Mummy Museum

One of the popular tourist attractions in Guanajuato is the Mummy Museum. One of the churches in that town buried people in catacombs rather than in graves, mainly due to the hilly-ness of the area. After about a century, they were running out of catacomb space. So, they started removing people from older catacombs, mainly people who had no family in the area to complain. They quickly noticed that the bodies were not as decomposed as they had thought they would be after so much time. Basically, the unique method of burial had mummified the bodies. The church started a back-door tourism industry charging visitors to see the creepy mummies. Over time, the town just embraced the unique mummies and created an official museum to preserve the mummified bodies and allow people to see them.

These are 3 examples of mummies. The woman on the left has her hands in a weird position, which leads us to believe that she was thought to be dead when she was buried but not really dead. She fought to escape once she woke up buried in a catacomb, but eventually died from lack of oxygen.


This woman was 8 months pregnant when she died, and at that time there was no way to safely remove the baby, so the baby died too.