Even in death, the famous are rarely allowed to rest in peace. The extraordinary fates of some celebrated remains are revealed in a new book . . .

JOHN MILTON

Before poet John Milton could be buried his body was pulled apart and bits sold off as souvenirs

The English poet best known for Paradise Lost was buried beneath the old London church of St Giles’s, Cripplegate for 16 years before being dug up by parishioners who wanted him to have a proper monument. 

But before this could be built, a drunk churchwarden and four friends pulled apart Milton’s remains and started selling bits off to morbid souvenir hunters. 

Thousands of teeth, supposedly all the poet’s, reportedly changed hands over the next few days. 

There was so little left of Milton that he was reburied at the church in a child’s coffin.

EVA PERON
The first lady of Argentina was embalmed on her death at the age of 33 in 1952. 

The process, ordered by her husband, Juan Peron, involved months of chemical baths and injections, and was performed by a Spanish anatomy professor. 

By the time he had finished, Evita had shrunk to the size of a 12-year-old girl and, said an observer, rang hollow like a shop dummy if you tapped her.

After Peron was deposed in 1955, the new regime — having first cut off one of the fingers of Eva’s corpse to assure themselves it was real— gave the body a secret burial in Italy. 

But Peronists demanded it back and eventually the exhumed corpse was delivered to the exiled Peron’s villa in Madrid. 

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His new wife restyled Eva’s hair and put her on display in the family dining room. 

Today Evita rests in a nuclear bomb-proof steel vault in Buenos Aires.

Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to be buried on the banks of the Seine but at least one part of his body is said to have made it off the island of St Helena while Joseph Haydn's remains was missing a skull for a century 

JOSEPH HAYDN

The Austrian composer was a victim of phrenology, a 19th-century pseudo-science which claimed that measuring skulls could unlock the brain’s secrets.

After Haydn’s death in Vienna in 1809, Carl Rosenbaum, a phrenology-obsessed friend of the deceased, decided that he must have the composer’s skull. 

He and a fellow phrenologist bribed a gravedigger at Haydn’s modest funeral to give them his severed head. 

Rosenbaum had the bare skull mounted in a black case topped with a golden lyre and displayed it in his house.

But ten years later Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, Haydn’s old patron, decided that a grander tomb was needed. 

When the body was exhumed and the head found to be missing, police raided Rosenbaum’s home but he hid the skull under a mattress, then had his wife lie on top of it. 

It was a century before the head was reunited with Haydn’s other remains.

NAPOLEON
Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to be buried on the banks of the Seine but was instead interred on the island of St Helena, where he had been exiled. 

But at least one part of his body is said to have made it off the remote mid-Atlantic island — his penis. 

The emperor’s doctor, Francesco Antommarchi, reportedly took  revenge for abuse he had received from the ailing Napoleon by removing the appendage in his post-mortem examination.

Father Vignali, Napoleon’s priest, claimed he took the organ along with some of the dead man’s personal effects, and the collection remained with the Vignali family until it was put up for auction in London in 1916, described as a 'mummified tendon'.

It was bought by a London bookseller, then sold to a Philadelphia book collector who in 1927 lent it to a museum in New York. 

A reporter for Time magazine said it resembled ‘a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace or a shrivelled eel’. 

Eventually it was bought by a top urologist who kept it in a suitcase under his bed until he died in 2007. 

The French Government has never accepted it as Napoleon’s but, thanks to the urologist’s decision to have it X-rayed, we know for sure what it is, even if not whose it is.

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The pathologist who conducted Einstein's post-mortem removed his brain and kept it

ALBERT EINSTEIN
Einstein wanted to be cremated to stop people worshipping his remains. Yet the pathologist who conducted his post-mortem, Dr Thomas Harvey, not only removed his brain but kept it. 

Harvey chopped the brain into a thousand pieces and divided them between various formaldehyde-filled glass mayonnaise jars. 

He kept these inside cardboard boxes, beneath beer coolers and under the socks in his wardrobe.

Finally, 33 years after he had removed it, in 1988 he surrendered his jars to Princeton Hospital — but their contents were too damaged to be of any scientific use.

OLIVER CROMWELL
The man who had Charles I executed was buried with great pomp, only to be exhumed by a vengeful Charles II and mutilated in 1661. 

His embalmed head spent more than 20 years on a spike on top of the Houses of Parliament before it reportedly fell off in a storm and landed near a guard. 

The man took it home and hid it in his chimney, telling his family only on his deathbed. His daughter sold the head, which was eventually exhibited as a curio in London. 

For years it was widely dismissed as a fake but in 1934, experts compared it to various Cromwell busts and death masks and declared it the genuine article. 

In 1960 it was buried at a secret location in the grounds of Cromwell’s old Cambridge college, Sidney Sussex.

D.H. LAWRENCE 
The author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who died of tuberculosis in France in 1930, had not specified his final resting place but his widow, Frieda, wanted him brought back to their ranch in Taos, New Mexico. 

It was five years before Frieda’s lover,  Angelo Ravagli, embarked on the epic trip with an urn containing Lawrence’s ashes — which he accidentally left at the railway station in Taos. 

A poet friend of Lawrence found the urn and gave it to Frieda — but said he kept some of the ashes, stirring a spoonful into his tea each morning to absorb some of the writer’s genius. 

BENITO MUSSOLINI
Il Duce’s brutal end — shot, beaten  to a pulp and hanged upside down outside a petrol station — was followed by burial in an unmarked grave on which his enemies danced.

After his body was dug up by loyal Fascists and ferreted away in a wheelbarrow, it was first stored in a garage, then hidden by sympathetic friars in a convent cupboard. 

It was recovered by the Italian Government and finally, after 11 years,  returned to Mussolini’s home town. The dictator’s mangled remains arrived in a wooden box marked ‘church documents’.

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It was five years before Frieda's lover embarked on the trip with an urn containing the ashes of Lawrence (left) but it was left at the railway station. It is believed the bones of Geronimo (right)  were stolen 

GERONIMO
When the great warrior died in 1909 he was buried on an Oklahoma reservation. 

His body lay undisturbed until the 1980s, when an anonymous source told Apache leaders that Geronimo’s head was now in a glass case in the HQ of America’s most secretive and exclusive student society, Yale’s Skull and Bones.

The whistleblower said that the father of President George Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush — both Skull and Bones members — had stolen the skull with other Bonesmen from Geronimo’s grave. 

It then reportedly sat in the clubhouse and new members had to kiss it at their initiation. 

Historians suspect that Bush Sr and friends actually stole the wrong skull, breaking into the tomb of another Indian chief by mistake.

Rest in Pieces by Bess Lovejoy, Simon & Schuster, £14.74.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2293062/What-happened-Napoleons-bony-died-New-book-sheds-light-fate-famous-peoples-remains.html#ixzz2qgJ2hCwj
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