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Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato (The Mummy Museum of Guanajuato)

Starting in 1865 and lasting all the way until 1958, the small town of Guanajuato, Mexico required that relatives pay a grave tax. When the relatives failed to do so for three years in a row, their deceased loved ones were promptly dug up and evicted. Weirdly, due to the extremely dry conditions of the soil and burial procedures the corpses often came up as well preserved if shrunken mummies. (The first to be dug up and found mummified was one Dr. Remigio Leroy on June 9, 1865.) The cemetery kept these strange mummified corpses in an underground —actually under the cemetery grounds itself — ossuary in case the relatives came around with the money wanting a re-burial. By 1894, the ossuary had racked up enough mummified bodies to re-brand itself as a museum.

The mummies, because they were formed naturally, are much more gruesome looking then your standard Egyptian mummy. With gaunt and twisted faces like extras from a horror movie, and often covered in the tattered rags they were buried in. Perhaps the most shocking to visitors are the shrunken children mummies, and one in particular claimed to be “the world’s smallest mummy” is no bigger then a loaf of bread.

(Source: atlasobscura.com)

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    A few years ago I visited this awesome place
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    Must visit this next time i go.
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