In 1833, there was a cholera epidemic which claimed numerous lives in Guanajuato, Mexico. As would be expected, the bodies were interred. However, death did not dissolve the financial obligations of the buried, as both death and taxes are equally certain. Under local law, the deceaseds' relatives were required to continue to pay a burial tax on a periodic basis. For those who did not do so, the bodies of the loved ones were removed from their graves starting in 1865 and put in storage in a municipal building. Eventually, the cemetery workers figured out that they could make a profit by charging relatives and tourists a fee to enter the building, and the El Museo De Las Momias (the Museum of Mummies) was born.
Disinterment of the deadbeats was outlawed in 1958, but the museum containing the corpses of those who left the ground prior to that time still stands and is still open for visitation.
Query: Why did the necrophiliac from Guanajuato skip his prom in 1959?
Answer: Because he couldn't dig up a date.
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| By Russ Bowling (originally posted to Flickr as Las Momias) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
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