Discover amazing facts about some of the world's most popular songs
Renowned Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí died on January 23, 1989 from heart failure. He was buried in the crypt below the stage of his Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain.
In June 2017, a judge in Madrid ordered the exhumation of Dalí's body in order to obtain samples for a paternity case. A woman had claimed that the artist had an affair with her mother in the mid-1950s. Tests carried out proved conclusively that Dalí and the claimant were not related. The case was thrown out. Apparently, after nearly 30 years of burial, Dalí's iconic mustache had remained perfectly intact!
Immediately after the PLO leader's demise, conspiracy theories began to circulate about the exact cause of death. His widow, Suha, pressed for a murder investigation, believing her husband had been poisoned. Yasser Arafat's body was exhumed by Swiss and French forensic scientists on November 26, 2012. Results published by the Swiss showed that Arafat may have been poisoned by polonium. The French, however, thought this unlikely. The debate continues to this day.
Zachary Taylor served as the 12th President of the United States from 1849 until his death on July 9, 1850. Many believed that the president had been murdered, dispatched by poison somehow administered into his food or drink.
To quash the assassination rumors, which persisted into the 20th century, Zachary Taylor's body was exhumed in 1991. No evidence of poisoning was found. Instead, its was declared that he had succumbed either to cholera or gastroenteritis. Pictured is Taylor's mausoleum at the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky.
María Eva Duarte de Perón, the First Lady of Argentina and known to millions as Evita, died of cervical cancer in Buenos Aires on July 26, 1952. During the construction of a memorial in her honor, her husband, President Juan Perón, was overthrown in a military coup. Shortly afterwards, Evita's body disappeared.
The whereabouts of Eva Perón's corpse remained a mystery for the next 16 years. However, her body had in fact been smuggled out of Argentina in 1957 and was buried under a pseudonym in a cemetery in Milan, Italy. In 1971, the body was exhumed and flown to Spain, where it was handed back to an exiled Juan Perón. He returned to Argentina in 1973 where he was again elected president, and died in office in 1974. His third wife Isabel arranged for repatriation of Evita's body in 1976. Evita was finally laid to rest in the Duarte family tomb in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.
Claims were soon made that the man laid to rest in Rose Hill was not Oswald but a look-alike Soviet agent. The allegations persisted for 18 years until finally, in 1981, Oswald's remains were exhumed. Dental records confirmed that it was him. He was reburied in a new coffin.
Christopher Columbus was the famed Italian explorer and navigator who completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean, and has been credited—and blamed—for opening up the Americas to European colonization. He died on May 20, 1506 in Valladolid, Spain. But even in death, it seems, Columbus continued to travel widely.
The body buried in the grave in Kearney, Missouri marked Jesse James was exhumed in 1995 for DNA testing against samples from descendants of Susan James, Jesse James' sister. It proved a match, and the case was holstered for good.
One of the Old West's most notorious outlaws, Jesse James met his end by being shot in the back by Bob Ford on April 3, 1882. James was promptly buried in Kearney, Missouri. However, some claimed the infamous gunslinger survived the attack and rode off into the sunset to live to a ripe old age.
Lincoln was buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. A decade later, thieves attempted to steal the president's body for ransom. They failed. But the coffin was subsequently hidden between the walls of the tomb to deter would-be grave robbers. Later it was decided to build a larger, more secure monument. During construction, Lincoln's body was secretly exhumed and reburied in nearby ground. Finally in 1901, after 13 months of construction, the president's remains were reinterred in the now familiar Lincoln family mausoleum. Amazingly, the exhumation of Abraham Lincoln was captured in photographs and published in a February 1963 edition of Life magazine.
Cromwell's body remained at Westminster until Charles II came to power. Seeking revenge for his father's execution, Charles ordered Cromwell's body exhumed, in 1661. After being hanged from the gallows by an angry mob, the corpse was beheaded and the head displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall until 1685. The remains, meanwhile, were dumped into a pit. It's believed Cromwell's head was interred in 1960 within the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, at a secret location near the antechapel.
Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974, Haile Selassie was overthrown in a coup led by the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. Held captive before he died, the former president apparently succumbed to "respiratory failure" on August 27, 1975. Many believed, however, that Selassie had been murdered by his captors. His corpse conveniently went missing.
In 1992, workmen found Haile Selassie's body buried under former President Mengistu Haile Mariam’s office at the Grand Palace. An exhumation was ordered. After resting in Bhata Church for nearly a decade, the coffin carrying the man some members of the Rastafari movement regard as the returned messiah of the Bible, was reburied in 2000 in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Cathedral (pictured).
Charlie Chaplin is cherished as a worldwide icon through his screen persona, The Tramp, and regarded as one of the most important figures in cinema history. He died on December 25, 1977, and was laid to rest in the village cemetery in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland.
On March 1, 1978, the comedian's body was dug up from its grave by two thieves who reburied it in a field in the nearby village of Noville. The pair then attempted to exhort money from Chaplin's widow, Oona. The grave robbers were eventually caught and the body returned to the same grave, this time reinterned in a reinforced concrete vault.
Seven years later, in October 1869, Rossetti decided he wanted to retrieve the manuscript and requested the grave be opened. His wish granted, the grave slab was removed, the coffin lid prized open, and the book recovered. A volume of poems from the exhumation were published as 'Poems' (1870).
Sources: (Life Magazine) (The Independent) (Cambridge News) (Al Jazeera) (AP News)
See also: Stars who died tragically young
Elizabeth Siddal was the wife and muse of English artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), co-founder of the influential Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Siddal died from an opiate overdose on February 11, 1862. She was buried along with an unpublished collection of Rossetti's poetry in the family grave in Highgate Cemetery, London.
The Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist Marie Curie is celebrated for her discovery of radium and polonium, and her huge contribution to finding treatments for cancer. She was also the recipient of two Nobel prizes. Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, and was interred at the cemetery in Sceaux, France, alongside her husband Pierre.
In 1995, the remains of Curie and her husband were moved to the Pantheon in Paris in honor of her life and pioneering work.
Argentine guerrilla leader Che Guevara was a major figure of the Cuban Revolution. He was eventually captured and shot on October 9, 1967, in Bolivia. For decades, the exact location of his body was a well-guarded secret.
In 1995, a Bolivian general involved in the operation broke his silence and revealed the whereabouts of Che Guevara's remains: he'd been buried near a Vallegrande airstrip, not far from where he was killed. Two years later, his body was exhumed and returned to Cuba in time for the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of his death. The famous revolutionary was laid to rest with military honors in a specially-built mausoleum in the Cuban city of Santa Clara.
King Pedro I ordered the arrest and execution of Inês' murderers by ripping their hearts out. Next, in a bizarre claim that history is still debating, he had Inês' body exhumed and placed on a throne. He then ordered the entire court to swear allegiance to their new queen. The doomed lovers' elaborate tombs grace the interior of the Royal Monastery of Alcobaça in central Portugal, placed together for eternity.
Palestinian political leader and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat passed away on November 11, 2004 from what doctors described as a massive stroke.
One of the signatories of King Charles I's death warrant in 1649 after the monarch's defeat in the English Civil War (1642–1651), Oliver Cromwell was a hugely controversial figure, considered by some a hero of liberty, by others a regicidal dictator. He died from natural causes in 1658, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Oswald was himself shot and killed two days later by Jack Ruby. Oswald was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas. But was the man in the coffin really Oswald?
Being deceased doesn't always mean resting in peace. Throughout history, there have been many bizarre instances where the dead have been dug up, exhumed for all sorts of reasons, and then placed back in their graves. These long-departed individuals include world leaders, intrepid explorers, celebrities from the worlds of art and cinema, and the odd notorious criminal or two.
Click on and dig through history's most famous exhumations.
A Galician noblewoman, Inês de Castro was a lady-in-waiting to Constance, the wife of a Portuguese prince, Pedro I. The prince fell in love with her and the pair began an illicit affair. When Constance died in 1345, Pedro took his lover's hand in marriage. Pedro's father, King Afonso IV, was enraged and ordered the murder of Inês de Castro, in 1355. When he finally took the crown in 1357, the still grieving Pedro exacted a terrible revenge for the killing of his spouse.
Columbus was buried in Valladolid. His body was then moved to Seville. In 1536, his remains ended up in what today is known as the Dominican Republic. Or it could have been Cuba. No one is quite sure. In 1898, they were supposedly shipped back to Spain and interned in a tomb in Seville's cathedral. Or are they? Some historians believe Columbus' bones are enclosed in a tomb inside the Columbus Lighthouse at Santo Domingo Este back in the Dominican Republic. Perhaps both cities have parts of the pioneering seafarer?
Famous individuals who were exhumed from their graves
Digging up the stories of these important historical figures
CELEBRITY Death
Being deceased doesn't always mean resting in peace. Throughout history, there have been many bizarre instances where the dead have been dug up, exhumed for all sorts of reasons, and then placed back in their graves. These long-departed individuals include world leaders, intrepid explorers, celebrities from the worlds of art and cinema, and the odd notorious criminal or two.
Click on and dig through history's most famous exhumations.