The mummy on the left looks thoughtful about death. But the mummy on the right looks kind of surprised about death. (Three Lions/Getty Images)

A lot of things happen by accident. You hit your hip on the edge of the dining room table by accident. You leave your oven on by accident. You forget your mother’s birthday by accident. But — you become a mummy by accident?

Yes, it happens. And here’s the story: In 1865, the town of Guanajuato, Mexico, had this crazy rule that if a family didn’t pay taxes to support the upkeep of the town cemetery, well, their dead relatives would have to be removed. The first dead person to be exhumed from a crypt in the graveyard was a French doctor named Remigio Leroy, since he didn’t have any local relatives to pay his tax. He’d been dead three years, so when cemetery officials opened Dr. Leroy’s crypt and discovered he hadn’t decomposed at all and seemed to have grown a beard (as writer Louis Aguilar put it), they were more than a little horrified.

After the horror wore off, however, the cemetery keepers did what anybody would do: They made Dr. Leroy a tourist attraction and charged admission for a look-see. The cemetery tax policy remained in place until 1958, and during that time, more than 100 mummies were exhumed from crypts in that graveyard. The mummies developed a fan base, so in 1894, a museum was founded to house them — the Museo de las Momias. If you want to see them today, you can travel to that Guanajuato museum — or conversely, Detroit. Thirty-six of the mummies are on tour, and right now, they’re at the Detroit Science Center. They’ll be traveling to six other U.S. cities in the next two years.

But let’s get back to accidental mummification — because if I’m going to be accidentally mummified, I’d like to strike a flattering pose before I’m frozen that way for eternity. How does it happen? Well, what happens when we decompose is that the microorganisms that have been crawling around our bodies all our lives eat us. They break us down to a liquid (gross), minus our bones, according to the Detroit Science Center. But those microorganisms can’t stay alive in freezing temperatures or dry conditions. Guanajuato is an arid place. And the crypts, which are basically aboveground drawers for dead people, hold bodies away from whatever moisture might be in the soil and air. Extremely dry conditions meant the microorganisms in the dead bodies died, and the bodies never decomposed.

What’s left doesn’t exactly endear you to death. Some of these mummies, with their wide-open mouths and contorted limbs, look awfully unhappy with their fates.

And, really, do you blame them?

For more mummification…
How can a corpse be incorruptible?
How Mummies Work
How Zombies Work