Chilling Details About These Famous Corpses

If all you know about Eva Peron, the former first lady of Argentina, you learned from the stage musical and/or film "Evita," you are aware she died tragically young of cancer, but what happened to her after that might surprise you. For some reason, no one thought to make a sequel to the musical where Eva's widower Juan Peron and his third wife, Isabel, dance around her body, singing about how they will make her pretty again.

But that is, in fact, what happened (minus the singing and dancing, one assumes). After Eva died, Juan was removed from the presidency by a coup, according to BBC News. These same coup plotters stole Eva's body and it began a strange journey that included time in government buildings, a van, and a purposely mislabeled grave in Italy. Finally, the body was disinterred from there and returned to Juan, who was living in Spain at the time. Reunited with his wife's body after 16 years, as The New York Times reported at the time, he kept it in his home.

Carlos Spadone was there when the body was delivered. "General Peron, the gardener, and I took the body out of the coffin," he later recalled. "We lay it on a marble-topped table. Our hands got dirty from all the earth, so the body had to be cleaned. Isabel took care of that very carefully with a cotton cloth and water. She combed the hair, and cleaned it bit by bit, and then blow-dried it. It took several days."

St. Bernadette of Lourdes started out as a young peasant girl in France, but her life changed forever in 1858, when she told people about her visions of the Virgin Mary, according to Artnet News. If you've ever heard of people taking pilgrimages to Lourdes, these visions, and an associated spring said to heal illnesses, are the reason why.

Little Bernadette was suddenly world-famous, but she hated the attention. After hiding out in a nunnery, she decided to become one herself, per Britannica. Sadly, Sister Bernadette hadn't been well for some time and would die of tuberculosis in 1879, aged just 35.

However, miracles associated with Bernadette continued after her death, which meant she was eligible to be canonized. Atlas Obscura records that the long process of becoming a saint involved some slightly odd requirements, including exhuming her body three different times between 1909 and 1925. Fortunately for those who had to do this deed, the woman who had been very pretty in life was, somehow, still unexpectedly pretty decades after her death. A doctor who was present the second time her body was dug up in 1919 wrote, "The body is practically mummified, covered with patches of mildew and quite a notable layer of salts, which appear to be calcium salts ... The skin has disappeared in some places, but it is still present on most parts of the body." This was good enough for the church, who decided Bernadette's body was "incorrupt," made her a saint, and put her on display for pilgrims to visit.

According to History Daily, the tomb of Li Chang, the Marquis of Dai, was discovered completely by accident during the construction of an air raid shelter in China in 1971. It was an astonishingly important and extensive archeological wonder – and then the team found the body of Xin Zhui. Also known as Lady Dai, she was the marquis' wife. Although she'd died well over 2,000 years before, her body was in remarkable shape.

One scientist told China Daily (via Indiana Public Media), "The body is so well preserved that it can be autopsied by pathologists as if it were only recently dead. When Lady Dai was found, her skin was supple and her limbs could be manipulated; her hair was intact; her type A blood still ran red in her veins, and her internal organs were all intact." While that all sounds amazing, the thing most viewers would care about – her face – did not look so great, as it was swollen to an unnatural size and shape.

It's not clear exactly how her body was in such a good state of preservation after more than two millennia, but scientists have theories. The corpse might have been covered in acid or mercury, which would have killed the bacteria that would normally deal with a dead body. And she was further protected thanks to layers of silk and a matryoshka-doll-like system of nesting coffins.

Oliver Cromwell was the member of parliament in the middle of the 1600s who was most instrumental in ending the monarchy – at least temporarily – with the execution of Charles I. Cromwell would go on to become Lord Protector and managed not to be executed himself, instead dying of a variety of illnesses aged 59 in 1658, according to Royal Museums Greenwich. He was given a prime burial spot in Westminster Abbey alongside a king, and while his actual burial was incredibly simple in keeping with his Puritan belief, a large public funeral service without his body was also held.

When Charles II, son of Charles I, was returned to the throne in 1660, he was not thrilled with the guy who had effectively killed his dad, as you might expect. So the king threw Cromwell out of the Abbey, and had his corpse hanged and beheaded, just for good measure. Then his head went on a pike for all to see.

Eventually, heads displayed that way will fall off, and this is where the story of Cromwell's corpse gets really weird. According to Sky History, the story goes that a guard took the head when the wind finally knocked it down. Then the trail goes cold for a while, until the head turned up again in the early 1700s and was passed around between collectors. One of them even liked to take out Cromwell's head and show it to guests. Eventually, the head believed to be Cromwell's was buried in a semi-secret spot at Cambridge University, per Westminster Abbey.

Laurence Stern's name might not be as familiar as that of his most famous creation, Tristram Shandy, the eponymous narrator and hero of Stern's most famous (and notably strange) novel. Stern wrote many other works as well, and was a member of the clergy in the Church of England, according to Britannica. He died in 1768, aged 54.

Unfortunately for Stern, the 18^th century was the high point of body snatching, and being a famous author was no protection from the "resurrectionists" who dug up freshly buried bodies and delivered them to medical men for dissection. Stern's corpse was exhumed from a graveyard in London and delivered to Charles Collignon, an esteemed professor of anatomy at the University of Cambridge, according to an article in the Journal of Medical Biography. While for a long time this strange event was thought to be just a legend, Britannica says it was finally proven in 1969.

While bodies were stolen and used in anatomy classes all the time, the students were probably surprised to see a famous face. Even before the internet, enough people knew what Stern looked like that he was recognized, with reporting at the time (via "A Culture of Mimicry: Laurence Sterne, His Readers and the Art of Bodysnatching") that "the marked features of the great humorist" led to his identification during a lecture, while the contemporary scholar Edmond Malone claimed, "A gentleman who was present at the dissection told me he recognized Stern's face the moment he saw the body." Thanks to his famous face, Stern would be returned to his grave.

You can see why people, even scientists who should know better, might think Albert Einstein's brain was special – and not in a metaphorical way, but in a "we should study this" way. For one scientist, the pathologist who did the genius' autopsy when he died in 1955, according to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People, this presented a moral quandary. You see, Einstein had stated in his will, "I want to be cremated so people won't come to worship at my bones." This is a perfectly fair wish for anyone, let alone one of the greatest scientists ever. But ... surely a brain doesn't count as a bone? And wouldn't studying this great mind be worth it, for science?

So pathologist Thomas Harvey left work that day after autopsying Einstein's body with the scientist's brain in a cookie jar. If you think this would be impossible to keep a secret for long, you would be right. In "Postcards from the Brain Museum" (via National Geographic), Brian Burrell explains, "When the fact came to light a few days later, Harvey managed to solicit a reluctant and retroactive blessing from Einstein's son, Hans Albert, with the now-familiar stipulation that any investigation would be conducted solely in the interest of science."

It wasn't until 1995 that the brain was taken on a cross-country road trip to be returned to its next of kin. The man who drove Harvey remembers it well, saying, "He brought out his bags, and in one bag, he had a Tupperware container in which he had stashed the brain."