Creepy Things Inside Queen Victoria's Coffin
Death. Inescapable, ever-lurking, and permanent. It's an altogether ooky business, no matter how you slice it, but if you add a dash of Victorian sensibilities into the mix, the whole uncomfortable affair gets kicked up a freaky notch.
And ain't nobody ever had more Victorian sensibilities than the famously Victorian Queen Victoria who, upon her passing, left astonishingly specific instructions as to how she was to be interred. The documents, according to Vintage News, stretched twelve pages long and were handled by the monarch's personal physician and confidant, Doctor James Reid. Kept secret from the royal family, they detailed a pharaoh-level list of items to be buried with Her Majesty. Fair warning, it gets pretty weird from here.
Queen Victoria's requests were not amusing
First and foremost, Victoria wanted to be laid to rest with a plaster cast of her husband's hand, which she had reportedly slept with for years following his untimely death at age 42. "But what's the point of having a facsimile of a dead man's appendage if it doesn't have anything to wear," you might ask. Fair point: she also included Albert's old dressing gown and one of his cloaks, embroidered by her daughter Alice, also deceased by that point.
And then there was the John Brown stuff. For first time visitors to the Carnival of Oddities that was Victorian England, John Brown was the queen's personal assistant, a royal servant hailing from Scotland. He and Queen Victoria spent a lot of time together after Albert's death. A lot of time. Questions were raised and accusations were uttered. It's unclear whether the two were romantically involved, but if you shook the Queen's round, black-draped frame hard enough, chances are that a little doohickey would pop up reading "all signs point to yes." Victoria was buried with a picture of Brown, a lock of his hair, and his mother's wedding ring on her finger. Again, all of this was kept secret from the surviving royals. The queen's secrets weren't revealed until years later, when the documents she wrote up were found in Reid's family archives. If anything, the discovery that the queen was buried with her husband's undead hand and a picture of her FWB only serves to cement Victoria's place as the mother of punk rock.