In the 5th century BC, Athens forbade anyone to die or to give birth on the island of Delos, to render it fit for the proper worship of the gods.

In 2005 Roberto Pereira, mayor of the Brazilian town of Biritiba Mirim, proposed a ban on death because the local cemetery had reached its capacity.

The French settlements of Le Lavandou (in 2000), Cugnaux (in 2007), and Sarpourenx (in 2008) have all outlawed death because of limited capacity in local cemeteries. The Sarpourenx ordinance added: “Offenders will be severely punished.”

Since 1878, no births or deaths have been permitted near Japan’s Itsukushima Shrine, a sacred site in Shinto belief.

In 1999 the mayor of the Spanish town of Lanjarón outlawed death, again because of an overcrowded cemetery. His edict ordered residents “to take utmost care of their health so they do not die until town hall takes the necessary steps to acquire land suitable for our deceased to rest in glory.”

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” said Woody Allen. “I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

06/24/2018 UPDATE: It’s illegal to die in Longyearbyen, Norway, because digging in the cemetery might unleash the century-old Spanish flu virus buried in the permafrost. (Thanks, Michael.)

In 1967, Ian Stevenson closed a combination lock and placed it in a filing cabinet in the psychiatry department at the University of Virginia. He had set the combination using a word or phrase known only to himself. He told his colleagues that he would try to communicate the code to them after his death, as potential evidence that his awareness had survived.

The combination “is extremely meaningful to me,” he said. “I have no fear whatever of forgetting it on this side of the grave and, if I remember anything on the other side, I shall surely remember it.”

His colleague Emily Williams Kelly told the New York Times, “Presumably, if someone had a vivid dream about him, in which there seemed to be a word or a phrase that kept being repeated — I don’t quite know how it would work — if it seemed promising enough, we would try to open it using the combination suggested.”

Stevenson died in 2007. As of October 2014, the lock remained unopened.

Mr. Zimmermann, whose will was proved in 1840, accompanied the directions for his funeral, in case they were not carried out, with something like a threat. In his will he says, ‘No person is to attend my corpse to the grave, nor is any funeral bell to be rung, and my desire is to be buried plainly, but in a decent manner; and, if this be not done, I will come again — that is to say, if I can.’ The Countess Dowager of Sandwich, in her will, written by herself at the age of eighty, proved in November, 1862, expresses her ‘wish to be buried decently and quietly — no undertaker’s frauds or cheating; no scarfs, hatbands, or nonsense.’ Mrs. Kitty Jenkyn Packe Reading, although evidently possessed of sufficient means, appears by her will, proved in April, 1870, to have been very anxious that one part, at least, of the expenses attending her funeral should be kept as low as possible. After saying she is to be placed first in a leaden and then in a wooden coffin, she provides that ‘If I die away from Branksome, I wish my remains, after being duly placed in the proper coffins, to be inclosed in a plain deal box, so that no one may know the contents, and conveyed by a goods train to Poole, which will cost no more than any other package of the same weight; from Poole station said box to be conveyed in a cart to Branksome Tower.’ … Mrs. Reading seems to have considered the details of her funeral with much minuteness; among other things she states ‘the easiest way to convey my coffin out of the house will be to take the window out of the dining-room.’

— Charles Bullock, Many Things, 1878

When Colonel Abraham Holmes, a supporter of Monmouth, was executed with some of his companions at Lyme Regis in 1685, the horses could not pull the sled carrying the condemned men to the scaffold. The attendants began to whip them furiously, whereupon Colonel Holmes, with one of those superb gestures of which the men of the seventeenth century were so frequently capable, got out to walk, saying, ‘Come, gentlemen, don’t let the poor creatures suffer on our account. I have often led you in the field. Let me lead you on in our way to Heaven.’

— Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 1983