April 13, 2015 • 23 mins
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 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's episode is
going to be a little bit of a springtime macab
It's got all the classics, You've got some unidentified corpses
(00:23):
which are exhibiting 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 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.
(00:47):
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. This project involved
the ex nation of a cemetery, and it was a
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
(01:09):
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 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
(01:33):
appeared very much like soap. A professor of anatomy at
the University of Pennsylvania named Joseph Lady was very 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
(01:54):
this specimen, and according to Hunt, Lady told him quote,
they have been very for nearly a hundred years, nobody
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.
(02:17):
After making a number of comments about the violation of
the grave and appearing to shut this mission mission down.
The cemetery 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,
(02:39):
and so he went out and he hired a furniture wagon,
and he sent a driver with the 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.
(03:02):
Documents in the Mooder Museum indicate that 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 cameo, you
(03:24):
may recognize the name Lady, so Dr 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 plat
(03:45):
urus on the wrong end of the skeleton. 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 it'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,
(04:05):
in addition to stumbling over the ethics of effectively stealing
these bodies, wondering how in 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 seventeen hundreds bodies of children
were exhumed from the Cemetery of Innocence to be moved
(04:28):
into a space that would later become the Paris Catacombs.
And this is sort of the first point on record
where we have people noting this condition. UH. Scientists Antoine
for Quax and Michel Tore 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
(04:49):
that several of them were covered in a waxy substance.
And this pair is actually credited with naming this substance
at a puss fair and that comes from the Latin
root words adepts or you'll hear adipose for fat and sarah,
which is wax adipus. There forms a part of decomposition,
but it doesn't typically happen. Most bodies don't do this
(05:12):
at all. It requires specific conditions, usually a moist alkaline environment,
and as the decomposition progresses, 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
(05:33):
like hard wax or damp mortar. And this process is
called supontification, and it actually stops 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.
(05:54):
It can happen in damp soil or water, so long
as the environment is low on oxygen. One are the
really fascinating things about suppontification is that it can happen
pretty rapidly in terms of a body. It's been documented
in observed research settings is happening even within a few days,
although it can stretch into more than a year. In
some testing that was done with pig davers, the process
(06:16):
actually started within hours. Warm water seems to hasten the process,
and while it does continue 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
adoposs air formation has been found in dry environments, but
(06:39):
that definitely appears to be the exception rather than the rule.
And then those cases it's 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 UH, and within
(07:01):
a given corpse, it tends to form. Again, this is
pretty logical, most commonly in areas where the 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 adipos there is that
(07:23):
it preserves bodies and slows normal decomposition, which makes it
hard to determine just how long the corpse has been dead.
And because it tends to persist once it's formed, the
adapas there can just preserve a cadaver almost indefinitely. And
in the case of soap Lady and her companion Soapman,
although it does not appear that they were actual companions,
(07:44):
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 process to take place, and as we just mentioned,
this also made it really tricky for researchers to identify
when each of them had passed before we kind of
get into some of the research and study that's been
(08:04):
done there. Do you want to pause for a brief
word from a sponsor, Let's do that. So the early
story on Soap Lady was that she had been an
elderly uh potentially obese woman who had died in sevent
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,
(08:26):
and at that point a team of researchers, which included
Gerald J. Conlogue, who was a radiographer at the time.
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.
(08:49):
The images revealed that she was definitely not elderly when
she died, she was younger than forty UH and they
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
(09:10):
a number of straight pins and two copper alloy buttons
on her body. These discoveries really shifted the time of
her death much later. Two 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
(09:30):
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 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
(09:51):
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 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 eight, so fairly recently, the Mooder Museum hosted
(10:13):
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 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,
(10:34):
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 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
(10:54):
Lady in the two thousands has led to the conclusion
that she may have been even younger than was previously
s aimated she could have even been as young as
in her twenties. They're guessing late twenties, 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
(11:15):
he was acquired in nineteen 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 Soap Man is about five foot nine. 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
(11:35):
been buried in the seventeen hundreds, and they similarly had
some confusion about his age gu estimate. It was estimated
that he was about sixty three at that point, prior
to the additional research that put him more in his forties,
and while he may have died of yellow fever, they're
not positive. They do not think it happened during the
sevent epidemic that they had attributed both of their deaths to. Initially,
(12:00):
Uh now we're going to move on to some other
similar bodies. In a soap mummy was found decapitated and
fully covered by adapas air, and this was floating in
Lake Brian's in Switzerland. The body was nicknamed brand Z
and it was really a mystery for fifteen years. While
some of the body had decomposed, most of the trunk
(12:22):
was sealed up in adipas air, and consequently the soft
tissues of his heart, stomach, and intestinal tract were all
really well preserved, and in eleven researchers from the University
of Zurich finally determined, based on algae findings in his
bone marrow, that Brands had drowned in the lake in
the seventeen hundreds and that he had slowly turned to
(12:43):
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 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 suppontification discovery was made
(13:06):
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 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
(13:28):
examined the body once it was taken to Port Angelus
had described it as being very similar to ivory soap.
The body was eventually ideate as Hallie Illingworth, 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 uh.
(13:51):
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 was found just
three is 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,
(14:11):
three years can completely in case the whole whole corps. Uh.
In the body of a young boy was found in
a sarcophagus from the late Roman 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
(14:31):
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 adipos air development, and in
other periods of time, Uh, they 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
(14:55):
hundred years. Before we get to a very modern problem,
uh about adapass air. You want to pause and have
a word from a sponsor. Let's do that. So I
mentioned this before our sponsor break that there are many,
many instances of adapasser appearing on corpses. Some are famous,
some are not. But it is a very modern issue
(15:17):
and it's actually causing a very real problem in Germany.
Some cemeteries actually recycle their space but adapass their 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
(15:38):
conditions for the full decomposition process 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,
(16:00):
So something has to be done to kind of manage
this um. But because of damp conditions and high clay
content of many of the burial 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 scientists began
(16:24):
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 bodies somewhere. Some
(16:46):
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 provoked that promote
the development of adapastair. However, and an initial examination of
some of these chambers actually revealed a different problem. The
(17:09):
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 is a fungal product
that is intended to accelerate decomposition of wooden coffins. And
(17:31):
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, you know, seven years
after the fact. It may be hard to tell. Um.
Other approaches to kind of advancing the science of decomposing
(17:54):
bodies are being explored. Uh. There are companies cropping up
that offer woodland bury like under a tree, or their
luxury cemeteries that are designed to feel more like park spaces.
And in those cases, at least the ones that I
read about in Germany, there is an option to have
a not recycled grave so that if the family wishes,
(18:16):
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. Uh.
And and that's soap people. It's probably fascinating. It is
(18:36):
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 it
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 the difference between
(18:57):
using a wheat based flour to bake a cake that
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 a lot of very specific
scenarios and conditions. Well, and the possibly apocryphal story of
(19:19):
how soap was discovered was people doing their laundry downstream
from a place where bodies were 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 believable than it being from
(19:40):
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. This the idea that you could turn soap. Uh.
(20:02):
I also have listener mail has nothing to do with
dead bodies. Uh. It is actually about our carousel episode,
and it is from our listener, Emmy. She says, I'm
a longtime listener and lurker, and I had to write
you as soon as I saw the title of today's
podcast because I am all about carousels. I have actually
even been on a velocipede carousel as one summer there
(20:23):
was an event on Governor's Island with a bunch of
hundred year old French carnival rides. They are indeed fun,
but do not ride in a short skirt. That sounds
like an amazing experience. By the way, if you want
to write us more about that, Emmy, feel free to
do so. When you mentioned the carousel with the civil
rights connection, I thought of my first. I thought first
of my childhood carousel in Glen Echo, Maryland. During the
(20:43):
Civil Rights movement, Glen Echo was still a working amusement
park and it was closed to black people. Students from
Howard University stage to sit in on the carousel in
the summer of nineteen sixty, which kicked off a chain
of events that led to the park's eventual integration the
following year. But this was long before my time, so
when I eventually learned about it while growing up in
the DC area, I was astounded that anybody wouldn't be
(21:05):
allowed to ride the carousel that has always been my
favorite place in the world. I love this. The lead
horse on the Glennaco carousel, which has a black naim
and roses around her neck, is my horse, Penny. I
named her when I was eight and now I'm thirty.
But I still come back every summer to visit, and
my very patient husband waves to me as I ride. Oh,
(21:28):
that's so much. It's the sweetest thing. So um and
Emmy thinks she is keeping the New York carousel scene
in business by buying tickets and making friends with wooden horses.
I love it so much. That's such a sweet story.
I have a carousel horse that I named at a
carousel I visit a lot. It is named Kobaud, So
I fully appreciate that. Emmy. I think it's awesome. If
(21:50):
you would like to write to us and share your
carousel horse story or anything else, you can do so
at History Podcast at houseto Works dot com. You can
visit us at Facebook dot com slash minst in history
at misst in history. On Twitter at miston history dot
tumbler dot com, on pinterest dot com slash missed in history.
They're gonna be some good soap body pictures going up
on Pinterest, and you can visit us at miss in
(22:13):
history dot spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to
buy some misst in history goodies for yourself or your
friends and loved ones. Uh. If you would like to
research a little bit more about what we talked about today,
you can go to our parents site, how stuff Works.
Type in the word decomposition in the search bar and
you will churn up. I think it's about third down,
usually an article called how body farms work. Uh. And
(22:34):
those are fascinating places where bodies are buried and then
studied to see how they decompose in various conditions. UH.
If you would like to visit us on the web,
you can do that at miss in history dot com.
We have an archive of all of our episodes, show
notes for all of the episodes that have aired since
Tracy and I became hosts, and an assortment of other goodies.
You should absolutely visit us there at misston history dot com.
(22:55):
And our parents site how Stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
has to have workstop cor
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's episode is
going to be a little bit of a springtime macab
It's got all the classics, You've got some unidentified corpses
(00:23):
which are exhibiting 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 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.
(00:47):
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. This project involved
the ex nation of a cemetery, and it was a
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
(01:09):
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 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
(01:33):
appeared very much like soap. A professor of anatomy at
the University of Pennsylvania named Joseph Lady was very 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
(01:54):
this specimen, and according to Hunt, Lady told him quote,
they have been very for nearly a hundred years, nobody
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.
(02:17):
After making a number of comments about the violation of
the grave and appearing to shut this mission mission down.
The cemetery 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,
(02:39):
and so he went out and he hired a furniture wagon,
and he sent a driver with the 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.
(03:02):
Documents in the Mooder Museum indicate that 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 cameo, you
(03:24):
may recognize the name Lady, so Dr 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 plat
(03:45):
urus on the wrong end of the skeleton. 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 it'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,
(04:05):
in addition to stumbling over the ethics of effectively stealing
these bodies, wondering how in 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 seventeen hundreds bodies of children
were exhumed from the Cemetery of Innocence to be moved
(04:28):
into a space that would later become the Paris Catacombs.
And this is sort of the first point on record
where we have people noting this condition. UH. Scientists Antoine
for Quax and Michel Tore 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
(04:49):
that several of them were covered in a waxy substance.
And this pair is actually credited with naming this substance
at a puss fair and that comes from the Latin
root words adepts or you'll hear adipose for fat and sarah,
which is wax adipus. There forms a part of decomposition,
but it doesn't typically happen. Most bodies don't do this
(05:12):
at all. It requires specific conditions, usually a moist alkaline environment,
and as the decomposition progresses, 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
(05:33):
like hard wax or damp mortar. And this process is
called supontification, and it actually stops 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.
(05:54):
It can happen in damp soil or water, so long
as the environment is low on oxygen. One are the
really fascinating things about suppontification is that it can happen
pretty rapidly in terms of a body. It's been documented
in observed research settings is happening even within a few days,
although it can stretch into more than a year. In
some testing that was done with pig davers, the process
(06:16):
actually started within hours. Warm water seems to hasten the process,
and while it does continue 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
adoposs air formation has been found in dry environments, but
(06:39):
that definitely appears to be the exception rather than the rule.
And then those cases it's 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 UH, and within
(07:01):
a given corpse, it tends to form. Again, this is
pretty logical, most commonly in areas where the 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 adipos there is that
(07:23):
it preserves bodies and slows normal decomposition, which makes it
hard to determine just how long the corpse has been dead.
And because it tends to persist once it's formed, the
adapas there can just preserve a cadaver almost indefinitely. And
in the case of soap Lady and her companion Soapman,
although it does not appear that they were actual companions,
(07:44):
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 process to take place, and as we just mentioned,
this also made it really tricky for researchers to identify
when each of them had passed before we kind of
get into some of the research and study that's been
(08:04):
done there. Do you want to pause for a brief
word from a sponsor, Let's do that. So the early
story on Soap Lady was that she had been an
elderly uh potentially obese woman who had died in sevent
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,
(08:26):
and at that point a team of researchers, which included
Gerald J. Conlogue, who was a radiographer at the time.
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.
(08:49):
The images revealed that she was definitely not elderly when
she died, she was younger than forty UH and they
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
(09:10):
a number of straight pins and two copper alloy buttons
on her body. These discoveries really shifted the time of
her death much later. Two 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
(09:30):
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 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
(09:51):
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 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 eight, so fairly recently, the Mooder Museum hosted
(10:13):
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 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,
(10:34):
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 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
(10:54):
Lady in the two thousands has led to the conclusion
that she may have been even younger than was previously
s aimated she could have even been as young as
in her twenties. They're guessing late twenties, 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
(11:15):
he was acquired in nineteen 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 Soap Man is about five foot nine. 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
(11:35):
been buried in the seventeen hundreds, and they similarly had
some confusion about his age gu estimate. It was estimated
that he was about sixty three at that point, prior
to the additional research that put him more in his forties,
and while he may have died of yellow fever, they're
not positive. They do not think it happened during the
sevent epidemic that they had attributed both of their deaths to. Initially,
(12:00):
Uh now we're going to move on to some other
similar bodies. In a soap mummy was found decapitated and
fully covered by adapas air, and this was floating in
Lake Brian's in Switzerland. The body was nicknamed brand Z
and it was really a mystery for fifteen years. While
some of the body had decomposed, most of the trunk
(12:22):
was sealed up in adipas air, and consequently the soft
tissues of his heart, stomach, and intestinal tract were all
really well preserved, and in eleven researchers from the University
of Zurich finally determined, based on algae findings in his
bone marrow, that Brands had drowned in the lake in
the seventeen hundreds and that he had slowly turned to
(12:43):
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 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 suppontification discovery was made
(13:06):
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 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
(13:28):
examined the body once it was taken to Port Angelus
had described it as being very similar to ivory soap.
The body was eventually ideate as Hallie Illingworth, 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 uh.
(13:51):
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 was found just
three is 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,
(14:11):
three years can completely in case the whole whole corps. Uh.
In the body of a young boy was found in
a sarcophagus from the late Roman 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
(14:31):
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 adipos air development, and in
other periods of time, Uh, they 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
(14:55):
hundred years. Before we get to a very modern problem,
uh about adapass air. You want to pause and have
a word from a sponsor. Let's do that. So I
mentioned this before our sponsor break that there are many,
many instances of adapasser appearing on corpses. Some are famous,
some are not. But it is a very modern issue
(15:17):
and it's actually causing a very real problem in Germany.
Some cemeteries actually recycle their space but adapass their 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
(15:38):
conditions for the full decomposition process 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,
(16:00):
So something has to be done to kind of manage
this um. But because of damp conditions and high clay
content of many of the burial 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 scientists began
(16:24):
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 bodies somewhere. Some
(16:46):
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 provoked that promote
the development of adapastair. However, and an initial examination of
some of these chambers actually revealed a different problem. The
(17:09):
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 is a fungal product
that is intended to accelerate decomposition of wooden coffins. And
(17:31):
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, you know, seven years
after the fact. It may be hard to tell. Um.
Other approaches to kind of advancing the science of decomposing
(17:54):
bodies are being explored. Uh. There are companies cropping up
that offer woodland bury like under a tree, or their
luxury cemeteries that are designed to feel more like park spaces.
And in those cases, at least the ones that I
read about in Germany, there is an option to have
a not recycled grave so that if the family wishes,
(18:16):
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. Uh.
And and that's soap people. It's probably fascinating. It is
(18:36):
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 it
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 the difference between
(18:57):
using a wheat based flour to bake a cake that
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 a lot of very specific
scenarios and conditions. Well, and the possibly apocryphal story of
(19:19):
how soap was discovered was people doing their laundry downstream
from a place where bodies were 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 believable than it being from
(19:40):
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. This the idea that you could turn soap. Uh.
(20:02):
I also have listener mail has nothing to do with
dead bodies. Uh. It is actually about our carousel episode,
and it is from our listener, Emmy. She says, I'm
a longtime listener and lurker, and I had to write
you as soon as I saw the title of today's
podcast because I am all about carousels. I have actually
even been on a velocipede carousel as one summer there
(20:23):
was an event on Governor's Island with a bunch of
hundred year old French carnival rides. They are indeed fun,
but do not ride in a short skirt. That sounds
like an amazing experience. By the way, if you want
to write us more about that, Emmy, feel free to
do so. When you mentioned the carousel with the civil
rights connection, I thought of my first. I thought first
of my childhood carousel in Glen Echo, Maryland. During the
(20:43):
Civil Rights movement, Glen Echo was still a working amusement
park and it was closed to black people. Students from
Howard University stage to sit in on the carousel in
the summer of nineteen sixty, which kicked off a chain
of events that led to the park's eventual integration the
following year. But this was long before my time, so
when I eventually learned about it while growing up in
the DC area, I was astounded that anybody wouldn't be
(21:05):
allowed to ride the carousel that has always been my
favorite place in the world. I love this. The lead
horse on the Glennaco carousel, which has a black naim
and roses around her neck, is my horse, Penny. I
named her when I was eight and now I'm thirty.
But I still come back every summer to visit, and
my very patient husband waves to me as I ride. Oh,
(21:28):
that's so much. It's the sweetest thing. So um and
Emmy thinks she is keeping the New York carousel scene
in business by buying tickets and making friends with wooden horses.
I love it so much. That's such a sweet story.
I have a carousel horse that I named at a
carousel I visit a lot. It is named Kobaud, So
I fully appreciate that. Emmy. I think it's awesome. If
(21:50):
you would like to write to us and share your
carousel horse story or anything else, you can do so
at History Podcast at houseto Works dot com. You can
visit us at Facebook dot com slash minst in history
at misst in history. On Twitter at miston history dot
tumbler dot com, on pinterest dot com slash missed in history.
They're gonna be some good soap body pictures going up
on Pinterest, and you can visit us at miss in
(22:13):
history dot spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to
buy some misst in history goodies for yourself or your
friends and loved ones. Uh. If you would like to
research a little bit more about what we talked about today,
you can go to our parents site, how stuff Works.
Type in the word decomposition in the search bar and
you will churn up. I think it's about third down,
usually an article called how body farms work. Uh. And
(22:34):
those are fascinating places where bodies are buried and then
studied to see how they decompose in various conditions. UH.
If you would like to visit us on the web,
you can do that at miss in history dot com.
We have an archive of all of our episodes, show
notes for all of the episodes that have aired since
Tracy and I became hosts, and an assortment of other goodies.
You should absolutely visit us there at misston history dot com.
(22:55):
And our parents site how Stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
has to have workstop cor
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Tracy Wilson
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