Funerals can be moving, joyful, or just plain weird. From dictators to pop superstars, let’s call these memorials special. In the early hours of August 31st, 1997, after a horrific car accident, Princess Diana was pronounced dead at a hospital in Paris. At first, her body was held in an empty first-floor emergency ward where the temperature was very high.
After blankets were hung over the windows to prevent photographers from getting shots of the body, the room got even hotter. Fans were then placed around the room to help stave off decomposition. Hours Prince Charles and Diana’s two sisters arrived for private prayers and rites with two vicars, after [music] which the body was taken out of the hospital on a coffin draped with a royal flag.
The flag violated protocol since Diana was no longer technically a princess, but Charles insisted she be treated as a royal in death. As such, Princess Diana’s funeral was held in Westminster Abbey. Her lead-lined coffin was so heavy that pallbearers had to rehearse with a practice coffin filled with enough concrete blocks to simulate the 700-lb casket.
On September 6th, an estimated 2.5 billion people around the world watched the funeral on live television. After his assassination on November 22nd, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was [music] buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. On the day of the funeral, November 25th, the president’s body was transported to St.
Matthew’s Catholic Cathedral for a Requiem Mass, and then onto an official state funeral at Arlington. As JFK’s body was driven past, Kennedy’s young son, John F. Kennedy [music] Jr., saluted his deceased father. Photographer Dan Farrell managed to capture the image, saying it was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.

He was that beautiful little child who stood for something [music] so hopeful in the face of such tragedy. John John had been practicing his salute before his father’s death, and it was First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy [music] who thought it would be an appropriate moment. It resulted in one of the most iconic images in modern American history, and it’s only made sadder by the fact that the day of his father’s funeral fell on JFK Jr.’s third birthday.
After President Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, he developed a detailed funeral plan that was reviewed annually by former First Lady Nancy Reagan. So, when Reagan died in June 2004, [music] there was a 300-page instruction manual combining state, military, and presidential funeral customs with Reagan’s extensive personal wish list.
Following his death, his body was taken to his presidential library in California for a day of public viewing. He was then transported by plane to Washington, D.C., to lie in state on Capitol Hill for 2 days. Once on the ground, his body was escorted to the Capitol in a procession headed by a single drummer.
Then came six horses pulling a carriage carrying Reagan’s 700-lb mahogany casket. [music] Behind that vehicle trotted a riderless horse with a pair of black boots wedged backwards in the stirrups, representing a [music] leader of the people who’d been struck down. After the 2 days of public viewing, a motorcade took Reagan’s body to the National Cathedral for a state funeral.
A national day of mourning was declared, shutting down the federal government and the New York Stock Exchange. [music] It’s the way Reagan wanted it. Michael Jackson died in June 2009 at the age of 50. 12 days later, the Michael Jackson public memorial service, produced and promoted like a concert, took place at the Los Angeles Staples Center.

Demand for seats was so high that the organizers held a ticket lottery. Of the 1.6 million who entered, only several thousand got the official pass, a glitter-covered hospital bracelets, which is more than a little creepy. The service began with the soul legend Smokey Robinson reading notes of regret from celebrities who couldn’t attend.
Technical difficulties resulted in an unplanned 10-minute break before gospel choir accompanied the arrival of Jackson’s golden coffin. The crowd sat silent for 15 minutes as it was put in place. A series of speakers [music] took to the microphone. The Reverend Al Sharpton talked about Jackson’s social legacy.
BECAUSE HE REFUSED TO LET PEOPLE DECIDE his boundaries, HE OPENED UP THE WHOLE WORLD. Queen Latifah read a poem by Maya Angelou, and Magic Johnson told a story about the time he ate Kentucky Fried Chicken with Jackson. >> [music] >> Each speaker was hugged by Jackson’s surviving brothers, who were all dressed like the Jackson of the ’80s, wearing sunglasses and one white glove.
One of the final speakers was Jackson’s 11-year-old daughter, Paris Jackson, who could only cry and talk about her love for her dad while a relative off-mic could be heard pushing the anguished child to speak louder. I just wanted to say I love him so much. On the evening of April 4th, 1968, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
was shot to death in Memphis [music] as he stood on the balcony of his motel room. Five days later, an estimated 200,000 mourners took part in a solemn march through the streets of Atlanta to Ebenezer Baptist Church, where [music] King had served as a pastor for nearly a decade.

The building couldn’t hold the massive crowd, but 60 members of Congress, President Richard Nixon, and cultural icons like singers Harry Belafonte and Mahalia Jackson [music] attended the service. Perhaps the most heart-wrenching eulogy was delivered by King himself by a recording of a speech he’d given at that very pulpit 2 months to the day before his murder.
The sermon was called “The Drum Major Instinct,” and as he spoke that morning, King had wondered what his funeral would be like. King’s sermon did not mince words in calling out the base instincts of white supremacists and the power of love to defeat them. Then, in what turned out to be a prophetic request, King said, SAY THAT I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR JUSTICE.
SAY THAT I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR PEACE. I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS. WHAT was at first just another eloquent Sunday sermon had become a message from beyond the grave. I’m not at all afraid of the thought of death, and in many ways look forward to it with much curiosity and interest. >> [music] >> In May 1990, Jim Henson, creator and chief artistic mind behind the Muppets, died suddenly of a bacterial infection [music] at age 53.
Despite his relatively young age, Henson had taken care to specify his last request, [music] and his relatives, friends, and associates gave him a joyous funeral service at New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine just 5 days later. Henson’s five adult children [music] each read letters written to them by their father not to be opened until after his death.
Brian Henson’s note revealed that many of the service’s most creative and whimsical elements had been the Muppet [music] master’s call. Have a wonderful time in life, everybody. It feels strange writing this kind of thing while I’m still alive, but it wouldn’t be easy to do after I go. Everyone at the service was given a simple puppet, a foam butterfly on wires that seemed to flutter its wings on its own accord.

As per Henson’s instruction, no one wore [music] black. He asked people to wear bright Muppet-style colors like the vibrant green of Kermit [music] the Frog, Muppet Henson voiced and operated. After a series of Muppet songs performed by Henson’s colleague, Caroll Spinney, in costume as Sesame Street’s Big Bird, sang Kermit’s signature tune.
It’s not that easy [music] being green. After Aretha Franklin died in 2018, her Detroit funeral was a memorial fit for a queen. The general public could pay their respects over a 3-day viewing period [music] at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Franklin’s outfit changed each day from a crimson dress to a pale blue one, and finally a rose gold suit.
When she was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, she was wearing a gold dress with shimmering high-heeled shoes. The service was held on August 31st, 2018 at Greater Grace Temple, and it lasted for just over 8 hours. It was attended by luminaries such as former President Bill Clinton, and more than a dozen A-list singers performed, including Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, and Faith Hill.
Finally, as an ode to a lyric in Franklin’s 1985 hit “Freeway of Love,” more than 100 pink Cadillacs parked two and three deep lining the streets outside the church. Sic semper tyrannis. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 15th, [music] 1865 at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. The Civil War had effectively ended just [music] 6 days earlier, and Lincoln’s murder further traumatized the already grief-ravaged nation.
The staging of the presidential funeral and the events surrounding it was such a massive undertaking that writers at the time dubbed it “the greatest funeral in the history of the United States.” The ceremonies began with Lincoln’s body lying in state at the White House and U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. The president’s body then embarked on a 20-day train tour of six states with open-casket [music] viewing in 13 cities.
All told, residents of 180 cities were given a chance to see or be near the slain president, [music] and an estimated 10 million people, about 1/3 of the U.S. population at the time, seized the opportunity in some way. At the final stop in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln was buried, 150,000 mourners attended, 10 times the [music] city’s population.
As Lincoln’s casket had to remain open for 20 days worth of viewing, the body had to be repeatedly embalmed. [music] Dr. Charles Brown served as the undertaker, treating the body, which starts to decompose right away, before every viewing. Notably, he used embalming techniques first practiced only a couple of years earlier during the Civil War.

According to legend, extreme measures were taken to ensure that the final resting place of 13th-century warrior Genghis Khan, ruler of the Mongol Empire, would remain [music] forever unknown. Many years later, European explorer Marco Polo wrote about the funerals of Mongol emperors with regard to Genghis [music] Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan.
According to Polo, it was tradition for the emperor’s associates to kill the military’s strongest horses so that they would accompany their leader in the afterlife. In addition to all that animal murder, innocent people were killed, too. Anyone who happened to see a funeral procession of an emperor, and thus be aware of the [music] general vicinity of the tomb, was executed.
The number could stretch into the tens of thousands. Genghis Khan’s tomb was built underground and further obscured by having 1,000 horses run over the earth to destroy any evidence of digging. It must have worked because to date, Khan’s tomb has never [music] been discovered, confounding all sorts of sophisticated modern expeditions and technologies devoted to finding it.
If you go looking for it, it’s in Mongolia, probably. Even that’s not 100% certain, but good luck. Should be investigated. Should you shut the [ __ ] up before you get us both killed. The USSR’s Cold War propaganda machine was so good at burying all the murder, starvation, gulags, and war deaths suffered by its people that when leader Joseph Stalin died in March 1953, the nation was united by a profound collective grief.
Oh, this is calamity. Calamity. Ah. The day after Stalin’s death from heart and lung failure, his body lay in state in an open casket in Moscow’s Hall of Trade Unions. Rooshed. Not rooshed. Whatever. Not rooshed. Rooshed? >> Would you stop with this? During the 3 days in which Stalin’s body was publicly displayed, [music] a steady stream of thousands of mournful Soviets came to pay their respects.
So many, in fact, that the Hall of Trade Unions couldn’t handle [music] the crowds. A number of mourners were crushed to death, but just as the Soviet people were led to believe Stalin was a good guy, the state-controlled media made sure it was impossible to know how many mourners died trying to show their loyalty.
The next head of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, put that number at exactly 109. Other non-Soviet sources claimed the dead were in the thousands. On March 9th, Stalin’s body was buried in Red Square next to that of Russian Revolution leader Vladimir Lenin. In another weird twist, Lenin’s body is still on display looking better than living Lenin did at the end with the help of a lot of wax and even more denial that he’s decomposing in plain sight.