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Mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico
- mysterious world
- May 4, 2022
- 2 min read
During the cholera outbreak of 1833 in Mexico, the demand for more cemeteries and burial places arose. Most of the bodies were buried immediately to contain the spread. At that time a few was charged from people for burying the bodies of their relatives.
In 1865,the city decided to commence exhuming bodies from Santa paula municipal pantheon cemetery niches and crypts if a certain family had failed to pay the fee for 5 years running, because of the shortage of burial places. Dr leroy had no local family to pay the fee so he was to be exhumed to make room for another body. To everyone’s astonishment, his body was found mummified.
More mummies were found all over the cemetery and after some confusion and chaos they were stored in cemetery’s catacombs. It was found out many years later that the climate of Guanajuato provides an environment for natural mummification. People started visiting the cemetery to see the mummies with their own eyes and the cemetery workers started charging them a few pesos. This place was subsequently turned into a museum called el museo de las momias (the museum of mummies) in 1969. Due to the epidemic, the bodies were immediately buried to prevent the spread. In some cases however it is believed that the dying people were buried even before they died resulting in horrofic facial expressions.
One of the mummies buried alive was Ignacia Aguilar. She suffered from a strange sickness that made her heart stop on several occasions. During one of those occasions her heart stopped beating for more than a day. Her family thought that she had died and buried her. When she was later removed from the place she was buried, her head was facing down, she was biting her arm and there was a lot of blood in her mouth. The museum of mummies contains more than 57 mummies and although the place might not be haunted, it is nonetheless a really creepy place to visit.
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