OBITCH a sinister paper trail!

"Just when I thought we had learned all that we could about mummies, I stumbled upon something else," Madison says near the end of this episode of OBITCHUARY, and that sentence captures the throughline of an installment that keeps circling back to one uncomfortable truth: humans have never quite known how to treat the dead with consistent dignity. From the 1800s to the present day, the episode traces a pattern of exploitation, mishandling, and outright disrespect — whether through commerce, carelessness, or cruelty.

Mummy paper and the rag shortage

Madison's coffin spinner dives into a genuinely bizarre chapter of industrial history. In the mid-1800s, America had a paper shortage. Paper was made from rags — linen and cotton scraps — and demand from newspapers, books, and letters far outstripped supply. Enter Isaiah Deck, a physician and geologist who traveled to Egypt in 1847 to search for Cleopatra's emerald mines. What he found instead was an enormous quantity of linen wrapped around millions of mummies. In 1854 he published a paper arguing that America's paper problem could be solved for fourteen years using mummy wrappings. He calculated that a single mummy could yield thirty pounds of linen, and that one Egyptian princess had been wrapped in forty-two yards of fabric.