If you're a frequent Cracked reader, it should hopefully be clear by now that the most accurate part of the Indiana Jones series wasn't the flirty students, as you might think, but the fact that archaeologists really do stumble upon some face-meltingly horrifying shit. Sure, the following discoveries won't literally cause your eyes to pop out as your face turns into wax, but once you see them, you might wish they had.
And now that we've given the impressionable ample time to turn back, let's get this freak show on the road ...
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The 2,000-Year-Old Corpse That Refuses To Rot
Huangdan2060 / Wiki Commons
It's a small wonder that archaeology is a thing, what with the amount of scaremongering that popular culture does for the trade. Hollywood has taught us that every skeleton could attack us with a pirate sword, every normal-looking artifact is the key to unlocking a great evil, and every chest is a container for a horror of world-ending proportion.
Unfortunately for one group of archaeologists in 1971, pop culture hadn't started this crusade. If it had, they might not have found this:
Hunan Provincial Museum
"Oh, hey, have you guys seen the masseuse? I've been waiting for a while."
We'll continue after your soul has finished screaming. Done? Great. This is the body of Xin Zhui, a Chinese noblewoman who died over 2,000 years ago, yet continues to be blessed with the skin, flesh, organs, and sunny disposition of a fairly fresh corpse. In fact, she's so well-preserved that doctors were able to perform an autopsy in 1972, presumably right after they got her to stop screaming.
Huangdan2060 / Wiki Commons
The gritty Mannequin reboot you've all been waiting for!
Experts still aren't sure, but they believe the whole reason her corpse managed to stay beautiful for this long is that it was buried so thoroughly that every method of decomposition basically went "lol j/k fuck that noise." Her tomb was located twelve meters underground, whilst her casket was placed Matryoshka-style inside seven other caskets and yet another burial vault. As for the body, it was wrapped in 20 layers in silk and suspended in a magnesium-infused acid bath. As a result, any corpse-eating bacteria would have suffocated through lack of oxygen and sheer fucking exhaustion.
Hunan Provincial Museum
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