The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (20 page)

On May 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln's body was laid to rest in a temporary vault in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, while a permanent mausoleum was under construction. The body was moved three more times, then placed in its permanent resting place within a newly constructed granite tomb on October 15, 1874.

But in 1876 a ring of counterfeiters made two attempts to snatch Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom until an accomplice was freed from prison. The second attempt was nearly successful—it was foiled just as the conspirators were prying open the sarcophagus.

Between 1876 and 1901, Lincoln's body was moved fourteen more times—sometimes for security reasons, other times to repair the granite tomb and its dilapidated crypt. In 1901 Abe was laid to rest a final time. As his son Robert supervised, Lincoln's coffin was encased in steel bars and buried under tons of cement. The body hasn't been moved since—as far as anyone can tell.

WHICH BODY IS FRANCISCO PIZARRO'S?

Francisco Pizarro, the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer and conquistador of the Incas, was stabbed to
death by his countrymen in 1541. His body was buried behind the cathedral in Lima, Peru, on the night he died, and it remained there for two and a half years. In 1544, his bones were exhumed, placed in a velvet-lined box, and deposited under the main altar of the cathedral.

Over the next 350 years, Pizarro's remains were moved repeatedly because of earthquakes and repairs to the cathedral. On the 350th anniversary of his death, in 1891, a mummified body authenticated as his was placed in a glass and marble sarcophagus, which was set out for public display. Then in 1977, some workers repairing a crypt beneath the main altar found two boxes—one lined with velvet and filled with human bones. The other box bore the Spanish inscription, “Here is the skull of the Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro, who discovered and won Peru and placed it under the crown of Castile.”

Which body was Pizarro's? In 1984, forensics experts from the United States flew to Peru to compare the two sets of remains, and they determined that the bones in the velvet-lined box were those of Pizarro. His bones were then placed in a box in the glass sarcophagus, and the imposter mummy (who was never identified) was returned to the crypt underneath the altar.

JOHN PAUL JONES'S CHEAP FUNERAL

John Paul Jones, the Revolutionary War hero and founding father of the U.S. Navy, died of kidney disease and bronchial pneumonia in 1792 in Paris. Though he was one of the greatest heroes of the American Revolution, that counted for little when he died. Rather than pay to ship his body back to the U.S. for burial, the American ambassador to France instructed Jones's landlord to bury him as privately as possible and with the least amount of expense.

In 1899, 107 years later, another U.S. ambassador to France, Horace Porter, became obsessed with locating Jones's grave and returning his remains to the U.S. for a proper burial. After six years of searching, Porter was pretty sure that Jones was buried in a cemetery for Protestants. The cemetery, abandoned decades earlier, had since had an entire neighborhood built on top of it.

Acting on information that Jones had been buried in a lead casket, Porter hired a digging party to tunnel under the neighborhood and search for a lead casket among the hundreds of rotting and exposed wooden caskets. They found three lead coffins—and Jones was in the third. In fact, his body was so well preserved that it was identified by comparing its face to military medals
inscribed with Jones's likeness. An American naval squadron returned him to the U.S. Naval Academy in July 1905, where the body was stored under a staircase in a dormitory for seven more years until Congress finally appropriated enough money to build a permanent crypt.

OUT OF PEP

Dale Christensen, a high school football coach in Libertyville, Illinois, once staged a fight and his own death at a pep rally to motivate the football team and fans for the game. When the community became up in arms about his “motivational skit,” he resigned from his job, claiming the students and athletes simply didn't understand where he was coming from.

THE “REAL” JESSE JAMES

The Wild West bank and train robber Jesse James was shot by one of his gang members in 1882. In the years after his death, several men came forward claiming to be the real Jesse James, arguing that the person in James's grave was someone else. Finally, in 1995, the remains in James's grave were exhumed, and their
DNA was compared with that of James's living descendants. The body turned out to indeed be that of the real Jesse James.

ZACHARY TAYLOR