Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories
Darren Marlar | Weird Darkness
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HONEY MUMMIES AND SUGAR-GLAZED GRANDPA: The Mellified Man And Corpse Medicine
Li Shizhen, a 16th-century Chinese apothecary, wrote of aged holy men in Arabia who ate nothing but honey until they died, then lay sealed in honey for a century to become a sugary remedy for broken bones. In Europe, King Charles II of England drank powdered human skull in alcohol, and the poor paid for cups of still-warm blood at executions. READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mrd72v94 FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Of all the instances of cannibalism found in human history, no one quite practiced it like some in China used to. In these cases, cannibalism came in the form of eating mellified flesh for medicinal purposes. In 16th century China, mellification was a way for elderly people nearing the end of their lives to donate their body to science. The idea, originally derived from an Arabic recipe, was that they could turn their bodies into medicine that would be ingested by their descendants to alleviate ailments like broken bones. The process of mellification was a gruesome one. In short, it consisted of very slowly turning one’s body into a mummified human candy bar. And that’s not even the worst part — for mellification to be the most effective, the process started while the person was still alive. CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)… 00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding 00:01:10.417 = Show Open 00:02:28.924 = And Mellified Man For Dessert 00:04:27.887 = Honey, I’m Dead 00:09:57.010 = Sugar-Glazed Grandpa 00:16:02.121 = Better Health Through Cannibalism 00:27:31.137 = Self-Mummification 00:30:39.753 = Corpse Medicine 00:39:58.915 = Show Close *** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break SOURCES and RESOURCES: “And Mellified Man for Dessert” by Katie Serena: https://tinyurl.com/rjwv5cw “Honey, I’m Dead” by Paul Salopek: https://tinyurl.com/wz23h9d “Sugar-Glazed Grandpa” by Brent Swancer: https://tinyurl.com/w2mqzyp “Self-Mummification” from Stranger Remains: https://tinyurl.com/w795gxp “Better Health Through Cannibalism” by Natalie Zarrelli: https://tinyurl.com/tsqhqbl “Corpse Medicine” by Maria Dolan: https://tinyurl.com/y6spcbcb (Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.) WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. *No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast* EPISODE SYNOPSIS: This episode of Weird Darkness covers the legend of the mellified man, a 4,300-year-old Bronze Age tomb in Georgia filled with honey-cured offerings, the self-mummifying Buddhist monks of Japan, and the centuries Europeans spent swallowing powdered skull, human fat, and fresh blood as medicine. It opens with mellification, in which an elderly volunteer ate and bathed in nothing but honey until death, then lay in a stone coffin of honey for up to a century before the remains were sold at market to treat wounds and broken bones, a practice historians have never confirmed with physical evidence. From there, archaeologist Zurab Makharadze describes cutting into the Ananauri 3 burial mound beside Georgia's Alazani River in 2015, where wild berries cured in honey 4,300 years ago were still red and still smelled sweet, buried with two full-size wagons, gold jewelry, and bones dusted in flower pollen. Next, the legend is traced to the 16th-century Chinese pharmacologist Li Shizhen, who heard of the Arabian "honey person" secondhand from Tao Jiucheng, and set beside other honey burials, from the golden sarcophagus of honey Alexander the Great was reportedly placed in to the wax-and-honey-coated body of King Edward I of England. The 17th-century English writer Richard Baxter, who treated his bleeding with moss grown on a human skull, leads into Europe's corpse medicine: King Charles II's King's Drops of powdered skull in alcohol, German physician Johann Schroeder's recipe for curing the flesh of an executed redheaded man, and French pharmacist Antoine-François de Fourcroy's instructions for rendering human fat. After that come the Shingon Buddhist monks of Japan who practiced sokushinbutsu, starving away their body fat for years, drinking tea from the toxic urushi tree, and ringing a bell inside a tomb until the ringing stopped and their fellow monks sealed it. The episode closes with Louise Noble's search for why a John Donne poem calls women "mummy, possessed", a trail that led her and Richard Sugg of England's University of Durham to Thomas Willis's drink of powdered skull and chocolate, a 1679 recipe for blood marmalade, and a last known attempt in 1908 to swallow blood at a German scaffold. More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.
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