From weird funerals to unconventional burial practices, you’ll be perplexed to see the degree of strange customs and rituals that people honor the departed.
Here are 10 of the creepiest funerals and customs worldwide, as we delve into the weird and unusual ways different cultures bid farewell to their loved ones.
10. Famadihana (Dancing with the dead)
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Back in 2017, there was a pretty major outbreak of the plague in Madagascar. Yes, the same plague called the black death that killed a huge percentage of Europeans in medieval times.
According to local officials, roughly 100 people died but the plague outbreak may have been made significantly worse due to a bizarre funeral ritual that’s been going on for centuries in Malagasy.
In the local Madagascar language, the custom is called Famadihana, which translates to English roughly as dancing with the dead. The ritual involves exhuming dead bodies, wrapping them up in cloth, and then dancing with them before putting them back in their graves.
So if someone died from the plague and their body was exhumed and then passed around at a dance party the bacteria that affected them in the first place could be passed around to everyone.
In the present, these weird funerals are meant to be a way to respect the dead but in this case, they actually spread the plague, a big health safety concern.
9. Death Beads
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In Korea, there’s an alternative to buying or cremating the dead. Instead of choosing one or the other, South Koreans make beads from their dead relatives.
They take their ashes and turn them into shiny beads, either blue or pink or black. These beads are then kept on dishes or inside fancy glass containers as a more decorative way to keep dead loved ones nearby.
This is not something that came from an ancient custom. It’s a new thing with the CEO of the death bead company, Bon Yang, recently telling the Associated Press that he makes around 500 beads out of human remains per year.
The process costs roughly a thousand dollars and with each year that goes by it gets a little more popular. One of the reasons for this is that South Korea is running out of space to bury dead people.
So instead of taking up space in an overcrowded cemetery people can now turn the corpses of their loved ones into colorful beads and put them on the mantel.
8. Hanging Coffins
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The hanging coffins in the Philippines were put there by members of the Igorot tribe who have lived in the mountainous northern region of the country for centuries. They’ve practiced the custom of burying their dead loved ones in coffins which they nail to the sides of cliffs.
Archaeologists and historians don’t know exactly how long this has been happening but it definitely predates the arrival of the Spanish in the Philippines. It goes back at least 2,000 years which is nothing short of amazing because it’s still happening to this day.
The reason the tribe is so eager to bury their loved ones high up seemingly on the side of mountains is because they believe that if the body of a dead person is closer to the sky they’ll be closer to the ancestral spirits.
The ancestors feared being buried underneath the soil they knew that eventually water would flow into their coffins and the skeleton would start to rot so the sides of the cliff seemed like the best option.
The coffins used for this type of burial are typically very small often with the corpse buried in the fetal position. This is another strange belief in which the Igorot tribesmen say everyone should leave the world the same way they entered it curled up like a fetus.
7. Tree Burial
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2,200 years ago a group of Celts gave a very strange burial to a woman. They dressed her corpse in sheep’s wool in a shawl and a sheepskin coat and then they stuck her inside of a hollowed-out tree trunk and left her there.
She was around 40 years old when she died and was decorated in a wide assortment of rich jewelry from necklaces to bracelets and even a bronze belt chain with pendants.
The grave of the woman was discovered in the city by construction workers there was another grave found nearby, also dating back to the same time but this one was of a male and not inside of a tree trunk.
They lived during a time when much of Austria Switzerland and other parts of Western Europe were occupied by the Celts who most famously lived on the British Isles.
However, the Celts and their strange rituals were considered the enemy of Julius Caesar and he put an end to their way of life by crushing them with his Roman empire.
As for why they buried people inside tree trunks or at least this one woman nobody knows it could have been one of those weird funerals, or rituals, or it could have just been a random act with absolutely no meaning behind it.
6. Underwater Burials
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There are these weird funerals going on right now off the coast of Florida. Unseen beneath the waves is one of the largest man-made reefs in the world originally inspired by the lost city of Atlantis.
The reef here is actually a cemetery filled with creepy stone columns statues of lions and a lot of dead bodies. The reef opened as an underwater cemetery 40 feet 12 meters beneath the surface just off the coast of Ki Biscayne.
It was created by the Neptune Society who have been providing funeral services since 1973. According to the Guardian, this was the first underwater mausoleum in the world.
The ashes of the dead are buried in submerged plots allowing people to sleep with the fishes forever. The cemetery currently has enough room to hold 125,000 burial plots but getting to the cemetery itself is a bit of a hassle.
If you want to visit one of your family members who are entombed here you either need to take a boat snorkel three miles 4.8 kilometers off the coast or strap on a scuba tank.
5. Sky Burial
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In Tibet, it was tradition to take the body of a dead person, drag it to the top of a mountain to separate it into pieces, and then throw them all across the ground so that the vultures could come and eat the scraps.
This kind of tradition is known as a sky burial and it was also practiced in China and Mongolia but this wasn’t meant to disrespect the dead.
Instead, it’s a perfect example of one of the main Buddhist tenets of compassion because Buddhists believe in kindness toward all living animals. One of the creepiest funerals, if not weird.
The idea was that since your body is completely worthless anyway and was only used as a host for your spirit, other creatures may as well be nourished with your remains. They saw the body as nothing but a shell so it made sense to recycle it in the best way possible.
Still, the inner workings of sky burials are a little more jarring to those who don’t practice them. The corpse is put into a sitting position for two days. The necessary prayers are recited and then the corpse is taken to the burial site.
Family members usually accompany the corpse on the journey while beating drums and chanting. Once they get to the site they burn juniper to get the attention of the vultures, and the sky burial custom is followed.
4. Endocannibalism
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Endocannibalism is a very ancient ritual in which the flesh of a dead family member or friend is eaten by those mourning for them. It’s as if you showed up to a friend’s funeral and everyone took a small bite out of them.
It’s one of the more disturbing funeral rituals practiced, though the purpose of the ritual is in the right place. Tribe members do this out of respect believing that if they eat enough of a dead person’s meat they’ll absorb the wisdom held by the deceased one.
Such tribe that practiced cannibal funerals is in Papua New Guinea they’re called the Fore tribe and they’ve passed down cannibalism over an unknown number of generations. However, they are not alone in this practice.
The Wari tribe in the Amazon did it as a way to transform dead bodies into spirits only by eating the dead person’s flesh so their soul could be cycled back into the natural world by becoming food for wildlife.
Once ingested and expelled the anthropologist Beth Conklin says that the Wari tribe did this as a way to process their grief eating the flesh of their loved ones helped to abate sad or painful memories. This has to be one of those creepiest funerals and not just weird.
3. Tower of Silence (Dakhma)
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Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest religions in the world that is still practiced today. It’s about twice as old as Christianity having been practiced for 4000 years. It was the state religion of Persia until the Muslim conquests tried to stamp it out in the 7th century A.D.
The Persians who wanted to escape Muslim persecution fled to India where the religion still holds power today. There are roughly 200,000 worshipers worldwide and it’s considered the minority religion in certain parts of Iran and India.
One of the beliefs of Zoroastrians is that the moment a person stops breathing their body has become impure. Death is considered to be the work of an evil entity called Angra Mainyu or Ahriman.
While things of nature such as Earth, fire, and water are pure works of God, contaminating them with decaying matter is sacrilege so the people are unable to burn or bury their bodies as a rule of their religion.
Instead, they create towers called Dhakma or Tower of Silence and lay the dead out to be exposed to the sun and consumed by birds. It’s quite similar to the sky burial except it’s done for wholly different reasons.
2. Sati Practice
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Sati is a banned funeral custom in India that you won’t believe was ever practiced in the first place. This is a funerary custom in which a widow was to throw herself onto the death pyre made for her deceased husband, thereby self-immolating in other words.
Initially, this was considered a voluntary act that was courageous during the Islamic invasion but later things took a very dark turn. It became less of a funerary custom and more of a forced sacrifice.
The whole point behind Sati was that a woman simply could not live without her husband. When the husband died so did the marriage but the only way for the marriage to end was for the woman to be a dutiful wife and follow him into the afterlife.
It was once considered a great act of devotion and later on it became a forced thing to do. It was basically like burning witches at the stake in medieval Europe.
It’s been estimated that between the 15th and 18th centuries, as many as 1,000 widows were burned alive each year, and believe it or not, this custom only ended when the British colonized India and banned the practice in 1850.
1. Ma’Nene
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The Toraja people of Indonesia have an extremely bizarre funerary custom that they practice on the island of Sulawesi. They treat their dead loved ones as if they were still alive in this place.
It’s customary to treat the dead just like you might treat a very sick person. They feed the deceased, keep corpses cozy in bed, and dress them up in their best attires.
They do this allowing their dead loved ones to live with them in their own house until it’s time for them to have an elaborate funeral. But the funeral isn’t where the strange custom ends.
Once the dead person is buried inside a tomb, they’re regularly visited by their relatives. People will show up to change their clothes, clean the corpses, and even prevent them from decaying.
The ritual is known as Ma’Nene in the native language which translates roughly to ‘care of the ancestors’. The funeral is so important that these people save money in their entire lives to afford as much extravagance as possible.
After all, they don’t so much fear the dead as they embrace them caring for people who have died years ago, while people in other cultures would have just buried their loved ones in the ground once and forever. Weird funerals, right?
So what do you think of these weird funerals and rituals? Do you believe eating your loved ones when they’re dead gives you their wisdom? Please leave your comments below.
