Laurinburg, North Carolina - Grave of Spaghetti, the Carny Mummy

In 1911, a traveling carnival worker named Cancetto Farmica was killed in a fight. His body was taken to McDougald Funeral Home. Cancetto's father traveled to Laurinburg, paid ten dollars down to have the body embalmed, and said he'd return with the rest of the money and burial instructions. And that was the last anyone at the funeral home ever heard from him. Just in case he came back, however, Mr. McDougald saved the body. For a while it hung from the wall in the embalming room. Later it was stored upright in a box in the garage. Locals, unable to remember or correctly pronounce Cancetto's name, began calling him Spaghetti.

And he became something of a tourist attraction, eventually being visited over the course of sixty years by thousands of people from all over the country.

In 1972, a New York congressman named Biaggi learned of the fate of his fellow Italian and raised enough of a fuss to finally convince the funeral home to bury the body. Spaghetti now lies in Hillside Cemetery under a marker donated by the funeral home. He's also reportedly under two tons of concrete, as the funeral home was worried that, due to his popularity, someone might dig him up. [Dean Jeffrey, 07/19/2003]

[RA: "Spaghetti" was killed when he got hit by a tent stake during a quarrel. It was not as rare as one might think to find a preserved corpse in a 20th century funeral home closet -- "The Alton Mummy," "The Stone Man," and "Speedy," to name a few... December 2006 - Dean adds "Back when I submitted that tip about Spaghetti, I remember there was some confusion about his real name. In NC newspaper article from the 1970s, he has yet another name (Frezzo Connsceppo rather than Canscetto Farmica) and during the course of the article, it's spelled THREE different ways. I also got a laugh out of the fact that the owner of the funeral home tried to hold Biaggi up for five grand for 'storage and other fees'."]