Drinkers shock at body in rum barrel ("it had a special taste..")

The Advertiser ^ | 5/5/06 | Mikey_1962

[RebelBanker]

You beat me to snopes.com! There have already been a couple of threads about this story.

[TheSpottedOwl]

Oh Gawd! I'm bumping for my bf to see when he comes home.

[Age of Reason]

Qouth the corpse: "I'll bet Lord Nelson didn't have to put up with this crap!"

I believe he did: http://home.xnet.com/~warinner/nelson.html

[Physicist]

I think it's unlikely that this story is true.

I got that feeling as soon as I saw the words, "According to the website..."

[null and void]

I was just thinking of you yesterday! Long time, no see...

[Age of Reason]

This isn't an urban legend?

Sounds like the middle paragraph here:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tap1.htm

"Similar ghoulish tales have been told in many circumstances, including one of a couple who bought a house that had once been an inn and who were delighted to find that one of the old casks in the cellar still held rum. Only after they had emptied it and cut the cask in two to make plant containers for the garden did they find the well-preserved remains of a man inside. Jan Harald Brunvand, the American academic who has made a lifelong study of such legends, has told versions in one of his books, including a related one dating back six hundred years about some tomb robbers in Egypt. Other tales tell of containers holding similarly preserved bodies of monkeys or apes that spring a leak on their way from Africa to museums; the leaking spirits are consumed with a gusto that turns to horror when the truth of the situation emerges."

[Piranha]

My wife and I just went to the Islands!

Oh, yeah? Jamaica?

Naah, she wanted to go!

[Little Ray]

When Adminal Nelson was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar, his corpse was preserved in a barrel of rum and returned to England.
After that, in some circles, rum was known as "Nelson's Blood."

[Kenny Bunkport]

This happened in an episode of "Monk."

[ReignOfError]

Life does sometimes imitate art, and many an urban legend turned out to happen after it had made the rounds for years. However, the complete lack of names and dates, along with pinning the whole story on a Hungarian police magazine Web site (cops love to swap stories), leaves me to take it with a large grain of salt.

[Larry Lucido]

So THAT'S what happened to old Vinnie "the worm" Garbanzo!

[Robe]

A drop of Nelson's blood wouldn't do us any harm,
No, a drop of Nelson's blood wouldn't do us any harm
A drop of Nelson's blood wouldn't do us any harm,
And we'll all hang on behind
And we'll roll the oak chariot along
We'll roll the oak chariot along,
We'll roll the oak chariot along,
And we'll all hang on behind.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Now we know where the Duke of Clarence has been hiding.

[SquirrelKing]

Girl in a Keg of Rum: Beaufort, NC

[Squat]

Was it another Kennedy?

[DTogo]

"Got a little Captain in you?" becomes "Got yourself in a little Captain?"

[wildbill]

For the past hundred years stories have been going around that some able seamen sampled the rum that the Admiral floated in.

Perhaps this led to the word 'bloody' being a curse word in England.

[Charles Henrickson]

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

There was a written history of the town that I grew up in which cited a incident in which a resident, who was English, died and was shipped back to England for burial in a barrel of whiskey. (Not much rum in Illinois. They probably used sour mash bourbon..) When the cask arrived, it was empty, the sailors having drained it. This book was written in approximately 1940, so if this sort of thing is an urban legend, it was been circulating for quite some time. In this instance, I suspect it was real.

[Flavius Josephus]

I recently saw a program on the development of medicine that talked a lot about grave robbing for bodies to be used in the medical schools a couple hundred years ago. They said preserving them in whiskey or rum and then selling the rum when the body was taken out was quite commonplace. After all, it's sterile, right? Right?