Original subtitles

SHATNER: A network of tunnels called the Empire of the Dead.

A legion of clay warriors

standing guard for eternity.

And ancient rituals that guide the soul

into the afterlife.

Throughout human history,

cultures around the world have created numerous ways

of honoring those who have passed away.

From traditional burials and cremations

to the art of mummification,

sacred rituals are used to show reverence

and respect for the dead.

But what happens if these practices are not followed?

Is it possible that mishandling the remains of the deceased

can actually curse the living?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

It's an inescapable truth of human experience

that we're all born,

we all live and then, one day,

we all eventually die.

For many cultures, the proper way to honor the deceased

is to provide their body with a permanent resting place

by using the sacred practice

of burial.

ROBERT CARGILL: 65 million people

die every year.

And depending on where they die,

depending on what they believe,

different cultures, different religions

bury people in different ways.

However, all of these burials,

regardless of where they occur,

have a few things in common.

Perhaps the most important is you don't mess with the dead.

Whether you believe in heaven and hell or not,

whether you believe in a God or not,

there's something about honoring the deceased

that is common throughout history.

Our earliest burials are about 100,000 years old.

Probably some of the initial reasons for burying the dead

weren't about ritual or religion but practicality.

We find a lot of early humans buried in caves--

places where people were actually living.

So burying them was a way to mark territory.

"This is where my ancestors are buried."

JOSEPH LAYCOCK: A lot of burial traditions

revolve around the idea that this is not just decaying flesh.

This is a person. This is someone whose life mattered.

And this goes all the way back to the Stone Age,

where, basically, cave people have been bound

in the fetal position

and buried with tools that they would have used in life.

So these traditions are really as old as humankind.

SHATNER: Over the course of tens of thousands of years,

burial practices started to reflect

the principles of organized religion.

Ancient cultures around the world believed

that a proper burial involved showing respect,

not just for a dead person's body

but also for their soul.

CARGILL: In antiquity, there were

very specific rites that were used to help

the deceased's soul navigate its way into the afterlife.

For instance, in ancient Egypt,

there was the famous Book of the Dead,

which is essentially a set of CliffsNotes

that helps the deceased's soul navigate

this series of tests and gates and booby traps

that are set to try to keep the soul

from entering into the afterlife.

MARK DONNELLY: The ancient Greeks

believed that the spirit

left the body as a breath of air.

And it was important to get the body itself

to the afterlife as quickly as possible

to reunite with the spirit.

To that end, they were often buried with a coin in the mouth

as payment to Charon,

the ferryman over the River Styx,

to aid them on their journey and help them locate their spirit.

SHATNER: Although many ancient European societies like the Greeks

believed in burying the dead,

oftentimes, they did not lay out individual graves

with nice, neat headstones for each body,

like we do today.

KEITH EGGENER: Historically speaking, in Europe,

people of all classes were typically buried in

mass graves.

It was really only the people

of the highest levels of the aristocracy

who would receive any kind of individual burial

and individual marker of their death.

However, eventually, as we enter into the early modern age,

the 1400, 1500s and forward,

increasingly, people want to be remembered.

Permanent burial for individuals

of even the nonaristocratic classes

becomes increasingly common,

and we see the rise of gravestones.

SHATNER: As individual graves became more common for the masses,

European and American communities in the 19th century

created new, elaborate burial places

that were located far away from churches and residential areas.

They were referred to as garden cemeteries.

DONNELLY: Garden cemeteries are

an interesting development. They come in,

at least in the American context,

in about the 1830s.

They were a different place,

a place outside of the city.

They have their own necropolis

that we can visit through big elaborate gates.

EGGENER: These cemeteries,

such as Mount Auburn in Cambridge,

Laurel Hill in Philadelphia,

Greenwood in Brooklyn and many others

were much larger than the church burial grounds.

They were also landscaped in a picturesque fashion,

with winding paths and hills

and all sorts of varied plantings.

So you're not thinking of the oblivion of the grave

but rather you're thinking

of the departed as resting peacefully,

surrounded by beautiful flowers and those who love them.

Death became widely seen as a gentle sleep.

SHATNER: Today, it is estimated

that there are 144,000 cemeteries in the United States,

in which over one million people are buried every single year.

Since the practice of burial is thousands of years old,

perhaps it's not surprising that we have inherited

a number of superstitions about how this ritual

should be performed.

LAYCOCK: There is a superstition of

carrying the body out of the house feetfirst.

And the idea was that if you carry the body out headfirst,

the corpse gets this backward glance,

and that glance could maybe invite someone

to come with the deceased into the afterlife.

Another is you can't take the body in the family car.

You have to hire a hearse.

The hearse can't stop on the way to the cemetery.

Because if it stops, the house where it stops

could perhaps get some of that death energy.

There's a superstition of having pallbearers wear gloves.

And this is the same logic-- that there could be

some sort of lingering death energy on the casket,

and if you have gloves, that will give you

some protection from it.

All people are driven to ritualize the process of death.

So when we think about what are these rites and rituals

doing for us,

making sure that certain rules are observed,

gives us some element of control

in a realm that is,

by definition, uncontrollable.

(singing)

SHATNER: Billions of people all over the world believe

that sacred rites and traditions

are the proper way to prepare a person's soul for the afterlife.

But on the other hand, throughout history,

there have also been customs that were intended

not to benefit the soul of the deceased

but rather to harm it.

These practices are referred to as deviant burials.

LAYCOCK: The word "deviant burial"

comes from archaeology.

When archaeologists look at dead people,

if someone has been buried in a way

that is different from everyone else,

that's known as a deviant burial.

For example, in this village in Poland,

archaeologists discovered about six buried corpses

where there were sickles that had been placed over the neck

or over the pelvis,

with the logic seeming to be,

if this corpse tries to get up, it will be cut with iron.

And one possibility is that these people

did something really bad while they were alive.

They practiced black magic or murder.

And the idea is that if we can basically mutilate their body,

this will stop them from entering into the afterlife.

SHATNER: It's unsettling to think that desecrating human remains

could doom a person's soul in the afterlife.

Which is why, for thousands of years, people have gone

to great lengths to prevent such violations from happening.

Like in the case of a Chinese emperor

whose royal tomb was protected

by thousands of fierce terra-cotta warriors.

SHATNER: Here in this rugged, mountainous region

bordering the Gobi Desert,

two brothers begin digging a well on their family farm.

But instead of water, their shovels reveal

a life-sized statue of a soldier.

When archeologists later excavate the site,

they unearth thousands of these sculptures

known as the terra-cotta warriors,

each with remarkably realistic facial expressions.

Every now and then, there's a game-changing moment

in archaeological history.

This is a discovery of that magnitude

because, as time went on,

it became clear that this wasn't just a few pots.

It was actually a vast underground army

of 6,000 soldiers standing to attention.

SHATNER: These incredibly lifelike statues

are actually part of a massive underground tomb complex

called the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor.

The mausoleum covers an area of nearly four miles

and contains numerous underground palaces and chambers

that surround a tomb mound at the center of the complex.

The tomb mound itself is quite unassuming.

It is sort of a pyramid-shaped, but it's made of earth.

And these days, it's covered with trees,

so it's all very green,

but when it was originally built,

it would've supported some large structures,

some large temple structures.

So, the tomb complex is far away

from the place where they'd discovered

the terra-cotta warriors.

And everyone doesn't really understand,

initially, how they can be part of the same thing.

The sheer size of the complex is unprecedented.

It's an amazing sight.

The scope of this is hard to describe.

There's chariots. There's horses.

There's an entire labyrinthine complex that exists,

and all of it intentionally kept underground

in what is literally an underworld.

SHATNER: This vast tomb complex was built in the third century BC

to be the final resting place for Qin Shi Huang,

the first emperor of a unified China.

Most of the ancient tombs in China

are statements of who you were.

So, what you get with this tomb is a huge statement

of how important this man was.

The amazing thing about his reign

is it only lasted 11 years,

but in that time, he completely transformed China

by making it one unified whole.

Even the name "China" seems to derive

from the name of his state, Qin.

So this is a guy who was unprecedented.

He thought of himself as the ruler of the known world.

DOMINIC STEAVU: As soon as he came to power, he started building

this tomb complex as a way of transporting

what he had acquired and what he had accomplished

in the living world into the afterlife,

into the world of immortals, and that included

material things, like treasures and vast, untold riches.

SHATNER: The pyramid-shaped, artificial mound at the center

of the complex is 250 feet tall.

Archaeologists believe that underneath this mound

is a chamber containing Emperor Qin's tomb.

According to ancient Chinese writings,

every detail of this chamber

was designed to perfectly mirror the emperor's kingdom.

There's a very elaborate passage that vividly describes

how the tomb was designed

from the Records of the Grand Historian

by Szuma Chien.

The main feature was a small scale representation

of the Chinese empire at the time,

and so it had all the waterways and the rivers and oceans

and geographical features that were duplicated

on a small scale.

There is this sense in Chinese society,

going right back to pre-history, that, when people die,

they kind of switch to another plane of existence,

and life goes on for them there.

So, the coffin of the first emperor

sits in the center of a map of the known world,

and so then, the towns are these little jewels

and the roads are gold.

And then above him, you have a ceiling

that has the constellations

in the sky because the constellations

are supposedly reflected by the world on the ground.

So, you have heaven and Earth and the emperor in the middle,

and it's all picked out in precious metals.

SHATNER: To date, the central burial mound

has only been partially excavated

because archaeologists believe that,

according to historical records,

it may be too hazardous to uncover.

STEAVU: According to the grand historian,

the tomb itself is highly contaminated with mercury.

The rivers and oceans were represented

by flowing mercury.

And this mercury was fed

through a very complex drainage system

and was mechanically activated

so that it permanently circulated.

CLEMENTS: In ancient China,

mercury was also believed to be,

one of the substances

that could help somebody achieve immortality.

And it just so happens that, since 1981,

we've known that there are very high concentrations

of mercury in the soil around the grave mound.

STEAVU: Because the soil around the tomb has high levels of mercury,

archaeologists are reticent about opening up the tomb.

There's a concern they could expose

the local populations to mercury poisoning.

And that it would lead to a large amount

of the artifacts being damaged or lost irretrievably.

SHATNER: Will archaeologists ever be able to safely open

the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang?

No one is certain.

But there are those who believe the emperor's body

was never located in the tomb's burial chamber

in the first place.

CLEMENTS: In Chinese history books, it says that the emperor

was buried at Mount Li, but it's not clear if that meant

in the mountain or in a grave mound near the mountain.

And this is important because, in the Middle Ages,

there was a historian who suggested that, actually,

the emperor was buried in a jade mine in a mountain nearby.

So, it's very possible that the tomb mound itself

is a decoy. That he's not there at all.

And if they start digging there,

they'll be digging in the wrong place.

One big hanging question that we're still left with is,

of course, what else is there?

We've only uncovered part of this tomb.

So, much of it still has not been revealed.

And who knows if it will ever be discovered.

SHATNER: More than two million people live and work

in this 41 square mile metropolis.

And although Paris is one of the world's

most instantly recognizable cities,

just below the surface of the City of Light

lurks a mysterious darkness.

A centuries-old labyrinth of tunnels that contains

the bones of millions of bodies.

The Paris Catacombs.

JEREMIAH: When you walk in there, you will see bones stacked.

They're everywhere.

You'll have thigh bones stacked up in places.

You'll have skulls stacked in other places.

It's almost like a warehouse of human bones.

LACY: We don't know which bone goes with which.

Sometimes, they're just piled up, but sometimes

it's almost a decoration, where they put them.

In some cases, they're more architecturally

or artistically placed.

JONATHAN YOUNG: There are, lined along the walls,

thousands of skeletons,

some with bits of clothing hanging off of them.

It's a whole network of tunnels, really.

There's about a mile of it that's open to visitors,

and you can see some of these places.

SHATNER: Over the main entrance to the Paris Catacombs,

there is carved a sign, which, when translated reads,

"Stop! This is the Empire of the Dead."

According to some estimates, the Paris Catacombs

hold the bones of more than six million people.

But why did Parisians decide to stack

all these bones together in the first place?

LACY: In Paris, you had people being buried

in a traditional sense in a graveyard,

but those are finite locations.

And they started running out of space.

So, if that is the case, after a certain amount of time,

individuals are gonna get dug back up

to create space for new burials,

and you have to do something with those bones.

So, they started to utilize catacombs as a way

to relocate those bones.

THOMPSON: In the Parisian Catacombs, very often,

bones have been rearranged,

made into even sculptural sort of forms.

In many ways, this conflicts with that,

Christian idea of keeping the body together.

PAUL KOUDOUNARIS: The one thing most funeral practices have in the world

is some kind of respect for one's ancestor

or some kind of feeling that this is one last act

of charity that needs to be completed

for the soul to move on properly.

On the other hand, the Paris Catacombs

was not a sacred site.

They were gonna get rid of the old bones, and they don't

want to have this problem again.

I would question whether the Paris Catacombs are respectful

to the dead or not.

SHATNER: Did the builders of the Paris Catacombs

desecrate the souls of the dead

by moving their bones from cemeteries

to the dark tunnels beneath the city?

There are many who believe the answer is yes.

And there is a local legend which says

that moving the bones of so many deceased people

unleashed a dark and malevolent force

that still haunts the catacombs.

And it is believed that if you're there

in the hours of darkness,

after midnight,

that you hear whispers coming

from the spirits of the skeletons

drawing you deeper and deeper and deeper into the catacombs,

where you get so lost, you will never get out.

YOUNG: The system of tunnels is really elaborate.

You can get turned around down there and get lost.

There's a legend in the city of Paris

that there was a doorman

at a hospital named Philibert Aspairt,

and he went on an errand down a staircase.

One rumor is that he was going to the wine cellar

to get a certain cognac. We don't know.

But there are various points of entry into the Paris Catacombs,

and, apparently, he went down the wrong staircase.

And he got himself in there and turned around and lost

and never came out

and died in there.

And they didn't find his body for 11 years.

So they buried him right there in 1804.

KOUDOUNARIS: The Paris Catacombs really were designed to be a spectacle

and a tourist attraction.

You know, they were not designed to have a sacred function.

You didn't go down in there and pray.

They designed it to be a famous macabre site.

And the whole point of it was, like, you know,

you look in this room and you cannot tell

a king from a pauper.

You cannot tell the wise man from the fool.

Death is this great leveler.

Understanding that aspect of death

is an incentive to live right.

Did the relocation of millions of human skeletons

into the Paris Catacombs unleash a sinister curse?

It's a chilling thought.

But perhaps what's even more bizarre

is the fate of many Catholic saints

whose bodies have been miraculously preserved

for all eternity.

♪ ♪

SHATNER: Cologne, Germany.

Near the center of this ancient city

rise the soaring twin spires of the Cologne Cathedral.

Every day, more than 20,000 people flock

through its arched doors

to visit one of Catholicism's most important sites:

the Tomb of the Three Kings.

Those who pray at this ancient shrine believe

that they will be divinely favored,

because it contains the bones of the three biblical wise men

who visited Jesus shortly after his birth

and whom the Catholic Church considers to be saints.

JEREMIAH: After death, a lot of the so-called saints

in Catholic Christianity--

their body parts were distributed.

And the reason for that was there was this idea

that they were a source of divine power

that could affect people,

that could affect miracles.

SHATNER: For the faithful, being in the presence

of even a tiny portion of a holy figure's body

is a powerful reminder

of God's promise of eternal life in heaven.

So, imagine how they must feel

when in the presence of not merely the body parts of a saint

but the entire body of one,

like in the case of the remains of St. Bernadette of Lourdes,

which lie perfectly preserved in a chapel in France

more than a century after her death.

ELIZABETH HARPER: St. Bernadette

was born in France in 1844,

and she saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary 18 times.

And it started when she was 14.

The spring that St. Bernadette saw the Virgin Mary

is now a point of healing for many people,

and many people go to Lourdes just to obtain the water.

JEREMIAH: St. Bernadette ended up dying in 1879 of tuberculosis,

and the Church decided

that her claim that she visited with the Virgin Mary

in Lourdes, France,

was trustworthy and decided to make her a saint.

And as such, they had to remove her body

from the current tomb, identify it

and then relocate it closer to the church.

And when they were doing that, they found out

that she was in a perfect state of preservation.

She looked as though she was still alive.

SHATNER: To this day, St. Bernadette appears as youthful in death

as she did in life.

Could it be possible that St. Bernadette's lack of decay

is actually the result of divine intervention?

An incorruptible saint symbolizes

that God has blessed that particular saintly person

so that their body that so many people have loved in life

is still recognizable

and becomes a focus for devotion.

SHATNER: Despite the symbolic miracle

such incorruptible bodies represent for the faithful,

according to many researchers,

there's nothing miraculous about them.

JEREMIAH: A lot of the so-called incorruptibles--

they were blatantly mummified.

St. Bernadette was enclosed in two hermetically sealed caskets.

Once it's exposed to air, she started to decay.

So they covered her face and hands with wax.

SHATNER: To the millions of faithful who visit the small chapel

where St. Bernadette's body now lies,

her uncanny appearance remains proof of the power of faith.

Unlike another incorruptible mummy,

which many consider to be evidence

of a much different power:

the power of the state.

More than one million mourners stand for hours

in below-freezing temperatures

to pay their final respects to Vladimir Lenin,

the Bolshevik leader who ushered in the Communist Revolution.

ALEXEI YURCHAK: When Lenin died in 1924,

he was associated in the minds of millions of people--

not everyone, but the majority--

with a radical transformation of human history.

Lenin and the... especially his family

wanted him to be buried.

But Stalin decided to create a symbolism

of an utopia that was created.

So, the idea was to keep him preserved

for future generations.

SHATNER: According to reports, Soviet scientists devised

an entirely new method for creating Lenin's mummy,

one intended to preserve his body for eternity,

as though he were frozen in time.

YURCHAK: It had to be

the exact likeness of Lenin.

It also had to feel like Lenin.

The so-called presence had to be there.

SHATNER: Almost a hundred years later,

Lenin's mummy still remains on display

in his mausoleum near Red Square in Moscow.

And it appears as though his body hasn't decayed

in the slightest.

Every few months, they give him a recharge.

You know, they hydrate him a little bit.

They put fake eyelashes on him.

As the art of mummification advances,

so, too, does Lenin's.

He's looking better every year.

STONEHILL: For many people,

it was more just a mere body that was being preserved.

It was the spirit of the era.

And Stalin was gone. Khrushchev was gone.

But Lenin was always there.

SHATNER: Can preserving the remains of the dead

actually keep their spirit alive forever?

Mm, perhaps.

But there are those who believe

that the soul is not only immortal

but can also be reborn

in a new body.

SHATNER: Three-year-old Dorothy Eady takes a traumatic tumble

down the stairs of her family's home.

Her injuries, while serious, are not life-threatening,

but they are life-changing.

Because in the years after her accident,

Dorothy Eady begins recalling memories

from what she claims to be a past life.

CHRISTINE SIMMONDS-MOORE: The story goes that she fell down the stairs,

had a head trauma and actually died and then returned to life.

And then, when she came back to life

after hitting her head,

she had later experiences where she seemed to know things

about ancient Egypt

that she really should not have known.

RAMY ROMANY: Her Dad would take her to the British Museum,

and when she went there, she saw images and artifacts

from the New Kingdom of Egypt

and said, "This is home."

And she became obsessed with ancient Egypt.

McGOWAN: Dorothy Eady was able

to read some hieroglyphs

from the time that she was ten years old,

and from the time that she was a teenager,

she was essentially writing

in a type of hieroglyphic script.

ROMANY: Then, as she got older,

she claimed to have been reincarnated

from a priestess in ancient Egypt

that was in a relationship

with King Seti I,

the builder of the Temple of Abydos.

SHATNER: Dorothy Eady's claims of a past life

may seem far-fetched,

but the truth is that many cultures

believe that our souls are immortal

and can be reborn again and again,

leaping into new bodies each time we die.

But could such an incredible notion actually be possible?

AMIR HUSSAIN: So, reincarnation,

literally, is this idea that we may live multiple lives.

We don't just live one life, we live a life,

we die and we're reborn.

We're reborn back into a physical body.

For example, Tibetan Buddhists believe

the Dalai Lama is a reincarnation

of Avalokiteshvara, the goddess of compassion.

And when the previous Dalai Lama dies,

they look for a boy born with certain signs.

And so, there's a great story

about the modern Dalai Lama, that, as a young child,

he is brought into the monastery

and he points to a bookcase, says,

"My teeth are in there, my teeth are in there,"

and they open it up and of course, it's the teeth

of the previous Dalai Lama.

And so, you do have people

who have that sense of awareness

of something that's happened in the past,

they've lived a past life.

ARIEL BAR TZADOK: The Kabbalah teaches that human souls

have a purpose as ordained by God,

to learn while here on Earth.

And sometimes, a single lifetime is not enough

to fulfill the mission and the cause

for which God has ordained that we be born here on Earth.

And therefore, souls will come back.

SIMMONDS-MOORE: A lot of people who have

past-life cases tend to be connected to trauma,

and I think that was the case with Dorothy.

It could be something to do with her own head trauma.

There's been a lot of research that tries to say

there is a soul that gets reincarnated,

but I think we can't really know

exactly what's happening

when people are having these memories.

SHATNER: In the case of Dorothy Eady,

her accurate recollections of life in ancient Egypt

were astounding.

At the age of 29, Dorothy moved to Egypt,

married and gave birth to a son who she named Sety,

to reflect her connection with the ancient pharaoh.

She would eventually be called Omm Sety, or Mother of Sety.

While not formally trained,

Dorothy became a well-respected colleague

of many of the world's foremost Egyptologist,

spending 50 years working as a draftswoman,

writer and unconventional historian.

After spending time with Omm Sety,

many experts began to believe that her incredible stories

might actually be true.

Omm Sety in this lifetime had extraordinary knowledge

and memory of the workings of the Abydos Temple,

and the artwork within.

The Temple of Abydos was the holy of holies

for the Egyptian people.

Omm Sety's arrival in Abydos

was stunning for everyone involved

because, as an English woman

walking into the temple for the first time,

she knew exactly where everything was.

She immediately knew how to find certain chambers.

She was able to even interpret

some of the hieroglyphs in the dark.

ROMANY: The head Egyptologist

took her to a place in the temple where he knew

she wouldn't know the answers to because it wasn't published yet.

He himself was the one that translated

every part of it, took him months.

But if Omm Sety is truly

a reincarnated priestess of Egypt, then she would know.

And she knew every part of that wall.

So, either she was really good

at ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or she truly was

a reincarnated ancient Egyptian priestess.

McGOWAN: Omm Sety became one of the most important Egyptologists,

one of the most important translators

of hieroglyphs in the world,

and she didn't have a formal education.

The story of Dorothy Eady is arguably

the single most convincing account of reincarnation

that we have anywhere in history.

SHATNER: There are many who believe

that Dorothy Eady's story proves that

reincarnation is, in fact, real.

But if our souls are really born again

into new bodies after we die,

why do only some of us recall memories from our past lives?

SIMMONDS-MOORE: If you look at the past-life research,

and you look at the cases that seem a bit more intriguing,

i.e., they seem to be providing stronger evidence

for something anomalous going on,

what we see is that it's people who died suddenly.

It aligns with the idea of unfinished business.

ROMANY: Even though Egyptians do not believe in reincarnation,

the ones around Omm Sety would decide to actually believe

that Omm Sety's story--

it's a little bit too much for coincidence.

SHATNER: The South Korean government passes a controversial law

declaring that people can remain buried for only 60 years.

After 60 years,

their body must be exhumed and disposed of

in an environmentally friendly manner.

The idea of so-called temporary burials

may sound shocking, but the fact is,

graveyard space has been dwindling

all around the world for decades.

EGGENER: Today, in most countries

in the world where burial is still practiced,

people are buried for a temporary period.

You, in effect, lease a grave site,

and then eventually, your remains are removed.

This is, in large part, a response to the fact

that there's a lot of people on Earth,

over seven billion now,

and we're still dying, as we always have.

Eventually, we run out of land

and there's no more space for burial.

And so, burial is becoming less and less common.

Cremation has become more and more popular

in many parts of the world.

SHATNER: In the last 65 years,

cremations have risen in the United States

by over 1,000%.

In fact, since 2015, more than half of all Americans

who passed away chose to have their remains cremated.

And many people are experimenting

with new ways to handle their ashes.

CARGILL: In the past,

when someone was cremated,

you put all of the ashes in the urn.

And yet, today, there are all kinds of alternatives.

People want to have their ashes spread

at all their favorite places.

So, the body is spread out.

LAYCOCK: More recently, as far as what people can do

with those cremains,

you can have your ashes turned into a-a diamond.

In Korea there is a company that turns your cremains

into a jar of pellets that look a bit like caviar.

There have been people having their ashes mixed

with concrete and dumped in the ocean

where they can become part of a coral reef.

There are so many things that you can do with cremains.

One of the strangest things that I've seen

in my career as an embalmer and mortician

is I did have someone request

that I put their loved one's cremated remains

into buckshot, like shells, and they wanted to be shot.

SHATNER: Being shot from a gun certainly makes the notion

of a traditional burial feel rather mundane.

However, one thing most experts agree on is that,

in the final analysis, it ultimately doesn't matter

how we say farewell to a person and their remains.

Rather, it's what we say

that is of far greater importance.

These are moments that would happen biologically,

without human interference,

but we cluster our rituals and our beliefs around them.

And following these guidelines

tells us one very important thing:

this person's still here.

If they weren't still here, if some element of them--

their soul, their spirit-- weren't still here,

we wouldn't need to do these things.

So, the fact that we do them helps remind us

that there's still something of that person.

It's an inescapable fact that everything that lives

must also, eventually, die.

And whether or not you believe in the soul,

the afterlife or even reincarnation,

the mystery of what happens to us after death

remains endlessly fascinating.

But of course, the frustrating truth

is that until our time comes,

the answers to all of our questions

about what lies in the great beyond

will continue to be unexplained.

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