Charles Dickens slept with his head pointing north. “He maintained that he could not sleep with it in any other position,” noted journalist Eliza Lynn Linton.

Ben Jonson was buried upright in Westminster Abbey — it’s not clear whether this was his request or required by circumstance.

And in 1800 Maj. Peter Labelliere was buried on Box Hill head down, declaring that as “the world was turned topsy-turvy, it was fit that he should be so buried that he might be right at last.”