- A coffin has 6 sides whilst a casket has just 4
- Only one in two billion people will live to be 116 or older!
- Cremation was only made legal in Britain in 1902 after 28 years of campaigning
- The oldest evidence of a cremation was found in 1969 and the remains were estimated to be almost 20,000 years old!
- Elephants and chimpanzees bury their dead by throwing leaves and branches on them
- For £45 an hour, there’s a UK company that hires out ‘Professional Mourners’
- When many people think about coffins, they imagine a casket that rests deep underground. Some communities hold a different view: they believe that coffins need to be close to the sky so that their dead can be closer to heaven. You can see this practice in minority groups from the Philippines as well as southern parts of China, where the deceased are placed in coffins and then left suspended from the sides of cliffs
- In 1992, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner purchased the crypt besides Marilyn Monroe at Westwood Village Cemetery for $75,000. He said ‘Spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up’
- Approximately 3 billion people (more than half the world’s population) viewed on TV or gathered in London for Princess Diana’s 1997 public funeral
21 June 2018