Manchester mummy Hannah Beswick (8 photos)

The fear of being buried alive is not such a rare phobia. Such greats of this world as Chopin, Nobel, Renoir, Schopenhauer, Gogol and others suffered from taphophobia.





Therefore, ordinary citizens who are afraid of ending up alive in a coffin are all the more understandable. And the heroine of this story, Hannah, had real prerequisites for this: the woman’s brother John was indeed alive at his own burial.



Antoine Wirtz "Premature Burial"

Hannah Beswick (1688-1758) from Failsworth was a member of a wealthy family. And a witness to how her relative was almost buried alive. The doctor drew attention to the words of one of the participants in the funeral ceremony that the eyelids of the deceased were trembling. It turned out that John was alive, he was just in a lethargic sleep. After recovery, the man lived another long life.

Hannah was so impressed by this story with her brother that she asked Charles White, the same family doctor, to make sure that her mortal body, when the hour of death struck, was transported to the grave exclusively as a dead person, and not in any other form.



Mr. White was apparently a good doctor. But with his cockroaches: he was fond of collecting all sorts of curiosities, and actively studied such areas that were still in their infancy as pathological anatomy and obstetrics. And as a result, he fulfilled the will of the trustee, but in a very specific way.

When Hannah died, he decided to embalm the body, although there were no direct orders regarding this in the woman’s will. The doctor studied with one of the country's leading anatomists, William Hunter, and put the knowledge he gained into practice.



Dr. Charles White

As much blood as possible was removed from the body of the deceased, organs were removed, and the arteries and veins were filled with a mixture of turpentine and cinnabar. After all the manipulations, the cavity of the corpse was filled with camphor, saltpeter and resin, the outside was thoroughly rubbed with aromatic oils, and the box where the deceased Hannah was supposed to be located was filled with Parisian plaster.



It is clear that after all these manipulations, Beswick had no chance of waking up in the grave and rising from the dead. But the deceased did not end up in this very grave. There were rumors that after independently carrying out all the manipulations, the doctor appropriated the amount that the testator left for her funeral.

Whether this is true or not is no longer known after years have passed. Perhaps White's actions were dictated solely by scientific interest. For some time the body was in the house of one of the relatives, and then returned back to White in an unusual package, which was the case of a large wall clock.



Manchester Natural History Society Museum

When it was the doctor’s turn, and in 1813 White left this world, the case passed to another physician, Doctor Ollier. He, in turn, donated the body to the newly opened museum of the Manchester Natural History Society in 1828. The unusual exhibit, which the ministers did not use as part of the exhibition available to visitors, received the unofficial name of the Manchester Mummy. “The Lady in the Watch,” who was a respectable woman and a pious Christian and was only afraid of being buried alive, turned into a curiosity like the stuffed animals presented in the museum.



Wax figure of Hannah Beswick

As a result, not only ordinary citizens, but also high-ranking persons stood up to defend the rights of the long-deceased Hannah. In particular, the Minister of the Interior and the Bishop. Who had to legally prove the fact of the death of the “lady in the watch”, since the necessary documentation, in particular, a death certificate, was never completed. And legally, Hannah was still not dead.

After all the bureaucratic issues were sorted out, Beswick was finally declared dead. And the woman found her last refuge in the Manchester cemetery in the summer of 1868. 110 years have passed since the death of the woman on whom taphophobia played such a cruel joke.



Naturally, after the mummy was laid to rest in an unmarked grave, people began to see the ghost of Hannah en masse, walking in a black lace robe through the cemetery, the territory of the former estate and the house of Dr. White, because of whom the woman hung between life and death for more than a century. However, the ghost did not particularly bother anyone.

And who cares about calm beings in our age of high speeds, when life is not enough to put our own accumulated affairs in order?