Death

But we don’t know for sure, because we don’t actually keep track.

A view of Green-Wood Cemetery circa 1870s, Green-Wood Instagram

You don't see "indiscreet use of laudanum" on death certificates much anymore.

From over 100 different euphemisms for death.

Don't be afraid to laugh—or wear a color other than black.

Grave-robbers, beware!

An 1862 engraving showing a skeleton gentleman at a ball asking a skeleton lady to dance, meant to represent the effect of arsenic dyes and pigments in clothing and accessories.

Whether it's poisonous dyes, pestilential fabrics, or flammable skirts, here are some reasons to be glad you're not getting dressed in 1837.

Funerals don't necessarily have to be somber events. These memorials and traditions are heavy on quirk.

Professor Sharon Ruston surveys the scientific background to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, considering contemporary investigations into resuscitation, galvanism, and the possibility of states between life and death.

Getty Images // Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

The famed writer died 75 years ago today, but at the time of his death, the Catholic church that housed his family's burial plots wouldn't allow Fitzgerald to be buried there.

And they could help determine time of death. Paging CSI.

Here are seven of the most picturesque and historically fascinating catacombs open for visits around the world.

No one knows who the man in the suit on the beach was—or how he died.

Friedrich Karl Wunder, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

Despite being extremely critical of private property, Marx purchased a plot in the privately-owned Highgate Cemetery.

Franz Reichelt is now remembered as the "flying tailor."

From the man who died because of a failed parachute suit to the daredevil who perished in a stunt gone wrong, sometimes brilliance comes with a price.

A compound produced by decaying tissue makes people more alert to threats.

In 1966, a young man came across a pair of dead bodies lying side-by-side. But what they were wearing took the discovery from tragic to truly bizarre.

The Mütter Museum recently discovered it owns the nation's largest collection of books bound in human leather—and now a research team is trying to track down the rest of the world’s examples.