🚨The following contains disturbing content. Please read along at your own discretion!🚨Also, not all submissions are from Community users.
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Did you know people used to casually pose and take pictures of dead people?
🚨The following contains disturbing content. Please read along at your own discretion!🚨Also, not all submissions are from Community users.
Photos were a luxury at this time, so if someone passed away before getting a photo taken during their life, this was their only opportunity to be captured in a still. As photography in general became more common, this practice of taking photos of the dead became less common.
Stories about people bursting into flames while minding their own business date back hundreds of years, though there are only a handful of reported cases, and the possibility of it has never been 100% confirmed.
According to a 2006 study done by the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine, illegible dosages and abbreviations of drug names have led to millions of injuries and thousands of deaths.
From the moment a person dies, insects become attracted to the decaying body. Forensic entomologists are able to determine time and cause of death based on the stages of larvae, insect behavior, and more.
According to a 2008 study, the eyeballs of blue-eyed corpses turned to brown or black within 48 to 72 hours of death when at room temperature. Pathologists and crime scene investigators have learned to take note of this, so as not to make incorrect notes while performing autopsies or misidentify victims.
Up until the 20th century, investigators would dissect victims' eyes after death to try to find the image, which would hopefully have been stored somewhere in the eyeball. Obviously today we know that's not possible.
Officially known as hyponatremia, this kind of death happens when sodium levels fall incredibly low. In 2007, one woman drank six liters in three hours for a contest to win a Nintendo Wii, threw up, and died hours later. Overhydration has killed many athletes as well.
Yeah, you read that right: accidental poisoning.
Cotard delusion is named after neurologist Jules Cotard, and the syndrome is currently in the DSM-5, the official handbook to mental illness diagnoses. It's also known as "walking corpse syndrome," and is believed to be caused by lesions in the brain.
For reference, bodies usually take about a year to get to this stage in the decomposition process in normal conditions.
If someone drowned, their lungs would be filled with water and they would have sunk to the bottom of wherever the body is, but if their body was dumped, their lungs would still have air in them and they would be floating.
Many companies exist to make no-longer-living bodies useful after they have lived a human being's life. Urns are old-fashioned, anyway (just kidding — do whatever you'd like).
Adipocere is a soapy-looking substance that a body's fat turns into when a body starts to decay in water, which is both fascinating and creepy.
They won't *actually* keep growing, but due to the skin retracting from dehydration, it will give the illusion that they are getting longer.
Coffin birth — officially known as "postmortem fetal extrustion" — is what happens when gases build up in the abdomen of a pregnant corpse, forcing the dead child through the vaginal opening. There have only been two reported cases of this happening in the last decade, but it's happened.
As tissues in the body die, they can experience something called a "cadaveric spasm," causing movements that look very similar to reflexes. While these spasms happen rarely, they can look like little twitches or big movements. This is not the same thing as rigor mortis, though it is similar and the two are often hard to differentiate.