Here comes the bride, all dressed in white and laying in… a coffin? Yes, that’s exactly how 58-year-old Jenny Buckleff arrived at her off-the-wall wedding – in a closed coffin, pulled by a motorcycle!

Jenny, who used to work as an embalmer at a funeral parlor, said that she wanted do “something different” at her wedding. “Instead of turning up in a horse-drawn cart, I thought I’m going to turn up in a coffin,” she said. So she decided to conceal herself in her brother Roger’s black coffin, while her sister-in-law Hayley pulled her all the way to the Llangefni registry office behind a VW Trike.

Interestingly, Jenny revealed that she isn’t actually into any bizarre or goth stuff. “I don’t normally dress like this and I’m not goth at all,” she told the media. “I work for Bet365, so you have to be well presented and I’m normally very smart. But my brother is different. He’s covered in tattoos so for once he looked the part. My brother and I are very close so it was nice to be able to do something to honour him and do something a bit different. He loved it and said it made his day.” Read More »

It’s not unusual for people to choose their coffins before they die, but 48-year-old Anto Wickham’s choice is a rather strange one. He’s gone and spent $50,000 on a 10-foot casket shaped like a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey.

Well, the shape of the coffin might be bizarre, but Wickham, a former soldier, has a pretty valid reason for choosing it. After witnessing the death of eight Army pals during the Iraq war, he began to plan his own funeral – he decided he wants it to be a celebration, rather than a mourning.

“While working in Iraq I had a very close call,” said Wickham, who spent 22 years with the Royal Irish Regiment. “Over a 28-day period in February 2007, I was attacked 74 times and there were some days we would get three or four hits in one day. I was attacked by heavy machine gun fire, IEDs and roadside bombs.”

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Enterprising coffin maker Stepan Piryanyk, from the Ukraine, is offering living people the chance to lay down in one of his comfortable coffins in order to get used to the afterlife. After all, death is always so sudden, so why not take some time to get used to it…

Lying down in a coffin as therapy is not unheard of. Just a week a go we posted an article about a special Chinese psychotherapy clinic where patients lay down in a coffin and have the lid shut over them, in order to experience death and rebirth. A Taiwanese professor also buries his students alive in a coffin in the floor of his classroom, to make them appreciate every second of their lives. But Stepan Piryanyk, from the Ukrainian town of Truskavets, has found a new way to use his spooky wooden boxes as a form of therapy. The owner of a large coffin-making business, Stepan decided it would be a good idea to set up a special room where people could just lay down in one of his comfortable coffins, and experience being dead. Ironically enough, some people actually took him up on his creepy offer and said it was a very relaxing experience. Read More »

Most people would consider lying in a coffin and having the lid shut over them to be a traumatic experience, a special psychotherapy service in Shenyang, China is using it as therapy to treat psychological problems and heavy stress.

The Shenyang Evening News reports over 1,000 patients have so far been”reborn” by simulating death with the help of psychologists. Tang Yulong, a consultant at this unique psychotherapy clinic in Shenyang, says people who suffer from psychological problems can be helped by simulating death. People go in a 5-square-meter “death experience room”, write down their last words, lie down into a coffin in the floor and are covered with a white cloth. To make this “dying” experience even more realistic, the “deceased” can even hear a dirge being played in the room. After five minutes of “serene time”, the sound of a baby crying breaks the silence, and a consultant opens the coffin with a cheery tune playing in the background. This rebirth apparently helps people get a new outlook on life. Read More »

People making their own coffin isn’t new to us here at OC. But the story of Fred Guentert sure is. Because he’s been building himself a coffin that’s fit for an Egyptian pharaoh – for the past 25 years.

Guentert, who is now 89 years old, has kept himself occupied for about a quarter of a century with his unusual hobby. And he sure does have something to show for it. The coffin he is to be buried in someday is 7 feet long and weighs 300 pounds. It is made of cedar and hand-painted in royal colors like gold, red, green and black. A hand-carved image of the Egyptian god Osiris adorns the lid. Near the base, you can see a colorful image of Isis. The interior has been decorated with a full-size painting of Nut – the sky goddess. On one side of the box is the Eye of Horus, looking on intently.

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Lindner, Poland’s biggest coffin manufacturer, certainly thinks so, since they’ve been using scantly clad models to market their products for the last three years. For the 2012 edition of their controversial sexy-morbid calendar they’ve used body-painted models.

The first edition of the Lindner Calendar appeared in 2010 and featured artistic photos of female models dressed in sexy outfits posing with coffins. It sparked quite a controversy, with members of the church calling it tasteless and shocking, but Lindner sold 3,000 copies and decided to release a second edition, the following year. the 2011 Lindner Calendar featured drop-dead gorgeous ladies wearing lingerie performing famous scenes from movies like James Bond, Reservoir Dogs or The Godfather alongside more of the company’s high-end coffins. Read More »

Most people would prefer to stay out of a coffin for as long as possible, but for devotees at the Looi Im Si temple, in Penang, Malaysia, sleeping in a coffin is the best thing that could happen to them.

The Taoist temple located in Jelutong worships deities linked to the afterlife, like Xiao Xian Bo, one of the two guards responsible for bringing the dead to the other side. Chu Soon Lock, the temple’s secretary, claims his grandmother founded the temple after receiving instructions in a dream, from hell deity Di Fu Bao Zhang. As the years went by the temple started worshiping various other deities like Ji Gong, Si Da Jin Gang and Mile Buddha. The weirdest part of the story of Looi Im Si temple started in 2007, when the spirit of Xiao Xian Bo arrived at the holy place and began addressing his devotees through the body of Chu Soon Lock’s brother.

Chu Soon Chye says he doesn’t know a word of Teochew, yet he speaks the dialect fluently each time he is possessed by Xiao Xian Bo. Back in 2008, when he was in a trance, Soon Chye instructed temple devotees to place five coffins within the temple, and only allow people with serious problems caused by bad luck to sleep in them. Only one of the five coffins is used, because the other four are apparently too small to fit into.

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Whether it’s by tuning their cars or driving them like madmen, car enthusiasts are always looking for ways to stand out, and now, thanks to the Cruisin Caskets, they can even go out in style.

However scary and sad, death is a part of life, so if you can’t cheat it, why not make the most of it? For car lovers who want to take their passion for automobiles in the grave with them, the guys at Cruisin Caskets offer the perfect solution – a car-shaped coffin made of fiber glass that can be shaped like any model car, from the 50s classics to today’s futuristic rides.

This “perfect way for the car aficionado to express their love for cars” can be converted into a nice-looking beer cooler, before it serves its permanent purpose, but the idea of seeing what’s to be my final resting place every time I want a beer doesn’t make much sense to me. Read More »

A 200-year old willow processing company has recently targeted the coffin business, and apparently had great success.

P H Coate & Son’s English Willow Coffins, from Somerset, England,  has started offering dead people an alternative to traditional wooden coffins. Some individuals are just bored by the same old wooden coffins, as if they died and have been buried in them too many times. Anyway, John Parfitt and company say willow is the more popular pick these days, because of it alluring aesthetics (cough!) and environmental reasons.

Willow coffins are hand-crafted by skilled willow basket masters (that explains why they look more like coffin-shaped baskets), using a traditional method, and clients have a selection to pick from. Environmentalist are going to go mad for these babies, but what about those artistic wooden coffins from Ghana, what happens to them?

Photos by Matt Cardy/Getty Images Europe via Zimbio

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