Posted on by Matt Gilligan

A Corpse on a Body Farm Was Caught Moving

This can safely be filed under: Nightmare Fuel.

Apparently, corpses don’t stop moving for up to a year after death, due to the various decomposition processes they go through.

Which makes me wonder how many of those bells rang at Victorian gravesides even though the people in the coffins were, in fact, dead.

Yikes.

The research that brought you this lovely tidbit of macabre information comes from an Australian body farm (a place where scientists study how bodies decompose in order to improve forensic techniques.

In a time-lapse video containing images taken every 30 minutes over a period of 17 months, researchers saw movement for far longer than they expected to – over a year and a half in some cases. In an interview with ABC News Australia, the authors said they believe the movements were mostly the result of drying ligaments.

“What we found was that the arms were significantly moving, so that arms that started off down beside the body ended up out to the side of the body.”

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So from Obesity TV programmes I go straight onto food!!: This is an amazing "5 Stages of Decay Cookie" by Claire Ratcliffe for the special Halloween event I'm holding at Barts Pathology Museum where I work: "Delicious Decay – The Edible Body Farm!!! The event (Friday night 28th and all day Saturday 29th) will feature edibles – savoury and sweet – based only on human decay and decomposition. The point is to raise awareness for the need, in the UK, for a Body Farm (or Taphonomy Research Facility) that actually uses human remains, like the one in Tennessee. We use pigs at the moment and they're consistently unreliable. That's why I'm working with @conjurers_kitchen (amazing food artist) and Dr Anna Williams (Forensic Anthropologist) to make this incredibly realistic. We even have the scents used to train cadaver dogs and a make up artist to make you look "decomposed"! www.deliciousdecay1.eventbrite.co.uk and www.deliciousdecay2.eventbrite.co.uk (I'll talk about the 5 stages in another post ?⚰) #humanremains #decomposition #remains2beseen #ediblebodyfarm #decay #deliciousdecay #taphonomy #bodyfarm #anthroplogy

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They’ve yet to publish their study, but hope their findings will continue to add to a body of research that helps police solve murders, among other things.

“This research is very important to help law enforcement to solve crime and it also assists in disaster investigations. It’s important for victims and victims’ families, and in a lot of cases it gives the victim a voice to tell their last story.”

Just an FYI: Body farms exist all over the world, and they depend on body donations from people looking to assist science after they’ve expired.

I say you might as well be helpful. Either way, you’re just going to be decomposing.

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