You’ve probably heard of the walking dead, or perhaps the living dead, but we are guessing
this is the first time you’ve heard of the dancing dead.
Today we are not going to recount for you some kind of fictional thriller wherein the
dead come back to life, but we are going to explain to you how the unliving move.
You might have thought that the dead rest in peace, but it seems that’s not always
the case.
It turns out we are wrigglers when we are no longer breathing.
We are turning in our graves so to speak, moving to the beats of the underworld.
Let us explain.
To get to the bottom of this we must first go to Sydney, Australia, and look at something
called a body farm.
No, that’s not a place where human bodies are grown, and we should explain what these
places are all about.
Body farms are where cadavers are taken so scientists can better understand how we decompose.
The bodies are left to decompose in a natural environment, hence the name “farm”, and
then they are monitored.
Why would we do this?
The answer in crude terms is so forensic scientists can study how quickly we rot.
Knowing the stages of decomposition in such a natural setting can be of use to forensic
anthropologists and also law enforcement.
You can find these farms in the USA, but there’s also one in Australia.
Australia might soon have one more, too.
You might be wondering how they actually get the bodies, since it would be quite unethical
just to take the dead there.
In some cases people sign-up to be left at a body farm after they die, and sometimes
the bodies are donated.
This usually happens when a body has not been claimed.
At one facility in Texas bodies are brought to the farm on gurneys, dropped off, and then
the observation process begins.
As you can imagine, some local residents in the past have aired their complaints about
a body farm setting up near them, with people protesting when one body farm was opened in
Tennessee.
Some of those protestors held up signs saying, “This makes us sick”, but such farms,
argue researchers, are needed.
Still, some people who lived close to one particular farm said the place stunk, while
others said they could see the rotting corpses from their house windows.
Now back to Australia, and the only body farm outside of the United States.
It’s full name is the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research.
One researcher working at this farm, a place which isn’t exactly in Sydney but in bushland
about 40 miles away, spent 17 months watching a body.
Her name is Alyson Wilson and she reported that something strange went down at that farm.
That body seemed to be moving in the grave.
She’d check on it, only to come back later and it had done a jig.
She said she left and the arms were down at its side, and when she came back the arms
were thrown in the air like it was dancing at an eternal rave for the dead.
Was someone playing a trick on them?
What was going on?
Well, she and her team used time-lapse cameras to watch the body.
When the video was played back to them something strange, and perhaps frightening or fun, depending
on your take, happened.
In the video the body really did throw its arms in the air.
What she found out after this is that some bodies have a moving routine when they are
in a state of decomposition.
She published her findings in a journal “Forensic Science International: Synergy”.
This finding still needs to be peer reviewed though.
So, what was going on?
There are a lot of reasons a body might move slightly after death, and sometimes this might
be because of maggots or other critters that are having a feast.
Sometimes fly or beetle larvae can make the body move, and sometimes bloating that goes
down after gases are let go can make the body move slightly.
But this might not be the case in the dancing bodies, and scientists are still trying to
figure out why those bodies did their afterlife routine.
It is likely just because of the mummifying process when the body dries out, but that’s
not certain, either.
The thing is, bodies decompose differently in certain environments.
This might also make a difference as to how the body moves.
What’s important for law enforcement is that if indeed bodies do move, then how they
move might give forensic scientists a better idea as to when the dead died exactly.
The Australian scientist believes she might have discovered something very important,
that perhaps has been overlooked in the past.
In interviews she said she’s always been fascinated by the dead and what happens after
death, and so for her getting down with dead bodies was her calling.
In one particular interview she said, “Once I observed a movement in a previous study,
I started researching and couldn’t find anywhere in the world that looks at quantifying
the movement, so I thought OK, I’m going to do this.”
The jury is still out as to what is happening exactly to those moving bodies, but some reports
suggest that scientists are now gobsmacked.
Another scientist was reported as saying, “Knowing that body movement can result from
the decomposition process rather than scavengers or original placement will be important when
it comes to determining what happened, particularly if this movement is much greater than first
believed.”
You would think that bodies in the U.S. were also filmed using the time-lapse technique,
but it seems right now the Australian researcher is ahead of the pack when it comes to how
bodies move after death.
We should point out that just after death bodies can move a lot.
This is due to rigor mortis.
Bodies can move, twitch, but from what we can see, not sit right up.
But these are the early stages of death and in Australia the movements were over months.
As you might have seen in our what happens when you die show, other strange things can
occur, such as the body emitting sounds, or believe it or not, cadavers giving birth.
Nails and hair might grow, and there have been cases of bodies just exploding, but cadavers
dancing in the dark after such a long time dead is still a pretty big discovery.
After hearing this, how do you think you’d feel about living next to a body farm?
What about moving bodies, what’s your theory as to why dead folk do a jig when dead?
Tell us what you think in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video The Strangest Ways People Died.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.