Book Excerpt

Excerpt from 'Long Live the Dead: The Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato'

Mummy of Dr. Leroy was first of 112 to be discovered

Louis Aguilar / The Detroit News

An excerpt from Detroit News Staff Writer Louis Aguilar's coffee-table book "Long Live the Dead: The Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato" (Detroit Science Center, $24.95)

On the morning of June 9, 1865, the remains of Dr. Remigio Leroy were removed from crypt #214 at Santa Paula Municipal Panteon because no one could be found to pay his grave tax of 50 pesos.

When the cemetery caretakers pried opened the French physician's wooden casket, located in the middle of a concrete wall of tombs, the men were horrified, according to one of the many local legends. One immediately fled and another fell to his knees in prayer because both feared they had just unleashed the devil.

Dr. Leroy should have been a skeleton. He died three years earlier during the great cholera scourge. Instead they found something with skin and still wearing elegant burial clothes. His beard had appeared to continue to grow beyond his death though his eyes had vanished. His dropped lower jaw and the slight tilt of his head to the right makes it looks as if he's in the middle of an engaging conversation.

Was it the hand of God or Satan? The brightest minds of 19th-century Guanajuato -- priests and politicians and philosophers and scientists -- gathered to examine him. Even an old Indian woman said to be able to communicate with the dead was brought in, but allegedly ruled Dr. Leroy wasn't sufficiently dead for her powers to work.

Little was concluded beyond he was actually dead and posed no health threat. He was a mummy, just as the ones in Egypt. Except he was unplanned; an accidental mummy.

The most decisive action came from the underpaid caretakers. They started charging admission to the steady stream of public who wanted to see the mummy.

Thus began a curious and macabre industry -- even for a country that joyously celebrates its dead every year. Dr. Leroy was the first of 112 mummies to be discovered, all of them pulled from the virtually airtight wall of tombs, away from bugs and dirt.

By 1894, 29 years after Dr. Leroy was unearthed, the first Museo de las Momias was opened. It was in the same location where the mummies were always stored, in catacombs underneath the hilltop cemetery.

Oddly enough, while city officials kept strict records of what dead person owed taxes, other pertinent information, such as the name of the person removed, has somehow been lost during time. That partially explains why so many feel free to cast whatever beliefs and stories they want on the mummies.

The current Museo de las Momias is as sleek and beautiful as an upscale boutique hotel. The parking lot is full of hustlers trying to sell tourists trinkets and candies that look like the mummies. You can hire a guide inside the museum and some of them will tell you this mummy may have died of sadness and this one was stabbed and this was one a witch.

Now, thanks to the Detroit Science Center, some of the latest medical forensic technology is being applied to the mummies to help obtain scientific answers.

Whatever hard, cold truths the scientists unearth, no one doubts the mummies will continue to be a litmus test of our own humanity.