Bunk. Coffins are not generally watertight, and the wooden coffins used in the antebellum South would decompose quickly in the moist soil. The bodies themselves would decompose equally fast. Certainly, the graves tended to be shallow, so raging floodwaters could erode the sod from the grave and expose the contents, but this legend of cadavers floating down the canals is hooey.
And above-ground burial of the dead was a French Catholic tradition that was simply transported to the New World when New Orleans was founded. It had nothing to do with water tables and boating boogeymen.
Or so I was assured by the docent at one of the Cities of the Dead. A man who, by the way, had all the appearance of a cadaver himself, and smelled strongly of the same embalming fluid favored by Ted Kennedy.
A man who, by the way, had all the appearance of a cadaver himself, and smelled strongly of the same embalming fluid favored by Ted Kennedy.
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Pickles float.
There are graves in NO. Some people, instead of a family mausoleum had raised burial plots. And there was a Jewish cemetery near the corner of Elysian Fields and Gentilly (I think - it's been awhile) that didn't use mausoleums at all.
Yes the water table is high, but they even did mass graves during the yellow fever epidemics.