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Bodies, bones & overflowing churchyards: a history of graveyards
00:32:06
Roger Luckhurst takes listeners on a tour of some of history's most unusual and intriguing graveyards
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- [00:04]
Roger Luckhurst
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more at WhatsApp.com Teen adjective used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained, one who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice.
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Ellie Cawthorn
An individual confident in their contradictions.
- [00:51]
Roger Luckhurst
They know the rules, but behave as if they do not exist. New Teen the new fragrance by Miu Miu defined by you at New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way. @newbalance.com Running I'm Scott Hanson, host of NFL Red Zone. Lowes knows Sundays are for football. That's why we're here to help you get your next DIY project done. Even when the clock isn't on your side. Whether that's a new Filtreat filter or Bosch and Cobalt power tools, Lowe's has everything you need to feel like the MVP of diy. So get it done and earn your sundae Shop now in store and online. Lowe's official partner of the NFL welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Burying the dead has never been a simple matter. Whether due to elaborate grave goods, unique burial rituals, or public health concerns, burial places through history have taken on a variety of unusual and intriguing forms. Roger Lockhurst's new book, A History of Living with the Dead, explores everything from the ancient tombs of the pharaohs and sky burials of Tibet to the overflowing churchyards of 18th century Paris and preserved bodies of 20th century communists. Ellie Cawthorn spoke to him to find out more.
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Ellie Cawthorn
It's great to have you with us, Roger, talking all about graveyards, burial rites, graves, the whole shebang. So why is it interesting to look at graveyards? What fascinates you about them?
- [02:56]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, that was one of the key things I wanted to address, I guess, because you might immediately think it's morbid. And I think lots of people do kind of avoid graveyards or have superstitions about graveyards. But on the other hand, loads and loads of tourism is about going to see graves or going to see mausoleums. You know, the most famous things in the planet really are these kind of memorial sites. Whether you're going to Egypt, see the pyramids, whether you're going to the Taj Mahal, whether you're going to Thailand to see Buddhist statues and an amazing complex. People go all over the world to do this. So I kind of wanted to explore that interest and that obsession. And also, I think the most surprising thing about it was just how constantly, actually, we are engaged with our own dead. And that's where the subtitle for the book came from, you know, this History of living with the Dead.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah, I have to say that graveyards can be a great place. And one of my lifelines in lockdown was the local graveyard. But how far back can we trace what we might kind of recognize today as a graveyard?
- [03:58]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, so this is a huge question for archaeologists and people doing early history, and really, the techniques for dating things that have been discovered can radically change the picture almost overnight. And I feel really nervous about, you know, saying, oh, it started at this point because we keep having to push this back, you know, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of years, according to the kind of latest findings. It used to be the case that we thought that you could identify Homo sapiens, so human beings by how they cared for their dead. So these are the people that start to, in the professional jargon, they start to intentionally deposit remains. So that is, you know, they think about graves and graveyards. But actually, I think we have now discovered that there are prior versions of humanity or hominids who were burying their dead probably intentionally. It's really difficult to kind of get much evidence. We desperately want these bones to speak to us. Of course, what we're doing is throwing interpretations on them. I mean, my favorite story about this, I think, is the idea emerged when a set of bones, really, really old bones, were discovered in a cave in northern Iraq. And this was in the 1950s. And they found, with new techniques that they just sort of started developing, that there was a whole bunch of different kinds of pollen in with these kinds of bones. And the person who was working on this thought, well, this is amazing. Obviously, they were burying bunches of flowers with the dead. So the Neanderthals were the first flower. And of course, by the 60s, this is like a model of hippies and so on. They're the first hippies. And we thought of Neanderthals as being this very kind of lovely race that unfortunately got killed off by nasty humans. And now what we, I think, believe is that that multiple amounts of pollen comes from. Wait for it. The gruesome fact that rats had kind of got into the grave, eaten the bodies, and this is the remains in their excretions. So, you know, that's where we are now. And that sort of sense of how we desperately project onto these very. But we are talking millions of years. So the bones really are very well preserved in certain kind of soils and particularly in deserts. So that kind of sense of pushing this back millions of years has really been the case.
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Ellie Cawthorn
And that story actually very kind of perfectly illuminates those two sides of graveyards. On the one hand, they can be very sad, but beautiful and moving. On the other side, quite gruesome and grisly reputations as well.
- [06:23]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, when you were saying that you'd been to graveyards in lockdown, I was doing the same thing and actually got very obsessed with all of the local lost graveyards near where I. To the extent that, you know, I'd say, well, we've got an hour to go out for a walk to my partner. And she would say, it's not another graveyard, is it? But, you know, I've seen this over and over again. So they are really restful, contemplative places. And I think we have really embraced that now. I think we used to feel that they were places slightly of dread or of things to avoid. And certain cultures do think they are definitely places to avoid. But they are these wonderful places too. And I think we can have this kind of sense of peace and contemplation. But also, I really enjoy the kind of full on gothic nightmare of these stories. We do really like gruesome stories about people waking up in their graves. They become global news stories immediately because you get at least one a year. We do like the gruesome side of it. And I really wanted to explore that sort of sense of that pull of both attraction, but also the shiver and repulsion that perhaps rightly we should feel is not a good idea to hang around with the dead too much.
- [07:30]
Ellie Cawthorn
And I'm sure we'll get into that side of things a bit later. Something that your book does, really interestingly, I think, is explore the different motivations for memorializing the dead. Because it's not always just as simple as wanting to remember a loved one, is it?
- [07:44]
Roger Luckhurst
No, that's right. I mean, I think that there are multiple ways of looking at this and I think it's so Rich and diverse across the planet. How people think about burial, graveyards, or how they might, you know, kind of relate to the dead in different kinds of ways. So actually, you know, the solemn fact, I suppose, is that you might have a. A classic burial in a cemetery and put up a Gravestone, but within 15 years is the average. No one visits them anymore. So it's not just about the immediate kind of memory. It's kind of doing something else. And I think what I got very interested in was kind of the politics, actually, of the dead. We recruit the dead. The dead do lots of work for us all the time. If you think about most national narratives, it's nearly always about, you know, the sacrifice of the people who founded the modern nation and so on. I mean, in England, we have this really big thing around Memorial Day in November for the Armistice, and that used to be even bigger as a kind of national memorial. And there are these kind of monuments in every village, every church, for those who died in the first and second world Wars. So that kind of sense of recruiting those kind of sacrificial dead to the idea of a nation, and that's really strong in different ways across the planet. So, you know, in France, you have a huge secular pantheon, which is a deconsecrated church that has all the famous dead dud in it and the occasional woman, actually. Amazing. So there's that, you know, then you also have, you know, national Independence Day kind of memorials. Very important in independent nations in. In Africa. One of my favorite graveyards is in Zimbabwe, where the cemetery is shaped like an AK47 rifle, because that's the rifle that they used as independence fighters. And the graves are the bullets in the magazine. It's really kind of hardcore, that idea of these dead are the ones that got us here. So this is our national memorial. And of course, leaders have these gigantic memorials as well. And that's not necessarily about them, but more about expressing political ideology or about, you know, the assertion of continuity after death and so on. So there are loads of different ways in which we think about using graves and gravestones.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Well, since you brought us onto the subject of political leaders and the use of their bodies, the first one that comes to mind, of course, is Lenin and his preserved corpse. But are there any other examples? You look particularly at the 20th century as well, don't you, that you would highlight?
- [10:11]
Roger Luckhurst
I mean, this, of course, goes all the way back to the pyramids of Giza. So that's, you know, if you're a pharaoh, then you have a really giant pyramid Increasingly massive kind of complexes. So there's always been the case that power equals a kind of massive memorial monument. But the Lenin story is great. So he died just after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings. So rather remarkably, I think they thought, well, there's a preservation body for thousands of years. Why don't we do this with Lenin? And they had a big argument about, you know, how they're going to preserve him. And actually a group of people who were Bolsheviks came up with a secret solution that would preserve him. And that was so successful that that family built a laboratory underneath Lenin, which is still there. So they keep, you know, preserving and caring for the body, but they were also responsible for preserving all other communist leaders in the 20th century. So they would kind of go around the world or if, you know, people conveniently died in Mosc because it was so cold, they would preserve them there. So they even did Ho Chi Minh, who was the leader of Vietnamese kind of insurrection and the communist insurrection. They preserved his body, but they kind of kept it hidden for about six years until the war was over. And then they could build a massive mausoleum in the capital. But also, you know, it's not just left wing ideology, but also, you know, very far right. Mussolini, a gruesome end, but also Franco in Spain, he spent quite a lot of his time building his own memorial. And in fact, he's only just been moved out of that memorial. 2019, I think it was, that he was moved out. And that has been a huge kind of political row about what do you do with these bodies. So actually, you know, they retain power in this odd sort of way even beyond their own life. And the body itself becomes this token that you can kind of move around and again recruit politically for your particular kind of means and ends.
- [12:00]
Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah. And as you referred to this idea of using the body for the projection of political power, it goes way, way back. What are some of the most extravagant or intense memorials or tombs that you found in your research?
- [12:15]
Roger Luckhurst
We all know, I think about Egypt because just of the conditions of Egypt. So, you know, sand very dry, and they built in stone. So we see these really very remarkable buildings and constructions, but also just the atmosphere. I mean, I've been lucky enough to go to the Valley of Kings where Tutankhamun's tomb and where all of the pharaohs were actually by this point, secretly buried. Cause they realized that building a giant pyramid was a big clue about where your body was. So they went into the Valley of Kings. It's a really kind of extraordinary atmospheric place. Silent deserts, burning sun, but also just a kind of an atmosphere of curious anticipation and awe, really almost religious awe. You can kind of see where all of that came from. And that's a very remarkable kind of place. And we know all about that because, you know, for example, in Assyria, they built with brick and mud, so all of that kind of disappeared. When we did find graves in Syria, they told a different story, a more remarkable story. It seemed to be that there were, like, hundreds of people sacrificed to some of the leaders there. And this caused a fascination in the 1920s and 1930s when they were being discovered. So these large numbers of servants and of warriors, soldiers being kind of killed to protect the leader in the afterlife. And of course, the most famous of that would be the first emperor of China and his terracotta army, which is still being unearthed, because there are thousands and thousands of these terracotta soldiers with different ethnicities, with different kinds, slightly different dress. They're all there, still waiting, still protecting the first emperor. So those are really remarkable instances, I think. And the Chinese ones, with their amazing jade armor suits, beautiful things which have been very well preserved. They are also very remarkable.
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Ellie Cawthorn
I mean, the Terracotta army is really like the ultimate example of the most elaborate, extravagant grave goods you could bury with someone. Which, of course, we see in societies across the globe and across time. Are there any the practices that we see recurring in different societies across space and time?
- [14:23]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, that's a really good question, because I think you can go back all the way with, say, mummification. So mummification is a kind of way of preserving a body by drying it out effectively. And that happened kind of naturally. So we think that the Egyptians perfected this by treating very carefully and very methodically bodies over 70 days through this kind of ritual process. But actually, 2,000 years before that, you know, in Chile, there was a culture that was. Because they were near the sea and because they had lots of salt, they were also preserving bodies in a different kind of way. But that's also mummification. And even up to the present day, actually into the 21st century, there are some Buddhist circles that have particularly holy figures that they want to preserve and do so with, you know, again, very kind of ritualistic practices around drying out a body, preserving the holy kind of figure. And then they also, you know, put them on display, and they are bodies sitting there, lacquered and preserved because they are particularly special. There's something about the special dead which means that you can kind of Treat them in a slightly different way. Because that's curious, because you think Buddhism is all about, you know, letting the body go and fire and cremation and, you know, the release of the spirit. That's all true, but it's also something that's obsessed about something particular, about the very, very holy body, which is worth preserving as a kind of model, as a practice that people should follow. So mummification is something that we discovered as a species quite early, several thousand years ago, but is still in practice.
- [15:57]
Ellie Cawthorn
I think to our kind of modern Western minds, we've been taught to be afraid of death. Death is something to hide away. So this idea of preserving a body and bringing it back out, living with it, seems very alien to us. And, you know, some people would be afraid of that. Are there any other practices you uncovered that, you know, seem particularly unusual or remarkable to our minds? Obviously not to the people practicing that. Sure.
- [16:21]
Roger Luckhurst
So this is the thing, again, that's a really, really good question, because this is the thing that I really wanted to address, which is what I think we do, we tend to do, is to slightly exoticise other people's practices, you know, particularly around dead bodies. And you kind of think, ooh, blimey, that's weird. That must be a very weird culture. But actually, that can be even a minor difference. So in the uk, I think we freak out slightly about how American funeral practices, you know, preserve the body. There's a viewing of the body, there's lots and lots of kind of preservation of the body that goes. And we kind of are slightly squeamish about that. And it's the same with, I think, up to quite recently, Protestant northern Europe, very stoical, and didn't really want to indulge in all of this sort of stuff. And they were really spooked out by what Catholics did in Southern Europe. So there are bodies everywhere. There are kind of preserved saintly relics and they go to the church and see a skeleton of a saint or a preserved finger of John the Baptist, all these kinds of things. One of the hundreds of John the Baptist fingers that there are in the world, that sort of sense of a slight kind of worry about that. So when you get to really different, then our kind of fascination becomes something perhaps a little bit morbid and we should maybe be careful about or be respectful about. I mean, I look in the book historically at how the Jesuits, so these, you know, very kind of severe intellectual Catholics, would kind of follow colonization processes. So when they went into New France, what's now part of Canada, they came across Native American tribes which were conducting very, very odd, but actually incredibly sophisticated and complex, complicated procedures where the bodies would be buried, remembered, but then also dug up every 10 years when the village moved, the bones would be displayed and then, you know, reburied in different kinds of ways. And the Jesuits were kind of horrified, but also fascinated by this and wrote volumes and volumes and volumes about what this Huron tribe, as they called them, or the Wendat tribe, were doing with their bodies. So there's that. And then, you know, we might think, well, of course, they did do that in the 16th or 17th century. But even today, you know, we are slightly too obsessed, I think, say, with VAR in India, where Hindus burn the bodies of the dead and then they're released, their ashes are released into the sacred Ganges. And that's a tourist spot, which is really weird, I think, really, really very strange and worth examining. But also, you know, sky burial in Tibet. So this is where, you know, because there is no way of burying bodies because you're on a mountain, there are these ritualistic places where bodies are left out and the vultures come down and eat the bodies. And that's also a problematic touristic occasion. And then there are descriptions online where you just. It's not fun, you know, it's not. It's not. And it's not an entertainment for you. It's not a gruesome spectacle. This is. This is a really kind of, you know, embedded ritualistic tradition. And I think it's worth having some anxiety about how we exoticise the dead whilst also confessing it's endlessly fascinating what we do with dead bodies. If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. You know that purple shop pay button you see at checkout? The one that makes buying so incredibly easy? Easy? That's Shopify. And there's a reason so many businesses sell with it, because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today@shopify.com promo. Go to shopify.com promo this episode is brought to you by Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. It's best enjoyed over ice or in your coffee. Delivering vacation vibes anyway, or anywhere you drink it. Find out more@rumchata.com Drink responsibly. Caribbean rum with real dairy cream, natural and artificial flavors, alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands, Pojoaquee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved. So good, so good, so good. New markdowns are on at your Nordstrom Rack store.
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Roger Luckhurst
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Roger Luckhurst
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- [20:50]
Ellie Cawthorn
That's why you rack. One thing I wanted to ask you about were catacombs and ossuaries. What can you tell us about them and some of the times that they've been used? And what.
- [21:02]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, so the ossuary.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah. Maybe you can explain what an ossuary is better than I can.
- [21:07]
Roger Luckhurst
First, in some burial practices, you develop an ossuary, which is basically literally a bone kind of store, so that once the whole process of natural decay has happened to the organic matter, you're left with the bones. And then the bones can be put into these stores and they can become very elaborate in their displays. So you can display, you know, different kinds of bones. You can have piles of skulls. Underneath the streets of Paris are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of skulls in their catacombs. They weren't put there until the 18th century, but nevertheless, you know, they are ritualistically displayed. They're one of the key tourist sites in Paris. You know, everyone goes to the ossuary there and you get them all across Southern Europe as well. So it's very kind of Catholic practice and it's, you know, designed to help you contemplate death again, to keep you on the straight and narrow in terms of your religious belief. Strikingly very few in the uk. And that's a kind of cultural difference again, you know, to do with the rising of Protestantism and the dislike of this display or lingering too much with the dead. So we keep occasionally coming across the odd hidden away ossuary that has either been forgotten or bricked up. And that can be quite interesting. But there are only a handful in England. And that again tells you about what Freud called the narcissism of minor differences. That is, you know, we're very like the Europeans, but actually, oh my God, they do really weird things with the dead. You know, we're not like that at all. We have much more respect and we preserve the dead in different kinds of ways. And of course, they would look at it in a Totally different way themselves. So that kind of sense of ossuries being kind of a key thing in Catholicism. So it meant that that was quite common in the medieval period. And I got interested in the Dance of Death, this kind of macabre, dancing skeleton that we put on the back cover of the book. Because this is a sense in which, you know, bones are everywhere around you in the medieval period, and particularly after 1348 and the black Death, you know, hundreds of thousands of bodies, pits, burial pits and so on for the people who died of plague, those sorts of things mean that the bones are kind of circulating all the time. So in a way, a repression of all of that is perhaps a sense of where we are getting over this major European trauma. But also it's a place to contemplate death and the risks, the chance that means that you might survive or might not survive an epidemic like that.
- [23:25]
Ellie Cawthorn
Well, leading on from the idea of an overwhelming amount of bodies, something that you look at in the book that many European cities in particular had to grapple with later on, is this idea of, what do we do with all these dead people? There's not space for them. What were some of the challenges that emerged about burying people in a respectful and also a sanitary way?
- [23:46]
Roger Luckhurst
Yes, yes. Not always successfully. We go back to ancient Rome. They were sensible in the sense that they built laws quite quickly that said you must bury the dead outside the city limits. And that's where the word necropolis comes from. So the city of the dead. So they have their own city, separate kind of space. In Christianity, particularly from the medieval period onwards as well, we kind of decided that we were going to live with the dead and actually they were going to be crammed around Christian churches in classic churchyards, but also in the walls or in the crypts of these churches as well. So they started to kind of, you know, in a sense, become the architecture in some kind of fundamental way. By the time you get to the 18th century, this is problematic because of the population rise in Europe and because of the concentration of populations into cities. You start getting real crisis around. What on earth are we going to do with all of these dead? Because a city like London is, you know, the largest in the world, a million people. You're producing an enormous amount of bodies. What on earth do you do with these bodies? There is limits to sanctified ground around churches. You start to get these private graveyards developing. They undercut the fees of the church. So, you know, poor people are burying, but not with any kind of sense of sanitation at All. So there were really a lot of gruesome, scarce in London, but also in Paris and other large cities where the dead would kind of literally overflow from these unregulated kind of graveyards. In the centre of Paris, there was a famous moment in the 1780s when a graveyard burst because of the amount of dead, and it just kind of ran through the centre of Paris. And that was the moment when they thought, we need to reform this and do something else. In London, there are a whole series of scandals in the 1820s and 1830s, including, you know, the fake famous Enon Chapel case, which was just a wooden floor where kids were dancing. And underneath, like, inches underneath were 20,000 dead bodies that were simply kind of rotting away and, you know, producing an enormous kind of horrible stench. And it was believed that they produced illness as well, kind of fatal diseases. They're just simply the stench of the dead. A very lovely thunderstorm happening behind me as well. And actually, because of those scandals, there were 20 or 30 years of debates about what to do with this in England. There was a new law that finally came in the 1850s that said you can't bury the dead in inner cities anymore. And that's the development of, you know, cemeteries. That's why our cemeteries are mostly on the edges of towns now and in these kind of slightly bleak orbital roads that you get around cities where you always have to go for funerals. That's because, you know, it's hygienic. It makes makes sense to do that. But it's also, some people think, a kind of turning away in the modern world from this intimacy, this proximity of death. It makes it much more traumatic when we come across it because we don't live with it. People don't die at home anymore. People don't have bodies in their houses, laid out for wakes and so on. In many cultures in Western Europe, some still do, but we've moved away from that. So that sort of sense of constantly moving the dead sort of slightly a little bit further away has been a sensible policy for most cultures for a long time.
- [26:58]
Ellie Cawthorn
Well, as a fan of the Gothic, Roger, you couldn't ask for much more than the thunderstorm behind you at the moment when you're talking about this subject.
- [27:04]
Roger Luckhurst
This is great.
- [27:06]
Ellie Cawthorn
But as well as moving cemeteries out of cities, there's also been a move to redesign them or think about how they are presented. We've talked about Paris, and Pere Lachaise Cemetery is a very famous example of this. Can you tell us about these new ideas that emerged about what a graveyard should at look.
- [27:24]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So Pere Lachaise, which I'm sure people have been to, again, is one of the major tourist sites in Paris, is where Oscar Wilde is buried, which I think is the most visited grave, as is Jim Morrison's grave, of course, if he's buried there. Some people say he isn't. And that opened in 1804 and that was part of the reform process. So to try and sort of try and find a way of treating the dead and buried in a different kind of way. So this is the first real garden cemetery, as it's called. It's a very picturesque. It's on a sloping hill and you can wend your way around it. Nature begins to be integrated in it. This is where we get our sense of, well, actually you can go to a graveyard for recreation, for a walk, for a sense of quiet from the city. And that graveyard was so successful in Paris that it was picked up around the world in England, in Liverpool and Glasgow first. But then the Garden Cemetery is famous in London because we have the so called Magnificent Seven. That's the seven cemeteries that were built around in a circle around London as it stood then. The most famous of those, I guess, being Highgate Cemetery, precisely because it's on the side of a hill and has these kind of great views over London and is, you know, our quintessential Gothic, Victorian, overrun kind of place where Marx is buried and George Eliot and hundreds of other real famous people. It also has an Egyptian section as well, which was, you know, momentarily fashionable. So there's that. And then it goes to America and America particularly the Forest Green Lawn Cemetery, those sorts of things are very popular in the States and still are increasingly, I think with green burials or green options, people want to be moving away. There's this whole trend in the last 20 or 30 years of moving away even from stone markers towards saying, well, actually I want a tree to grow out of my burial site, to be fed in a way by the nutrients of the body, the natural cycle of life, those sorts of ideas. And these are incredibly beautiful spaces. Actually that idea of the ecological burial was early 20th century, started in Scandinavia, but also was picked up across the world. And there are some very, very beautiful places I've been to, some very beautiful cemeteries actually, and funerals in those kinds of spaces, which can be very moving in the sense of. It clearly gives comfort for this idea of thinking about cycles and returns and giving back, rather than a kind of artific refusal of this kind of process, but an embrace of it.
- [29:57]
Ellie Cawthorn
But as well as eco burials, you know, more people are being cremated now than ever before. So are graveyards becoming a thing of the past? Or do you think that we'll always want a way to remember the dead and a place to remember the dead?
- [30:11]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, it's true there are lots of processes of cremation, but also, you know, preservation after that. So, you know, you could spend a little bit extra to get those cremains, as they're called, and then crush them into diamonds and things like this. You can be blasted into space now if you. But you have to ask Elon Musk nicely. So that kind of sense of, you know, there are other ways of doing this, but I still think there is this sense of, since the Romantics, you know, it's landscape, it's the natural world that we've kind of imbued with spirit, I think, and our sense of spirituality. So this sense of being on a nice countryside or a nice aspect or a prospect where you can go and pay respects to your dead, but also enjoy the kind of natural world taking over and see these processes in action, I think are really kind of important. I mean, my father died a few years ago. We spread his ashes on the side of a hill outside Bristol, legally, I should add, because you do have to have legal permission to do that. And it was inside of one of his favorite things, which was the chocolate factory. And I just think the idea of kind of him being able to see the chocolate factory and all of that chocolate that he loved is a lovely thing. So it really does, I think, link you to nature, but also to cycles. And it's a way, maybe a more secular way actually, of just sort of thinking, well, this is. Is the rhythm of life. That was Roger Luckhurst speaking to Ellie Cawthorn. His book is a history of living with the dead. And Roger has appeared on this podcast before to talk about the cultural history of horror movies. Search for horror films at chilling cultural history wherever you listen to find that episode Limu Emu. And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty, Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. And now a scary story brought to you by Instacart. It's a quiet Sunday night too quiet. As your head hits the pillow, a short, shadowy figure appears.
- [32:33]
Ellie Cawthorn
Mom, you're bringing snacks tomorrow, right?
- [32:35]
Roger Luckhurst
Your soul leaves your body. You forgot, and the PTA parents will never let you forget. But then you remember. You can get whatever you need for the week delivered in as fast as 30 minutes through Instacart. Take that, PTA parents, for one less Sunday. Scary. We're here. You know the words that dominate our news cycle? Private equity keeps inventing digital stocks. But do you truly understand how they impact your world and your wallet? In a world that skims the what? Understand the why? Because context changes everything. Subscribe to learn more at bloomberg. Com, the global benchmark for business news.