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FILE 125 · VOL XX · The Dead Are Still Working
You Paid to See Real Human Bodies at the Museum. Nobody Knew Who They Were.
The sign said the bodies were unclaimed. Someone came to claim them.
Based on: The Bodies Exhibition
Intake record
| Recovered from | Shipping crate for a traveling anatomy exhibit, warehouse in Ontario, California |
|---|---|
| Contents | A specimen inventory with 22 numbers crossed out, an exhibit guard's shift log, a visitor comment card in Mandarin, a 2008 legal settlement |
| Finder | Kevin Liang, exhibit installation technician |
| Status | The exhibit and the 2008 settlement are documented. The comment card is not. |
Recovered file
In the early 2000s, a new kind of museum show went on tour. It displayed real human bodies, stripped of skin, preserved, and posed. A man playing basketball, his muscles exposed. A woman standing, her nerves spread out like a tree. Slices of a brain. Lungs blackened by smoking. A fetus at different stages. [1]
The bodies were preserved with a process called plastination, invented in Germany in 1977. Water and fat in the tissue are replaced with plastic. The body becomes dry, odorless and almost permanent. [1]
Millions of people paid to see them. Schools brought students. It was science, and it was art, and it was very, very popular. [1]
There were several competing shows. One of them, called Bodies... The Exhibition, was run by a company in Atlanta. Its bodies came from China. [2]
In 2008, the attorney general of New York investigated where they came from. [2]
The company had said the bodies were unclaimed people who had died in China. But it could not show that any of them had agreed to be displayed. The bodies had been supplied by Chinese police. The investigation found that the company could not prove they were not prisoners, including people who had been executed. [2]
The company signed a settlement with New York in May 2008. It agreed to post signs at the exhibit telling visitors that it could not independently verify that the bodies were not those of people who had been tortured or executed in Chinese prisons. It agreed to offer refunds to anyone who had bought a ticket before that, and wanted their money back. [2]
The signs went up. The show went on. Many people still came. [2]
Around the same time, journalists reported that human rights groups had long raised concerns about China using executed prisoners as a source of organs and bodies. [3]
None of the people in the show have ever been identified.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 125 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.