Oh, we're doing some uh, we're doing some cool stuff with our classic episode this week, Noel, we're exploring mummies.

Mmm, we are indeed that not mummies and Daddy's No.

Mummy's the embalman kind, the kind that potentially arise from the dead and spook people out on Halloween.

It's also a fun lo fi costume.

Just involve some toilet paper.

Yeah.

This is the story of a city called Guanayato, and back in the day they instituted a grave tax, which just feels terrible, like that's so petty and penny pinching.

You're going to tax people on the way out as well.

If you couldn't pay the grave tax, you would run into some harsh penalties.

Three, if you fall three years behind on your loved ones resting place, they will dig the body up and they will take it out.

Of the grave.

Yeah.

And these bodies were not just non into Egypt.

They weren't like wrapped in linens and mama in that classic fashion.

They were somehow found to have been naturally mummified, and words spread and it became something of a sideshow attraction, which is pretty gross.

Grave diggers are trying to make a quick buck charging folks to take a peek at these naturally mummified remain So why don't we jump into the story and hear all about the mummies of Guanayato.

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio, Casey.

Could we get a little bit of spooky music just for a second in the background.

Here is in fact October perfect.

Welcome to the show, Ridiculous Historians.

We are men of our word.

Earlier, we had floated the idea of finding some more frightening, disturbing creepy tales as we get closer to Halloween.

Ben, didn't we do a Pope based kind of spooky creepy tale already?

But that was pre October?

No, you're right, that was pre October, and we talked about whether or not we should save that one.

But that was just such a cool and strange story.

Oh, we were compelled.

The power of Christ compelled us to put that podcast out in the world.

And the power of super producer Casey Pegram helped make that reality.

We're looking at a story today that is equal parts ridiculous and I would say.

Tragic, yeah, I'd say mainly tragic mm hmm.

And book yeah, and this is something that you had you had a hip to me to Noel, which is the story of mummies in Mexico.

Yeah, pacifically, the Mexican town of Guanajuato, which was established in the early sixteenth century and was something of a boom town for silver mining.

It became that in the eighteenth century to the point where I believe it actually kind of messed with the economy of silver because there was just so much damn silver coming out of there that it like jacked with the price of silver in a way that caused some real economic problems in the region.

Absolutely.

Yeah, for a time it was the third largest silver mine on the planet in terms of production.

They still have traces of this mining industry, right, especially what is it Boca del in Ferno.

Boca del in Ferno.

It's a mine shaft that boca meaning mouth, so that's that's the mouth of Hell, and this is an attraction you can see there are also it's known for its beautiful architecture, these brightly colored Baroque buildings and there are these like narrow kind of alleys between the buildings and it's a very walkable, picturesque little city.

But it also was an important stronghold during the Mexican Revolution when Mexico was able to break free of Spanish control.

And that is when Father Miguel Hidalgo in eighteen ten, who was the parish priest in Dolores, put out his infamous Grito de la Dolores, which is the shout of Dolores, and he assembled a mob of peasants brandishing machetes and clubs, and they eventually made their way to Guandajuato because it was the most prominent largest city in the area and that became their stronghold and the site of the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.

So a lot of history in this town.

But today's episode it's not about any of those things.

Oh yes, yes, let me set this up.

We should say that the name Guanauato actually translates to mountainous place of frogs.

Love that and it's had several different names throughout it time because it's a very old city.

So maybe an Aztec era where the name was, Yeah, what was it.

It was the land of straw, I believe, and the word is beautiful where this is translated from and it was an Aztec word paks Titlan you know, that's that is a beautiful word.

I personally, I also liked Mooti the place of metals, Yeah, which is the older, older name.

It makes perfect sense.

It was also the place of a weird government sanctioned grave robbing.

That's right.

Today's story involves grave robbing, and it involves I'm just going to say it, a really terrible move on the part of local government.

So there's a big city, a lot of people get buried.

You know, life happens born, you live, and you die.

And there was a cholera outbreak around the area of Guanuatu in the eighteen thirties, around eighteen thirty three or so, and these people when they expired, they were interned, they were buried.

In some cases they were embalmed.

But a few years later the local government puts attacks on graves.

Yeah.

So the thing is like, you would rent this place, like you didn't own it.

Yeah, yeah, you would rent it.

And I think the initial rental period was about five years, and then you had to re up your rental.

Your family had to you know, assuming you had any family to speak of, and if you didn't pay this.

This is something that was instituted between eighteen sixty five to nineteen fifty eight, by the way, very recently done away with.

And if you did not pay for three years in a row, that's right, then your peeps would be uprooted, literally dug up, not really dug up because they were in these air tight mausoleum chambers.

They would be removed and evicted and they were either taken to a simple pauper's grave outside of town.

And this is the thing too, is interesting about the story of this culture very much reveres death.

You know, you have like the Deos deos Martos and all of these kind of death related rituals and just deep veneration for one's ancestors and paying respects, and you know, this very religious culture.

The idea of digging up these loved ones and like putting them in a less desirable burial space had to have been very painful for some of these families.

But that wasn't even the worst thing that could have happened, was it.

Yeah, there are stranger things that happened because they would be put in a pauper's grave, or they might be placed in an osuary which was actually under the cemetery grounds itself, waiting in case the relatives would come back, cough up the money and have their loved ones reinterred or reburied, which did happen in a couple of cases.

These people were taken out of the grave and then put back in.

But when they were taken out of the grave, often they weren't decayed in the way that you would expect a body to rot over time.

They were preserved.

They were mummies.

They were mummies.

They had become mummies naturally.

They were mummified by the environment in which they were interred.

I believe the first one that was found mummified was a man named doctor Remiguio Leroy in eighteen sixty five, the.

Frenchman, right, or the French doctor, I think is what he was known as.

So we're sort of bearing the lead here and we were getting there.

But yes, Ben, this is very important, the fact that they were naturally mummified from lack of oxygen and just the very dry climate that existed there as part of the world, and so they would literally just dry out and their clothes would rot quicker than their bodies would.

And here's the thing, these mummies when they found this Frenchman, the first guy they found that had undergone this transformation.

They were like, this is pretty cool.

And by day I mean, I guess the city people that ran the mausoleum, what do you think, like city officially this was a state run facility, right right, Yeah, they were like, Okay, this is pretty cool.

We should hold onto this guy.

And so they do that, and they continue doing that for several years before they realize, hey, I think we might have a little moneymaker on our hands.

So what happens then is the ones that the curators, let's call them deem I guess fascinating.

Enough specimens are kept and in the fifties a museum is opened.

Yes, it's true.

This hearkens back to our earlier episode, which seems so long ago.

Now.

On corpses in a dior rama, do you remember that.

I very much do with the camel and the Arabic gentleman with the human skull, I believe, right?

And when yes, and when we say thought to be fascinating, what do we mean?

This is pretty graphic stuff?

Is mean things like mummy that was pregnant, or people who appear to have been buried alive, such as Ignacia Aguilar, the people who were buried alive were almost certainly buried by accident due to the extreme nature of the color outbreak.

And yeah, that's right.

And a lot of these specimens were found to have cholera or have suffered from smoke inhalation.

There's a really great, really short podcast from a show called Mexico Unexplained.

I think that's what it's.

Yeah, and it goes into some of these details, but really interesting that they would have had smoke inhalation because it was either from smoking cigarettes or any kind of tobacco, or possibly from working in those minds under less than ideal conditions.

Oh yes, And before we get too far away from it, I want to clarify because I remember it.

I did find the explanation of how this museum thing came about, and it's kind of disappointing in what it says about the human condition.

Because once word of the Guanauatu mummies started spreading around town, other people in town were apparently sneaking over and paying people who worked at the cemeteries just a couple of pesos to sneak in and take a quick peek.

So it was a the workers were motivated by profit, and then they were incentivized, you know, because this burial tax is still around to pull more and more bodies out of the crypt and then find more and more mummies and charge more and more people to see them.

So where were they keeping them before the museum situation took off?

Before the museum, they would eventually they would be kept in that ossuary under the graveyard, just like for a rainy day.

And Kate, well, the official reason again is just in case the families come back and say, we do have the money to pay the burial tax.

But why would they keep them versus burying them outside of town?

Like my understanding whether they kept these because they were so crazy looking and they.

Like I think, I think it's a situation again where there was an official reason and then there was a real reason, got it.

So let's talk about this museum.

When that started happening.

El Museo de las Momias, which you know, the Museum of the Mummies.

It was the same place where the cemetery workers were just charging people several pesos to enter into the building and see the bones and the mummies, with again doctor Leroy being the first one on display.

But when did it officially become a museum instead of this underground display of death.

Yeah, that's right.

But like I said before, you know, there was money to be made here and the government wasn't getting those mausoleum lease rental fees, so they figured they would capitalize in another way, and they opened this to the public in the nineteen fifties and it was actually voted Guanajuato's I believe number one tourist attraction.

And so for a nominal fee of two pesos you can take a look at the more than one hundred, one hundred and eight Yeah, one hundred and eight dried out human mummies, natural mummies, and that this includes all different types of situations in varying the stages of decay kind of.

Yeah, and you can still see their facial expressions in a lot of cases, which you know, we mentioned the somewhat gruesome details that have allowed investigators to determine who was buried alive and who was buried when they were actually dead.

Well, the one you mentioned that was buried alive actually still has her hands like trans like you know, like covering her eyes, biting her arm.

Yeah.

And the thing too is most of these these cadavers have these just pained expressions, as though they're like shrieking in agony.

And it's because of what happens when the tongue dries out during this rumification process and the jaw starts to slacken.

You start it kind of looks like the scream.

You know that that painting and this is pretty crazy.

Ray Bradberry actually wrote a short story about based on his visit to this this museum when he was vacationing with his wife in Guanajuato, and he wrote a story called The Next in Line where he very vividly describes this.

So I'm gonna read a little bit of that for Casey.

Can we get that spooky music back for this?

This is I think this deserves it.

They were screaming.

They looked as if they had leaped snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands over their shriveled bosoms and screamed.

Jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils flared and been frozen that way.

All of them had open mouths.

There was a perpetual screaming.

They were dead and they knew it.

In every raw fiber and evaporated organ, they knew it.

She stood listening to them scream.

They say dogs here sounds.

Humans never hear sounds so many decibels higher than normal hearing that they seem non existent.

The corridor swarmed with screams, screams poured from terror, yawned lips and dry tongues, screams you couldn't hear because they were so Highho not cool, Ray Bradberry, not cool?

What do you think about that, Ben?

Yeah, I've actually I've read this story.

It's Ray Bradberry is a fantastic writer and very appropriate for Halloween.

The Mummy Museum also inspired other works of fiction.

In the late nineteen seventies, Verner Herzog took a number of shots of these various mummies for the title sequence of his film Nosferatu the Vampire because he just wanted a morbid, eerie, atmospheric opening sequence.

I remember that sequence, and I did not know that, Ben.

And one of the museum's other notable points of interest is that it has the smallest mummy in the world.

It is a fetus from the pregnant woman that we had mentioned earlier.

It's a heartbreaking thing, and it's strange to feel the turns of history so immediate and tactile, you know, because so often we think of these horrific or tragic events as an abstract thing from a history book, but going and seeing these real people is a tremendously profound and moving experience.

One other work of fiction that we absolutely have to mention is the film that incorporates the mummies of Guanahata in a not accurate way, is called Santo Versus the Mummies of Guanawato.

Santo being a very popular luchador.

Luchador.

These are these wrestlers that wear this cool masks, and this guy was like a real celebrity and it was almost sort of like Abbot and Costello, you know, meets Frankenstein or whatever.

It was like a very well known national figure fighting a very well known national monster.

Yeah, Rodolfo Guzman Herta, famous wrestler at the time.

And we found we found some various clips of this film, you know again, made in nineteen seventy two, and I'm all in, I want to check it out.

I want to watch the whole thing.

I'll come back with a review.

If I'll come back with a review, if there's some interest.

What makes it relevant for our interest today is that this film spread word of the mummies outside of Mexico and people began to learn about this on an international level.

Yeah, I mean it started kind of became much more of a fixture of popular culture at the time, and it wasn't really replicated for many years, but it certainly spread awareness and likely upped the value to the government of this place, right.

Right, And this leads us to the ethical question that we've run into before, you know, and that question is is it right to display the bodies of these people?

Certainly, I mean it's certainly not with their consent, and we don't know if their family members were asked or if they're family members consented.

Yeah.

There's actually a quote in this piece from the Guardian that just talks about how there were no laws broken in doing this, that the Mexican people have a different attitude towards death that they don't I don't know, and it's kind of counter to what I said at the beginning of the show.

I would assume that it would be this would be very disrespectful, This would be considered like heresy, kind of you know, to disinter the people's loved ones.

But you know, the guy that's in charge of this place seems to think differently.

Yeah, this guy, Arturo Taberas, who is the head spokesman for the Guanajuato government, said in this daily mail piece, I think I misattributed to The Guardian earlier that quote the museum is an important part of Guanajuato's tourist appeal.

Okay, that's your first point.

The museum breaks no laws and displaying its exhibit to visitors who are given fair warning of his graphic content.

Here's the important part.

We have a different cultural approach to death in Mexico.

Here we celebrate the cycle of life and accept death as inevitable.

Ninety nine percent of the visitors leave the experience pleased with what they saw.

But here's the thing.

So many of these infants in the museum, of which there are several, are often dressed as saints.

So there's one that goes by that they call colloquially Little Saint Martin, who is it's basically a skeleton of a tiny baby wearing the traditional garb of Saint Martin, something called a cassock, and holding a broom and holding rosary beads.

And it is macabre, my friend, So I'm.

Glad that you mentioned the Guardian, because there's a Guardian piece I remembered I wanted to bring up.

It's called Why Mexican Celebrate the Day of the Dead by Antonio Wa and in there it has this just stunning octoviopause quote about what he sees as the Mexican attitude with death.

He says, the Mexican is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it.

True, there is as much fear in his attitude as in that of others, but at least death is not hidden away.

He looks at it face to face, within patience, disdain, or irony.

And I think that's you know, maybe that's it.

Maybe that's what makes it okay.

Maybe this is an important thing rather than an exploitative thing, you know what I mean, Because they can't be making that much money, right, profit can't be the sole motivation at this points.

As four thousand visitors a week, I mean, that's a decent amount of cash.

Yeah, I guess it does add up.

Yeah, sure, it's been open since the fifties.

I mean, you know, yeah, you're right, kind of a bit of a cash cow when you say so myself.

But I guess what I'm getting out I'm struggling with is there even so this this tax was relinquished right and at the end of the fifties, but nineteen fifty eight, in nineteen fifty eight, but there actually was a recent addition to this collection was a baby that died in nineteen ninety nine at six months old.

So I want to clear something up real quick.

And we actually had a little discussion off my The law that required the tax, there was a grave tax went away in nineteen fifty eight, but there was also like you still had to rent these spaces.

You still had the land, and like you would up re up it for like twenty years or something like that, Like it started like a five year and then if you didn't come back, then they could still remove your loved ones corpse.

And that happened with this baby.

And the really heartbreaking thing is apparently the baby is in the collection museum and the mother who's still living pretty regularly comes in visits in child.

Yeah, and there's some the description of how this happens sounds remarkably cold.

So if the if the family, the surviving relatives choose not to pay or re sign on that lease.

Then the body is removed and it goes to the museum's curator, and the curator inspects the corpse to see whether it's good enough to be added to the collection.

And I had earlier said the number was one hundred and eight corpses in the display, but I believe it's one hundred and eleven now because they have added some.

I thought that wasn't too confusing with the difference between the grave tax and the lease, because they were two different things, and it threw me for a little bit.

But no, we got there.

I think we did.

I think we did.

So what's what's next?

Yeah, this sounds like a place that I would be intrigued.

I mean, I'm I'm into kind of like this sort of dark type stuff.

I went to the Museum of Death in la and quite enjoyed that, even though some of it was even a little little much for me.

A lot of like embalming videos and you know, murder crimes, seen photographs and things like that.

But do you think this is right, Ben, Do you think this is a value to society to be able to experience death in such a raw, you know, kind of detached way.

It's interesting to me.

I mean, that's the question I asked earlier in the show.

You know, ethically, is this more useful to humanity as a memorial, as a way of educating people, or is it exploitative.

It seems like the museum itself has a lot of support from the local community, and it is of benefit to science because we're able to research the process of natural mummification.

Texas State University had some great research on how this stuff occurs and how the environment interacts with the corpse.

But I would say it's similar to did you ever see a body's exhibit?

I never did, but I've seen photographs of it and the perfectly preserved codaverage whether you see the muscles and all that stuff.

And it's fascinating.

Yeah, where you see organs or the circulatory system or nervous system taken out and kind of plasticize to give you a better look at human anatomy.

But those people, when they were alive, didn't consent to that, right, Surely not in every case, And we have to ask ourselves at what point does the benefit to science or the benefit to history outweigh the ethical pitfalls of displaying someone's corpse after they die.

I will say that if I'm in that town, I will go visit just because I think it's in a way it would feel more like memorial or commemorating the deaths of those people.

And these were not These were not for the most part, these were not well off folks.

These were the point, right, These were common people.

Yeah, I mean the idea they had to you know, because I mean rich people would have been able to buy a plot, right, and you certainly didn't have to lease.

That's not the law.

It's just they couldn't afford to buy a grave plot, so they were able to lease it in one of these municipal cemeteries, mausoleums or whatever.

Right, absolutely, and I would air on the side of scientific benefit and historical commemoration.

Guanawato's mayor, doctor Eduardo Hicks at the back, in two thousand and seven, initiated the Guanawatu Mummy Research Project and invited several scientists to go down and spend more than a year exploring the origin and the development of the mummies.

And it's also been a subject of national geographic documentary series which I'm going to tell you the name of it.

I haven't seen the series, but the name throws me off.

You're ready, I am the Mummy road Show.

Nice, So it's sort of like the Antiques Roadshow, but with mummies.

Mummies.

Yeah, I feel like, yeah, that's a little glib.

But in these recent years they've learned a lot about the people, the individuals who were interred here and then later displayed in this museum.

It's an incredibly interesting article and if you would like to read it, let me know on Ridiculous Historians and we could just post it up there.

And if you are a person who does not want to see any of the visuals of this stuff, we completely understand.

This particular article has no photographs.

Oh, I think that's a pretty good place to leave it.

There's certainly if you're into photographs, there's plenty of them out there, and these are really pretty upsetting images, to be honest, but it's also they're strangely beautiful, I want to say, haunting, very haunting, as you may have gotten from that Ray Bradbury passage, and it really apparently severely affected him and that he felt the need to write this piece to kind of exercise some of those demons from himself.

And I could see that.

I wonder what it smells like in there.

Ben probably is kind of musty, like an old library or something, because these corpses would not have had a smell of putrification because everything was just dried up.

The mummification happens so rapidly, like a lot of museums.

It probably just smells old in some inexplicable way.

But our senses are so vulnerable to our pre existing mental states, right, so maybe we are mentally capturing the smell.

You know what.

It Probably it probably smells like cleaning cleaning supplies because there's a lot of glass, so I'm sure they have to use a ton of windex.

It probably smells faintly clean.

Yeah, may be a little bit of a chemical smell.

And I have a question too.

So so far we have we have covered a very interesting specific type of vampire native to the Philippines.

We've looked at mummies, although they were not monster mummies from an old universal horror film or something.

What particular monsters are historical cases of monstrosity?

Should we should we look at next?

Should we look at the trials of were wolves?

That's always an interesting strange path to go on.

One of the things we did the other night when we had a game night at the obviously played a game called Werewolf, where I ended up falsely accusing several of my closest friends and coworkers of being were wolves and had them lynched.

And they didn't deserve that, Ben.

They were village, they were townspeople the whole time, and they were be able to forgive myself for that.

They probably won't be able to forgive you either.

That's okay, So I deserve it the end of it.

I deserve it.

But in their memory, we should, in fact research something about were wolves.

I think that's smart.

Yeah, let us know if there's a werewolf's story that particularly stands out to you.

I'd love to.

Ben.

You might be saying, but how on earth do I contact you?

Guys, Well, it's quite simple.

We've got good news.

If you are on the internet, you can find us on Instagram, you can find us on Twitter, you can find us on Facebook, in particular, check us out on Ridiculous Historians our Facebook community page, where you can talk with your fellow listeners, all of whom I assure you are brilliant, wonderful people with great taste and podcast.

Right, that's pretty good.

Yeah, I support that.

Let's thank our super producer Casey Pegram for you know, being super as always.

Thanks to our friend and colleague Alex Williams, who composed our theme.

Thanks to Christopher Hasiotis and Eve's Jeff Coate, our research associates.

Thank you to Jonathan Strickland, aka the Quizzer, who's been quiet lately.

Yeah, thank god.

Oh folks, I suspect Noel really no you like him?

Your friends?

Sure?

Whatever you say?

Man, oh man, Noory, Well, I will try to keep the quiztor heat off of you.

Mike, I'm kidding.

I welcome man.

I need a little little kick in the pants every now and then.

Who better to do it than that guy?

And most importantly, we're to thank you for bringing this great story.

To the show.

Oh Man, no problem.

It was a lot of fun.

That's That's not the right thing at all.

It wasn't really fun at all.

It was kind of disturbing and upsetting.

But I'd rather there's no one I'd rather be disturbed and upset with in this world, ben than you, and you, folks, We'll see you next time.

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