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Claim: Photograph shows an Arizona man who keeps his dead wife in a glass-enclosed coffee table.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2000]
Origins: Shades of Juan Peron: a heartbroken husband has his dead wife's body preserved and keeps it around the house. In this case, however, the grieving widower has also incorporated his beloved's corpse into a functional home furnishing! This one is just a macabre but silly story. Every state of the U.S. has laws governing who can transport dead bodies and how they can be disposed of, and "The husband would like to take his wife's corpse home to keep in his coffee table" doesn't pass muster in any state, no matter how much a "cemetery caretaker" might sympathize with the bereaved, and no matter what influential "authorities" might grant permission. Nor would a glass case (even an airtight one) keep a body entirely free from the effects of post-mortem changes and decomposition. Poor Lucy would had to have been treated with some very advanced embalming and mummification techniques costing many thousands of dollars to preserve her, and even then she still wouldn't look this good. (The idea of preserving a dead person's body in a glass case has certainly been around for quite a while, as a 1903 patent Readers familiar with aquariums have pointed out "Lucy's" glass case looks suspiciously like a large fish tank turned onto its side. In particular, they note the side nearest the couch appears to have vertical supports that don't exist on the side nearest the camera. Large fish tanks are braced this way. In a nutshell, "Lucy" is more angelfish than angel. The "Lucy" story was around long before it was used as accompanying text for the photograph displayed above: It was published in a 1991 collection of silly stories harvested from a UK tabloid, where its Fakes like the "Lucy" photo appear plausible because most folks are not overly familiar with what happens to dead bodies and thus what is and is not possible in terms of preserving them. A common misconception has it that embalming preserves a body for a very long time, possibly even indefinitely. If truth be told, ordinary funeral home practices maintain the deceased in a state of not-too-terrible decomposition for usually about three days to a week, generally just long enough to get through the funeral without the bereaved being confronted with the smell of ongoing decomposition. Embalmed bodies deteriorate just a little bit more slowly than unembalmed ones, but the end result is pretty much the same Cadavers preserved for medical dissection can be kept viable for about two years, but these are subjected to extraordinary embalming techniques which generally take one to three days to complete. The resultant cadaver does not, however, look lifelike, so one should disabuse oneself of any notion that "Lucy" was subjected to this form of preservation. Likewise, the extraordinary techniques used to preserve Lenin and Peron should be ruled out on their cost basis Odd grammatical errors in the original text and the fact that the filename of the attached picture was "lucymuerte.jpg" might lead one to conclude that this message was originally written in Spanish. Last updated: 29 November 2001 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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