In ancient Greece only suicides, infants who had not yet grown teeth, and persons who had been struck by lightning were denied the privilege of cremation and were buried instead. When cremation was conducted, the ceremonies were elaborate and solemn and the ashes of the deceased were placed in urns of burned clay and buried. Later, when burial became the custom in Greece, the bodies were enclosed in elaborate stone caskets, similar to the Roman sarcophagus.
In the Danish colony of Greenland, the Vikings who settled on its shores believed that there was danger of pollution from the evil spirits that lurked around the corpse until the smell of death had passed away. They burned the dead body before it became cold and tried to avoid inhaling any of the fumes from the fire. They also burned every object in the dead person’s house.
The Zulu tribe of Africa always burns the property of the dead to prevent evil spirits from remaining in the person’s home. Many Native American tribes followed the same custom of burning the possessions of the deceased, and it is not uncommon to hear of contemporary men and women who, after the funeral of a relative, superstitiously burn the individual’s clothes and other belongings.
Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs employ cremation as a standard method of disposing of the dead. In India the body is cremated on a funeral pyre whenever possible, and in ancient times widows were sacrificed alive on the burning pyres with their husbands.
Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease
See also: AIDS, Alien Infection, Alien Virus, Black Death, Infection, Mad Cow Disease, Spanish Flu
In 1986, the initial signs of a frightening new disease began to quietly surface in the United Kingdom. It was given the name of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). It has since become far better known as mad cow disease. For the farmers whose animals were affected, identifying a BSE-infected cow quickly became a very easy task: quite simply, they moved, and acted, like zombies.
The way in which the cows walked noticeably altered: as the effects of BSE increased nearly day by day, walking became shuffling. Their manner changed from docile to erratic and, at times, to dangerously belligerent and violent. And it was all due to the fact that cows were secretly being fed the remains of other cows. The infected were, in effect, cannibals, and just about the closest thing one could imagine to real-life animals of the zombie variety.
When the scale of the disaster became apparent, huge concerns dominated the minds of just about everyone in the United Kingdom: did the virus have the ability to jump from species to species? Could eating the meat of an infected cow cause the development of BSE-like symptoms in people? And, if so, what about sex or kissing: could bodily fluids spread the disease? As the outbreak grew on a near-daily basis, the answers to those controversial questions became the stuff of nightmares. And a stark realization hit home all across the land: Britain was infected.
When matters were at their absolute height, sensational rumors were rife in the media that millions upon millions of British people were very likely already affected and, when the symptoms started to manifest, the nation would quickly be plunged into unrelenting chaos. People would be split into two camps: those free of infection and those irreversibly affected by it. Fortunately, such a cataclysmic situation failed to come to pass. It did not, however, prevent a significant number of people falling victims to the deadly human version of BSE: Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, or CJD.
While there are several categories of CJD, the one which caused so much panic across the United Kingdom was vCJD, which is better known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, and that is specifically caused by eating BSE-tainted beef. Official figures in the United Kingdom suggest that around two hundred people died from vCJD which, like its animal form, provokes distressing, strange and violent behavior of both a physical and psychological nature. Although, in a nation of around sixty million people, two hundred may not sound like many, it is important to note one disturbing factor: vCJD can, it is believed, take decades to develop. That is to say, it’s not out of the question that millions of British people—who unknowingly ate BSE-infected beef products back in the 1980s—might, in just a few years from now, start to develop the classic symptoms of vCJD. The rise of the infected could, one day, be coming to the United Kingdom yet again.
Crosse, Andrew
See also: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Born to Richard Crosse and Susannah Porter on June 17, 1784, at Fyne Court, Broomfield, Somerset, England, Andrew Crosse was a definitively self-made amateur scientist and an early pioneer in the field of electricity. He was also someone who, ultimately, was likened to a real-life equivalent of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, of Mary Shelley’s much-revered 1818 novel, Frankenstein. It’s a book that tells the story of a crazed scientist who procures various human body-parts and stitches them together. Then, via electricity, he animates the terrible, obscene creation, which goes on a violent killing spree. But how, and under what particular circumstances, did Andrew Crosse become so linked to Mary Shelley’s fictional mad-scientist?
In 1800, when Crosse was still just in his mid-teens, his father passed away. Five years later, his mother did likewise. As a result, at the age of just twenty-one, Crosse took on the running of the family estate. And, with a significant inheritance in-hand, Crosse was free to pursue his passions of alternative science and electricity. Such was the strange nature of many of Crosse’s early experiments—which were conducted in a laboratory of the type in which Dr. Victor Frankenstein would have been right at home—that, amongst the locals in the village of Broomfield, Somerset, Crosse quickly became known as “the thunder and lightning man.”
By the 1830s, Crosse’s research had reached epic and impressive proportions: his lab was packed with advanced and unusual machines; powerful batteries dominated the room, and rumors flew around Broomfield that Crosse was up to no good. Then, in 1836, something remarkable happened: Crosse found in his lab what he described as “the perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail.” In the days that followed, yet more curious, little insects appeared. Very soon, Crosse’s laboratory was teeming with them. It appeared to Crosse that they had spontaneously manifested during an electro-crystallization experiment that he had performed.
The local media soon got wind of the story and Crosse found himself deep in controversy. The reason why was simple: dark tales started surfacing to the effect that Crosse had found a way to both create and animate new life. Anonymously sent threats reached his mailbox. There were accusations that he was engaged in Witchcraft and the black-arts, and Crosse was even blamed, by irate farmers, for a crop-failure in the area.
To this very day, there is still a great deal of debate on the nature of Crosse’s bizarre experiments and the apparently spontaneous manifestation of unusual insects in the lab. The most obvious explanation is that the experiments were unknowingly contaminated from the beginning, and the insects hatched in wholly normal fashion. There are, however, suggestions that Crosse may have succeeded in animating life—even if he, himself, was unsure how such a phenomenon was astonishingly achieved. Crosse’s fringe science research continued until May 1855, when he died from the effects of a devastating stroke. Nevertheless, the legend of “the thunder and lightning man” lives on.
As mentioned above, one person who has very often been
