I first discovered death when I was four years old. My mother was going through my clothes, deciding what could be passed down to my brother and what could be given away. She did the same with my brother's clothes and when she went to put the items she'd decided to get rid of in a bag, my brother told her to keep them…
As the popular ensemble sitcom How I Met Your Mother draws near the end of its nine-season run, a downer of a fan theory is starting to look more and more feasible. The theory: The Mother has been dead this whole time. M. Night Shyamalan'd!
Multiple sources are reporting the awful news this Sunday that Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of Hollywood's most engaging actors, was found dead today in his Manhattan apartment of an apparent drug overdose.
A fortysomething woman in Montreal was killed this morning after her scarf got caught in the escalator at a train station. Holy fucking shit. An escalator strangled someone to death. I need to lie down.
Saddest: Firefighters say an 8-year-old boy who saved 6 people from an early morning fire in Penfield, New York lost his life while trying to save a 7th person — his disabled uncle.
Thanks to heavily lobbied-for changes to laws governing debt collection, student loans don't vanish after the loan holders declare bankruptcy. Nor do they vanish when the loan holder dies. Some loan companies have policies in place that erase student debt accrued by a deceased person; others do not. And the ones that…
For hundreds of years, people wore mourning jewelry to commemorate their dead loved ones. But what secrets about the past can you learn from these dark baubles made of diamonds, skeletons and bits of loved ones' hair.
It's the most wonderful time of the year! Caitlin Doughty of Ask A Mortician fame (yes, FAME) visited Mike Zohn at Obscura Antiques in New York City's East Village to "shop" for "gifts." Carved skulls, sea roaches, diaphonized rats and dental articulators ahoy!
A widowed father, in a tribute to his late wife who died of cancer at 31, staged a photoshoot with the couple's young daughter that's as gorgeous as it is sad as a sort of "farewell" to the house the family once shared. Seriously, grab the onions and a large knife; you're going to need a solid cry alibi to explain away…
Peter O'Toole, one of the best stage and screen actors ever, has died at the age of 81, according to his agent. Though he was nominated eight times for an Academy Award, O'Toole never received one, which is so absurd that it deserves its own Monty Python sketch. For some good Sunday reading, check out Gay Talese's 1963 …
What does a person deserve for being caught possessing another person's credit cards and baggies containing trace amounts of marijuana? A fine? Probation? Jail time? Nah, not tough enough. How about death?
It's hard to imagine anyone disliking Paul Walker, whose sudden death this holiday weekend seemed so unlikely that a Twitter hoax insisting that news of Walker's death was in fact a hoax briefly gave hope to would-be mourners on social media. Paul Walker — of the easy-smiling, effortlessly-charming Walkers — couldn't…
Brittany Murphy, the actress perhaps best known for her work as the lovable Tai in Clueless, died on December 20, 2009 at the young age of 32. At the time, her death was breathlessly reported; despite the fact that her career had taken a bit of a hit in her final years and persistent rumors of her having possible…
Caitlin Doughty, our favorite mortician, weighs in on Viking funerals. You might like boats, and you might like fire, and you might want your corpse to set sail in a boat that's on fire, but apparently, if you do so, you will be breaking a bunch of laws.
If you were alive and on the internet yesterday, you're already familiar with the very latest in Tumblr cringe porn:"Selfies at Funerals." Created by Brooklyn-based editor Jason Feifer, "Selfies at Funerals" combines two things Americans loathe (self absorbed teenagers & funerals) to brilliant effect.
Here's our favorite mortician, Caitlin Doughty, hanging out with the simply sickening Laganja Estranja and talking death, Bette Midler, hooker makeup and what music they'd like to have played at their funerals.
Did you know that about 15% of the American funeral industry is run by large corporations? "Death is a for-profit business," explains our favorite mortician, Caitlin Doughty. Corporate structure sometimes means a funeral director will try to "upsell" products to grieving families. Caitlin's advice: "Know what services you…
A woman living in Hartford, Connecticut posted on Craigslist Tuesday with a "Very unusual request - w4w - 55 (Gtr Htfd)". She's looking for a partner...for a man...who is not her husband...because she's dying of pancreatic cancer. If this is real, it's definitely unusual, if not necessarily winner of the weirdest thing…
Gabby Williams is eight years old, but looks like a newborn. She is one of only a handful of people across the world who age at an incredibly slow rate, and scientists are trying to figure out why. Once they do, the discovery could help fight Alzheimer's, and even give us an aging "off switch," which would give humans…
Derek Medina, 31, fatally shot his wife, Jennifer Alfonso, in their South Miami home this morning. He then posted a confessions and pictures of her dead, bloody body to his Facebook wall.
