Why Do People Sleep With Their Dead Spouses?
A Belgian woman was recently caught sleeping with her husband's corpse a year after he died. And she's not the only one
Authorities in Brussels made a grotesque discovery earlier this week in the apartment of a 69-year-old woman: the mummified remains of her husband’s corpse, snug in a wool sweater and sinking into the scarlet stains of his own postmortem fluids. He was lying on the left side of their shared bed, his wife too despondent to even change the sheets. The 79-year-old man, known only as Marcel H., is believed to have died from an asthma attack last November.
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Le Van, a 55-year-old Vietnamese man, has slept next to his wife’s corpse since she died in 2003. He spent his nights atop her grave for the first 20 months, and when the wind and rain proved too much, he dug a tunnel into her plot to rest next to her underground. He later exhumed her corpse and wrapped her bones in papier-mâché so he could sleep with her arts-and-crafts mummy at home. Van may have taken his cue from Xie Yuchen, a Chinese man who
slept with the dried remains of his wife for eight years until they were discovered in 2013.
In Russia, one bereaved spouse
encouraged her five young children to spoon broth into the mouth of their father’s cadaver. She used air fresheners to cover up the smell. Investigators discovered the family’s secret only when two of the girls, ages 14 and 9, decided to dispose of his body against their mother’s will.
Then there’s the Argentine woman who recently admitted to traveling to Mexico several times a year to sleep inside her husband’s mausoleum. She brings bedding and a small cooker, and has even installed wireless. As the widow told local media rather matter-of-factly: “When you love someone, you do all sorts of things.”
And just last week, a German man was cleared of murder after police in Mombasa found him sleeping next to his wife, who had expired days earlier.
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One practical curiosity is how it could be possible for someone to bear the famously repugnant smell of a rotting corpse. Nathan notes that in many cases the feeling of loss is so grave it can actually mute the senses.
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In some cultures, it’s still socially acceptable to spend an entire evening with a loved one’s corpse, albeit not in your own bed and not for weeks at a time. [...]
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