La Chiesa dei Morti, The Church of the Dead, is located in Urbania in Italy. Inside lies the Cemetery of the Mummies, which was built in 1833. This cemetery is famous for its strange phenomenon of natural mummification.

This is the mummified corpse of Si Quey, the most famous serial killer of Thai history. His corpse is on display at the Museum of Forensic Medicine Niyomsane Songkran. Si Quey was a Chinese immigrant who moved to Thailand in 1944. Si Quey raped, murdered and then ate the heart and liver of more than half a dozen male children, he beleived that by cannibalising parts of his victims he would become immortal. He was captured and executed by hanging in 1950. After the autopsy, the corpse was filled and covered with paraffin wax to preserve it. Over the years, Si Quey became a bogeyman for the Thai children, parents would scare their misbehaving children by telling them: “Behave yourself or Si Ouey will come for you.”

Giving Birth to a Mummy

Zahra Aboutalib, from Morocco, delivered a child she’d been carrying for almost half a century. This shocking yet fascinating story began in 1955 when Zahra went into labor. She was rushed to a hospital, but after watching a woman dying on the operation table during a Caesarean section, Zahra fled back in her small village outside Casablanca. After the pains were gone and the baby stopped kicking, Zahra considered him a “sleeping baby”. “Sleeping babies” are, according to Moroccan folk belief, babies that can live inside a woman’s womb to protect her honor. When Zahra was 75, the excruciating pains occurred again. Doctors performed an ultrasound test and discovered that her “sleeping child” was actually an ectopic pregnancy. What is even more amazing is how Zahra survived and how the dead fetus was accepted by the body just like another organ. Generally, this doesn’t happen. If not discovered in time, the growing fetus will eventually strain and burst the organ that contains it. Under these circumstances, the mother has few surviving chances. After nearly five hours, the surgeons successfully removed Zahra’s calcified fetus.

Stone babies, lithopedions, are an extremely rare medical phenomenon. According to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, only 290 cases of stone babies have been documented.

Natural Means of Preservation

Embalming has been in vogue since time immemorial without the deliberate intervention of humans.

• Freezing: By this method bodies are preserved for centuries in the ice and snow of glaciers or snowcapped mountains.

• Dry cold: A morgue located on the top of St Bernard Mountain in Switzerland was constructed to permit free admission of the elements. True mummies were produced as a result of the passage of the cold, dry air current over the corpses.

• Dry heat: Natural mummies are produced in the extremely dry, warm areas of Egypt, southwestern America, and Peru.

• Nature of the soil at the place of interment: There are recorded instances of the discovery of bodies in a good state of preservation after long-term burial in a peat bog, which had a high tannin content, or in soils strongly impregnated with salts alluminuim or copper.