Toxic dress

[svart]

My boss, lovely lady but quite gullible, swears this story is true. A couple of years ago a young girl bought a dress to wear to her school formal from a Sydney department store. On the big night she hadn't been wearing it long when she collapsed and ended up in hospital.

Investigation showed that the dress had been purchased, used to dress a corpse for a funeral and then removed after the showing of the body. It was later returned to the store where our hapless victim later purchased it.

Her collapse was caused by the chemicals that had been used during embalming.

Sound like a UL to me. What do others think?

 

[Graylien]

Why would you dress a corpse in a prom gown?

 

[stu neville]

REAL desperation for a date?

US popular culture seems to imply your entire future success and happiness depends entirely on how well the Prom goes....

 

[TheQuixote]

IIRC this story has been used twice on two different CSI's - CSI Vegas and CSI New York, the latter being the most recent. This from snopes deals with the UL.

 

[svart]

Why would you dress a corpse in a prom gown?

Why not? Death is no excuse for not looking your best.

Thanks Quixote now I have to find a way to tell my boss she's been had.

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

IIRC this story has been used twice on two different CSI's - CSI Vegas and CSI New York, the latter being the most recent.

Yep - the CSI NY is a word for word retelling of that UL (although it was a wedding and the same question goes - it would be unlikely for someone to get buried in a wedding dress although I might) and as CSI touched on things like the reselling of coffins and other corpse meddling it must at the very least be a big concern.

CSI are known for picking up ULs (most explicitly the swimmer in the tree) or unusual medical phenomena (they used the chimera condition in one).

 

[escargot]

Women certainly used to be buried in their wedding clothes if they died within a certain time after marrying, probably about a year.

Not so long ago either - there is a grave in my local cemetary where a 'bride' lies buried in her wedding dress. It is near my mother's family grave and dates from the 1940s.

Stealing the grave-clothes back before burial could probably be a messy business.

 

[drbastard]

sorry about that!

 

[TheQuixote]

Women certainly used to be buried in their wedding clothes if they died within a certain time after marrying, probably about a year.

Yeah, a great-aunt on my maternal side died of some illness (diptheria or something like that) only a few days before the wedding and was buried in her dress and wearing the wedding ring her fiance had bought.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

That damned Poisoned dress

I can contribute a little here.

The earliest version I know of the poisoned dress legend appeared in one of the late Bennett Cerf's books back in the mid-1940s. (Cerf and his contemporary Alexander Woollcott were both superb Fortean folklorists although they probably didn't think of themselves by that title.)

According to Cerf's recension the original story transpired in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the department store was the well-known Shillito's, which still exists but is now one of the flagship stores of the Lazarus chain.

Another version from the late 1940s repeats Cerf's details but adds that the events happened around 1910.

Later the story turned very racist and thus even more ugly, with the addition that the first dead girl (the one who was professionally embalmed and who had been clad in the dress only at her funeral) had been Afro-American.