A brand new historical true crime podcast when you lay suffering a sudden, brutal death. Starring Allison Williams. I hope you'll think of me erased the murder of Elma Sanders.

She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl until she met that man right there.

Written and created by me, Allison Flopp.

Is it possible, sir, we're standing by for your answer.

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I'm Paul Muldoon, a poet who, over the past several years, has had the good fortune to record hours of conversations with one of the world's greatest songwriters, sir Paul McCartney. The result is our new podcast, McCartney a Life in Lyrics. Listen to McCartney A Life in lyrics on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody. Did you ever want to know how mummies work and how you mummify a person? Well, you can learn if you listen to this one from March 15. Hey, look at that date. March 15, 2011. How mummies work?

Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. We're about to do this stuff you should know thing.

Yeah.

Did you like that? I did. How you doing, man?

Great, now that I've switched out my foul smelling microphone cover.

Yeah, this is actually take two. This thing's nasty. I'm not getting near it, but I can only imagine. Yeah. Something's putrefacted on the mic cover. The p clipper cover.

Yeah.

Weird.

You know, in real studios, they change these out every now and then.

These things have been running for at least a year, I think.

$0.50. All right. What's your sterling intro?

Speaking of $0.50, do you remember when we were talking about fossils?

Oh, yeah.

And we said that every once in a while something happens so that a fossil naturally occurs and that it's desiccated, the skin is dried out. That's a mummy.

Yeah. Who knew?

I knew. Yeah, me, too, actually, when we talked about that, I was like, we have to do how mummies work. And here we are.

I'm kind of surprised this one has slipped under the radar for so long.

Yeah.

Right up our alley.

Yeah. I went and looked. I'm like, surely we do have it.

And being fascinating gruesome.

Yeah. It's like stuff you should know. Died in the Wool. Yeah. And you're about to hear why, dear listeners, because we're about to talk about all the things that happened to a corpse after death, which we've done before, but we need to go over again.

Mummies are cool, though.

They are very cool. So, Chuck, let's say that you were stabbed in the stomach enough times so that you could not move any longer. You couldn't walk back home. It was out in the woods, and the one person you're with, the very person who stabbed you, left you there to die, you bleed out, you're dead, things start happening to your body, right?

Yeah. Pretty quickly.

Up first is autolysis.

Yes. That's kind of gruesome. That's when your organs that have digestive enzymes actually say, well, this is what we do, so we're going to start digesting the organs.

Right. And not like my stomach is eating itself because I'm hungry. Like my stomach is actually eating itself. It's rupturing and oozing and it's being reduced to nothing yeah. While that's going on. And that actually, I think, if I remember correctly, that kind of helps kickstart the process of putrefaction. Right?

Yeah. Autolysis starts within a few hours after you're dead. The body knows.

And if you want, like, a really big overview of this or an in depth look at what happens to the body immediately after death, you should listen to our rigor mortise podcast, if you haven't already.

Yeah.

Body Farms. We talked about it in there, too.

So yes, putrefaction you're right. Is followed by or follows autolysis, and that is when bacteria does its little job and produces everything to a skeleton. And depending where you are, this can happen in a few months.

Right. Depending on where you are. Now, we, as human beings, are a subtropical species, right, Chuck? You know that.

Sure.

So we are designed, if you believe in that kind of thing, to decompose most readily in a warm, humid climate. That's where the bacteria that breaks down our tissue lives or thrives.

Moisture, warmth.

If you have cold, dry things change a little bit.

Like a refrigerator.

Exactly. Which is a good place to store a body if you want to preserve.

It, or food, if you want to eat it.

That's a good point, too.

Body, if you want to eat it.

For an in depth look at that. You might want to listen to our Cannibalism podcast, though.

That's right.

Right. But let's say you don't have a refrigerator. Nature provides it for you on some occasions. There's Utsi, the ice man, right.

Is he the iceman?

Yeah, that's the iceman, yeah.

1991, in the Italian Alps. This dude is very well preserved, natural mummy.

He's amazing.

Died and basically got buried in ice and kind of stayed that way.

Yeah. I think they have the impression that he fell into a crevasse, died, but it was during, like, a blizzard, maybe. And he was covered with snow and ice that stuck around for millennia. But he's so well preserved. You can see the tattoos on his skin still.

Yeah. And we knew hey, they tattooed people 5300 years ago.

Exactly.

Little window into what life was like for iceman.

Yeah. He had, I think, a nice little set of arrows and his bow and sure. Copper Age European guy.

I think he had a wallet size photo of you as well.

Of me?

Yeah.

It's not possible.

He was from the future. That's what I think.

You just blew my mind, Chuck. Good so ice, as we talked about in fossils, too, is a very good preservant.

Sure.

But nothing does it. Oh, pete boggs too. You remember I finally showed you that picture of Tolan Man? Can't forget about Pete again if you have not gone and looked up Tolan Man, it's awesome. Like his whiskers are still there. I know. And he lived a couple thousand years ago. Right.

What's his name? Did they name him? Just Tolan Man.

Tolan man.

I would have named him Petey.

Terrible. So those two are pretty good, but the natural money preservant is sand. Yeah.

I had no idea.

The reason why sand is such a great preservative is because it actually wicks away and absorbs and just removes any type of humidity in the body, which allows the body to desiccate, which means that there is no place for bacteria to live, which means the tissue remains intact. And that's all a mummy is? It's a corpse with its tissue intact.

Well, and this kind of kickstarted the whole mummification, artificial mummification craze in Egypt, because at first they buried bodies, they weren't in caskets, they were buried in the hot sand. And that preserved the body for so long. They said, well, hey, if the body's preserved, then that means the spirit's preserved. And all of a sudden, we have new views on the afterlife and life.

Right. So what they decided to do, I guess what you've just said, though, is that mummification, the whole concept of mummies that we have that was so ingrained in the Egyptian culture happened by accident, right? Yeah. So they figured this out, so they start purposefully burying people in the sand with the intent of them being mummified. Right. But the problem is, somewhere along the way, they began to have horrible thoughts of their dead relatives choked with sand.

Right.

So they started to say, maybe we should put some sort of barrier up in between the corpse and the sand.

Yeah.

And that led to caskets, right?

Yeah. It started with just like a wicker covering, and then that eventually led to wooden boxes. But here's the rub. Now the body is not preserved. Now the body rots. desiccates? Well, no, it doesn't desecrate.

It's just a normal corpse now.

Yeah. It becomes a skeleton.

You've put a barrier between the body and the preservant in the form of a tomb.

What's an Egyptian to do, then?

Well, the Egyptians, being the very pious culture that they were, and the very intuitive and smart culture that they were, for that you should go read. Did the Greeks get all their ideas from the Africans? Good article.

Did you read that one?

Yeah.

Did we do that podcast, man?

Let's do that. Okay. They decided that they needed to rectify their religious beliefs with their problem, their need to preserve bodies. And what did they do?

Well, they said, maybe we can replicate this natural process that we've discovered through man made artificial trial and error. Yeah. It's kind of like it's called embalming, Josh.

And they actually figured out, Chuck, that one of the problems with the desiccation, the natural desiccation in the desert, was that the skin turned like this crisp brown right. Like over baked chicken.

Yeah. It's exactly what it looks like, actually.

Yeah. And with these embalming techniques that they eventually mastered, they could preserve a body better than it could be preserved naturally. Which is man conquering nature. That's right. Conquering death, even.

Well, come on, it's close. They didn't have huge success at first. They would embalm the bodies mainly to keep it away from the elements, wrap it in linen soaked in resin, and they would create nice little shapely forms that look kind of like people. But that didn't really do a whole lot because the bandages didn't really halt the composition. They basically figured out that it happens from the inside out.

Right. It took them a few centuries, if not millennia.

They're basically wrapping it up, and it's just disintegrating within the bandages at first.

Right. But those bandages are important because they stick around pretty much the whole time. Same with the resin. Right.

Yes.

So those two very early embalming techniques or mummification techniques stuck around. But it was a big leap when they figured out, oh, wait a minute, this is going on inside. And so we need to start addressing.

That by removing organs.

Right. And it's about here, I think, that we hit the Middle Kingdom, and the mummies that we think of were produced from the 18th to 20th dynasties of the Middle Kingdom.

Yeah. That was when the heyday of mummification.

Right, right. Which was between 15, 71,075 BC.

Yeah.

The mummies that we think of, the ones that are still around, like, really well preserved today, they were preserved during this time. Right, right. So what do you do when you realize that everything bad is happening to a corpse from the inside out? How do you address that?

Should we just walk through the process one by one? The gruesome process?

Yeah.

Okay. First thing you do is you take it and it varies the different processes. Within the processes. They had things that they would say, sort of like religious rites that they would go through as well. It's a very sacred process. But they would take the body generally to the Redland Desert region. It's not near a whole lot of people, so people aren't grossed out. But it is near the Nile River. They needed the Nile River to well, we'll see that in a second.

Step one.

Step one.

You need the Nile for step one.

They think they did it in open tents, obviously, to get some good ventilation going. And the first place they took the body was to the ibu. The place of purification.

Yeah. That was basically the Nile, or the place where they the place near the Nile where they rinsed the body with they washed the body off. Yeah.

It's like a rebirth. Symbol of rebirth.

Right. So the corpse was hastened, or some of the spirit was hastened in the afterlife. And we should probably say here, so it doesn't get too confusing, there were three spirits that the Egyptians believed comprised a person. Right. The Ka, the BA and the AK.

AK, yeah. It's always tricky to pronounce that.

Right. So I think with this purification process, the BA or the AK, were moved along to the next world. But the Ka, that was the one that was inextricably linked with the corpse, which became the whole reason for mummification. As long as the corpse was preserved, the ka was preserved and the afterlife could you know, the the person could live in the afterlife. But once the corpse died, the ka died and that second death was final. Which is why they wanted to preserve bodies in the first place. Right.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

It's like the opposite of ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

That's right. So after they've washed the body and sort of reborn it in the rivers of the Nile, they carry the body to the pur nefer. And that is the house of Mummification. And this is kind of where this is the basement of the fisher house, basically in 6ft. Under the fishers.

Oh, yeah.

This is in the basement. This is where Rico and the gang would get to work. They would lay it on a wooden table. The body they removed the brain by hammering a chisel through the bone in the nose.

You know, I knew that already before this article. Christian Slater is in like he's in one of the creep shows or Amazing Stories or Tales from the Crypt.

The movie pump up the volume.

It might have been that, but I think it was like a smaller vignette, like a mini movie within the larger movie. It was called, like, lot number Nine or whatever.

Gleaming the Cube, think it was.

No, that's called Brotherhood of the Tiger now. I think they changed the name. Yeah. Anyway, there's a mummy who's hell bent on taking other people's brains using these hooks or whatever.

Well, and that's exactly what they do. They make a nose hole basically larger than the nostrils. They insert a big hook, iron hook and start scooping it out. Eventually they go down to a spoon and eventually they just rinse out the remaining bits of brain. And what's funny is so hold on. They discard the brain because they thought, I don't know why we have this stuff in our head, but we probably don't need it in the afterlife.

Right. Which is kind of unusual for the Egyptians because they preserved organs. Yeah.

But not the brain.

And what's funny, though, I think what we've just kind of meandered past that we should kind of meditate on for a second, Chuck, is that they get to a point where they fill the head with water, I imagine. Close the nose and the mouth and shake the head around to slosh all this stuff out. And then lean the head over and let all the last bits come out.

Yeah, that's how I would do it.

I wonder if they did shots of that stuff as, like, part of the ceremony.

I would draw the line there.

Would you?

Well, they probably just thought I don't know. They didn't even know what the brain was.

Yeah, that's true. Just waste.

So the brain's out. Josh. Then they take a blade made from obsidian, sacred stone, cut a little incision on the left side, and reach in and start pulling out the organs that they can get to.

Right.

And then preserving those, like you said, except for the kidneys, because they didn't.

Think they were important either, which they were, you know. I mean, the kidneys are important, but it's not like brain important.

Well, I mean, you need kidneys to live. I'm sure they preserve the appendix.

You need all of yeah.

That was probably the most holy of the organs.

So they actually when they preserve these things, they would wrap them in resin, strips of linen. Right. Basically, they would mummify each organ.

Yeah.

And then they put them in canopic jars. Basically, it was like, here's your body, and then also here are your organs. Don't forget these with you.

They'd leave the heart, though, because they thought the heart was linked to the soul and the spirit. And they're kind of on the money there, I think.

So these organs take up space in our chest and abdominal cavities. So they would actually stuff the body with, like, incense and other materials as well, right?

Yeah. Well, first they'd rinse it. Once they I forgot. They'd take out the lungs to the abdomen.

Yeah, right there.

You can't get along right under the rib cage. A little side slit. And then they would rinse the chest cavity with palm wine. And then they would stuff it with.

They would shake that patchouli, basically. Yeah.

Straw. Well, it didn't say what actually. It just said other materials. I would use straw.

Maybe frankincense little mer. Yeah.

Just to complete the trilogy.

Um, a brand new historical true crime podcast.

The year is 1800. City Hall, New York.

The first murder trial in the American judicial system.

A man stands trial for the charge.

Of murder, even with defense lawyers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr on the case. This is probably the most famous trial you've never heard of. When you lay suffering a sudden, violent, brutal death, I hope you'll think of me starring Allison Williams. I don't need anything simplified, Mr. Hamilton. Thank you. With Tony Goldwyn as Alexander Hamilton.

Don't be so sad, Catherine. It doesn't suit you.

Written and created by me, Alison Block.

What are you doing? Let go of me.

Listen.

To erased the murder of Elma Sand.

She was a sweet, happy virtuous girl.

Until she met that man right there.

On the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Yes, yes, the Street Stoic podcast is back. One of the quotes that came to mind here is from Drake. The lyrics that came up for me was from Beyonce. I pulled a quote from just one of my favorite artists in general, Kid Cuddy. We are combining hip hop lyrics and quotes from some of the greatest to ever grace a microphone in it. He says, because it's just waves. Gotta just float, float and have faith. It's just waves. It's the line that we've all heard before from Lauryn Hill. And she says, don't be a hard rock when you really are a gem. Along with ancient wisdom from some of the greatest philosophers of all time, Seneca.

Right.

And he says, your mind will take shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impression. A stoic quote from Epictetus where he says, don't seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will. Then your life will flow well. And listen, I know we all could use a daily shot of inspiration. So this is the podcast for you. Listen to season two of the Street Stove podcast as part of the Michael Dura Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a place beyond this place, a middle ground between the light and the darkness, the nader and the zenith. For some, it's a bridge between the living and the dead, yet for others is something else entirely. It's the place where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched the other side and felt the presence of something beyond this world. Welcome to Hip Hop Horror Stories. I'm your host, Belly, and each week we're going to take you to the limits of your imagination as we explore the reality of paranormal experiences. I believe in this shit for real. And the stories you're about to hear might make you believe too.

Everywhere I looked, I saw something and.

I looked closer and noticed there was a hooded figure.

And whatever it is, it's like cave. It's like it became reality.

Listen to Hip Hop Horror Stories on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

Body from, like caving in on itself, basically maintaining a little bit of shape.

And then here is the key. This is the key to mummification. And as a matter of fact, I'm just going to say it now, I found it on the internet. There is a step by step, very easy to follow recipe on, I think, wikihow, which I don't normally go on, but it's the only place I can find a recipe for mummifying. A chicken using the Egyptian method. And it calls for natrin, right?

Yeah, that's the key.

Natrin is this basically a compound that the Egyptians figured out they could gather and combine from the Nile, which is basically baking soda, sodium bicarbonate and salt, table salt, sodium chloride. You mix the two together and it becomes this perfect preservant. So they would put natrient powder, which is like this just accelerated the technique of mummification by light years.

Sure.

And they would cover the body with this stuff and leave it and it would just completely dry the body out, right?

Yeah. This took about 40 days. They had to guard the body while this was going on, obviously, because they didn't want vultures digging through the natron for what lies beneath. After the 40 days, they moved the body then to the Wabet, which is the house of purification. Yank all that incense and the stuffing out, refill it with the natron resin soaked linen and other materials. Again, whatever these mysterious things are. Then they would sew all the incisions up, cover the skin with resin and then say, hey, it's time to wrap this puppy.

Yeah. And this is where we get the idea for the mummy, our modern idea of a mummy. Always wearing bandages that are always coming off. Yeah. They don't you can just see the eyes, maybe some teeth or something. So this is where we're at. They're at the bandaging procedure. That 35 or 40 days. While the natrium powder was doing its work, wicking away all of the basically acting as the desiccant.

Yeah.

The family of the deceased was going around town going, do you have any linens we can have forever?

Yeah.

Do you have some linens we can have?

How'd you like your linens to spend eternity in heavens above with our dad?

They collected about 4000 sqft. Just top of my head. That's about how much they gathered of linen and would bring it to the embalmers and the embalmers would say, hey, we like this piece. That piece is horrible. You're really going to bury your dad in this? And they would take the best stuff and they would cut it into or they would tear them into strips three to eight inches wide of bandages and they would start the wrapping, which would take a little while, right?

Yeah. It takes a week or two, I guess, probably, depending on how big the body is. Common sense. Start with the hands and feet. You wrap all this is the initial underwrapping, I guess. You wrap everything individually, each little finger, each little toe, everything's wrapped. And then once everything's wrapped individually, they do a whole body wrap, applying new layers, coating the linen with again, the hot resin to keep everything in place. Uttering spells. Sometimes they would wrap amulets over different parts of the body, wrap it up in there with you, protect you in the next world, that kind of thing.

Right. And then presto changeo. You are a mummy. And before we go further, the process we've just described this really ornate wonderful lengthy process.

I know where this is going.

You would think about it like there's so many there were a lot of Egyptians running around and a lot of them died on any given day, and there was a lot of work to be done. So this process that we just described was for the people who had lots of money. For some reason, the wealthy have always been revered right. And have always gotten special treatment. Right. If you were just an ordinary schmo like me or Chuck, you were going to get the budget package, which is basically like instead of carefully removing all of the organs, preserving each one, they would inject oil, like this oil mixture into your cavities, let it sit for a few days.

They had to stop up all your orifices first so it wouldn't leak out.

Thank you. I don't know how they did that.

I guess with other materials.

Right. So they would stop you up full of oil, let you sit for a few days, and then unstop your orifices and let all the oil drain out. And it would carry the liquefied organs and tissue out with it. It's a lot easier, a lot faster.

So even this many thousands of years ago, you get what you pay for.

Exactly.

It's pretty sad.

Yeah.

There's always been a budget package, or maybe that's a good thing, that it wasn't only just reserved. Like if you don't have any money, you just can't get mummified.

That's a way to go.

They thought, you know what? Let's think of a cheaper way to do this for you folks, right? Let's just fill you up with oil, stop up your orifices and give you a good shake.

Yeah. So you're prepared, you're all wrapped. However they got your organs out, you're bandaged, and you are now about to be outfitted with what's called a Cartinage cage, which is kind of like a breastplate, some cool, like, forearm armor, leg armor, pretty much this thing that's going to hold your body together for a while.

Right.

And a funerary mask, which is like the famous masks we think of when we think of like, King Tut, like it's a death mask. And these were extremely important because they directed the spirit, the ka, to the right body afterward. So it was in a person's visage or possibly that of a god, but the spirit would be in on what to look for. They would know that that's how they knew who was who.

Sure. This guy is supposed to either look like Josh or Anubis. Either way, I think that's him right over there.

Right.

So let's grab him.

And speaking of Anubis, you would be committed to your tomb following a funeral procession where you were carried in your sewet, right?

Yeah. That's what you think of with King Tut. That's the casket that looks like a person. Like the gold casket in the shape of a human.

Right. It's a sewet. It's a sewet that would be carried to your tomb, and there would be a priest dressed as the jackal god anubis there was the ceremony of the mouth, which is pretty cool because there was some sort of weird understanding, I guess, that you had died.

Right.

And now certain things had to be restored. And the ceremony of the mouth was this passing over of sacred objects across the sewet's face, the casket's face, and it would restore your five senses.

Yeah. Because you need that.

Exactly. So you're placed and this is weird, Chuck. Did you find this odd that your casket was placed leaned up against the.

Like, I would do that while I was getting everything ready, and then I would lay it down. So it almost made me think that they kind of forgot, and they say, oh, well, we left that first one leaning against the wall, so I guess that's the way we do it.

Yeah.

But that's not true. No, I'm sure they had a very.

Good reason, probably because it was easier to just walk upright out of there.

Well, yeah. I would think they wanted to leave it upright, but standing it upright, they didn't have, like, the perfectly level floor probably wasn't too secure, so they just gave it a little lean.

Sure.

Little help.

Which is far less secure than just laying it down on the floor. Following that, your furniture. Don't forget your canopic. Jar of organs laid next to you.

Little food, maybe.

Sure. Your furniture. Basically the stuff you're going to need in the next life to be comfortable. Yeah. And your tomb is sealed up, and it's probably inscribed with something along the lines of, as for anybody who shall enter this tomb in his impurity, I shall wring his neck as a bird's. As a standard mummy curse. Yeah. A mummy curse on the tomb.

Yeah. People became in the 1920s, Howard Carter dug up King Tut's tomb and people were just crazy for mummies at the time.

Yeah.

Westerners are like, oh, my gosh, this is so interesting. This curse thing is so neat. Laurel and Hardy are doing mummy curse movies, and a microbiologist from Germany named Gothard, Kramer, or Kramer said, there may be something to this cursed thing, because they bury people with food, produces mold spores, so when they unearth this tomb, all these mold spores are released into the air and it might kill you. So it's not that there's something to the curse, but it could lead people to tie the two together. Well, you unearth a tomb, then you die.

Certainly. There's something weird about the Carter expedition who unearthed King Tut's tomb in 1922, because eleven of the people who were involved, not necessarily present, but involved, died within seven years.

Eleven people in a canary.

His canary died right when they entered the tomb. A cobra ate it.

That's bad luck.

It is. And then it just went downhill from there. So there's all sorts of explanations, but it's also oddly intriguing. And like you said, Egypt mania gripped the west. Yeah, they loved it, right? And there was actually unraveling parties where people would get their hands on mummies and then unbandage them, see what's in there, which is like, that's not what you do with a dead body.

That's desecration.

Yeah.

It's bad luck, too.

A brand new historical true crime podcast.

The year is 1800. City Hall, New York.

The first murder trial in the American judicial system.

A man stands trial for the charge.

Of murder, even with defense lawyers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr on the case. This is probably the most famous trial you've never heard of. When you lay suffering a sudden, violent, brutal death, I hope you'll think of Me, starring Alison Williams. I don't need anything simplified, Mr. Hamilton.

Thank you.

With Tony Goldwyn as Alexander Hamilton.

Don't be so sad, Catherine. It doesn't suit you.

Written and created by me allison Block.

What are you doing? Let go of me.

Listen to erased the murder of Elma Sands.

She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl.

Until she met that man right there.

On the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Yes, yes. The Street Stoic Podcast is back. One of the quotes that came to mind here is from Drake. The lyrics that came up for me was from Beyonce. I pulled a quote from just one of my favorite artists in general, Kid Cudi. We are combining hip hop lyrics and quotes from some of the greatest to ever grace a microphone. In it. He says, because it's just waves. Gotta just float. Float and have faith. It's just waves. It's a line that we've all heard before from Lauren Hill. And she says, don't be a hard rock when you really are a gem. Along with ancient wisdom from some of the greatest philosophers of all time, seneca.

Right.

And he says, your mind will take shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impression. A stoic quote from Epictetus where he says, don't seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will. Then your life will flow well. And listen, I know we all could use a daily shot of inspiration, so this is the podcast for you. Listen to season two of the Street Stoke podcast as part of the Michael Tura Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a place beyond this place, a middle ground between the light and the darkness, the nader and the zenith. For some, it's a bridge between the living and the dead, yet for others is something else entirely. It's the place where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched the other side and felt the presence of something beyond this world. Welcome to hip hop horror stories. I'm your host Belly, and each week we're going to take you to the limits of your imagination as we explore the reality of paranormal experiences. I believe in this shit for real. And the stories you're about to hear might make you believe too.

Everywhere I looked I saw something and.

I looked closer and noticed there was a hooded figure.

And whatever it is, it's like cave. It's like it became reality.

Listen to hip hop horror stories on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Go. So that pretty much is the Egyptian mummy. And that's what we mainly think of. But they weren't the first people to do this kind of thing.

No. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah. The oldest mummies actually on the planet are from northern Chile. The Chinchoro people. Chinchuro. Let's go with Chinchuro.

Okay.

They started doing this about 2000 years before the Egyptians, but they were not very much like the Egyptians. They basically dismembered and disemboweled the body, put it back together again, sewed it up and then covered it with black mud.

Well, they put it back together with like straw and sticks. That's what they had. They made cupid dolls out of like.

These bodies basically covered it with black mud and shaped it into a human form. But they believe that this wasn't necessarily done to preserve the body for the afterlife. Maybe it was more for the people left on the planet Earth to mourn the death of their loved one, keep them around a little longer.

Which is very sweet because they saw.

Evidence of like retouching of the paint, signs of wear and tear. So that basically they were kept in the households for a little while, they think.

Basically. It's statues. Freaky, freaky statues. Yeah. And that was 5000 BC. Which is 2000 years before the Egyptians came onto the scene at all.

That's right.

And what did you say, the Chinchoro people? Yeah, they were settled on I think.

I went with Chinchuro, but someone will point that out if I'm wrong.

Agreed. They're not the only ones in South America who got into mummification either. The Incas very famously did as well. They had a little habit of sacrificing children to their gods. Jerks. And they cultural relativism. Chuck that's right. Not jerks through this process. Like the child and the child's family were just treated like royalty for this. It was a high honor to be chosen to be sacrificed to the gods. And they would get the child really wasted on this fermented corn concoction. Take the child up to the cave. Sometimes I think they would whack the kid over the head or other times they would get the child so wasted that they just would leave them there in the cold temperatures, exposed to the freezing temperatures and the child would die of exposure.

I can't say jerks about this.

You can, you're jerks. But there's a very famous mummy called the maiden who's a 15 year old girl, and she was sacrificed as thanks to the gods for a really good corn harvest by the Incas in Peru 500 years ago. Did you see that picture I sent you?

Oh, yeah. Was that her?

It's like looking at a girl who's sleeping, but she's been dead for 500 years. If you've been to South America, as I know you have, or Central America, she looks just like one of those girls you might see down there, like a Central American indigenous person.

She's probably short, then.

She looks kind of short.

Yeah. That'd be funny if she was, like, six two.

But then moving on up, there's also one, and it didn't make it into this article, but Chuck, I've been there myself. Guanajuanto, Mexico, has a mummy museum, and they have the world's smallest mummy. I think it might have been a fetus, really, but they were all naturally mummified, to the great surprise of the 19th century townspeople who had to move a graveyard and found, like, okay, there's a lot of mummies.

How big was it?

It was very small.

Give me an object.

Coffee cup.

Coffee cup.

Okay. Standard coffee cup.

Sorry. Got you.

But then there's, like, people, they were still wearing their suits. And it's really amazing. You walk into this little Mexican building and there's just dead people everywhere, just behind this glass. It's very neat. If you ever go to Guanajuanto, Mexico, you have to go to the mummy museum.

I think I should.

Yeah.

Lady Qing. China chinese were they were lousy with mummies. Yeah, they loved to mummify people. She was an aristocrat from about 2000 years ago, and she is believed to be about the best preserved ancient mummy so far.

Did you see her picture? Yeah. With her tongue sticking out pretty well.

Mummified, yeah.

And her hair still.

Yeah. They haven't studied her a whole lot, the Chinese haven't, so they don't know exactly how she was prepared. But they do think that mercury and the embalming fluid might have had something to do with it.

Yeah, I would imagine that will do it.

Mercury, yeah, sure.

And also in China, mummies have kind of rewritten history a little bit. Some very ancient mummies from 1000 BC. Before 1000 BC, they found some people of Indo Iranian descent.

Yeah.

And they're like, what they linked them to basically Mesopotamia through tattoos and other implements that they had and the shape.

Of their face, the way they looked.

Yep. And they figured out, like, wait a minute, these people were like, Indo European traders.

What are they doing here?

And they just made their way to settle in the deserts of China before the Han Dynasty ever showed up.

Yeah.

So that kind of changed things a little bit.

I'm sure if we talk about mummies, we got to talk about the more modern day mummies because of the big interest in mummification, thanks to Tut being found was the big one. That's right around the time Lenin died in Russia. And they said, you know what, let's preserve Lenin and display him in the Kremlin. So that's exactly what they did. And we do not know exactly how because it's an ancient Russian secret. I don't know about ancient, but it's a secret. And they it's ongoing because they continue to immerse him in a preservative bath every now and then.

Andy's wears a waterproof suit.

That's right. And if you've ever seen pictures of Lenin or Ava Perrone, they look pretty lifelike. Yeah, but hers was way cool. They basically replaced all the fluids in her body with wax.

Right.

Which would be a very modern take on the ancient practice.

There's also incorruptible corpses of the Catholic faith.

What's that?

It's basically a person who is so pure on earth that their body just didn't rot. And there's example. There's one he's like a prince. He's like a child prince. I think he died more than a thousand years ago or about a thousand years ago. And his body's totally preserved. And there's no evidence that he was embalmed or anything like that. What they don't understand. There are some bodies out there that just defy logic. I wrote an article on you should read it.

It's a miracle.

How can a courts be incorruptible?

We need to are you keeping track of these awesome ideas? Where's our person? Where's our boy Charlie? Or no, our boy Friday. Okay, Charlie. And then Josh. Finally we have in the 1970s, some scientists discovered something called plastinization. And that is when all of the water and lipids in the body cells are replaced with polymers and you basically become like plastic, very flexible and durable. You don't decompose and you don't stink too bad. And that is used to preserve bodies mainly for anatomical research at this point.

Or for bodies world or bodies the exhibit. Have you been?

No, I've never been. But that's how they do it.

It is really something. I mean, you're right there up on this corpse missing its skin, and like it is a dead person. And it's really interesting. There's one, the one that I went to in Atlanta, it's two eyeballs and they're connected to the spinal cord, which is going down and then coming off the spinal cord are the major nerves of the central nervous system. And that's it. And it's just laid out perfectly and really kind of surprising.

I'm shocked that I haven't been to that yet.

That's pretty cool. It's definitely worth going to.

I did the dialogue in the dark thing.

I have not been there. That's next. Yeah.

Was that kid you know, I was a little disappointed.

Yeah.

Not in the exhibit itself, but the way they do it. I think it could have been like really awesome, but the way they do it wasn't as awesome as it could have been. Just my take.

Yumi and her sister went and she said they would have liked it, but there was this very loud, drunk woman who kept falling into people they wanted to kill.

Nothing you can do about that near in the dark weather. You could just like kick her in the shin and run away. We should mention Bob. Dr. Bob Briar. Real quick, though. He is an Egyptologist who in 1994 said, you know what, I want to try and replicate the Egyptian technique. And he did it.

Chicken.

Yeah, with a chicken. And he did it was pretty successful at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. And one of the things he learned from doing this, that the way the body ends up looking is a result of the mummification process, not the fact that it's been in the ground for thousands and thousands of years.

The shriveled, wrinkled look. Yeah.

So that's one thing he learned.

That's a big thing to learn, though. I mean, think about it. Egyptology hasn't really advanced much in the last 50 years, has it?

Not that I know of. I know Geraldo didn't find squat.

No, he didn't. No, that wasn't Geraldo. Geraldo looked for Capone's. Oh, that's right.

I watched that one. That was fun. I was a youngster and I was so excited.

Yeah, but so disappointed when it happens.

Just a total disaster.

Yeah.

Poor Geraldo.

Well, that's it for mummies, right? Chuck, you got any more? Are you mummied out? Yep. All right. If you want to learn more about mummies, check out M-U-M-M-I-E-S in the handy search bar@howstuffworks.com. You can learn how to mummify a chicken on wikihow. And what else? I think there might be a website for the mummies of wanawanto that's I think G-U-A-N-A-J-U-A-T-O maybe.

Sounds good to me.

Does it?

You know, I think Matt and Rachel from Coolest stuff on the planet did a thing on the Egyptian mummy.

Oh, yeah.

Or not. Egyptian Mummy museum. Mummy Museum.

Want to want mummy museum. Yeah. Yes.

Coolest stuff on the planet.

Check it out. That is definitely worth watching as well. Worth watching. Anyway. And I said, Handy search bar somewhere in there. Which means, I guess, time for listener mail.

Hi, Chuck. And Josh and Jerry. My name is Maddie. I'm twelve years old. I love your podcast. I wait all day at school to get home so I can check for new podcasts. They always help me fall asleep. But not because they're boring, but because it gets my brain thinking and the brain gets tired.

That's cool, man. That's fun.

I was wondering if you'd give a shout out to my best bud Casey. Casey has a tumor in his leg and is in a wheelchair. He tells me he is very miserable, but at least he gets to listen to me talk about you guys. And fun fact, he also has a pet rooster named Lewis.

Sweet.

And Lewis is house trained, so he just runs around the house.

That is awesome.

House trained chicken. So please give Lewis I'm sorry, Casey, a shout. And Lewis, while we're at it, sure. Make him feel better. It would make his day, or even his year. And tell me which podcast you're going to put it on, because I am just twelve and some of them are inappropriate. Was this one appropriate?

I don't know. Probably not. The shaking the brain part out. We'll figure it out.

Okay.

We'll tell him to just listen to the listener mail and let his parents listen to the rest.

And also a suggestion, the infamous story of that French queen who said, let them eat cake. I don't remember her name.

Marie Antoinette.

Marie Antoinette.

That was Kirsten Dunst.

And remember, I do not have Facebook, so please answer me by email. She says, oh, is it a she?

Is it DD or TT?

It's DD.

Oh, okay.

And then her signature is potato and a mushroom from Maggie. I don't even know what that means.

All the kids are saying it this day. Really?

Yeah.

All right.

Potato and a mushroom, everybody.

You just said Maggie. It's Maddie. Right. Maddie. Okay, Maddie. Thanks for that email, Maddie. Did we give a shout out to Lewis and Casey?

Well, Casey, we hope you're feeling better, bud. I'm sorry to hear about that. And hope you're up and around before you know it.

Take care of Lewis. Yes, if you're an Egyptologist and you have some good mummy stories, we want to hear it. You know what? If you have any good mummy story, we want to hear it. Wrap it up in an email and send that email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com.

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