For several months, outraged Internet users have been publishing posts in which they claim that Europeans have allegedly begun making tables from dead bodies. We checked whether this method of burying the dead is actually practiced in Europe.
Publications about "cannibalistic morals"Residents of Europe began to disagree regarding their deceased relatives in the Russian-language segment of the Internet. in summer 2023, but new posts on this topic appeared in February 2024 Reportedly in unnamed countries in recent years An unusual method of burying the dead is gaining popularity: instead of burial or cremation, corpses are filled with transparent resin, and the resulting cubes are used as coffee tables. At the same time, the records contain a photo of a family who allegedly treated the body of their deceased grandmother in this way. “They don’t even have respect for their ancestors, who are not given a normal rest,” comment news authors of such posts. This method also had supporters - they thinkthat this way you can better preserve the memory of the deceased person and have some physical connection with him.
For example, Telegram channels wrote about an unusual method of burial, supposedly gaining popularity in Europe.Hunter in touch"(36,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Dawn" (twice: 29,000 And 20,000), "Awakening World"(20,000), "Chronicles of the Past" (twice: 12,000 And 7000), "Secret plan» (12,000) and others (examples here, here And here). Posts on this topic received hundreds of thousands of views in public pages on VKontakte (here, here, here, here And here), they also appear in "Odnoklassniki" And Instagram*, on some websites Media and on entertainment resources. In RuNet, news about a new type of funeral rite came from the English-language segment of the Internet, where such publications collected tens of millions of views and thousands of likes in Facebook*, Instagram, X And TikTok.
In most of the above publications, the viral photo of an old woman’s body inside a transparent cube is not an independent photo, but a screenshot of a blogger’s tweet Chris Ray Gun (944,000 views), but he is not the author of the photo. Using the reverse search From the image you can find out that the photo was first published on June 19, 2023 by another user of the social network X under the nickname Free Willie Urqs. “Coating loved ones with acrylic resin worked great for grandma,” the tweet said. That post received less than 5,000 views, and almost the same one that the author posted a few minutes later went viral - he received already 387,000 views.
Free Willie Urqs tweets were written as comments to a post by visual effects specialist Kelly Porta, working on Hollywood blockbusters including Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: No Way Home. June 18 Port published a similar photograph in which there was a huge dog in the cube instead of an old woman. Accompanying the image was the caption: “Coating your loved ones with acrylic resin makes a great Father's Day gift!” The tweet received 12.5 million views. The version with the old lady Port sent in the comments commented like this: “Grandma made a great coffee table!”
That is, we can already conclude that the original photo was edited - instead of the dog, Free Willie Urqs photoshopped an old woman. Moreover, after some time, the blogger published two new pictures in which the provisions woman's hands and fingers and added puppy.
The image created using a photo editor became popular and went beyond the social network X, losing its original context, so foreign fact checkers became interested in it. So, a Snopes journalist contacted Free Willie Urqs and asked describe the process of creating a picture. “I can answer for myself, but I can’t say what Kelly Port used to create the original image. My changes were made in the new beta versions Photoshop with generative AI,” explained The author provided a screenshot from the program as evidence.
Snopes fact checkers additionally checked picture using various services for detecting images generated by artificial intelligence: Hive AI Detector, Illuminarty.ai And Fake Image Detector - all of them confirmed with a high degree of probability that the image was created by a neural network. Circumstantial evidence like this often happens in such cases, you can discover it yourself - for example, the grandmother “buried” in acrylic seems to have extra fingers, which are also unnaturally curved (although in this case the defects in the image can be explained by distortion of the reflection).
And although the photo that circulated in 2023-2024 is not real, the idea of preserving the dead in transparent cubes is not new. Back in December 1903, a similar method of preserving the bodies of the dead patented Joseph Karwowski, a “subject of the Tsar of Russia” who lived in the USA. “The purpose [of the invention] is to create a means by which a corpse can be hermetically enclosed in a piece of transparent glass, which makes it possible to exclude air from entering the corpse and preserve it indefinitely in an ideal and life-like state, so that it does not decompose and always has a living appearance,” - it was said in the application. At the same time, Karvovsky did not provide the patent office with samples.
As for the methods of handling the body of the deceased that have recently appeared and have not yet become widespread in Europe, there is water cremation (also known as resomation). How explains BBC, the technology uses a mixture of potassium hydroxide and water to destroy human remains, which is considered a greener alternative to incineration. After four hours, only bones remain from the body, they are ground into powder and then returned to loved ones in an urn. Resomation is used in Canada, South Africa and many US states; it was reported to be available in the UK in the summer of 2023.
Thus, creating coffee tables from dead people is not gaining popularity in Europe. The viral image of an old woman in a transparent cube was created using a neural network as a parody of the work of a visual effects specialist. Over time, the picture began to be circulated without context, resulting in a story about an increasingly popular burial method that sparked widespread outrage.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: @Urquwill (X)
- Is it true that the photo of a burned Israeli child was created by a neural network based on a photo of a rescued dog?
- Is it true that after death the Pope is hit on the forehead with a silver hammer to make sure he is dead?
- Is it true that the exhibition Body Worlds: Kyiv, the exhibits of which were made from the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, was canceled in London?
If you find a spelling or grammatical error, please let us know by highlighting the error text and clicking Ctrl+Enter.
