El Museo De Las Momias

WARNING: GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING CONTENT

Listed as #7 on Cracked.com's 7 Most Horrifying Museums of All Time, El Museo De Las Momias located in Guanajuato, Mexico is described as a "nightmarish carnival of the rotting dead..." Over a hundred naturally preserved mummies line the walls of this crypt-come-museum. 

Its residents were once six feet under, until around 1865 it was determined that families must pay a yearly grave-tax, and if they could not their relatives were exhumed and stacked in a sunken crypt. Those who were buried had become unintentionally mummified because of the very dry condition of the earth. In the 1900s the mummies began to attract tourists, and cemetery workers would charge passers by a few pesos.  Eventually the collection became so large that it was turned into a museum where you can still visit. The law of the grave tax was overturned in Guanajuato in 1958, but the museum is here to stay.  

When the museum first opened, the dead were lined up along the walls, facing inward, dressed in long white robes, one can only imagine what it would be like to walk down that corridor with nothing at all between you and rows of unseeing dead...

Among the various horrifying attractions are infants, the elderly, the smallest mummy in the world (a fetus from a pregnant victim of cholera) and various mummies who were actually buried alive during a rampant cholera outbreak. 

To cut the spread of disease many victims were buried immediately resulting in some premature burials- which may explain the horrified expressions on many of the faces.

Here is the Cracked.com article on El Museo De las Momias:

The El Museo is the museum of HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THAT!

Why... does that exist anywhere?


To say this is a museum full of mummies doesn't even come close to conveying the unspeakable horror of this place. How about this: In ancient Rome, and college fraternities, there is a brutal and humiliating tradition known as running the gauntlet, during which you strip naked and run through a valley of horrors. Guanajuato's El Museo De Las Momias ("Museum of the Mummies") is just like that, except that it's the spectators who are naked. And dead.

You know one of those hands will reach out and grab you.

The Mummies of Guanajuato are naturally preserved bodies from a cholera outbreak that hit Guanajuato way back in 1833. Since this is basically just a huge open grave with floodlights, its legality and moral status continues to be the subject of much discussion everywhere except in Mexico.

Most of the mummies on display were corpses whose families could not afford to pay a grave tax levied on their families once they died. If you failed to pay the taxes, you guessed it...

You went up on display.

smallest mummy in the world

Hey, have we mentioned the babies?

"Come play with us..."

"...forever..."

"...and ever..."

Read more: The 7 Most Horrifying Museums on Earth | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_18686_the-7-most-horrifying-museums-earth.html#ixzz252i8bRwy