M.J. Rose

Iconic (and mysterious) corpse, Rosalio Lombardo, AKA the jewel of the Palermo catacombs…

Via Curiosity.com,

This Mummified Two-Year-Old Appears to Blink Every Day
Written by Reuben Westmaas

“Down in the catacombs of Sicily, you can visit the incredibly well preserved body of a two-year-old who died in 1920. And that’s not the spooky part. The spooky part is the fact that if you stand there long enough, you’ll see her eyes open and close.

Meet “Sleeping Beauty”

Rosalia Lombardo led a short, strange life. The daughter of a city official from Palermo, Italy, she was only two years old when she died of pneumonia. Her father, Mario Lombardo, took it about as well as you’d expect. In his grief, he contacted the legendary embalmer Alfredo Salafia to preserve his little girl in perpetuity. And if you dispute the existence of legendary embalmers, ask yourself: how many other embalmers do you know of that have their own Wikipedia page?”…

Click here for the full story, and scroll down the page for a great video (this video is actually the highlight of this whole piece. It’s from the series, Ask a Mortician, here).

Ok guys, stay with us here for a few minutes and enjoy the wonderful oddness of this fellow demonstrating how Medieval people walked before the invention of hard-soled shoes…

These are just magnificent.

From Atlas Obscura,

New York City’s Mail Chutes are Lovely, Ingenious and Almost Entirely Ignored
by Luke Spencer

“If you have ever worked in an old building, the chances are you will have at some point walked past a small mysterious brass box. Located about halfway up the wall, it is notable for a flat length of glass leading both into and out it, disappearing into the ceiling and the floor below. Often painted over, ignored and unused, they are a relic of the golden age of early skyscrapers called the Cutler mail chute.

The Cutler mail chutes flourished during the advent of the first multi-story buildings in the turn of the 20th century. The invention was fairly simple: the glass chutes would run internally the length of the building, with a mailing slot on each floor. Rather than having to make the trek downstairs to find the nearest mail box or post office, you would simply pop your letter into the chute from whichever floored you worked on, and gravity would swiftly carry your letter to a mailbox in the lobby, for daily collection from the postman. In an era when people were sending handfuls of letters each day, the convenience of the Cutler mail chute was a godsend…”

For the rest, click here.