In 1981, wildlife photographer Carl McCunn paid a bush pilot to drop him near the Coleen River in northern Alaska. He thought he’d arranged for the pilot to pick him up again.

He hadn’t.

State troopers found his body the following year. He had tried to winterize his tent, then shot himself in the head. A 100-page diary read, “I think I should have used more foresight about arranging my departure.”

An ingenious American lately computed that in the United States alone, half-a-ton of pure gold, equivalent to half-a-million of dollars, was annually put, as stuffing, into the teeth of the living, or otherwise employed by the dentist on people’s food-grinding apparatus; and inasmuch as none of this precious metal is ever extracted after death, our shrewd calculator ‘reckoned’ that, at this rate, a quantity of gold equal to all that now in circulation would, in the course of three centuries, be lying buried in the earth. It is strange to think that one digger, the sexton to wit, is constantly returning to mother earth nearly as much gold as the other digger is constantly extracting from her bosom.

— Patrick Maxwell, Pribbles and Prabbles, 1906

Cited in Epitaphiana: or, The Curiosities of Churchyard Literature, 1873.

Here lies the body of Thomas Woodhen,
The most loving of husbands and amiable of men.

N.B.–His name was Woodcock, but it wouldn’t rhyme.

Erected by his loving widow.

From Epitaphiana: or, The Curiosities of Churchyard Literature, 1873.

Another great man who lost his head after death: René Descartes. The French philosopher died in Sweden in 1650 and was interred there for 16 years. When his body was exhumed for return to France, the ambassador appropriated his right index finger (“the instrument of immortal writing”) and, apparently inspired, one of the Swedish guards took the skull, engraving on it “Descartes’ skull, taken and carefully kept by Israel Planstrom when the body was sent to France and hidden since that time.”

The skull bounced around Europe for 150 years, with various owners carving their names on it; it was discovered missing only when the coffin was opened again in 1819. A Swedish chemist, no doubt rolling his eyes, tracked it down and returned it to the French academy.

Bonus beheading: When Sir Walter Raleigh was executed in 1618, his head was embalmed and given to his wife. She kept it until her death in 1647, when it was returned to Raleigh’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.

For those keeping score, our list now includes Descartes, Raleigh, Joseph Haydn, Oliver Cromwell, Jeremy Bentham, and Albert Einstein. Keep ’em coming.

(Thanks, Sarah.)

Terrified of being buried alive, Hannah Beswick left a bequest to her family physician, Charles White, on condition that she be kept above ground for 100 years. So when she died in 1758, White added her embalmed corpse to his collection of anatomical preparations, and every day he and two witnesses raised the veil and confirmed that she was indeed dead.

But 100 years is a long time, and the observations passed from reverent to perfunctory and finally absurd. The doctor eventually stored the mummy in an old grandfather clock, whose face he would open once a year to check on the patient, and when he died Miss Beswick was actually put on display in the entrance hall of the Manchester Natural History Museum, from which, wrote Edith Sitwell, the “cold dark shadow of her mummy hung over Manchester in the middle of the eighteenth century.”

Only in 1868, 110 years after her death, did the secretary of state issue an order for Hannah’s burial, and she was interred in an unmarked grave. Perhaps by that time she was glad of the rest.

See also My Dearly Departed.

Conclusion of an epitaph on a tombstone in eastern Tennessee:

She lived a life of virtue, and died of cholera morbus, caused by eating green fruit, in the full hope of a blessed immortality, at the early age of twenty-one years, seven months, and sixteen days. Reader, go thou and do likewise.

From Epitaphiana: or, The Curiosities of Churchyard Literature, 1873.