In a spectacle at once grisly and mundane, the tomb of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was opened on Tuesday so that Swiss, Russian and French scientists could test the former leader’s body for signs of death by poisoning. Although at the time of his death in 2004, blame was assigned to a stroke, the recent discovery of polonium-210 on some of his personal items led France to open a murder inquiry in August. In getting one more look at the sunlight after thinking to have left it forever behind, Arafat joins a surprisingly long list of famous figures whose bodies have been exhumed. Disputed cause of death often lies behind this morbid ritual, as in the case of Simón Bolívar, dug up by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in 2010 to gain evidence for an arsenic-poisoning theory (after almost two centuries resting in peace). More often though, these corps célèbres are disinterred in order to be moved to more comfortable–or at least more elegant–quarters. (Paris’s Panthéon boasts a veritable who’s who of transplants.)
History affords us yet stranger instances of exhumation, as in the case of Serbian soldier Arnold Paole, removed from the earth in 1726 due to suspicion that he had been plaguing his village after death as a vampire. Christopher Columbus was exhumed and his body moved no less than three times after his death. Even the great actor Charlie Chaplin continued his theatrical hijinks postmortem; one year after his death in 1977, grave robbers absconded with his corpse and held it for ransom. They were caught before any payment was made, and the Little Tramp now lies under six feet of concrete. Louis Braille, Daniel Boone, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Cromwell, Jesse James, and Tutankhamen. The list is a long and distinguished one. Be it in in newsreels, folktales, the bars of a song, or the hands of commissioned forensic scientists, the truly famous can always make a comeback. // Patrick Barrett
