My grandmother lived for years in Calvert, Texas. One day when I was 9 or 10 she took me to the local funeral home to see "Mr. Mojo," a corpse they kept there. Seems he'd died many decades prior, but his family didn't come up with some funeral-related fees, and they abandoned the corpse.
So Mojo was given a whole lot of preservatives, apparently. When I saw him he was completely white and chalky. I could peer through a little screen window on the coffin lid and see his face as he stood there in the closet. It hardly seemed real. The funeral home guy told me he was half black and half Chinese. The coffin stood about five feet tall.
Apparently, he was laid to rest in '02. I've got a faded newspaper clipping about him somewhere, and the accompanying photo is just as creepy as you'd imagine, a sepia-toned image of that unearthly face peering through the mesh.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
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4 comments:
What, no link to a pic?
That's a hell of a story. Are you sure Mr. Mojo wasn't a dummy? I can't believe there was a funeral home that thought it would be good business to display a corpse. They probably thought they were demystifying the process.
Michael
He wasn't on display in the lobby or anything. My grandmother and I showed up unannounced at the funeral home, and she knew the man there. He took us in the back, where it was suitably creepy, and led us into a walk-in closet illuminated by one light bulb. The coffin was behind other junk in there, kinda callously disregarded.
The whole story about the guy's life is so detailed yet unspectacular that I'm inclined to believe it's true. I mean, what he looked like was rather surreal, but I think if it had been a stunt with a dummy they'd at least have been more creative with the backstory, like making him a bank robber or something. But I guess I'll never know for sure.
Maybe I can find my photo somewhere. I have an idea where to look. I'll poke around online, but I have my doubts about being able to locate one posted somewhere.
Ah ha, so he wasn't on general display. That makes more sense. I doubt they'd go to the trouble of making a fake if they weren't gonna put it out where anybody could see it. Though I do think it's puzzling that they kept Mr. Mojo around for as long as they did without burying him.
And considering your grandma thought, "I know, I'll take the kid to see a real corpse," she must have had a macabre sense of humor.
Michael
You know, there's gotta be a song in here somewhere about Mr. Mojo rising.
Michael
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