The lady featured on this site volunteered to have a small underground camera installed in her casket, so the world can watch her decompose. Of course, in that environment it could take a decade or more, so I suppose it can be seen until the website disappears or the camera breaks.
I’m not sure what to think of this. It’s very creepy, but at the same time could be very educational for people in the forsensics field to study the real-time decomposition of a corpse in a sealed, buried casket, something you really can’t see happening otherwise.
I’ve always had a kind of fascination for forensics/anthropology, so I find it weirdly cool at the same time.
I think it’s her face that gets me creeped. It’s very haunting. According to the info on her she died young.
I was able to download the picture onto my home computer and Photoshop tells me it’s nothing more than an animated GIF, with one frame clear and one frame a little fuzzy so it looks like a camera refreshing.
Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble - but we are fighting ignorance here, right?
It’s a fascinating idea. Very “Vanitas” . You know, the Medieval paintings of young pretty women contemplating skulls ?
Yet, I doubt this site is real. I see a head-shot of a woman lying down, and she looks perfectly healthy to me, like she went asleep today. She doesn’t even have sunken eye-sockets.
There exists software that will automatically-create GIFs from vector input; I see no reason that there could not be a program to create GIFs from video input, especially at a low frame rate. Can common frame grabbers output in GIF?
Through Straight Dope I learned of the site rotten.com. I don’t provide a link because it is, obviously, totally not safe for work.
It shows shocking photo’s of people in accidents, war casualties, disfiguring diseases, etc. It features some photo’s of exhumated corpses, and warcasualties who have been dead a few days. They look very different from the cam-shot on the site in the OP.
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I find many of the pic’s on rotten.com fascinating. Yet that somehow seems perverse, something I should excuse myself for. I don’t agree.
I think it is perverse that on TV we DO get to see (and avidly watch) explosions, shootings, and dramatized killings; but we never get to see the real life result of those actions.
If anything, the pictures on the site make me feel pity for the fragility of the human body, and respect for every life that ended in the death the picture documents.
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Yes, it’s possible. Gif output is actually not very common, but it is certainly possible to capture frames and output them as .gifs.
That’s not what is happening here though; it’s an animated GIF, cycling endlessly between the same pair of frames, mocked up to make it look like live video. The site is fake.
Yikes! I thought that maybe if she had been embalmed well, it could have slowed down decomposition a lot (it often can for years) but…geez. An animated GIF?? That sucks. Thanks for the investigations!
Oh, and sorry I didn’t have a warning about the links - I didn’t even notice those till Patty O’Furniture mentioned it. I had my attention focused on the “cam”.
I’m dying of laughter here. It has long been a running joke (I HOPE a joke) that New & Improved Scott (my boyfriend) wants a closed circuit TV set up in his casket. I was so excited to think that someone beat him to it!
"The speed with which a body decomposes is unpredictable. It’s possible to preserve a corpse for extended periods, as in the case of a medical cadaver, but this requires a strong solution of embalming fluid, which results in a leathery, decidedly unlifelike appearance. Since the purpose of modern embalming–which is not required by law, incidentally–is simply to keep the body looking presentable for the wake, a dilute solution is used. This postpones decomposition for only a short time.
Under the most favorable circumstances, a body after six months in the grave would simply be discolored and possibly covered with mold. If the body has had the misfortune to have been sealed in an airtight metal casket, though, anaerobic bacteria–that is, those that thrive in an airless environment–will have had a chance to get to work, and the body will have putrefied, meaning it will be partially liquefied. The smell in such cases is indescribable. Simple wooden caskets, believe it or not, often result in more gradual decomposition."