● Your body is a pretty useful thing while you’re alive, but what about when you’re
dead?
What parts of the body could you make music with?
What are the most inventive uses for human skin?
Here are the chilling things people have done with body parts.
15 - Church of bones ● Throughout history, many enterprising
architects have created buildings using the bones of their enemies, or their most holy
saints.
These skeletal structures are known as ossuaries and the most impressive lies in Czechia.
The Sedlec Ossuary contains the bones of up to 70,000 people which have been fashioned
into wall decorations and even a giant skeleton chandelier which hangs from the centre of
the chapel. 14 - Foot modelling
● Oregon resident Jerome Brudos had a thing for women’s shoes.
But rather than becoming the next Alexander McQueen or Jimmy Choo, Brudos instead became
a serial killer, killing at least four young women in the late 1960s.
Brudos would abduct his victims and kill them in his garage, without his wife ever finding
out.
He amputated at least one of the corpse’s feet in order to model his collection of shoes
in photographs.
13 - Fingernail paperweights ● Viking mythology tells of a great ship
made of fingernails that will sail forth to do battle with the gods at the end of the
world.
Meanwhile a man in Queens, New York, has made something considerably less impressive from
his fingernail clippings.
Mike Drake saved over a thousand clippings over a year and made them into paperweights,
which he has, unbelievably, been able to sell for over $300 a pop.
12 - Aztec organ removal ● The ancient cultures of Central and South
America had some pretty violent ways of keeping the gods happy.
One such method, practiced by the Mayans and Aztecs, was human sacrifice by heart removal.
A cut would be made under the victim’s ribs, and the high priest would reach into the chest
and pull out the still-beating heart.
The liver would also be removed and used for making prophecies, meanwhile the body would
be kicked down the stairs.
11 - Rasputin’s penis ● Famous mystic Grigori Rasputin is known
for his rise to power within the Russian royal family, his dramatic assassination and for
numerous rumours about his way with women.
Many of these rumours suggest that Rasputin was particularly well-endowed, and a museum
in St Petersburg claims to have a relic of his manhood.
The twelve-inch Siberian schlong is preserved for display to visitors, and was supposedly
cut off his corpse by a chambermaid who wanted a souvenir.
10 - Ted Bundy’s heads ● As one of the most horrific killers in
America’s history, it’s safe to say that Ted Bundy was a big fan of dead bodies.
The psychopath would take the corpses of the young women he murdered to remote areas to
spend time with them, but also decapitated several of his numerous victims.
Bundy would then take these heads home with him to put make-up on and presumably do unspeakable
things to.
9 - Einstein’s eyes and brain ● It’s perhaps no surprise that the brain
of the man most famous for his intelligence was kept after he died in 1955, and is still
on display in a museum in Philadelphia.
But Albert Einstein’s eyes were also removed from his body and given to his eye doctor,
who kept them as a memento of his good friend.
The two eyeballs are currently sitting in a safety deposit box in New Jersey.
8 - Skull cups ● A classic trope from TV and movies is
the barbarian villain drinking from a cup made from a human skull.
Evidence of this practice dates back to the neolithic period in cultures all over the
world.
Warlords in ancient China would fashion cups from the skulls of defeated tribe leaders
to drink wine from, and skull-goblets found in England date back nearly 15,000 years.
Surprisingly, there is no evidence that the Vikings ever drank from these skulls.
7 - Ed Gein ● Inspiration for just about every famous
movie serial killer, Ed Gein is notorious not so much for the number of people he killed
- he had two confirmed victims - but more for what the police found upon searching his
house in Wisconsin.
Among the items discovered were a lampshade, a wastebasket and chair coverings made from
human skin.
They also found a belt made of nipples and bowls made of skulls, most of the parts coming
from bodies he had dug up.
6 - Homemade wig ● One evening in 1985, a police officer
was shot in the head during a routine traffic stop.
Three days later, the perpetrator, 30-year old Alex Mengel was picked up by police in
a car belonging to a woman whose hair was also found in the car.
It emerged that, when fleeing the first crime, Mengel had murdered the woman, stole her car
and cut off her scalp for a disguise in the attempted kidnap of another victim.
5 - Legbone pipe ● Within a branch of Tibetan Buddhism, there
is a practice known as Chöd, where the practitioner attempts to face their own mortality and nothingness.
Many of these rituals are performed in places such as graveyards and some involve the use
of an instrument known as a kangling.
This horn is made from the thigh-bone of either a venerated teacher, or violent criminal.
By blowing into the bone-pipe, the practitioner brings themself closer to death and emptiness.
4 - Bloodbath ● Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory
is regarded by many as the most prolific female serial killer.
As reports of young peasant women disappearing surfaced in the late 16th Century, stories
arose of the Baroness capturing and torturing girls in her castle.
Rumours spread of her biting flesh off the girls’ faces, burning them with tongs and
most famously, bathing in the virgin’s blood to rejuvenate her beauty.
Some historians believe the stories were a smear campaign to discredit the baroness.
3 - Shrunken heads ● The Jivaroan tribes of the Amazon are
known for their bizarre practice of head shrinking.
The creation and possession of an enemy’s shrunken head is thought to give the owner
power, according to the Jivaroan’s killing-obsessed belief system.
To make the heads, the flesh and skin are removed from the skull and placed over a smaller
ball, then boiled and dried until the features shrink down to the size of a tennis ball.
2 - Burke and Hare ● In the early 19th century, the city of
Edinburgh was hit by a spate of grave robbings, as medical schools offered high prices for
bodies to practice anatomy on.
As families began burying bodies in locked cages, two men realised that in order to maintain
their revenue for corpses, they might have to speed up the process by murdering victims
themselves.
Over a year, Burke and Hare killed sixteen people, usually while drunk, and sold the
bodies to the Royal College of Surgeons. 1 - The Destinies of the Soul
● In 2014, scientists at Harvard University determined that a book which had been in their
library for nearly 100 years was bound with human skin.
A note from a doctor at a 19th century asylum said he had taken the skin from the back of
a dead female patient.
The skin was used to bind the volume of a French book whose title translates to “Destinies
of the Soul”.
DNA analysis confirmed that the material was indeed human.