Mummies Galore at Guanajuato's Museum of Mummies - Guanajuato, Mexico

Dr. Remigio Leroy, whose mummified remains are pictured above in Guanajuato's Museum of Mummies, was the first mummy found in Guanajuato in 1865, and the fact of his mummification was discovered quite by accident. The city had decided to commence exhuming bodies from Santa Paula Municipal Pantheon cemetery niches and crypts if the families had not paid a fee for five years running, and more burial space than usual was needed at the time for plague victims -- Dr. Leroy was from France and had no local family to pay the storage toll and was thus exhumed from Niche 214 to make room for a paying customer. And to everyone's astonishment, his body was found to have been mummified.

More mummies were quickly found in the then four-year-old cemetery; after some head-scratching, cemetery workers started storing mummies in the cemetery's catacombs... and (living) people started slipping in on the sly to see them. Go on to the next page to learn what happened next...