The 6 Most Terrifying Things People Used to Do With the Dead

6 Victorian Postmortem Photography

People of the Victorian era were into all sorts of kink that ranged from the ball-shrivelingly strange to the downright lethal. And once you were actually dead, things didn't get any less freaky: On the weird end of the Victorian fashion spectrum lurked memento mori pictures. When a family member passed away, the Victorians had photos taken of the dearly departed. These eerie shots served as grim keepsakes, reminders of the inevitability of death -- and fashionable home furnishings.

Luckily, the living looked just as creepy as the dead.

Originally, "memento mori" meant almost anything -- locks of corpse hair woven into jewelry, death masks, paintings of the deceased -- just so long as you were probably haunted for carrying it around, it counted as an MM. The advent of photography changed all this. Suddenly, the middle class could afford to have the pallid, waxy corpses of their loved ones immortalized on a budget. And, since early cameras had exposure times of up to 10 minutes -- meaning the subject would have to sit really still (corpses are generally pretty still, and if they're not, you've got bigger problems than a blurry picture) -- the photographers were generally down to take some soft-core photos of the dead.

The relaxed posture sometimes added a cheery, casual air.

For a truly fashionable corpse display, the bodies needed to appear as lifelike as possible. This was achieved with a number of cheats, not unlike the ones food photographers use to trick you into thinking a Big Mac is edible. A common technique was to prop the stiff's eyes open or paint pupils onto the developed picture (because that's what corpses need help with -- augmenting their unblinking vacant stares). Children were sometimes surrounded with their favorite toys and, for a side of extra creep, occasionally done up like zombified cherubs. For adults, a complicated pose-a-corpse apparatus enabled more complex stances.

Turn the crank to see him perform a jig.

Because that's how little Johnny should remember his loving dad -- staring balefully across the barriers of death while propped up like a meat Muppet.

5 Naga Trophy Skulls

In the Naga Hills of the Naga district of northeastern India, there lived a tribe called, surprise, the Naga. The Naga treated the skulls of fallen foes like video game currency: Collecting enough top-quality heads bought a warrior many privileges, such as access to special tattoos and ornaments that marked him as a great hero.

In case your victims' decorative skulls didn't already mark you as a badass warrior.

A post-headhunt Naga camp was a sight straight out of a horror movie: Heads would be left on open pedestals for months while the meaty parts rotted away. The bare skulls would be displayed in the communal warriors' hut, where aspiring young hunters were housed. Of course, extra points were scored for how formidable the opponent had been. Warriors had a tendency to decorate their trophies with stuff like animal horns and tusks, for the same reason kids slap lime green spoilers on their Honda Civics today.

Like Civics, skulls don't have to worry about drag. Because they're magic.

Among other things, these horned skulls were totally acceptable marriage dowries. If a headhunter wanted to strike up a romance with a lady, he'd give her the pimped out head of a vanquished enemy. Hey, it's a surprisingly sensible gift -- chocolate lasts a day, and flowers last a week, but that defiled skull will haunt you for a lifetime.

There's also the Indonesian Dayak tribe, who shared a lot with the Naga: They, too, were very aggressive headhunters who also displayed their trophy heads in communal long houses. The only difference was that their skull trophies were, if anything, way more fitting for your black metal band's debut album cover:

They did a DNA test. This was human. Superhuman.

4 Powdered Mummies

For hundreds of years, mummia was a wonder medicine used to fix basically everything. According to apothecaries, mummia could staunch internal bleeding, ease menstrual pains, and even speed up the healing of wounds. Oh, and it was also made of desiccated human corpses. Yes, we're talking about goddamn powdered mummies, and yes, that shit was applied internally.

Every bathroom had a jar! No bathtubs or toilets, but everyone had their mummy powder.

From the 11th century until, well, now (hopefully), mummia was a readily available medicine in Europe. Tomb raiding thrived, as enterprising grave robbers sold powdered corpses on the street like nightmare cocaine.

When actual Egyptian mummies weren't available, you could just manufacture your own. The traditional recipe, as explained by the 15th century mystic/doctor Paracelsus, went as follows: Take the body of a young man who had died suddenly due to "unexpected violence," paint the inside of his chest cavity with asphaltum (a black resin used in the mummification process), wrap the body in bandages, dry it out like a human Raisinet, and then grind it up.

Of course, there's only one way to be sure that he dies suddenly, unexpectedly, and violently.

All this dead-guy-dust-eating insanity was based on the belief that mummia contained vital life forces and could overcome the weak, sick flesh of the living, purging all illness from their systems. From about the 16th century onward, mummia started being dismissed as alchemical claptrap. However, because horrific madness is nothing if not resilient, mummia still persisted for quite some time. In fact, as late as the 19th century, a well-known German pharmaceutical company had mummia available in its catalog. The catchy product description was: " Genuine Egyptian mummy, as long as the supply lasts, 17 marks 50 per kilogram."

At those prices, you'd be crazy not to buy!

3 Blackbeard's Skull Became a Punch Bowl

Edward Teach, better known as the most fearsome pirate of all time, Blackbeard, spent years terrorizing the East Coast and the Caribbean. A bear of a man with lit fuses in his beard and a less than neighborly disposition, he eventually proved too big of a bastard to live: The authorities got fed up with his antics and dealt him a Cracked-worthy demise. To make absolutely sure that the sturdy pirate had finally bit the sawdust, they cut his head off.

And hung it from the bowsprit, yar.

Then they made a souvenir out of it.

Initially, Blackbeard's head was stuck on a pole by the mouth of a river in Williamsburg, Virginia, as a brutal warning to anybody else harboring aspirations of piracy. Eventually, when the flesh had rotted away, somebody decided to do the logical thing: drink liquids out of it.

The inscription, not visible: "Deth to Spotswoode." Spelling wasn't a pirate priority. Yar.

The Raleigh Tavern appropriated Blackbeard's skull, plated it with silver, and converted it into the bottom of a huge novelty punch bowl. The above picture isn't the real deal, but it is thought to be a fairly close approximation. The bowl was bizarrely known as "The Infant." For over a century, the Infant remained there, occasionally being lent out to dinner parties for aspiring serial killers.

By the 1920s, the skull had disappeared, likely stolen by a drunken party guest. It resurfaced sometime in the 1990s and is now on display at the Peabody Essex Museum. BUT BE FOREWARNED: We are fairly sure it's a BYOB situation.

2 The Many Strange Adventures of Rasputin's Dong

The mystical "Mad Monk" Grigori Rasputin liked boning. Lots and lots of boning. Honestly, who doesn't? But he wasn't left to his own manual devices. No, strangely, women seemed to respond to his insane hobo musk, and he pretty well screwed his way through the final days of the Russian czars. Eventually, somebody woke up on the wrong side of Rasputin's sticky sheets, and the monk was killed six ways to Sunday, four on Monday, three on Wednesday, and one just for fun because it's almost the weekend. However, that wasn't the end of Rasputin's adventures: Even in death, a part of him was determined to live on. His disembodied elephantine dong:

Astoundingly, that's the first excuse we've had to type that particular sentence.

The strange story of Rasputin's penis goes like this: After his death, the royal family's maid is said to have cut off Rasputin's glorious schlong and, for reasons best left unspoken, handed it to Marie, Rasputin's 17-year-old daughter. While most girls might not appreciate receiving their dead father's hacked-off dick, Russia grows a heartier breed up there. Marie happily wrapped the wiener in newspaper and hauled it to Paris, where it was kept on ice and worshiped by Rasputin's fans and followers.

Shockingly, Marie eventually got fed up of people idolizing her father's man-stalk. Leaving Paris, she took it with her to Buenos Aires and finally California. After her death in the '70s, an author and Rasputin expert acquired Marie's possessions, including her father's penis in a velvet bag. In 1994, the dong was sold at a London auction for a paltry $640. We can't make up our minds whether that was the best or the worst deal in history.

We'd have cut off a horse's penis and pretended it was Rasputin's.

After a decade of unknown (but presumably sexually horrifying) adventures, the wang reared its wrinkly brined head again in a Russian museum of erotica. It was now strangely withered and blackened, and someone had seen fit to pickle it, but it still measured an intimidating 12 inches.

Hobo musk, indeed.

1 Necropants

Necropants. Whooo boy, necropants.

Necropants, or nabrokarstafur in Icelandic, are a stave -- a mystical artifact made of runic magic. They're also easily the most terrifying fashion statement this side of Crocs-with-socks. Sure, they're leather pants made out of a dead man's skin. The name gives away that much. What it doesn't reveal is how much of said skin is included. Hey, here's a replica:

No necroshirts, though. Armpits are disgusting.

Yes, necropants are trousers made from the nether regions of a dead man, up to and including the, ahem, gentleman's region.

If you want to make your own pair -- and we can't imagine why you wouldn't -- the first thing you need is the skin from the lower half of a dead man. Not just any man will do, mind you -- you will need the person's permission to wear half his corpse as yoga pants. Otherwise the magic won't work. Just because you're wearing a man's peeled crotch doesn't mean you can be rude about it, after all.

Tell him you want to get in his pants and make magic happen.

Why would you want to do this?

The answer is simple: Necropants come with a magic scrotum pocket. To activate it, run to the nearest old widow and steal a coin from her. Don't worry about getting caught -- your reputation doesn't have much lower to sink after you've started running around town in another man's nut-sheath. Simply place the coin in the scrotum of the necropants and it will magically draw money into the nut sack, giving you access to unlimited pocket change.

Or you could just ask the dude at the bus stop. But that seems awkward. Flayed dong-johns are probably the better way to go.

N. Christie is currently traveling the world to determine once and for all what the Seven Wonders of the World really are. You can read more from Kyle on Twitter.

Related Reading: Speaking of crazy things done with dead bodies, check out the smoked corpses of Papua New Guinea. And if taxidermied animal art is more your speed, give a look to these man-faced cheetahs. Think Cracked doesn't have more insulting attempts to honor the dead? Think again.