson: texans are weird (i can say that, as i am one)
Unfortunately, all of my grandparents are dead. But now I feel like opening their graves and leaving notes for whoever decides to dig them up next. Because, y’know, surprise!
Does it count if extremely heavy rain caused the cemetery soil to cause a mini landslide? … and the coffins started popping out? I swear that shit really happens that’s why they put the caskets in concrete now. However, the weird part is that he doesn’t remember which cemetery it was in Mexico. How do you forget that kinda shit?
I am so curious about the rest of that story. How did they get the body home? How long did they keep the body under the bed? WHY did they keep it under the bed? And how did it get LOST?
You have to find out these details. This story will just get better.
Two questions:
1. Would you be more scared of her sitting in a room across from any grandmother knowing she dug up a dead human corpse or that she killed someone and then buried their corpse?
2. What is the name you, Dear Bloggess, have given this corpse? I know you’ve never seen or met it but I think that’s a minor detail. You’ve named many other dead carcasses and I think this one is special enough for you to name. Don’t you?
Ohhh man I lived on a farm growing up and I FEARED accidentally finding a body while we were out picking stones and shit, mostly because my dad was a jerk who was all “There are probably ancient bodies out there with the stones! People used to bury bodies on their farms! You could find one!”
Not motivational, daddy-o, not motivational one little bit.
When I was in elementary school my best friend and I found a human leg bone on our playground from the cemetary that was right next to the baseketball court up a little hill. It apparently popped through the fence. They ended recess really quickly that day!
Am I the only one that wants to know why you would put the dead body under your bed? Also, how does one lose a dead body that was clearly hidden under said bed, and finally, who the hell would sleep on a bed when they know a dead body was hidden under it? Have they never heard of the monsters under the bed?
Also, how did Goofy get butter to put on his ears? I would suspect that security would be called instead of Goofy.
My dad was buried in a cemetery in Ozark, Missouri, that has hand-painted signs posted on all gates saying you can’t dig up your relatives until you get permission from City Hall first. So, you know, something happened that caused the caretaker to finally say, “Okay! Fine, I’ll post some signs since you people can’t remember this one simple rule!’
Unfortunately, all my grandparents are dead, but I’d bet my paternal grandpa dug up a corpse or two. He came from rural Nebraska, it’s possible.
My mother and all her family have dug up a corpse. I don’t know about my fathers side ofte family, but they were all Mennonites, so I think probably not.
All of my grandparents are dead so I can’t ask them. However, I have right now in my curio cabinet, the cremains of my dad and 3 dogs. Because why not? My father-in-law used to be part of the Cremains Crew but he was finally buried when my MIL died last year and we tossed his urn into the casket with her. There was serious money riding on whether or not that urn would come flying right back out. It didn’t.
When I was 9 my guinea pig, Weezy died and we buried her in the back yard. My friend begged me to dig her up about 3 months later. We also buried my Mrs. Beasley doll next to her. Mrs. Beasley looked the same. Weezy.. not so much. I learned a lot that summer.
Hmm. I come from a weird family where when you die you just kind of disappear. Someone in the family calls to let you know that so and do died. That’s it. No funeral, visitation, or memorial. Just gone. Perhaps they are some of the people that your relatives are digging up? I have no idea where they actually are, so it is possible! We broke tradition when my mom died. She is in my sister’s backyard! Sealed into a birdbath in fact. Which on one occasion did prompt my young son to stop by the birdbath and pronounce “well hello gramma. I see that you’re a birdbath now.”
How do you lose a corpse? Like in a move?
My grandpa never dug anyone up, so far as I know, but he had a human skull in the basement. He thought it was OK to own a dead person’s head, for science. Of course, he wasn’t a scientist. He was an accountant.
I just dug up my grandma to ask her but she refused to answer any of my questions. She always was a spiteful old bat.
Oh Kat. Jenny has dug up bodies. Just not human ones.
Also, is anyone thinking about the Graveyard Book right now? Great book.
“I never dug up a human corpse.”
That’s what she said.
(Sorry. It was too easy.)
I dug up a rat head once ……grandmother shot some Jehovah Witnesses onetime with her shot gun….not sure what she did with them afterward??? T:)
Funny you mention digging up corpses, because this just happened in my town this week:
http://www.goupstate.com/article/20120328/ARTICLES/120329642/1112?Title=Casket-unearthed-remains-stolen-at-Oakwood-Cemetery
I, however, have never dug up any corpses, 🙂
we have professional photos of caskets with dead relatives in them–yuck.
WHY did they have that photographed? Some of them are even that “old fashioned” hand coloring!
Good Lord!
One of the photos is of a young man killed in a hunting “accident” sure it was an accident.
My pap-pa was an archaeologist. So is one of my mother’s cousins. Used to go on digs when I was little. ‘nuf said.
No bodies…………….but I know for a fact my grandmother would go poaching with her dad when she was growing up. Also there was a still behind the house.
No bodies dug up by my relatives…but there is a rumor that one of them buried someone…illegally. I am not sure if I want to follow up on that rumor.
Maybe Victor’s meemaw is the reason for the curse on your house you experienced a while back? I believe I remember you suggesting that maybe you disturbed an ancient Indian burial ground and that was the reason for the string of bad luck. Someone needs to somehow make this right. I’m looking at you, meemaw.
Also, none of my grandparents (or my husband’s) are alive anymore. I should’ve added sadly. But! I was watching an old Blue’s Clues with my kids tonight and Steve was doing his Elvis schtick, and I thought about how my dad met Elvis before he was really famous – they were from the same area and were the same age and that I don’t think there’s a way to express to my kids how absolutely cool that was. *sigh* Oh, yea, I just thought of it. If I were to have met Justin Biever, I suppose. That’s sad, right? The Biev is nowhere near the coolness level of Elvis, and yet, the hysteria’s there. Am I like my disapproving grandmother, then? Because of my dislike of the Biev? Totally rhetorical and I’m rambling, just wanted to throw that out there. OK then!
both of my mom’s parents were pushed in an open grave ‘occasionally’ and played in a graveyard but never dug anybody up. i was also informed that my mom was pushed in an open grave by her oldest brother and left there for a few hours. awesome.
You know, now that you’ve posted it online… it’s going to happen.
My grandparents did not dig any of our relatives up. Instead, they grew strawberries on top of them. Mmm, zombie strawberries. Yum.
I have got to stop reading your blog when other people can hear me. I giggled like a maniac through this whole thing. Maybe my grandparents are to blame for that.
I’m going to take a leisurely stroll through the comments for this post because: awesome topic!
So, I asked my dad if anyone in our family had ever done this, and this is the story he told (paraphrased):
Apparently his dad divorced his mom to marry a crazy lady who left the nun-hood (?) to marry him. When he was 92, she stopped taking her meds and then divorced him. He went into an assisted living facility, where he was apparently quite the hot ticket with the ladeez. ANYway, he gave my dad his car, which he wasn’t needing any more. My dad found an old onion bag in the trunk that held a jug (?) of ashes labeled with a lady’s name. She was reportedly my grandfather’s girlfriend from years prior. She had died, no one claimed her, and he somehow got her ashes. Which he put in an onion bag, and then stored for decades in the trunk of his car. That’s the closest we’ve come to dead bodies. Unless you count the time I dug up my dead-and-buried pets to see what they’d look like.
I, personally, have never dug up a corpse THAT I KNOW OF. My friend Dana, however, had the SAME corpse DELIVERED TO HER twice. Apparently the same coffin floated up out of the low-lying Louisanna dirt and needed re-burying during two different hurricanes…Katrina and Ike. Imagine my morgue-running friend opening a coffin and finding a toe-tag written in her very own handwriting. Surreal.
.
Your meemaw didn’t happen to say the corpse under the bed (Dibs on movie title!) happened to have the first name of Jimmy?
See it wasn’t a big plot from the mafia to hide his body, it was just your meemaw!
Beware of the Meemaw!! (Dibs on even scarier movie title!)
I did find out my gramps was kind of ‘woohoo’.
Random acquaintance, “Did you say your gramps name was ‘blankity blank?'”
“Why, yes I did?”,said I
“Was he the one who murdered his first wife and had a song written about it?”
“Ummm, yes…”
“I LOVE that song!!”
“Um, thanks?”
my gramma says she didn’t.
i’m sorry.
I don’t think I want to ask my grandpa about his dead body experience. He was a police officer and could probably have some gruesome stories.
So, since they dug it up on Easter, were they hoping for The Miracle Of Resurrection?
My 88 year old Papaw lives with me, so I asked him (without preamble or explanation) Hey, Paps, when you were a kid, did you ever dig up any dead bodies?” Without even batting an eyelash, he says, “Nope, but I planted more than one.” The man didn’t even look up from his solitaire game.
I’m still scarred by Stand By Me. And I wasn’t even actually there.
What a pussy.
I never would have survived the 30s. Roaring or not.
======================
First I thought this post was great.. And then I read the comment!
Well, it’s not like they did it on purpose.
Ha Ha! My first thought when I read this was, “I’ve dug up a body!” But I’m an archaeologist and its my job, so maybe this doesn’t count.
God knows what’s been done in the name of keeping skeletons in closets. If you don’t have one of your own – go dig one up. 🙂
I don’t and never will dig up a dead body, but I have a couple of cadaver dogs who’s favorite way to indicate a buried human, is to dig furiously until they get to the body.
Now I know why Victor married you. You reminded him of his grandma! LOL
I dug them up and asked them. They don’t seem to remember.
Damn, if my grandkids ever ask me if I’ve dug up a corpse, should I lie and say it was only one or tell them the whole I’m-not-shitting-you-I-really-did-root-through-jars-of-bones-when-I-was-seven story? Probably neither, come to think of it.
my grandma threw away a cat once. while it was STILL ALIVE. I’m thinking that might be almost as awesome as digging up a corpse… she said it wasn’t a big deal though because the cat didn’t have much life left in him anyway.
Porn holograms and built in brain computers really bummed me out. What a shitty world that will be (I know all the men disagree butb believe me, it’s not a good thing).
No digging up of bodies done by my late father but he did help embalm them for burial! It was a part-time job at the funeral home to help pay the bills for his family of seven (yup, seven) children!
I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that no one in my family ever dug up a dead body, at least not a human one.
I know for a fact that the owners of the house I grew up in will find corpses in our backyard… just not human ones…. but there is at least 2 dogs, 20 chickens, 2 ducks and 2 parakeets buried in on their land.
Victor’s mom sounds like a hoot. Though I imagine the body was prob. more like Otzi the iceman than Tales from the Crypt, but still… Now days you’d probably get seven shades of shit for digging up bodies in an Indian graveyard. Maybe her parents just pretended she was makin’ it all up, then sold it (“crazy kid, she got that from your side, ya know.”) Honest though, these comments got me thinking Pet Semetary meets Poltergeist, w/ a large slice of necromancy (diggin’ up gram & gramps to grill them about grave robbing. Sheesh.)
My grandparents have all been dead for years. Mom’s dad was once a cowboy, later did day labor, ‘spossible. Even If I asked him I couldn’t be certain ’cause he would bullshit you just for, and when he said it was b.s. you weren’t sure that wasn’t b.s. My dad’s dad died when he was a kid, don’t know too much about him but he’d disappear occasionally – again, ‘spossible. One of my great-great-great+ ancestors mom’s side was hung for horse theft. Another was a ranger who robbed a payroll stage coach, even had a wanted poster.
I once found some teeth on my aunt & uncles farm, my aunt said they belonged to a dog. I know, not the same.
I’m going to have so many dead body stories to tell my grandkids, but they will all be from work (unless something unexpected comes up).
Well, I did have an ancestor whose reason for death was declared as having shot himself with a rifle…….in the back of his head………..accidentally.
And the scariest part of this story is that I have always said that I came from the shallow end of our gene pool.
…when I start seeing dead people, I’ll ask them. I can say it wouldn’t shock me if my step-grandpa had.
My grandparents are dead bodies so I can’t ask them, but I could dig them up!
Well, it was my Dad’s Mom who taught my brother and me how to play poker and blackjack, and how to catch and clean fish. But it was his Dad, my grandy, who told us of the cattle rustlers back in previous generations of his family. It all has kind of a “country boy can survive” feel to it. Well, or girl, in my case.
That’s why you write special chapters and leave them all over the house.
Like Easter egg hunting but more words!
You, of course will be eating/drinking the chocolate.
Drinking involves vodka so I vote for that option.
Sex and corpses.
Glamours life they all lead.
God, I love your brain. : )
Thanks, Jenny. Now I know that I should write a book, apparently. Because *my* family has *lots* of great stories…
This is the true story of how I dug up a grave when I was 10.
I grew up on my grandparent’s farm with my little sisters & parents. It was not a working farm, but there was still a barn and a chicken coop, and other fun stuff like berry patches and fruit trees. My sisters and I were adventurous. We would jump from the hayloft down to the concrete floor, only holding a decaying rope that was on a pulley. (Not sure how we were never injured…) We climbed trees, played house in the chicken coop, and were little badass rulers of our land.
One year, my grandma (Oma) decided to donate the chicken coop to the town’s historical society, to be displayed along with an original log cabin. Our playhouse was gone. A little bummed, but we decided to check out what was in all that freshly turned up dirt where the coop used to be. Archeology time!
We were convinced we would find dinosaur bones. At first, we found rusty tin cups, pans, and silverware. It was cool, and we were happy to find anything at all. But then, BONES! They weren’t large, but still a pretty frickin awesome discovery. We ran to show our parents, but we’re told they were probably chicken bones (duh). Not totally convinced, we kept digging. Imagine our horror, when we dug up a large cut stone, with a name and two years listed. (I still remember the first name, James, and the years, 1913-1945).
We were shocked! A motherfucking GRAVE!! Pulling our parents over to inspect it, we were sure something tragic happened to poor James, and expected they would share the secret of a relative who had died in WWII. We waited as they looked it over, searching their faces. And then….They didn’t know a fucking thing. They guessed it was a memorial stone and told us that we were not living on a secret war hero burial ground. That was pretty much the end of our foray as archeologists.
So I guess this is actually “the true story of how I thought I dug up a human grave, but it turns out it was just a chicken grave. “
For some reason this made me think of you:
http://consumerist.com/2010/07/combine-your-loves-for-alcohol-taxidermy-with-beer-packed-in-rodent-carcass.html
Hold on, I’ll go dig Gram up and ask her. I bet she totally did it. She would have loved you.
Oh god, I really kinda want to ask her but, we’ll she’s not doing so hot at focusing today and I’ve been trying to get her to pack a suitcase, I’m guessing asking her about digging up corpses might distract her.
Of the three deceased G-parents I’m thinking one could have, but it would have been for a good reason, not as a childhood lark.
Nope. Nobody ever dug up a corpse in my family.
“I never Dug up a human corpse”. That’s all I want to say.
My initial reaction was “I’m not asking MY grampa – I KNOW he’d say yes… then he’d admit he stole all it’s gold fillings, and left it there…” My grampa got chased by REAL Indians (AND shot at) while hunting for buried treasure, way back when. Now he just tries to steral any gold or silver anyone in the family has, so he can melt it down and sell it. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised by ANYTHING found in the canyon behind his house….
Just looksee all these comments, who knew?! I wish I had a family story of grave robbing to share, but I don’t. And maybe it’s weird that I wish I did … !! I enjoyed the post and comments though, thank you. I look forward to your old age 🙂
I’m going to go dig up my grandmother right now and ask… 2 birds with one stone.
Gee, what is the statute of limitations on being an accessory to dumping a dead body under a bed? (Uh-oh.)
They only had to cut off chickens’ heads and drown kittens in my family.
Jenny,
This may come as a real shock to you, but people in your family, going wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy back, are just different.
Not like you.
The total non-descript conformist wallflower in HR.
Ahem.
No dead bodies – at least its never come up. But this just reminded me of the fact that my grandfather’s cremated remains are in my grandmother’s shed in her back yard. When my grandfather died 15 years ago my grandmother respected his wishes to be cremated but couldn’t bear the thought of scattering him. But she also couldn’t bear to have his ashes in the house BECAUSE IT CREEPED HER OUT. So she bought one of those marble containers from the mortuary and then put it in the corner of the shed. She then proceeded to make a garden to the side of the shed and put a bench next to it. She said she wanted a place to go and visit him so made her own little mausoleum . Its all incredibly sad but also a tad weird. She told my mother that when she dies that we could scatter their ashes together somewhere. Can’t tell if that’s romantic or not but it creeped my mother out. Even at 16 I had the strangest dreams because of this. In one dream I dreampt that for some reason we all disappeared and strangers were going through our effects only to find the ashes in the shed having them say “What the… ” Can’t figure out why I wasn’t wondering about where we went instead of worrying what people thought.
I think grandparents just think differently… not sure if its an age thing or an era thing though.
PLEASE ask Victor’s Meemaw “How on earth do you misplace a human corpse?” and post a follow up! I’m dying to know how that happens!
Alas all my Grandparents are dead.
So I dug them up to ask them, but they remained silent on the issue. I think its a conspiracy of silence, like the Mob has.
My grandfathers probably did in WWII, but dead so can’t ask them. My great-great-something-grandfather shot a bushranger in colonial New South Wales, so I suspect him of doing worse. Another g-g-grandfather was arrested for running an illegal still, which I think is cooler.
When I was a kid we used to play with skulls, but they belonged to goats, foxes and cows. I never thought that could be perceived as weird ’til now.
I’d have to dig them up and re-animate them to ask them, and given what one of them was like alive, I don’t relish the thoughts of zombie grandma! I guess that mystery will remain unsolved.
Ok, they stored it under dads bed? And then they LOST it?! You must find out the rest of this story. Do it!
Thanks for reminding me of, as my Grandmother would have said, “our people”. We have great stories as well, and love to ‘connect’ ourselves to those folks from long ago.
My father-in-law has never dug up a corpse, but he did bring in one on his fishing line, in the river behind their riverfront home. A few months later he caught another leg on his fishing line, but that turned out to be a mannequin leg.
By the way, I do have an ancestor who was a ship’s captain back in the days of sail. He married one of his passengers. Her husband had fallen overboard during the voyage.
The best I’ve got: Watching some TV show with my grandmother, we see a car roll over. She says, “That happened to my father. Only he was in a tractor when it rolled over in the ditch.”
My lovely bride asks, “Oh, no. Was he okay?”
To which Grandma replies, “No, he was decapitated.”
It’s hard to carry on a conversation after that.
I don’t think my grandma ever dug up a body. However, she’s recently been asking about her 4th husband. (There was never a 4th husband). But seeing as how she’s had 3 others die on her…Maybe there is a 4th? And she buried him after realizing that she just didn’t want to have to tell everyone that she lost yet another one. And now that the dimentia/Alzheimer’s is kicking in, she forgot that she’s not supposed to tell us. So maybe she’ll dig up #4, just to prove to us that she’s not crazy and knows damn well what she’s talking about.
My husband found a partially buried body in the woods behind his house when he was 11. It was the 1970s and he didn’t actually dig it up but still…it is a dead body story.
My grandparents are all deceased so I can’t ask them but I would not be at all surprised if my paternal grandmother wasn’t involved in the burying, if nor digging up of dead bodies. Most of her family were bootleggers and had several stills in West Virginia during Prohibition and thinking back to some of her stories about that time there were pauses in the telling and gaps in the stories that just might involve someone official being ‘removed’ from the area
Really, you’re not missing out. Decomp’s a bitch.
And it lingers
I would, but I would have to dig them up first and I’m not sure they would be very responsive to my questions.
Wait, didn’t you dig up your dead dog? That’s got to count for something.
My grandfather was the funeral director in a small town so he buried pretty much all the dead bodies in town but I am not sure if he ever had to dig one up. My mother lived in the upstairs of the funeral home until she was 12 and she used to have to sit by the phone when my grandparents were outside doing yardwork in case a call came in. He owned a hearse and a station wagon which doubled as the ambulance, because if you didn’t make it in time you just drove back to the funeral home instead of the hospital.
No human corpses, BUT, one day my grandparents were telling a story about my dad when he was a baby and nonchalantly brought up that they were living with a MOB BOSS for a couple of years. Yeah, they were poor. His sister was friends with my nana. She continued, “They were SO nice. They gave fruit baskets to the poor and helped the neighbors out when the husband lost his job.” Really, the mob was just a nice group of boys? Really? Still cant get over it….
If I asked my grandparents if they ever dug up a dead body, well then…it would be me who just dug up a dead body. So, I guess that’s a win for me, right?
I’ll ask my grandma, but I don’t think she ever dug anybody up. Although maybe when she was drunk. She tells an awful lot of drinking stories. And apparently loves martinis. Grandma is weird.
My dad actually dug up a body when he was a kid — and stored it under his bed until he went to college. (I think he said he gave it to his University…..)
I need to have him tell the story again so I have all the details, it’s pretty hazy in my memory!
My grandpa was picking up a body during his short career at the funeral home, and as he was driving the body sat up and looked at him. There was not enough of alcohol in the world to keep him from quitting that job.
i think we may be related. Exhuming bodies and moving them without the proper paper work is a federal offense.. Ask me how i know. But hey there is fun in every funeral!
I’m concerned about the haunting that HAD to have taken place since the body came from an Indian Burial Ground. LIke seriously. That body didn’t go missing, it was taken by the ghost family he has. Or maybe he just walked away.
Just a brief idiom interlude:
It was the roaring 20s (because of the roaring economy)
and the dirty 30s (because of the depression compounded by the dustbowl in America)
…not the “roaring 30s”….
I know a family of seven brothers who played “priest” as children. They would say a Mass and then bury one of the brothers. The parents did not find out until only six showed up for dinner one night. None of them died. Yet.
There are so many things wrong with your grandmother’s story that I instantly love her. “It wasn’t anyone we knew.” Crazy!
My grandma usually tells me how much her life sucked because she had these horrible jobs sewing sequins on circus performer costumes or inking comic books. And then she gets mad because instead of receiving sympathy from me I tell her, “Why are you complaining? Those sound like kickass jobs to me.”
Grandparents. They just don’t understand how good they had it.
When my grandpa died he was buried next to the neighbors spouse for a while and it caused way more scandal than it was worth.
Clearly, my lack of experience in digging up people and hiding them means I too am pussy. But blogging really is hard.
Its not a dead body, but more of a skeleton-in-the closet story. My friend was booking a flight for her sweet old grandmother who had never driven or worked outside of the home. TSA requires everyone to have ID, since she didn’t drive she needed alternate proof of residency. Born on an Indian reservation she didn’t have a birth certificate. My friend asked her grandmother for a copy of her marrage license, but her grandma said she was never married to her grandpa. Why not? Her grandpa was married to someone else. My friend found three social security cards with three different last names, but she was never legally married to those fellows either? I am not sure if they ever sorted out the ID for the flight, but my friend had some new questions about her grandmother’s past.
Very interesting story and I want to explore to learn about this “dug up a dead body” story…
Digging up a corpse in NOT graverobbing unless you take something from it.
It’s desecration. That’s just a misdemeanor.
You COULD claim ‘sightseeing’ or ‘curiosity’ and if the judge has a sense of humor you might just get off with community service at the local morgue. Like Lindsay Lohan. (Although she may be there trying to exhume her career as well)
People had to dig up corpses before the Internet. What else were they going to do for fun?
I’m pretty sure my grandparents didn’t dig up any corpses. HOWEVER, this is just the sort of thing my ex-husband would do. He’s the type to dig up a body, touch the naughty bits just for fun and then share a beer (or 4) with it. By then he’d be too lazy to re-bury it. He’d likely put it in his truck just so he’d have someone to talk to. He IS an ex for a reason.
Of course it’s a rampant activity, even unto today!
Where do you think all the damned zombies are coming from?
This is how the Zombie Apocalypse starts/started.
My grandparents are dead, so sorry I can’t ask them, but I’m thinking seriously of asking my parents the next time I see them!
I’m with you on the corpse digging! It’s so Stand By Me. Every kid kinda needs to poke a dead body with a stick. I wish I had a Hardy Boys grandpa. Or at least even a Lil’ Archies grandpa because sometimes they would solve mysteries in haunted houses too, and plus I liked Spotty.
I used to collect cow bones from the trail behind our house. I was convinced I could collect the entire cow until my Mom found my stash in the garage and threw it away. I cried a lot that summer.
I totally flashed back to a story I heard from my grandma…
1920s. Entire family starving, no food to be had. A new sibling, only a few weeks old, had died and been buried in the back yard (because that’s what you did back then, no big.)
She remembers looking out the back window and seeing the dogs fighting over something… turns out they’d dug up the baby.
Yeah. Horrific doesn’t even begin.
Kickstarter was made for this. Jenny, you can totally dig up a body.
As a small child my grandma drove me past the playground near her house and said nonchalantly, “there’s the playground where _______ buried her husband after she chopped him up and put him in trash bags.”
I was three and she felt it was an appropriate story so it’d be safe to assume she’s dug up a body or two.
As far as I know, no one in my family has ever dug up a human corpse. While walking home drunk through a cemetery back in the 40’s, a member of my extended family fell into an empty grave and spent the night there until he was rescued the following morning. I believe it is the same guy who tried to kill his wife twice and ended up committing suicide.
There’s a reason I’ve never met most of that side of my extended family.
Pretty sure my Memere never did, my other grandparents are dead so I can’t ask them. I probably shouldn’t ask my Memere anyways, she has Alzheimer’s, and it might not be the best kind of question to ask. Might hurt some family members feeling that she can’t remember them, but can remember digging up a corpse.
No dead bodies that I know of, but my mother’s mother once filled out the map for all the graves in her local small town cemetery with the names of who was buried in each one. When she finished she had one grave left over that no one could identify, so she wrote “spook” on the map. Also when she was at college during the summer renewing her teaching certificate she conducted a bat funeral. A bat had gotten into the dorm; the younger girls didn’t know what to do and since she was the older non-trad (yes, they had them in the 1920s) student they came to her for help. She knocked it down with a broom, killing it, but then they had to bury it properly, with a “preacher” and “mourners” and a grave marker that read “A.Dam Bat”. My mother used to have a picture of the ceremony.
I think there are enough skeletons in my family’s closet just to assume that they have done that and much, much more. Also, they owned 6 funeral homes and a 50 acre burial site…probably.
Well what else were they supposed to do during the ’30s??? Gotta have some way to keep themselves entertained….
I dug up a few goldfish we had buried in the yard in jewelry boxes just to see what they looked like after.. awhile. My brother broke my dead grandmother’s thumb at her funeral… but that isn’t really on topic except that it involves dead people/
I am sooooo stuck on moving the dug up dead body to under the bed that I am getting stomach cramps from laughing. Can’t wait till I get past this to the “lost it” part of the story . . . OMG tears and more convulsions of laughter . . .
Nobody here to hear or see me. I think that is a good thing as now I am choking
Clearly, I need to practice this belly laugh thing a little more often – thanks Bloggess
One problem – I would have to dig up my grandparents to ask them…… and then I could say I dug up a dead body too.
Way cool…. I’m heading to Commerce TX now…. Later Gater! Oh wait – you do have a gator – a Pirate Gator. Tell him later for me.
Grandpa didn’t dig up any corpses that I know of… but he did smoke a lot of hemp rope and “chew on poppies when they got all doughy” — (“You ate OPIUM grandpa??” “No, I just chewed on the doughy part of the poppy”). To which his only reply was, “Nothin’ but dope… nothin’ but dope.”
Yeah, that WAS pretty dope, grandpa!
Oh, and he came very close to being shot to death by a local bootlegger. Seems the guy had stash-spots around their little Nebraska town, so he wouldn’t ever be caught with illegal hooch in his possession. Grandpa and his best buddy decided to tail him, steal the jugs of hooch and turn a quick profit. Nothin’ but dope, Grandpa.
I have never been so pissed that all of my grandparents are deceased.
My grandparents are pretty interesting, but not this interesting.
I have a grandfather that in his retirement years has built a scale model dollhouse…of his actual house. Down to matching upholstery fabric and wallpaper. And he also tells me the same ten stories every time I see him. Although none of them involve WHY he made a scale model dollhouse of his own house (complete with model dog…just like his own dog. Possibly covered in her discarded fur…)
My other grandfather is once went to jail for stealing bananas. And he learned to barber in jail. He also got the cops to be his designated driver on multiple occasions and made them take him through the McDonald’s Drive-Thru. And was generally such an obnoxious drunk that the cops would beg my grandmother to come and pick him up from the drunk tank. And she refused.
So while grandfather number two is inherently much more amusing and interesting (and ended his town drunk reputation many years ago) I would almost certainly peg grandfather number one as the one to dig up dead bodies. Or have dead bodies (hello tiny creepy replica house?). I mean, he had a Christmas tree farm for many years. What better place to hide that shit?
Oh, it’s a real post.
My grandparents are dead, so I had my daughter ask my mom. Damn, no dice. I do believe one of my ancestors was responsible for bringing a venereal to this country though. Does that count?
So after I posted about a true story, then I realized that your post was not true. I guess I was laughing so hard at the fact that it MIGHT be a normal thing for that generation that I had to share mine too. Oh well after reading all the other posts of digging up dead things I figure that my story isn’t as odd as I originally thought!
Thanks dad for telling the story of how to stop a husband from beating his wife via rotting corpses.
Just as long as Victor doesnt use the shit sandwich saying when you guys finally do break down and dig up a corpse..
Because those things are NOT easy to get back in the ground..
Just as long as he doesnt look at the corpse and say well, its our shit sandwich, and now we have to eat it..
I asked my Grandma, she said she hadn’t dug up a corpse, but then went on to tell me how her Dad was hit by a train one day while drunk. He lived.
OMG Y’ALL! MY DAD DUG UP DEAD BODIES.
“I must admit that I was once involved with digging up some dead bodies. It happened when I was on Okinawa. The engineers were building a new road and cut through the side of a hill. They uncovered a cave that the Japanese had used to store some small arms. During the invasion the Marines frequently used explosives to seal caves rather than take a chance that they were occupied by fanatical enemy troops. I was “volunteered” to help do an inventory of the weapons. As we proceeded we found three bodies. Based on what was left of the uniforms our intelligence people were able to determine that they were Japanese Naval Infantry (Marines). They were buried with full military honors in one of the cemeteries on the island.
Dad”
Does it count if I did up my grandmother to ask her if she ever dug up anybody?
Your “this-is-not-a-real-post” posts are my favorite!!!! 😀
Ah heck girl! I used to live in Windsor, Ontario on the riverfront right across from Detroit.
My mom used to find what was left of people on the beach after the lake freighters were done with them.
Mob hits, mostly.
We moved.
My grandmother just turned 95. She’s from NC, she grew up on a farm, and was married when she was not-quite-sixteen—she MUST have dug up at least ONE dead body. I’ll find out and let you know.
I did once dig up a mummified cat from under my porch (I was probably 7 or 8 years old)—it was crazy looking. Do you think my future grandkids would find that interesting enough?
No, no. You will be the grandma who is constantly digging in the yards and random fields. And when your grandkids ask you why, you will respond that you haven’t found a dead body yet. MAYBE YOU COULD DIG UP A DINOSAUR!!!!! That would be so much cooler than digging up a random human. And if it were a new species you could name it. And everyone who’s spent more than three minutes on this blog knows how awesome you are at naming things. Maybe you should start digging now…..new hobby, ready-set-go!
Jenny, you’re part way to the grandkids story with the digging up of the dead dog. That’s a start at least. My grandparents are all dead, but I feel quite sure that my maternal grandparents probably have a graveyard story, if not one of my uncles. The paternal grandpee’s are boring. (Truthfully, I don’t know much about them).
Hum…post number 418, is anyone still out there ? Alive ? I can’t help but wonder about the future now that The Bloggess has posted this thing…a couple hundred years from now someone will get their PhD researching Jenny and her followers.
Does it count if I have to dig up my grandparents in order to ask them about this?
Of course, about 100 of these entries probably asked the same thing. I should really do some cursory skimming of posts first, shouldn’t I?
sure as shit my grandma did.
And no shit I’m not lyin here, it was when she rode with Belle Starr.
Yep….
we were the rough and rowdy sort.
Then on the other side of the family, we hid out Billy the Kid.
is it any wonder I freak out when a cop tails us?
I used to love sitting and listening to old people stories when I was younger. They all seem have a way of glossing over the important stories. The key is to steer the conversation back there slowly and make them think they thought of it and haven’t told you that one yet.
My grandma accidentally went to the very first Star Trek Convention in New York City in the 70s. Her podiatrist’s office was in the same hotel as the convention and the crowds of people just swept her right into the con, even as she tried to fight her way upstream like a salmon to get back into the elevator . There were so many unexpected attendees that after they ran out of tickets, they were just letting people in, or there’d have been a riot. I know she attended the first one because I’d read that NASA had loaned them an actual spacesuit that an astronaut had worn on the moon, and someone stole the glove, and she spontaneously told me without prompting that there’d been a terrible fuss about someone’s missing glove.
My Dad dug up my mom’s urn several times. It was beginning to feel like “Where’s Waldo”, except it was “Where’s Mom?”. First he purchased a wreath that you put an urn on and set it in the water to sink into the lake…that didn’t go over well with my siblings. Then it was I will keep her urn on my bedroom dresser beside her picture, but that didn’t work because it creeped him out at night. Then it was Mom can be buried under her favourite lilac tree in between the houses. But she only lasted there until he came up with a brilliant idea to move the tree into the fenced backyard. So dig up Mom again and the tree and move them to the backyard. Then that didn’t go over well because a bylaw states you can’t bury your dead on your property. So Dad finally decided to bury her in a cemetery where the ashes are placed in a vault in a wall. So her proceeds to take a bus ride down to the cemetery with her urn in his lap so that she can have a final resting place. On a side note, I don’t think my mom would have been too happy to have been buried in the backyard because my dad wanted his urn to be placed on top of hers. She once stated that she didn’t want his ashes to be placed above hers because she had spent 54 years with him on top and she wasn’t going to spend an eternity with him on top of her! My family…they are just punch lines in a joke.
This is hilarious. If only the comments I had with my grandmother were this interesting but instead they are all about ex lax and icy hot for arthritis pain!
I am not aware of any of my grandparents digging up a body, but I do know that my grandma and grandpa stole a body from a morgue and smuggled it across the border in the trunk of their Buick in the early 60’s. Apparently they were in Mexico City on vacation with another couple, when the husband kicked the bucket. There was going to be a huge delay in getting him transported back home through official channels and it was going to be quite expensive, so they went all criminal.
Oddly enough, this is not the strangest story about my family I know.
Relatives…………………………………
My great-grandfather used to run booze to the US during prohibition, but that was what most fishermen in eastern Canada did during the off-season.
I’d love to ask my grandparents if they ever dug up corpses, but they’re all deceased, so I’d have to dig them up and reanimate them to ask. And at least two of them were cremated, which I think means I’d need to find other bodies to put them in. After all that, it would seem sort of strange to say “I brought you back to ask you if you ever dug up dead bodies”. And it would be awkward if the answer was “no”.
I don’t know if my grandma ever dug up a corpse. But I know that we, as kids, would make forts in old abandoned cars in the field, dig holes that spanned about 20 ft. across and 8 ft. deep, and would make bows and arrows out of branches and such and shoot them at each other. One of the neighbors kids even shot his brother in the arm and they had to take the kid to the hospital or something. We would also walk around with 5 gallon buckets and fill them entirely with garter snakes and then after holding the snakes we would out them back where we found them. Hundreds of snakes.
No chance to ask my grandparents, except maybe if I went to their graves and dug them up. I should probably do that anyway. Haven’t seen them at all yet, so this way I finally knew what they looked like. Okay, when I think of this it’s not good. I think they should stay.
But I’m going to ask my dad, he’s as old as other people’s great-granddads, so maybe he’s dug out a corpse in the 30s. Gonna ask him tonight. So, please keep this poll up and running until tomorrow.
Oddly yes, as have my brothers. Until maybe a decade ago it was very commonplace for the village neighbors to dig the graves of the dead. It still goes on today to a lesser degree. In fact it was an honor. They are buried in family graves so it’s nothing to hit a shovel off a body or two if they have been buried a while and the cast of digger characters has changed. Only caskets hold up pretty well. The wooden coffin people are usually seen again. I have heard too many stories of “hair, still lovely on her head”, or “he had an awful long shin bone” of people who died years ago. This was a totally normal part of our childhoods. My dad was an often honored gravedigger. Haven’t thought about that recently actually. That’s definitely a good story for my American kids. 🙂
Apparently digging up dead people is still something that is done….http://www.ksn.com/content/news/also/story/Grave-robbers-rip-casket-open-and-steal-skull/2hlrOAFtG0GmwBDcfiS6Zw.cspx
my pop and his pals used to go ‘joy-riding’.. you know, stealing cars, basically. it was easier back in the 30’s and 40’s. well, one time, they stole a station wagon.. except it was the morgue wagon, and was occupied. he said that one of them looked in the back, saw a body, and they skidded to a halt and ran… man, he laughs.. those were the days, i suppose. sigh.
But didn’t you dig up your dog and re-bury him? I think that counts. It’s brave as hell, anyway.
I received a burial plot for Christmas one year. From my father in law. Does that count? I returned the gift to him graciously.
I’m certainly considering calling up my grandma and saying “Hey, did you or anybody else in our family ever dig up a corpse?” Although I have a feeling she’d end up telling me the same old stories and never telling me about any corpses. My other grandma, on the other hand, would tell me all kids of crazy stories, and I bet there would be at least one involving a corpse. If only she was still here… *Sighs*
Anyway, although you may think this isn’t exactly a post, I say it’s a great one. Any post involving meemaws and corpses is worth writing about. And reading as well.
Let us know how the poll goes. I bet if we told the grandmas and grandpas it was a contest of sorts they spill the beans more willingly. We can even present them with a certificate of “The Coolest Grandparent Still Alive” and promise not to dig up their dead bodies once they die. Unless they have no sense of humor, then it’s better not to talk about death. Just live it at “Coolest Grandpa (or Grandma) Around.” Yeah, that sounds better.
Digging up human corpse? No way! not even animal corpse! it an eew! But mind you I saw a corpse who was killed and buried inside the septic tank! The policemen dug it..
My grandparents were digging a cellar in their home in Napa, CA sometime in the 40’s when Grandpa dug up a few Native American corpses. He ‘called the boys from Berkeley’ to come and take a look at them in case they wanted to stick them in a glass box on display or whatver at the Univ. Turns out that one of the dudes was placed in the grave with his hands and feet folded a certain way or whatever that signified that he was probably an important man. Possibly a medicine man. So there you go, Grandparents farm house now rests on an Ancient Indian burial ground, never saw medicine man’s ghost.
My great grandfather’s first two wives went missing. He lived on a farm. In the hills.
Dig up? No, not dig up. Nope.
Suddenly I’m feeling very sad that I’ve never dug up a body.
I’ve been trying really hard to think of something that would be equal on the ‘coolness’ meter, and so far, I’ve come up with NADDA.
I hope that your grandchildren will be very grateful for all of the ramblings.
It’ll be even more awesome if you fake having Tourette’s and start throwing FUCK SHIT TWATWADDLER into your stories at random. Jussayin’
Well, my maternal grandmother seems a little too conservative for that sort of thing and my maternal grandfather is a retired cop, so that could go either way. My whole half of my Dad’s family are rednecks so you know how that goes; anything is possible. And my 103 year-old great-grandmother(-in-law?) survived Auschwitz, so I’m pretty sure that tops any corpse-related stories I may otherwise find out about.
My family still lives on the Reservation where we put the deceased up on a kind bunkbed made out of wood and leather strips. Then we just left them out there. In the open. To…. I don’t know…. wait? I remember playing with all my kid sized relatives beneath SEVERAL of my “crossing over” family members.
What’s worse now is that I can’t imagine being sealed up in a coffin underground! But the other side of me doesn’t have any desire to be pecked by pidgeons, either. I may have to live forever.
Well my maternal grandmother seems a bit to uptight for that sort of thing and my maternal grandfather is an ex cop, so that could go either way. And my entire Dad’s half of my family are rednecks so you know how that goes; anything is possible. And my 103 year-old great-grandmother(in-law?) survived Auschwitz so I think the point may be moot anyway.
ok 100% true story, my grandparents met each other for the first time at a seance, in the local cemetary when they were like 17. my grandpa was supposed to scare the girls into thinking there was a real ghost. he had chains, and was suposed to run thru the cemetary moaning in the distance while they held a seance in an open mausoleum. my grandparents decided about 10 or so years ago to buy burial plots at that cemetary where they first met. romantic right? (i honesty think it is!) they also paid in advance for a stone bench to be put at their graves. my grandpa decided to take pictures of himself laying fake dead on the bench with flowers in his hand, and sent it to the family. (this is their typical strange humor). last year when he died, all of his kids, us 13 grandkids and our kids begged my grandma to show us the mausoleum where they met. we all took pictures of it and climbed up the embankment it’s surounded in. our utter sillyiness made that day more bearable for my grandma because we could all appreciate the family history that’s happened in that little cemetary.
After reading this to my husband:
Me: Should I call her, or just drop it into the weekly letter come Monday?
Husband: Oh, I’m willing to be YOUR grandmother has dug up a corpse.
Me: WHAT?! Why would you think that?
Husband: She was a DRIFTER.
Me: Only that one time! And not on purpose! Though, there are clearly some dark secrets in grandmas past none of us are aware of…yeah, I’m betting she has.
I’ll get back to you with this answer.
Dang…I feel like I’ve missed out on so much. My Meemaw didn’t dig up any corpses but she did move around a lot and often forgot to tell her family where they lived that week. Its okay, somehow they always found her.
Hold on… I’ll have to go dig them up to ask them. But then they probably won’t be very responsive, and well, if they are I’ll be too busy running like hell and screaming to hear what they’d have to say. Sorry 🙁
Must be the kind of thing kids did back in the day cuz I’ve always known that my grandmother doesn’t want to be burried because they used to dig up the bones when they were kids. Gross!
Well I’m pretty sure my grandparents never dug up any dead bodies. They are all dead now themselves but if that re-animation machine I’m working on pans out I will let you all know. 😛 Some of my relatives did live across the street from a cemetery though. Also, many of my relatives were in wars. One great-grandfather was 40 miles away when Custer died.
This is too a real post. This is the stuff all of your “real” posts consist of…freaky shit that we want to know but we don’t want to know, you know? Yeah.
It’s not too late. You can dig up a body tonight! If you do, please write about it (when they allow you to have a pencel).
When I was in college I tried to buy a skull online, like part of a science class skeleton decommissioned and put up on Ebay. My plan was to bury it in a garden on the quad so that, when our university replanted the flowers in a month or two, they would discover the skull and have to make the South Oval a crime scene.
Sadly, skulls are very expensive (in terms of making your own or buying off Ebay.) So I never did it. Kids?
They hid the body under the bed and then LOST it? How do you lose a corpse under a bed? Did it walk off on its own? Did the under-bed grave get robbed?
My grandparents never dug up bodies. My grampa just threatened to “lose” people in the bog out back.
As far as I KNOW no one dug up a dead person. Although my granddad tried to kill his step-dad, which WOULD have resulted in a dead body. just rambling . . . .
I have no more living grandparents, but I’m quite sure, they never dug up a corpse. Oh yes, maybe, I really don’t know. ha,ha.
Me too, I never dug up a human corpse. Thanks for letting me visit your site.
My dad has a graveyard outside his kitchen window containing early California miners. One time he helped a guy dig out his great-grand uncle in order to bury him in the family plot, very far away. There are still a few bodies there, so you are never alone at breakfast.
So you mean after all this time with us going gaga over Stand By Me and Stephen King he was simply telling a story that happened to EVERYBODY back in the days?! I demand a refund. Btw, I still cannot remember the name of that fat kid from Stand By Me.
This is not a comment. It’s just me rambling pretending we’ve grown old together and living in a retirement home on Mars. So it’s fair that you ramble too.
My husband found a dead body when he was 10. It was in a quarry where he was scuba diving and it was still wearing a suit. There were cinder blocks and all.
I’m wondering at what age the re-telling of the same stories to the same people over and over again start. Will it just happen all of a sudden one random day. Like, will we be at the gas station telling the attendant that pump 9 doesn’t work, and then as soon as we finish, we just start all over again with the complaint? “Hey, pal, pump nine isn’t working. What do you mean you already know? And you haven’t fixed it already?!?!” Are those of us who have blogs doing it already? Yikes.
By the way, I’m very happy to have found the blog!!!
Does an animal corpse count? That became a “thing” after Pet Cemetery came out. I didn’t do this, mind you. But I know people who did. And my grandma didn’t seem surprised. Does that tell you something?
i haven’t heard of any human exhumations, though as feral children playing on my grandmothers farm, our favorite toys were cow bones. they make great tools and weapons and helmets… and we did burn a cow in a bonfire as a family (it was already dead… if that makes it better). our family is apparently more into animal morbidity than human
My mom found a man in the grove once – she thought he was dead. He was just drunk.
I’d ask my grandparents, but I’d have to dig them up first. THANKS A LOT.
Cemeteries used to freak me out as a kid. My grandparents used to like to go there and have a picnic at the grave-site. A PICNIC! 😮
On a similar note, Today I’m going to Portland’s Mind-Body-Spirit Expo. I’m dressing extra nice in case one of the mediums brings through my mom. She was really critical. 😀
also – thanks for the awesome conversation starter at the next family gathering!
I can totally relate. My grandparents took my up to the attic the last time I was visiting them (November-ish) and were giving me awesome old cameras and dishes, which was pretty fantastic. My grandpa was sorting through stuff in the back corner of the attic, digging past old canning supplies and Norman Rockwell crap, when he found a box that had been rubber-banded shut. He opened it, and I saw that it was full of bones. He turned around and was puzzled by the freaked out expression on my face. “We dug these up when I was a kid. They were all over the farm.” Not a calming response, so he clarified. “Oh, it’s only an Indian.” Yes, Grandpa. That makes it all right. Oh, old people.
I dug up a dead squirrel when I was a kid. I’m not sure if that counts.
I’m late to the party because it was just one of those weeks again.
I wouldn’t put it past one of my grandparents to dig up a body but they never shared that story with me and now it is too late. One of my grandpas did slip in a mention of a relative being eaten by his dog once and when I stopped him and tried to get him to go back and tell me that story he just brushed it off like it was a stupid story because this guy came to a lousy end. Like he was an idiot and that is just what happens to idiots.
For giggles: he did tell me that he and his brother kept getting their lunches taken away from them every day by a bully at school so one morning they peed on the cookies in their lunch and were then happy to hand over the lunch to the bully. I thought that was awesome.
You say this isn’t a real post. I wonder if my posts are real posts. I’m always out of the loop, two steps behind, and never get that memo. I like Meemaw.
My great grandparents owned a taro farm in Hawaii. My grandmother used to tell stories of having to pile up bones by the wall every once in a while. Today there is a strict Burial Council who has the power to hold up multi million dollar construction projects for months if bodies or significant cultural artifacts or structures are found. Times have changed.
Damn…in order to ask my grandparents, I would have to dig them up. All of them. 🙁
Those that have grandparents, still? Go call them and tell them you love them.
I’m not sure about either set of grandparents (since they’re all gone), but I do know that one of my uncle’s dug up some old Indian bones.
I worked for an archaeological firm for a few years, and we had these tiny burned fragments of a body (that we lovingly called the Indian Princess) that we kept in a plastic bag. We couldn’t curate or do anything with the remains until the governmental agencies and landowner’s finally agreed on some legal crap. As far as I know, she’s still in my desk drawer in my old office waiting for her burial.
No shit, My grandfather dug up an Indian skeleton in Leesburg, FL when working on a runway at the local airport back in the early 60s. It sat in my uncles closet for awhile from what I was told. Never did learn what happened to it.
My grandparents are all dead… Should I go dig them up and restart the trend…
I AM 36 though, so that whole “little enough not to go to jail for it” thing may be over…
Not my grandparents, but my stepbrother found human bones (including a goodly chunk of skull!) while out fishing.
Granted, the spot of the river he was fishing was right up alongside the graveyard, so it was a matter of when, not if. Still, imagine the Big Fish Story he has!
Jenny, I would call my grandma, but she died last week. Don’t be too sad about it, though because she was in a coma and it had been a long time, and she’s probably much happier now, or maybe not, depending on where she ended up, if you know what I mean. But I wish I had asked her about this before, because if any of my relatives had ever dug up a body, it would have been her, I just know it. She lead a helluva crazy life. I know that at least at one part of her life she was a combination dog breeder/bookie, and the dog-breeding side was to cover the money she got as a bookie. Grandpa got put in jail for about 2 years around that time, and we all thought grandma had gotten a divorce, but she was just waiting for him to come back WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE WHERE HE WAS. We later found out he was in the mob. So. Too bad I didn’t think to ask her about this before, but now she’s gone. Maybe I should do a seance or something.
As much as I love this post, the comments are the clear winner here.
I’d think it’s quite normal that you haven’t dug up a human corpse. There are more people in the world who haven’t than who have anyways.
I probably have the greatest grandparents ever, and although I’ve never heard a “This one time I dug up a corpse” story, my grandfather did find a dead body in their pasture in the 80’s. That has to count for something…right?!
My grandparents had this human skull in a basket on the bookshelf in the living room and they called him “Uncle Charlie.” The story went that my uncle and his cousin took it from an Indian burial ground they found out in the woods when they were kids in the ’40s, and whenever they told the story they all thought it was reallly funny. I always thought it was awful, and one time when one of my brothers and I were visiting, we took the skull and gave it to a regional anthropology museum with the hope they might be able to figure out where to repatriate it. We told our mom and she said she was glad we did it because having the skull in the house had creeped her out since she was a little kid.
I live in Kentucky and not one of my relatives have a story about digging up a corpse. I’m pissed as hell!
I can agree with the old people digging up bodies. My friends dad, when he was twelve, thought it would be funny to dig up Old Lady Something-or-Others body and steal her arm. When the police caught up with him and his friends, the cop beat him with the arm. Mind you, her dad would have been in his 70’s if he were still alive, so he counts in this group of elderly grave robbers.
Does it count that my grandma dug up a house? Seriously. She and my mother and aunt (when they were very young, probably the 1940s) were walking on the beach in California and one of them tripped over something. When they looked closer they discovered it was the roof of a house. Family lore says that they dug it out of the sand and moved in. Since I wasn’t there I can’t attest to the veracity of this event but why would my grandma lie? I’ve always loved that story; thanks for the reminder Jenny.
My mum and her parents apparently have quite a few times. This is what happens around Australian farm land, apparently. She only told me when I asked for this blog.
Things that happened to my grandparents:
One hid a cow on the upper floor of a village house when the Nazis were raiding Lithuanian villages for things to use including animals to eat
My great grandfather turned his wife into the police for stealing when she didn’t steal, in order to get her in prison, while pregnant, so he could have a valid reason to divorce her and marry another woman. Both she and the baby died. I am the spitting image of this woman. My grandfather doesn’t even know his mother’s name, his father refused to tell him, he was 4 when this happened. He’s 86 now.
My grandmother’s sister was defenestrated and died.
The other deaths are not as interesting.
My mother’s cousin’s son was hit by lightening and died at the age of 5.
I dug up a dead body once 🙂 It was just as awesome as you’d expect! Though mine was legal…they were building a road over where some Civil War soldiers were buried so I was one of the volunteers to dig up the graves so the bodies could be moved.
How about, when you get grandchildren, you take them with you to dig up a corpse TOGETHER? That way you both get to be an awesome grandmother AND your grandchildren get something to tell THEIR grandchildren AND you´ll be remembered like forever. Win-win-win-situation.