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The strangest things can be found in the far-flung corners of Houston’s cookie-cutter suburbs - a Hindu temple here, a Buddhist temple there, the Forbidden Gardens over yonder, and this, a museum dedicated to death, nestled between office parks and apartment complexes.
The museum is the work of the National Funeral Home Director’s Association. Its location in Houston, home to SCI, the largest “end-of-life” service company in the country, shouldn’t be a surprise. What is surprising is how fascinating the museum is. Twenty-seven vehicles, from a horse-drawn sled to modern hearses to a complete funeral bus with room for the coffin, the mourners and the flowers, crowd the floor. Displays along the edges trace the history and culture of funerals, from Victorian mourning to Egyptian mummies. You can see the tools of an embalming room from earlier in the 20th century, and compare them with battlefield embalming conditions from the mid-1800s. Other highlights of the museum include a wax Abraham Lincoln laying prostrate; Snow White’s coffin to frighten your children; a macabre story of a coffin built-for-three; and unusual, hand-carved Akan coffins from Ghana.
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