We’re back with another edition of Urban Legend: Fact or Fiction. In this chapter, we are going to look at the tale of the body in the barrel. You may want to skip the wine and rum until you read this one.
The Story
Many years ago a married couple bought an older home. While the former owner did leave a lot of their junk behind, the price was right, so they jumped on the opportunity. Figuring they might be able to sell what they didn’t want or need.
After cleaning for a few days, the pair worked their way down into the cellar. There they found a large barrel shoved into one of the corners. The Pinterest-addicted wife was over the moon and wanted to cut it in half to use it as a planter in the yard. The duo began to pull the barrel out only to be shocked by how heavy it was.
Liquid could clearly be heard sloshing around inside. After some hunting online they were able to get a tap, and after a few days of waiting they breached the barrel to find it was full of rum. “Cleaning up their mess in exchange for free booze seems like a deal to me,” the husband remarked. To revel in their good fortune, they used the rum to supply a housewarming party and many more parties after that.
After about a year of knocking back some great rum, the barrel got harder and harder to pull from. Assuming it was tapped out the couple began to move it once again. Only to find that it was far heavier than it should have been once again. Confused, they moved it out of the corner just enough to begin sawing the barrel in half.
That’s when they discover the source of the extra weight, the corpse of a grown man shoved inside the barrel.
Variants
The Body in The Barrel urban legend is pretty straightforward with the unchanging detail being someone unknowingly drinking or eating from a container that also has a dead body in it. Sometimes the deceased is an ape or monkey instead of a human because versatility is important to any good tall tale. The barrel of booze has been rum, wine, whisky, and even a massive amount of honey.
The honey variant comes from the 13th century and centers around workers on an archaeology dig finding a large pot of Winnie the Pooh’s favorite snack. Given it was around lunchtime and honey’s seemingly eternal shelf life, one of the workers decided to taste it. Of course, it’s the best thing he has ever put on bread and he encourages his co-workers to dig in.
Everyone is happily chowing down until someone finds a big wad of hair in their scoop. That is when they make the sickening discovery that there is the body of a small child curled up at the bottom of the jar.
In another variation, a US company is importing cheap beer from another country via tanker ships. And like our well-worn rum barrel, it starts to get hard to pour from. So one industrious worker hops in to see what is jamming up the lines. That’s when he discovers the body of a murdered sailor. How do they know they were murdered? Well, the sea dweller’s arms and legs had been chopped off preventing their ability to swim.
But by this time a bunch of it had already been bottled and shipped out. The company kept the whole ordeal out of the papers, hitting on another beloved urban legend trope, the media coverup.
Themes
As we discussed with the Accidental Cannibals legend most people find the notion of eating another human, even unknowingly, gross. This makes sense considering cannibalism, in most cultures, is considered taboo, at the very least.
In most cases consuming these yucky foodstuffs is presented as some kind of penance, since typically those consuming it were not its rightful owners. Or in the case of the company, selling a low-quality product for what we can only assume is one hell of a markup.
All alongside the (unknowing) desecration of a corpse, another common cross-culture taboo. Sometimes this penance takes a supernatural turn and the spirit of the corpse in the cask also haunts the property.
All of this is just to remind the reader that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Pop Culture
There is absolutely no shortage of dead bodies being found in odd places in pop culture. So here we are just focusing on corpses found in some kind of container for alcohol.
- 1997 – The Canadian animated anthology series “Freaky Stories” aired the episode “Not the Waltons.” One of the stories is about a couple who buys a haunted house only to find the dead body of the old owner in a barrel of wine.
- 2005 – In an episode of “Monk” titled “Mr. Monk Gets Drunk” a corpse is found in a cask of wine.
- 2009 – In an episode of “Bones” titled “The Critic in the Cabernet” a dead body is found in a wine barrel.
- 2009 – That same year the History Channel series “Urban Legends” aired an episode with this tale.
Is it Real?
Before modern transportation and embalming methods, it wasn’t uncommon for people to be put in barrels that were filled with alcohol to preserve the corpse until they could get a proper burial. During this period if someone died abroad the only real options were to bury them where they perished, or preserve them in something like alcohol until they can be transported back home. And since it’s not like there is a neon sign on the barrel saying “DEAD BODY IN HERE,” this urban legend is more than likely true.
The most famous example comes from 1805 and the remains of Admiral Nelson. After he was killed by a French sniper in the Battle of Trafalgar, his body was preserved in spirits. Which particular alcohol remains the subject of much debate but the legend normally says brandy or rum. His ship, the HMS Victory, had to stop at Gibraltar for repairs due to damage sustained in the battle. There the cask was drained and the liquor was replaced with wine.
When the barrel was reopened in England, a considerable amount of wine was missing. It is speculated that sailors were sneaking sips from the cask during their voyage. At this point, the legend is so entrenched in navel history that it’s impossible to tell if this is fact or fiction. However, it did give rise to the naval slang term “tapping the Admiral” for getting an unauthorized drink. As well as the practice of calling rum “Nelson’s Blood.”
In 1895 Prince Henry of Battenberg died from malaria while in a British expeditionary force in West Africa. His body made its way back to England for burial in a makeshift tank created from biscuit tins and filled with rum. Unlike Nelson, there is no rumor that people drank from it, just an example of how common the practice was.
In 1857, Nancy Martin, a resident of Wilmington, North Carolina embarked on a year-long cruise with her father and brother. Sadly, she died while they were at sea. The crew nailed a chair to the bottom of a large cask and tied her body to it, to keep it from moving too much. The barrel was then filled with whatever available alcohol they had. Whiskey, rum, and wine were all poured in.
When Martin’s body arrived back home, she was buried in Oakdale Cemetery, still inside the cask. Like Prince Henry, there is no rumor that alcohol was siphoned from the cask. Probably because that sounds like the worst recipe from jungle juice, we’ve ever heard. But that does make her story the reverse of this urban legend.
NBC News reported on an admittedly dubious version of this urban legend in 2006. A source claimed that Hungarian builders drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum they found while renovating a house. Once they got to the bottom though they found the body of the owner’s long deceased husband. His body was shipped back from Jamaica in the barrel 20 years before, to avoid the cost and paperwork of an official return.
And while it wasn’t alcohol, the 2013 case of Elisa Lam is a very real example of this. Lam was staying at the infamous Cecil Hotel while visiting LA. After going missing for 2 weeks, her body was found in one of the hotel’s water tanks after guests complained about the water pressure in their rooms. Guests during these two weeks undoubtedly used and drank water that Lam’s body was floating in.
The Body in The Barrel urban legend is:
Print Sources Used:
Brunvand, J. H. “The Corpse in The Cask.” In Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, W. W. Norton and Company, 2001, pp. 96.
Brunvand, J. H. “The Corpse in The Cask.” Too Good to be True: The colossal book of urban legends, W. W. Norton and Company, 2014, pp. 197-198.
Brunvand, J. H. “The Corpse in The Cask.” The Choking Doberman And Other “New” Urband Legends, W. W. Norton and Company, 1984, pp. 114-118.
