Forbidden Knowledge: Casket Failure

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There are many, many little features and details of mortuary work which are fascinating to me. The business and logistics of death are morbid yet absolutely necessary: yes, your dad is dead now, but somebody’s gotta do something with the body before it starts rotting and causing a mess of the whole place. Someone’s got to tell the bank he is gone — someone’s gotta handle the assets, the passwords, the bills, the debts, etc. etc.

I could write a whole book on the economics of death. Alas, this is the Forbidden Knowledge series specifically, and so I have to zero in on a particularly ghastly, vastly underappreciated detail.

Fortunately for me, there’s one immediate answer that comes to mind.

Imagine this:

You’re walking home — from school, from work, from some other function — you name it. You decide to take a shortcut through the local cemetery. Usually you’d rather avoid doing this, but your [insert loved one of choice] is going to kill you if you don’t get home in time for dinner. It’s getting late — the moon has just about overtaken the sky, and all the street lamps have turned on — so you get your ass in gear and cross the (actually quite nice and well-maintained) parkland surrounding the tombstones.

But something interesting happens when you pass by the mausoleum. This is not one of those old-school mausoleums that are dedicated solely to one very rich individual, no — this is the cemetery’s mausoleum, where inside and outside the walls are filled with what are called above-ground graves. Just as you cross by the outer wall’s lamplights, you swear you can hear something.

Creeeaak, creeeaak. THUD, THUD, THUD!

You stop in place. Your hair stands on end. Nope, fuck this, you think to yourself. I have seen way too many horror movies to know where this is going. I hate this. I gotta haul my ass in gear and 40-yard dash across the cemetery garden, flowers be damned. And yet, curiosity keeps to held there. You here it again.

Creeeaakkk, THUD THUD THUD! Creaaaak, THUD!

Your rational mind kicks in. After all, your parents told you all those horror movies were fake. There has to be an explanation for this. Maybe the… marble, of the mausoleum, is just… settling? You don’t know is marble can actually settle. Still, there’s only one way to figure out the truth.

Very slowly, you turn back towards the above-ground graves. You turn towards the source of the sound.

Right there, dead in the center of all the plaques, is a casket that catches your eye. You are close enough to hear that the creaks and thuds are coming from that grave in particular — but there’s something else about it that makes it even more obvious.

The thick, oozing blood pouring viscously down its side, and pooling up onto the ground below.

Creeaaak, THUD THUD!

This is enough to set you off. You run so fast you’re pretty sure you just broke the human land speed record. When you get home you don’t dare tell anyone why you were breathing so heavily — or what you saw. In your room you gather up a few stray items — some canned beans, an old baseball bat, a fresh set of clothes — because you just know when you wake up tomorrow the zombies will have taken over. You go to sleep and pray that you and your family will be safe.

Then, the next morning, you wake up. In anxiety and terror, you open up your phone, and check the news.

Nope, nothing. Everything’s normal.

The good news almost confuses you. You watch the body language of the others at the breakfast table — nothing seems amiss. The horror you witnessed the night before seems to not have permeated the real world yet.

That morning, you decide to walk through the cemetery again. Certainly you didn’t just imagine things — you’ve never taken drugs in your life, nor have any pre-existing mental health conditions. It was just too… too vivid to be a dream. And yet, when you get there, and you find that same grave you saw oozing viscera the night before… you find it is perfectly normal. No blood. No sounds. Just another grave next to countless other graves.

What the fuck? you think to yourself. Am I going crazy?

Well, fortunately, no. As it turns out, your brain was wise to turn on rational thinking mode — what you just witnessed, my friend, was a casket failure.

…

The actual technical details behind a casket failure are drab, dull, and depressing. But, in a way, that’s just what makes them all the more interesting.

There’s a lot of small details that go into making sure a body can actually stay in a casket. After all, the person is, you know, dead, so they’ll probably be staying in there for a very long time. Put anything into storage for that long and things are bound to be off.

There are two main categories of handling this: preparing the body, and preparing the coffin. In preparing the body, we try to mess with its biological factor in such a way that the chance of rotting (at least in the short term) is slim: embalming fluids keep the flesh preserved, draining the blood reduces the chance of bio-sludge build up, etc. etc. In preparing the coffin, a lot more goes into it than just making all that comfy-looking padding: The casket has got to be air-tight, and that means literally no strange particles are coming in or out of that big box. If a grave preparation was done right, you could uncover a body buried hundreds of years ago and find it in the same condition as the day it was buried.

Of course… this is very ideal, to say the least. It’s very hard to get everything right: most corpses end up looking how they do in the movies, with the coffin still intact and the body more-or-less recognizable, but with clear signs of degradation and rot. No matter how hard you try, some failures in the casket will rear their ugly head down the line.

The easiest way to deal with failures is by not playing the game in the first place. The best method to handle a dead body, it turns out, is to just throw that baby in a dirt pit and let Mother Nature handle the rest. Disease doesn’t spread due to the dirty layer, detritovores will lick the body squeaky clean in less than a week’s time, and the resulting matter will cause great natural growth to the surrounding area. A great win all around!

Alas, cultural standards see this as “defiling” the body, and we’ve all collectively decided we need to be buried with “dignity” instead. Lame. Well, the next best solution is to bury the body underground. You see, casket failures only count if it occurs above ground, as I already mentioned: if a corpse starts leaking cerebral fluid in the dirty, and no ones around to see it, did it really leak? Another very obvious — and exceedingly popular — way to avoid this problem is cremation, which is just getting rid of the body altogether however still having a symbol (usually an urn filled with the ashes) to remember the person by. This comes with its own problems (who wants to keep around a big heavy urn for hundreds of years?) but they’re outside the scope of this article.

And so, this is all to say that above-ground casket failures can make some nasty work. Literally nasty, true, but also in terms of their psychological impact: Family members rarely want to hear that Uncle John is now hemorrhaging fluids all over the lilacs from beyond the grave, and cemetery owners would rather not deal with a bubonic outbreak in a place that has a bad enough reputation as it is. So in the world of actual morticians, casket failures tend to be treated more as a “failure of the industry” spoken in hushed tones rather than something that’s forbidden or scary. But I think, for the average Joe, it also fits that latter description just fine.

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