The Man Who Attended His Own Funeral to Test Who Really Cared

A 74-year-old veteran orchestrated an elaborate funeral procession for himself while alive, forcing an entire village to confront uncomfortable truths about love and loss.


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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
I'm Darren Marler and this is weird dark news. Muhan
Law from Bihar, India, wondered who'd show up at his funeral,
so at eight seventy four, he decided to find out.
October eleventh, twenty twenty five, the village of Kanchi and
Gaya District woke up to the sounds of death moving
through the streets. A band played a song I'm not

(00:32):
even going to try to pronounce, a melancholy song about
leaving this world behind. Mourners chanted Ramnam such a high
the traditional declaration that only God's name is truth. I'm
probably butchering that as well. A flower decorated buyer carried
what looked like a shrouded corpse through the narrow village lanes.
Hundreds of people stopped what they were doing. Neighbors emerged

(00:54):
from their homes, Relatives traveled in from surrounding villages. Some
genuinely wept. The bonnie wrapped in white cloth was Mohan Law,
and he was very much alive. The seventy four year
old retired Air Force officer lay perfectly still while his
entire community performed the rituals of mourning. Every detail matched

(01:14):
what they had seen are real funerals. The decorations, the chants,
the procession routes to the cremation ground. Nothing seemed off
at the cremation ground. Loll sat up. The shift from
grief to confusion to shock happened fast. People had just
carried this man to his own cremation. They'd wept for him.
Now he was looking back at them from the funeral buyer.

(01:37):
They burned a symbolic effigy instead while the music kept playing.
The ashes got immersed in the nearby river, completing the
ritual in every way except the actual death part. Then
Law organized a feasts for everyone who had attended. His
explanation was straightforward. He wanted to see how much attention
and respect people had for him while he could still
appreciate it. People mourn you after you're dead, he told reporters,

(02:00):
but rarely check on you beforehand. He wanted to experience
that outpouring of respect now, not posthumously. Seeing so many
people show up made him truly happy. Lall isn't some
eccentric pulling a stunt here. He's actually known throughout the
area as somebody who contributes to his community. He retired
from the Indian Air Force lost his wife fourteen years ago,

(02:22):
has two sons and a daughter. Lives with his extended
family in Kanchi, about thirty kilometers from the city of Gaya.
Got his education at the local high school. That cremation
ground where his mock funeral ended. He built it. Spent
six hundred thousand rupees of his own money roughly his
pension savings, to construct a proper mucddam for the village.
The reason was practical. During monsoon season, cremating bodies in

(02:46):
the area became nearly impossible. Traditional outdoor pires don't work
when everything is soaked. Families struggled, so Lall built the
facility with both traditional woodburning options and modern electric cremation
make sure funeral services could continue year round. Turns out,
this was the first time in Gaya district that someone

(03:06):
who built a mokki dam used a mock feuderal to
inaugurate it. A Killerstacur, a family member who attended said
Laul is a very social person. People came from villages
all around to pay their respects. Upendra Yadav, another villager,
called it a unique example of community spirit. The event
went viral across India on social media. The confusion came

(03:28):
from mixed reporting. Initial stories made it sound like vanity,
an old man needing validation faking death to count attendees.
The reality was more complex. Lall wanted to test affection, certainly,
but he also wanted to properly open the crematorium that
he had funded for his community. Two purposes in one
elaborate performance. In rural India, funerals are not private affairs.

(03:51):
Neighbors carry the coffin, Villagers recite prayers together. Everybody shares
food afterward. The collective participation matters. All staged all of
it while conscious, turning mourners into spectators while he watched
from the center of his own death ritual. There's something
universal in what Lall did, actually, the fear of being forgotten,

(04:12):
the need to know that you mattered, the desire to
feel appreciated in tangible, visible ways. Rural India's changing children
moved to cities for work. Elderly people sometimes feel invisible
even while alive. That question of would anybody come to
my funeral grows louder with age and isolation. Lall got
his answer. Hundreds showed up. They carried him. They wept.

(04:36):
They came when they thought that he was gone. Now
they know that he was watching the whole time. Whether
that knowledge changes anything when someone dies remains to be seen.
Lall proved people would show up for him, at least.
What he couldn't test was whether they would check on
him next week, or next month or next year, when
he's still breathing and might need something besides a funeral procession.

(04:58):
The crematoriums there are now ready for real deaths. The
feast is over. Life in conci goes on, and Mohan
Lal knows exactly how many people would attend his funeral.
If you'd like to read this story for yourself or
share the article with a friend, you can read it
on the Weird Darkness website. I've placed a link to
it in the episode description, and you can find more
stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange, and more, including

(05:21):
numerous stories that never make it to the podcast, at
Weirddarkness dot com slash news