Some strange death items.

I appreciate links to weird death stuff and if you find interesting items please leave a URL in the comment section.  I got this one from tbird who visits this site from time to time.  A must read.

St. Vincent de Paul (Died 1660!!!!!!)

I had never heard of incorruptible corpses, which as I learned from the article is the phenomenon where a body doesn't decompose as it normally would even without any kind of special undertaking measures, i.e. chemical embalming or mummification.  This is said by the Catholic Church to be a sign of purity of soul and indeed all the photos in the article are of saints.  If these photos are accurate then the preservation of these bodies is truly miraculous.   I don't know what this says about the saintliness of our most recent Pope John Paul II.  He was unembalmed and viewed for six days until burial and as I recall needed constant touching up because the decomposition process was proceeding quite normally.   

Coincidentally, I witnessed a disinterment yesterday, and the contrast between that corpse (two years underground with a compromised vault and casket) and the ones in the photos couldn't be more extreme.

Carl Tanzer
I would imagine that he gave "live" girls a weird vibe. 

 Dead girls are not so fussy.

This brings to mind one of the strangest cases of body preservation I've ever heard of.  In 1930 Carl Tanzler aka Count Carl Von Cosel fell in love with a beautiful woman named Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos.  When Maria died from tuberculosis the heartbroken Carl stole her body from the mausoleum and then lived with the corpse for nine years before Maria's suspicious family blew the whistle on his necrophilic romance.  Carl was quite ingenious in his use of wax, wire, glass eyeballs and what must have been copious amounts of perfume to keep Maria Elena from rotting away as he slept with her night after night.  Go here for the Wikipedia overview of this very, very bizarre case of obsessive love.

A beautiful, young Maria.  Pre-death.

Love is blind.  (And has no sense of smell.)