October 19, 2019 • 21 mins
We're revisiting a 2015 episode on a very fascinating corpse. Saponification is the process of turning to soap, and in certain conditions, cadavers do it. The Soap Lady is one of the most famous cases of an adipocere-covered corpse, but there are many like her.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Today we are going back to an
episode that did not come out in October, but it
definitely could have. It's our apisode about the soap Lady,
who is part of the Mooder Museum collection, as well
as other famous corpses that suppotified as they decomposed. And
it is also connected to an episode that is coming
(00:23):
out in a few days, but we're going to keep
the exact topic of that one a surprise. So enjoyed
this and we'll see you back here in a couple
of days. I feel free to send us guesses if
you want, and in the meantime, enjoy Welcome to Stuff
You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:48):
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy View Wilson. And today's
episode is going to be a little bit of a
springtime macob. It's got all the classics, you've got some
unidentified corpses which are being strange characteristics. There's a little
bit of science in there, some modern issues associated with
this science. And we're even gonna have a cameo from
(01:08):
a famed paleontologist and we're actually titling the episode The
Lady Who Turned to Soap, but we're actually going to
talk about a few different corpses that have been found
covered in some degree of a substance, which is sometimes
called grave wax. This story, as we're telling it today,
starts in eighteen seventy five, and at that point a
city improvement project in Philadelphia unearthed a unique find. Uh.
(01:33):
This project involved the exhumation of a cemetery, and it
was the thing that they had to do in order
to get the project done. Yeah, and I've read different
accounts of what that project may have been. Some say
they were trying to build a train platform and it
was gonna take up some of they needed some of
the space that the cemetery occupied, and others are like, no,
it was a widening of streets. So I don't have
(01:54):
a concrete definitive on what the public works project was.
But two of the bodies that were exhumed as they
were trying to move this portion of the cemetery exhibited
this really distinctive characteristic. They had turned to a substance
that appeared very much like soap. A professor of anatomy
at the University of Pennsylvania named Joseph. Lady was very
(02:16):
excited about this discovery, and he shared this news with
his friend and colleague, William Hunt. In Hunt wrote an
article for the Public Ledger which described ladies intense enthusiasm
over this specimen, and according to Hunt, lady told him quote,
they have been buried for nearly a hundred years, nobody
(02:38):
claims them, and they would be rare and instructive additions
to our collections. Hunt's account described his visit with Lady
to the cemetery to speak to a superintendent in the
hopes of acquiring the bodies for the College of Medicine.
After making a number of comments about the violation of
the grave and appearing to shut this mission mission down,
(02:59):
the semi terry superintendent finally told the duo quote, I
tell you what I do. I give the bodies up
to the order of relatives. And so the pair left
the cemetery and Lady had taken the superintendent's comment as
a hint, and so he went out and he hired
a furniture wagon, and he sent a driver with the
(03:19):
furniture wagon with a note that the bodies were the
grandparents of the wagon driver's employer and asked that they
be released to the driver. And so that same cemetery
worker who had dropped this hint to Lady that relatives
could collect bodies, sent the deceased on their way in
the furniture wagon. Documents in the Mooder Museum indicate that
(03:40):
Lady paid seven dollars and fifty cents for each of
these bodies. The Mooder Museum, which is part of the
College of Medicine, kept the soap Lady, but the Soapman
eventually went to the Smithsonian Institution as part of the
National Museum of Natural History. And now, just to acknowledge
his MEO, you may recognize the name Lady. So Dr
(04:03):
Joseph Lady is usually referred to as the father of
American vertebrate paleontology, and in the Cope and Marsh bone wars,
which are covered by previous hosts of this podcast. In
an episode UH, it was actually Lady who backed up
Marsh in his assertion that Cope had placed the head
of Elasmosaurus plate us on the wrong end of the skeleton.
(04:24):
This was a particularly painful episode because Lady had actually
been Cope's mentor, so for him to be the one
that actually validated criticism of him was quite a drama.
But that's just in case you're recognizing that name and
it's ringing a bell, that was who he was. So
you may at this point, in addition to stumbling over
the ethics of effectively stealing these bodies, wondering how in
(04:48):
the world does the body turn into soap? And these
two soap bodies are definitely not the only specimens to
exhibit this very weird waxy transformation. In Paris, in the
late seven hundreds, bodies of children were exhumed from the
Cemetery of Innocence to be moved into a space that
would later become the Paris Catacombs. And this is sort
of the first point on record where we have people
(05:11):
noting this condition. Uh. Scientists Antoine for Quax and Michel
Tourre were on hand to study those bodies during the exhamation. Uh.
They were there because they had an opportunity to study decomposition,
and they noticed that several of them were covered in
a waxy substance. And this pair is actually credited with
naming this substance at a puss air, and that comes
(05:33):
from the Latin root words adepts, or you'll hear at
a pose for fat and sarah, which is wax adipus
their forms as part of decomposition, but it doesn't typically happen.
Most bodies don't do this at all. It requires specific conditions,
usually a moist alkaline environment, and as the decomposition progresses,
(05:56):
the body's fat slowly turns into this soap like substance.
The corpse wax is sometimes called starts off soft, kind
of like a paste or a petty, but it hardens
over time into something more like hard wax or damp mortar.
And this process is called suppontification, and it actually stops
(06:16):
the decay process. Is it slowly encases the body with
wax and shuts out the oxygen that's needed for normal decomposition.
It happens most successfully when a corpse's body fat is
exposed to anaerobic bacteria. It can happen in damp soil
or water, so long as the environment is low on oxygen.
One of the really fascinating things about suppontification is that
(06:38):
it can happen pretty rapidly in terms of a body.
It's been documented in observed research settings that's happening even
within a few days, although it can stretch into more
than a year. In some testing that was done with
pig cadavers, the process actually started within hours. Warm water
seems to hasten the process, and while it does continue
(06:59):
in cold water, it just does so at a slower pace.
For a body to be completely transformed by the process
rather than just the fatty tissues takes about two years,
and in some cases adapos air formation has been found
in dry environments, but that definitely appears to be the
exception rather than the rule, and in those cases, it's
(07:21):
the moisture of the body itself that kind of provides
the ideal conditions for these anaerobic bacteria, and it's been
documented in bodies that have been embalmed as well as
those that have not. Uh. It is most common in
cases of people with high body fat, which sort of
makes sense, and within a given corpse, it tends to form. Again,
this is pretty logical, most commonly in areas where the
(07:44):
body fat is concentrated, So if someone carries a lot
of their body fat in their abdomen, that's where it's
going to be, Versus if someone carries it in their hips,
that's where it will really start forming in the largest proportion.
One of the major problems of adiposser is that it
preserved bodies and slows normal decomposition, which makes it hard
to determine just how long the corpse has been dead.
(08:07):
And because it tends to persist once it's formed, the
adapassir can just preserve a canaver almost indefinitely. And in
the case of Soap Lady and her companion Soapman, although
it does not appear that they were actual companions, just
that they were found in the same graveyard, their caskets
had allowed water to seep in and sort of work
its way in and provide the perfect environment for this
(08:28):
process to take place. And as we've just mentioned, this
also made it really tricky for researchers to identify when
each of them had passed. And before we kind of
get into some of the research and study that's been
done there, do you want to pause for a brief
word from a sponsor, let's do that. So the early
(08:54):
story on Soap Lady was that she had been an elderly,
uh potentially obese woman who had died in seven in
two from yellow fever. There was a big outbreak of
yellow fever in the area during that year. The story
persisted actually for a long time until around the nineteen eighties,
and at that point a team of researchers, which included
Gerald J. Con Looge, who was a radiographer at the time.
(09:16):
He is now a professor of diagnostic imaging at uh
Canipiac University and his two student assistants came and they
did some interesting study of the body. They took X
rays and that really changed the soap Ladies story significantly.
The images revealed that she was definitely not elderly when
she died. She was younger than forty uh and they
(09:38):
were also able to determine that she had been, in
fact a solid, diminutive woman. She was short, her skeleton,
though appeared healthy uh and it did appear that she
had a kidney stone or a gall stone because they
noticed some calcification points in the abdomen. Additionally, they discovered
a number of straight pins and two copper alloy buttons
on her body. These discovery has really shifted the time
(10:01):
of her death much later to have the straight pins,
which were found at her head were believed to have
held a chin strap so that her mouth didn't droop
open before she was buried, and several other straight pins
were found lower on her body and they're believed to
have held a shroud in place. And these pins that
the team found were the same as those that were
(10:21):
manufactured in England in the eighteen twenties. I also read
that they started being manufactured in the US in the
eighteen thirties, so Soap Lady could not have died in
the seventeen hundreds at this point. Her cause of death, however,
remains a mystery. The two buttons were also a type
that was commonly used in the eighteen hundreds, and they
were positioned in such a way that they were probably
(10:43):
closing the sleeves on her clothing at the wrist. These
pieces of evidence really helped the researchers estimate her death
as being sometime in the eighteen thirties, and then uh
in two thousand and eight, so fairly recently, the Moodor
Museum hosted forensic experts and radiographers to study the Soap
Lady once again, and in fact, that original team that
had studied her in the eighties came back and were
(11:05):
part of this. So at this point she was removed
from her plexiglass display and casement, and she was examined.
I read one newspaper report that said she's getting her
physical like they said it kind of glibly. X rays
were carefully taken, they did like polaroid X rays, and
they assembled them right there on the spot so that
researchers could look at her skeleton and its entirety next
(11:26):
to the actual body. They also took digital X rays
for later development, and they removed some hair so they
could perform toxicology tests. And analysis of the work that
was done with Soap Lady in the two thousands has
led to the conclusion that she may have been even
younger than was previously estimated. She could have even been
as young as in her twenties. They're guessing late twenties.
(11:48):
But she's still Oh, we don't have all the details
on her story. We're still figuring it out. So Man
has also been studied by scientists at his home in
the Smithsonian collection since he was acquired and inteen fifty eight.
It's believed that he was in his forties when he died,
which is estimated to have been sometime between eighteen hundred
and eighteen ten, and Soapman is about five ft nine.
(12:11):
He's still wearing his stockings, which always seems to come
up in descriptions of him, which is kind of charming, uh,
And much like Soap Lady. He was originally believed to
have been buried in the seventeen hundreds, and they similarly
had some confusion about his age guestimate. It was estimated
that he was about sixty three at that point, prior
to the additional research that put him more in his forties.
(12:33):
And while he may have died of yellow fever, they're
not positive. They do not think it happened during the
sev epidemic that they had attributed both of their deaths
to initially. Now we're going to move on to some
other similar bodies. In nine six a soap mummy was
found decapitated and fully covered by adapasair, and this was
(12:55):
floating in Lake Brien's in Switzerland. The body was nicknamed
n Z and it was really a mystery for fifteen years.
While some of the body had decomposed, most of the
trunk was sealed up in adapass air, and consequently the
soft tissues of his heart's, stomach, and intestinal tract were
all really well preserved. And in twleven researchers from the
(13:17):
University of Zurich finally determined, based on algae findings in
his bone marrow, that brin Z had drowned in the
lake in the seventeen hundreds and that he had slowly
turned to soap after he settled into sort of a
sediment grave on the bottom of this body of water,
and he just sat there quietly. You know, the sediment
had compacted so much that oxygen wasn't getting in. But
(13:38):
an earthquake eventually dislodged him from the lake bed, and
that is how he came to the surface where he
was discovered. In nine forty a pretty grisly it suppontification
discovery was made in Washington State, an Olympic National Park,
a woman's body was found on Lake Crescent, and in
this case, the body had clearly been dumped. The woman
(14:00):
had been rolled up in blankets and then tied with
a rope, and her face had decomposed to the point
that it couldn't be identified, but the rest of her
body had turned to this waxy substance, and a medical
student that had examined the body once it was taken
to Poor Angelus had described it as being very similar
to ivory soap. The body was eventually idd as Hallie Illingworth,
(14:22):
who had gone missing three years earlier, and ultimately Hallie's husband,
Monty Illingworth, was found guilty of her murder. Yeah, and
that one's kind of interesting because it does point out
sort of I know, when I started researching this, I
was thinking, this must be a process that takes a
really long time. But she had vanished in seven and
(14:43):
was found just three years later completely encased. So uh,
in addition to the scientific research done, that's kind of
an easy case study that shows, you know, in natural
non lab conditions, three years can completely in case the
whole whole corpse. In eight, the body of a young
boy was found in a sarcophagus from the late Roman
(15:04):
era in the city of Man's, Germany, and this had
a coding of what scientists have described as quote a
puff pastry like substance assumed to be adapas air. And
this particular cadaver is unique in that it was in
an area with fluctuating groundwater levels. So this means that
in some periods of time, conditions were conducive to adapass
air development and in other periods of time. Uh, they
(15:27):
were not, and they enabled the boy's corpse to actually decay.
But scientists point to this find as significant because even
with these fluctuating environmental factors, the adipos air has persisted
for roughly sixteen hundred years. Before we get to a
very modern problem, Uh about adipus air. Do you want
(15:47):
to pause and have a word from a sponsor. Let's
do that. So I mentioned this for our sponsor break
that there are many, many instances of adapasa appearing on corpses.
Some are famous, some are not. But it is a
very modern issue and it's actually causing a very real
(16:10):
problem in Germany. Some cemeteries actually recycle their space, but
adapas air formation is creating a real challenge when it
comes to that practice. Normally, plots and cemeteries that practice
recycling are exhumed for reuse after fifteen to twenty five years,
long enough in good conditions for the full decomposition process
(16:33):
to have taken place, leaving only skeletal remains. In Germany
isn't the only place that's done this, but there have
been a lot of studies done around that. So it's
one of those cultural things where I When I have
told people about this, they get really weird and it's like, well,
we have finite space on the Earth and seemingly infinite
people happening, So something has to be done to kind
(16:54):
of manage this um. But because of damp conditions and
high clay content of many of the very sites, like
a lot of these cemeteries were just not placed on
ideal ground, bodies are not decomposing properly, and that means
that graves can't be recycled, and there's sort of this
whole research effort happening trying to fix this problem. Swiss
(17:14):
scientists began a project in two thousand eight to try
to solve the problem by introducing a reconditioning system into
the soil. But the problematic element to that solution is
that there has to be a place where they can
create auxiliary graves to be dug for these corpses that
are covered with adapas are like, they can't They can
recondition the soil, but they still have to put these
(17:35):
bodies somewhere. Some cities opted instead to purchase water tight
burial chambers, and in some cases private citizens have purchased
their own these tombs offer up environments where decomposition can
happen the way it normally should without the conditions that
promote that promote the development of adapas air. However, and
(17:55):
an initial examination of some of these chambers actually revealed
a different problem. The absolute absence of moisture has led
to corpse is mommifying rather than decomposing. So filters have
been added to some of the crypt models in the
hope of creating a more perfect afterlife environment to promote
proper decay. Another solution that is also a Swiss brainchild
(18:17):
is a fungal product that is intended to accelerate decomposition
of wooden coffins. And I uh read about this in
an article in Spiegel online, and this was in two
thousand and eight, and I did not really find later
information on how successful that is or is not, So
we don't really know if that's worked yet. It's still only,
(18:37):
you know, seven years after the fact. It may be
hard to tell. Um. Other approaches to kind of advancing
the science of decomposing bodies are being explored. H There
are companies cropping up that offer woodland burials like under
a tree or their luxury cemeteries that are designed to
feel more like park spaces, and in those cases, uh,
(19:00):
the ones that I read about in Germany, there is
an option to have a not recycled grave so that
if the family wishes, they can keep you in that
plot forever. I think they have to pay like an
annual fee. I'm not entirely clear on the economics of it,
but it's an option now to kind of skip over
this whole recycling issue. And and that's soap people. It's
(19:23):
probably fascinating. It is strange and fascinating. It is probably
no uh surprise to people who have maybe watched Fight
Club or read other things that you know, fat and
soap are connected. One of my friends that I was
talking to so didn't isn't this how they discovered that
body fat could be used as a cleaning agent? And
I was like, not this specifically. It's sort of like
(19:44):
the difference between using a wheat based flour to bake
a cake and a cake spontaneously forming in a field
of wheat. You can you can use fat in the
soap making process, but for soap to just form on
its own is a full other thing that requires all
lot of very specific scenarios and conditions well, and the
(20:05):
possibly apocryphal story of how soap was discovered was people
doing their laundry downstream from a place where bodies are
being burned for sacrifice, and so correct the ash and
the the fat and all of that we're mixing together
and flowing into the water. It's possibly apocryphal, but more
(20:26):
believable than it being from adapas there right, So, yeah,
it's they're they're connected in terms of chemistry, but it's
not quite the same situation. Uh, this completely fascinates me.
Admittedly I have a taste for the macab especially when
it involves science. But yeah, it's very fascinating, does the
(20:47):
idea that you could turn to soap. Thank you so
much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have
heard an email at or U or a Facebook you
are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at History podcast
(21:09):
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History. And
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
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to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
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(21:30):
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. Today we are going back to an
episode that did not come out in October, but it
definitely could have. It's our apisode about the soap Lady,
who is part of the Mooder Museum collection, as well
as other famous corpses that suppotified as they decomposed. And
it is also connected to an episode that is coming
(00:23):
out in a few days, but we're going to keep
the exact topic of that one a surprise. So enjoyed
this and we'll see you back here in a couple
of days. I feel free to send us guesses if
you want, and in the meantime, enjoy Welcome to Stuff
You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:48):
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy View Wilson. And today's
episode is going to be a little bit of a
springtime macob. It's got all the classics, you've got some
unidentified corpses which are being strange characteristics. There's a little
bit of science in there, some modern issues associated with
this science. And we're even gonna have a cameo from
(01:08):
a famed paleontologist and we're actually titling the episode The
Lady Who Turned to Soap, but we're actually going to
talk about a few different corpses that have been found
covered in some degree of a substance, which is sometimes
called grave wax. This story, as we're telling it today,
starts in eighteen seventy five, and at that point a
city improvement project in Philadelphia unearthed a unique find. Uh.
(01:33):
This project involved the exhumation of a cemetery, and it
was the thing that they had to do in order
to get the project done. Yeah, and I've read different
accounts of what that project may have been. Some say
they were trying to build a train platform and it
was gonna take up some of they needed some of
the space that the cemetery occupied, and others are like, no,
it was a widening of streets. So I don't have
(01:54):
a concrete definitive on what the public works project was.
But two of the bodies that were exhumed as they
were trying to move this portion of the cemetery exhibited
this really distinctive characteristic. They had turned to a substance
that appeared very much like soap. A professor of anatomy
at the University of Pennsylvania named Joseph. Lady was very
(02:16):
excited about this discovery, and he shared this news with
his friend and colleague, William Hunt. In Hunt wrote an
article for the Public Ledger which described ladies intense enthusiasm
over this specimen, and according to Hunt, lady told him quote,
they have been buried for nearly a hundred years, nobody
(02:38):
claims them, and they would be rare and instructive additions
to our collections. Hunt's account described his visit with Lady
to the cemetery to speak to a superintendent in the
hopes of acquiring the bodies for the College of Medicine.
After making a number of comments about the violation of
the grave and appearing to shut this mission mission down,
(02:59):
the semi terry superintendent finally told the duo quote, I
tell you what I do. I give the bodies up
to the order of relatives. And so the pair left
the cemetery and Lady had taken the superintendent's comment as
a hint, and so he went out and he hired
a furniture wagon, and he sent a driver with the
(03:19):
furniture wagon with a note that the bodies were the
grandparents of the wagon driver's employer and asked that they
be released to the driver. And so that same cemetery
worker who had dropped this hint to Lady that relatives
could collect bodies, sent the deceased on their way in
the furniture wagon. Documents in the Mooder Museum indicate that
(03:40):
Lady paid seven dollars and fifty cents for each of
these bodies. The Mooder Museum, which is part of the
College of Medicine, kept the soap Lady, but the Soapman
eventually went to the Smithsonian Institution as part of the
National Museum of Natural History. And now, just to acknowledge
his MEO, you may recognize the name Lady. So Dr
(04:03):
Joseph Lady is usually referred to as the father of
American vertebrate paleontology, and in the Cope and Marsh bone wars,
which are covered by previous hosts of this podcast. In
an episode UH, it was actually Lady who backed up
Marsh in his assertion that Cope had placed the head
of Elasmosaurus plate us on the wrong end of the skeleton.
(04:24):
This was a particularly painful episode because Lady had actually
been Cope's mentor, so for him to be the one
that actually validated criticism of him was quite a drama.
But that's just in case you're recognizing that name and
it's ringing a bell, that was who he was. So
you may at this point, in addition to stumbling over
the ethics of effectively stealing these bodies, wondering how in
(04:48):
the world does the body turn into soap? And these
two soap bodies are definitely not the only specimens to
exhibit this very weird waxy transformation. In Paris, in the
late seven hundreds, bodies of children were exhumed from the
Cemetery of Innocence to be moved into a space that
would later become the Paris Catacombs. And this is sort
of the first point on record where we have people
(05:11):
noting this condition. Uh. Scientists Antoine for Quax and Michel
Tourre were on hand to study those bodies during the exhamation. Uh.
They were there because they had an opportunity to study decomposition,
and they noticed that several of them were covered in
a waxy substance. And this pair is actually credited with
naming this substance at a puss air, and that comes
(05:33):
from the Latin root words adepts, or you'll hear at
a pose for fat and sarah, which is wax adipus
their forms as part of decomposition, but it doesn't typically happen.
Most bodies don't do this at all. It requires specific conditions,
usually a moist alkaline environment, and as the decomposition progresses,
(05:56):
the body's fat slowly turns into this soap like substance.
The corpse wax is sometimes called starts off soft, kind
of like a paste or a petty, but it hardens
over time into something more like hard wax or damp mortar.
And this process is called suppontification, and it actually stops
(06:16):
the decay process. Is it slowly encases the body with
wax and shuts out the oxygen that's needed for normal decomposition.
It happens most successfully when a corpse's body fat is
exposed to anaerobic bacteria. It can happen in damp soil
or water, so long as the environment is low on oxygen.
One of the really fascinating things about suppontification is that
(06:38):
it can happen pretty rapidly in terms of a body.
It's been documented in observed research settings that's happening even
within a few days, although it can stretch into more
than a year. In some testing that was done with
pig cadavers, the process actually started within hours. Warm water
seems to hasten the process, and while it does continue
(06:59):
in cold water, it just does so at a slower pace.
For a body to be completely transformed by the process
rather than just the fatty tissues takes about two years,
and in some cases adapos air formation has been found
in dry environments, but that definitely appears to be the
exception rather than the rule, and in those cases, it's
(07:21):
the moisture of the body itself that kind of provides
the ideal conditions for these anaerobic bacteria, and it's been
documented in bodies that have been embalmed as well as
those that have not. Uh. It is most common in
cases of people with high body fat, which sort of
makes sense, and within a given corpse, it tends to form. Again,
this is pretty logical, most commonly in areas where the
(07:44):
body fat is concentrated, So if someone carries a lot
of their body fat in their abdomen, that's where it's
going to be, Versus if someone carries it in their hips,
that's where it will really start forming in the largest proportion.
One of the major problems of adiposser is that it
preserved bodies and slows normal decomposition, which makes it hard
to determine just how long the corpse has been dead.
(08:07):
And because it tends to persist once it's formed, the
adapassir can just preserve a canaver almost indefinitely. And in
the case of Soap Lady and her companion Soapman, although
it does not appear that they were actual companions, just
that they were found in the same graveyard, their caskets
had allowed water to seep in and sort of work
its way in and provide the perfect environment for this
(08:28):
process to take place. And as we've just mentioned, this
also made it really tricky for researchers to identify when
each of them had passed. And before we kind of
get into some of the research and study that's been
done there, do you want to pause for a brief
word from a sponsor, let's do that. So the early
(08:54):
story on Soap Lady was that she had been an elderly,
uh potentially obese woman who had died in seven in
two from yellow fever. There was a big outbreak of
yellow fever in the area during that year. The story
persisted actually for a long time until around the nineteen eighties,
and at that point a team of researchers, which included
Gerald J. Con Looge, who was a radiographer at the time.
(09:16):
He is now a professor of diagnostic imaging at uh
Canipiac University and his two student assistants came and they
did some interesting study of the body. They took X
rays and that really changed the soap Ladies story significantly.
The images revealed that she was definitely not elderly when
she died. She was younger than forty uh and they
(09:38):
were also able to determine that she had been, in
fact a solid, diminutive woman. She was short, her skeleton,
though appeared healthy uh and it did appear that she
had a kidney stone or a gall stone because they
noticed some calcification points in the abdomen. Additionally, they discovered
a number of straight pins and two copper alloy buttons
on her body. These discovery has really shifted the time
(10:01):
of her death much later to have the straight pins,
which were found at her head were believed to have
held a chin strap so that her mouth didn't droop
open before she was buried, and several other straight pins
were found lower on her body and they're believed to
have held a shroud in place. And these pins that
the team found were the same as those that were
(10:21):
manufactured in England in the eighteen twenties. I also read
that they started being manufactured in the US in the
eighteen thirties, so Soap Lady could not have died in
the seventeen hundreds at this point. Her cause of death, however,
remains a mystery. The two buttons were also a type
that was commonly used in the eighteen hundreds, and they
were positioned in such a way that they were probably
(10:43):
closing the sleeves on her clothing at the wrist. These
pieces of evidence really helped the researchers estimate her death
as being sometime in the eighteen thirties, and then uh
in two thousand and eight, so fairly recently, the Moodor
Museum hosted forensic experts and radiographers to study the Soap
Lady once again, and in fact, that original team that
had studied her in the eighties came back and were
(11:05):
part of this. So at this point she was removed
from her plexiglass display and casement, and she was examined.
I read one newspaper report that said she's getting her
physical like they said it kind of glibly. X rays
were carefully taken, they did like polaroid X rays, and
they assembled them right there on the spot so that
researchers could look at her skeleton and its entirety next
(11:26):
to the actual body. They also took digital X rays
for later development, and they removed some hair so they
could perform toxicology tests. And analysis of the work that
was done with Soap Lady in the two thousands has
led to the conclusion that she may have been even
younger than was previously estimated. She could have even been
as young as in her twenties. They're guessing late twenties.
(11:48):
But she's still Oh, we don't have all the details
on her story. We're still figuring it out. So Man
has also been studied by scientists at his home in
the Smithsonian collection since he was acquired and inteen fifty eight.
It's believed that he was in his forties when he died,
which is estimated to have been sometime between eighteen hundred
and eighteen ten, and Soapman is about five ft nine.
(12:11):
He's still wearing his stockings, which always seems to come
up in descriptions of him, which is kind of charming, uh,
And much like Soap Lady. He was originally believed to
have been buried in the seventeen hundreds, and they similarly
had some confusion about his age guestimate. It was estimated
that he was about sixty three at that point, prior
to the additional research that put him more in his forties.
(12:33):
And while he may have died of yellow fever, they're
not positive. They do not think it happened during the
sev epidemic that they had attributed both of their deaths
to initially. Now we're going to move on to some
other similar bodies. In nine six a soap mummy was
found decapitated and fully covered by adapasair, and this was
(12:55):
floating in Lake Brien's in Switzerland. The body was nicknamed
n Z and it was really a mystery for fifteen years.
While some of the body had decomposed, most of the
trunk was sealed up in adapass air, and consequently the
soft tissues of his heart's, stomach, and intestinal tract were
all really well preserved. And in twleven researchers from the
(13:17):
University of Zurich finally determined, based on algae findings in
his bone marrow, that brin Z had drowned in the
lake in the seventeen hundreds and that he had slowly
turned to soap after he settled into sort of a
sediment grave on the bottom of this body of water,
and he just sat there quietly. You know, the sediment
had compacted so much that oxygen wasn't getting in. But
(13:38):
an earthquake eventually dislodged him from the lake bed, and
that is how he came to the surface where he
was discovered. In nine forty a pretty grisly it suppontification
discovery was made in Washington State, an Olympic National Park,
a woman's body was found on Lake Crescent, and in
this case, the body had clearly been dumped. The woman
(14:00):
had been rolled up in blankets and then tied with
a rope, and her face had decomposed to the point
that it couldn't be identified, but the rest of her
body had turned to this waxy substance, and a medical
student that had examined the body once it was taken
to Poor Angelus had described it as being very similar
to ivory soap. The body was eventually idd as Hallie Illingworth,
(14:22):
who had gone missing three years earlier, and ultimately Hallie's husband,
Monty Illingworth, was found guilty of her murder. Yeah, and
that one's kind of interesting because it does point out
sort of I know, when I started researching this, I
was thinking, this must be a process that takes a
really long time. But she had vanished in seven and
(14:43):
was found just three years later completely encased. So uh,
in addition to the scientific research done, that's kind of
an easy case study that shows, you know, in natural
non lab conditions, three years can completely in case the
whole whole corpse. In eight, the body of a young
boy was found in a sarcophagus from the late Roman
(15:04):
era in the city of Man's, Germany, and this had
a coding of what scientists have described as quote a
puff pastry like substance assumed to be adapas air. And
this particular cadaver is unique in that it was in
an area with fluctuating groundwater levels. So this means that
in some periods of time, conditions were conducive to adapass
air development and in other periods of time. Uh, they
(15:27):
were not, and they enabled the boy's corpse to actually decay.
But scientists point to this find as significant because even
with these fluctuating environmental factors, the adipos air has persisted
for roughly sixteen hundred years. Before we get to a
very modern problem, Uh about adipus air. Do you want
(15:47):
to pause and have a word from a sponsor. Let's
do that. So I mentioned this for our sponsor break
that there are many, many instances of adapasa appearing on corpses.
Some are famous, some are not. But it is a
very modern issue and it's actually causing a very real
(16:10):
problem in Germany. Some cemeteries actually recycle their space, but
adapas air formation is creating a real challenge when it
comes to that practice. Normally, plots and cemeteries that practice
recycling are exhumed for reuse after fifteen to twenty five years,
long enough in good conditions for the full decomposition process
(16:33):
to have taken place, leaving only skeletal remains. In Germany
isn't the only place that's done this, but there have
been a lot of studies done around that. So it's
one of those cultural things where I When I have
told people about this, they get really weird and it's like, well,
we have finite space on the Earth and seemingly infinite
people happening, So something has to be done to kind
(16:54):
of manage this um. But because of damp conditions and
high clay content of many of the very sites, like
a lot of these cemeteries were just not placed on
ideal ground, bodies are not decomposing properly, and that means
that graves can't be recycled, and there's sort of this
whole research effort happening trying to fix this problem. Swiss
(17:14):
scientists began a project in two thousand eight to try
to solve the problem by introducing a reconditioning system into
the soil. But the problematic element to that solution is
that there has to be a place where they can
create auxiliary graves to be dug for these corpses that
are covered with adapas are like, they can't They can
recondition the soil, but they still have to put these
(17:35):
bodies somewhere. Some cities opted instead to purchase water tight
burial chambers, and in some cases private citizens have purchased
their own these tombs offer up environments where decomposition can
happen the way it normally should without the conditions that
promote that promote the development of adapas air. However, and
(17:55):
an initial examination of some of these chambers actually revealed
a different problem. The absolute absence of moisture has led
to corpse is mommifying rather than decomposing. So filters have
been added to some of the crypt models in the
hope of creating a more perfect afterlife environment to promote
proper decay. Another solution that is also a Swiss brainchild
(18:17):
is a fungal product that is intended to accelerate decomposition
of wooden coffins. And I uh read about this in
an article in Spiegel online, and this was in two
thousand and eight, and I did not really find later
information on how successful that is or is not, So
we don't really know if that's worked yet. It's still only,
(18:37):
you know, seven years after the fact. It may be
hard to tell. Um. Other approaches to kind of advancing
the science of decomposing bodies are being explored. H There
are companies cropping up that offer woodland burials like under
a tree or their luxury cemeteries that are designed to
feel more like park spaces, and in those cases, uh,
(19:00):
the ones that I read about in Germany, there is
an option to have a not recycled grave so that
if the family wishes, they can keep you in that
plot forever. I think they have to pay like an
annual fee. I'm not entirely clear on the economics of it,
but it's an option now to kind of skip over
this whole recycling issue. And and that's soap people. It's
(19:23):
probably fascinating. It is strange and fascinating. It is probably
no uh surprise to people who have maybe watched Fight
Club or read other things that you know, fat and
soap are connected. One of my friends that I was
talking to so didn't isn't this how they discovered that
body fat could be used as a cleaning agent? And
I was like, not this specifically. It's sort of like
(19:44):
the difference between using a wheat based flour to bake
a cake and a cake spontaneously forming in a field
of wheat. You can you can use fat in the
soap making process, but for soap to just form on
its own is a full other thing that requires all
lot of very specific scenarios and conditions well, and the
(20:05):
possibly apocryphal story of how soap was discovered was people
doing their laundry downstream from a place where bodies are
being burned for sacrifice, and so correct the ash and
the the fat and all of that we're mixing together
and flowing into the water. It's possibly apocryphal, but more
(20:26):
believable than it being from adapas there right, So, yeah,
it's they're they're connected in terms of chemistry, but it's
not quite the same situation. Uh, this completely fascinates me.
Admittedly I have a taste for the macab especially when
it involves science. But yeah, it's very fascinating, does the
(20:47):
idea that you could turn to soap. Thank you so
much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have
heard an email at or U or a Facebook you
are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at History podcast
(21:09):
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History. And
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
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