Mummy Mystery: The Curious Case From Austria
A centuries-old mystery is solved as researchers reveal an 18th-century Austrian mummy was embalmed in a most unusual way — via the rectum. Discover the bizarre yet fascinating details of this historic mummy and the science behind his preservation
By all accounts, the air in the tiny Austrian village of St Thomas am Blasenstein has always been thick with history – and, until recently, an air of mystery of the mummy . For tucked away in the local church crypt was the desiccated body of a man long dubbed the “air-dried chaplain”, thought to be none other than Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg, an 18th-century vicar with apparently lofty connections and an even loftier post-mortem tale.
Now, in a twist that would have raised more than a few ecclesiastical eyebrows back in the day, scientists have discovered that Sidler wasn’t simply left to dry out in the Alpine breeze, but was instead embalmed in a most unorthodox fashion — from the rear end up.
Yes, you read that right.
According to Dr Andreas Nerlich and his team from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, the dearly departed chaplain had his abdominal and pelvic cavities stuffed — quite literally — with wood chips, broken twigs, fabrics like silk and hemp, and zinc chloride. And, astonishingly, all of this was apparently inserted via the rectum. No slicing or dicing, no sarcophagus-scale theatrics à la ancient Egypt — just a bit of backdoor packing, if you will.
“It was quite the surprise,” admitted Dr Nerlich, rather understating the matter. “There was no external evidence of embalming, and the abdominal wall remained intact. The only logical point of entry was… well, the posterior.”
Talk about an exit strategy turned entrance.
The revelations, published in Frontiers in Medicine, shed light on how earlier scans had missed the internal stuffing entirely. All that was visible was a suspicious round structure near the lower bowel — a finding that had once sparked outlandish rumours of Sidler having swallowed a poisonous capsule. As it turns out, the object was a humble glass bead — likely a decorative remnant from the stuffing fabric, perhaps once part of a rosary, now immortalised as the world’s most over-analysed intestinal bauble.
Further poking around (with appropriate reverence, one hopes) revealed a man who likely died between 1734 and 1780, matching the historical record of Sidler’s death in 1746 at the age of 37. Bone, tooth and skin analyses confirmed he lived like a proper priest of the time — not exactly starving in a hair shirt, but dining well on meats and grains and indulging in a cheeky puff on the pipe. The poor fellow even bore the skeletal marks of bunions, no doubt the consequence of cramming his feet into fashionable pointy shoes — the clerical equivalent of suffering for one’s style.
As for what finally did him in, it wasn’t poison but rather good old-fashioned tuberculosis, causing bleeding in the lungs. A grim end, no doubt, but rather par for the course in an era when sneezing in the wrong direction could do you in.
And the embalming? The boffins reckon it was likely a last-ditch effort to stave off the spread of disease — miasma being the big baddie of the day — or perhaps to allow safe transport of his body to his home monastery at Waldhausen. After all, no one wants to turn up at the abbey gates in a state of advanced decay.
Still, this method of embalming via the back passage has never been documented before, suggesting that the mummy might not be so singular after all. It raises a host of questions: Was this bottom-up preservation more common than we realised? Did other monks meet similarly inventive ends? And who, pray tell, drew the short straw for that particular job?
In the end, Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg might be gone, but thanks to some rather intimate science, his legend lives on — and not just as the “air-dried chaplain”, but now as the most thoroughly stuffed priest in Christendom.
It’s fair to say, he’s left a lasting impression — even if it’s from the wrong end.
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