Your trip to Mexico wouldn’t complete if you are not visiting the Guanajuato mummy museum. The mummies were discovered in the cemetery of Guanajuato, a city Northwest of Mexico City (near Léon) and were literally “dug up” between the years 1865 and 1958. Actually the mummies began attracting tourists in the early 1900s. It was the time when many history lovers have a trip to Mexico to visit the Guanajuato mummy museum and sense the horror atmosphere in there, a place called the land of the dead.
Just like the experience of famous author, Ray Bradbury, said, “The experience so wounded and terrified me; I could hardly wait to flee Mexico. I had nightmares about dying and having to remain in the halls of the dead with those propped and wired bodies. In order to purge my terror, instantly, I wrote ‘The Next in Line.’ One of the few times that an experience yielded results almost on the spot.” In the late 1970s, a filmmaker Werner Herzog took footage of a number of the mummies and used it for the title sequence of his film Nosferatu the Vampyre. Again, what a horror!
The combination of the soil conditions and a dry climate of the mountainous area caused the bodies in the local cemetery to dry out naturally before they could decompose. These are the reason why Guanajuato has their mummies where their bodies were placed in tombs, seven rows high and those in the middle row were more likely to have been naturally mummified. There are 119 mummies display in the Guanajuato mummy museum and many other natural mummies are still lying in the cemetery.
The Guanajuato mummies are quite strange because some are clothed, some aren’t. There are only few of the mummies that wearing their socks or shoes, also they have old people while others are only infants. The museum contains a few local legends like there is a body that was said belongs to a woman who had been buried alive. If you have trip to Mexico and visiting the Guanajuato mummy museum, you will know that the legend was true because of the two factors: the woman’s arms were raised over her face and her forehead had scratch marks, apparently in mid-struggle to escape her grave. Also, one man exhumed in the 1940s, profound he had been stabbed to death, with a golf-ball-sized wound visible in the parched husk beneath his rib cage.
The Guanajuato mummies are located in the Museo de las momias high on a hill overlooking the city where the closest airport is Léon which is about 45 minutes away. You can also take a bus from Mexico City.
image source: http://photo.net/travel-photography-forum/00W3Yj