San Bernardo mummy
A San Bernardo mummy on display
When one thinks of mummies, one most likely envisions ancient Egypt and the complicated processes of mummification that implies. Yet, there are many other places in the world which have produced mummies of their own, often without any artificial preservation means necessary. One such place lies in the South American country on Columbia, where for decades there have been reports of corpses that simply refuse to bow down to the inexorable passage of time, due to mysterious, misunderstood processes that remain free from the ravaged of entry, rotting, and passage of time.

Nestled in the Andes mountains and located about a 3-hour drive from Bogota, Columbia lies a rural town called San Bernardo. Although surrounded by magnificent sprawling natural vistas and numerous unique species of flora and fauna, the town itself is rather unremarkable, looking very much like many of the other small towns and villages scattered throughout the region, and one could drive by it completely without giving it much thought. Yet it is here where a strange mystery has played out over decades, in the form of a collection of corpses that do not seem to rot, rather mummifying and preserving themselves naturally to remain remarkably intact and resistant to time through unknown means that have stumped scientists.

The "San Bernardo Mummies," as they have been called, were first discovered when the town relocated its cemetery in 1957 after a flood came sweeping through. As the grave workers toiled away going through bodies in the above ground vaults common to the area and moving them to their new resting places, the startling discovery was made that many of them seemed to be totally fresh and untouched by rampaging decay or decomposition, seeming to be locked into something akin to a perpetual state of suspended animation. Such naturally mummified remains were found throughout the cemetery, and one grave digger named Eduardo Cifuentes said of such a finding:
The burial pit was full of bodies. I didn't like stepping on them because they were humans like us so I started organizing them. I liked the idea of keeping them for posterity
It was Cifuentes who would bring the case to the attention of outsiders and begin some process of examining the strange corpses. It was found that not only were the bodies somehow petrified or mummified in some way, but that also their clothes were mostly in good condition when they should have been rotted to mere tatters. There was no evidence of any attempts to embalm the corpses or tamper with them in any way, nor any sign of some sort of chemical intervention in the soil, they were just for some reason immune to the normal deterioration process, defying the process of decay and merely exhibiting some wrinkling, paleness, or in some cases conversely a browning of the skin. Considering that other corpses in the cemetery had inexorably rotted away as expected, no one could figure out why these should remain so relatively pristine, and it is a mystery even now.

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