|
Cremation: A step by step guide
|
What state will you be in after 10 minutes in the cremation retort? How about after 20 minutes or 30 minutes or one hour? Will you be all gone in 15 minutes or will
parts of you survive in the furnace for a couple of hours? If you want answers to this macabre question this is the page for you. We will follow the stages of Jackie's
cremation, but first, to get you in the mood, lets introduce the crematorium, and the incinerator.
|
WARNING! This page takes a detailed and irreverent at bodily disintegration in the cremation retort. If you wish to have a gentler, kinder view on of the
incineration of human flesh and bone visit Light Like the Sun.
Some people may find the images on this page disturbing. Sure you don't
want to leave? OK sister, carry on scrolling down - its your funeral.
ARRIVE AT THE CREMATORIUM
|
Jackie has been to crematoria many times in the past. She has watched the curtains close around the coffins of relatives. She has walked away in her sexy black sheer
tights and sensible shoes while an uncle or friend has slipped out to his incineration.
Today it's her turn to be in the coffin when the curtains close. This time she won't be leaving - except through the chimney.
|
THE FINAL CURTAIN - 45 minutes later.
|
A few songs from the choir. A few Bible readings. But the crematorium is a busy place and Jackie's time is soon up. The minister says a few words about
resurrection. He pushes a button and the curtains close around Jackie. If the Supreme Uncreated
Being ever wants to resurrect her, there won't anything left of the
original Jackie for Him to start from.
|
|
MEET THE INCINERATOR - 60 minutes later
|
The incinerator is a fully automatic Diamond 2000EF single end cremator. There is no opportunity for Jackie to rest in peace. Violent destruction awaits her inside.
The ultimate victory of thanatos - Freud's death principle - through the rapid and violent technological reduction of Jackie to her inorganic base.
The cremator has two downward firing gas burners in its main chamber. Should Jackie prove difficult to finish off, these burners are designed to deal completely and
effectively with difficult residue. The cremator also has an entry burner which will be used to eliminate smoke from Jackie's waste gases. This burner may also be used to break up
her bones. The burners will get cremation chamber's temperature up to 850 degrees Centigrade before it swallows Jackie. Later on they will stop her from smoking and
re-ignite her if her fire goes out during the closing stages of cremation. Since Jackie and her casket are good fuel (providing around 800,000 BTUs of heat) the burners don't
need to ignite at any other time.
Air to feed Jackie's fire comes from 18 jets, 9 at each side of the cremator, as well as through the main burners.
|
|
IGNITION
 The cremator door opens automatically and a the wall of heat spreads out
from the chamber. Jackie's coffin is inserted into the furnace (using the automatic coffin loading machine) where it quickly catches fire, bulges and warps. As the wood
from Jackie's coffin burns brown/grey smoke puffs out of the crematorium chimney. The coffin sides collapse and fall, exposing Jackie to the direct effect of the flames. Time
for her stockings to smoke and her toes to toast. Jackie's skin and hair scorch, char and burn. But Jackie is 65% water and there's a lot more wet material inside her
that needs to dry out before it can burn.
|
|
... By 10 minutes after IGNITION
|
The soft tissue on Jackie's face has been charred. Jackie's scalpe has burnt away revealing the top of her skull, which is not yet calcined. (Calcined bone is bone that
has been so thoroughly heated that all moisture and grease is oxidized or driven off, leaving only white, easily crumbled pieces.) All of Jackie's bone will eventually be
calcined - only the mineral component of her bones will be left. Her bones will fragment into small pieces and distort due to rapid water loss.
|
|
As the water is driven out of Jackie, her muscles slowly contract, causing her thighs to steadily spread and her limbs to gradually flex. Jackie's tendons shrink as they too
loose water and this could pull her into a fetal position. Her stomach swells before the skin and abdominal muscles char and split; the swelling is due to the formation of
steam and the expansion of gases in Jackie's guts.
|
|
... By about 15 minutes after IGNITION
|
Jackie is 25 about percent fat. (The fat percentage for females is normally higher due to the breast tissue.) Her fat will fuel the fire, increasing temperature and so
increasing destruction. The gas jets can certainly be turned off once Jackie's fat ignites since she will continue to burn in her own grease.
Jackie's fat may start to evaporate. This gasified fat will mix with the air and the inflammable mixture generate a large amount of heat - the temperature rising to 1100
degrees centrigrade. The higher temperature will generate more inflammable material. Jackie's combustion now becomes furious and there may be a discharge of smoke if
it cannot be controlled.
|
(Workers in the horrific Nazi crematoria reported that woman and children burn faster. Under the guidance of the
SS, female bodies were arranged at the bottom of the pyre to feed the
fire with their additional subcutaneous fat.)
 Looks like Jackie's tits with their fat content could be really
explosive. But at least Jackie is 100% natural woman. "...in California there is a problem with gloopy residue from silicone breast implants accumulating on
the floors of furnaces." (Kate Berridge in Vigor Mortis.) UK crematoria now insist that silicone breast implants are removed prior to cremation.
|
|
... By about 20 minutes after IGNITION
-
The external "table" or layer of Jackie's skull shows long narrow cracks.
-
The skin of Jackie's chest has burned away. Her ribs are visible.
-
The skin of Jackie's arms and legs has burned away. The exposed muscle is charred and the bones of her forearms are visible. The bones of her hands and feet can also
be seen. They are calcined and connected by charred soft tissue. Even when her hands and feet fall away from her legs and arms they are still recognizable.
Nevertheless, they will soon be completely destroyed.
|
|
... By about 30 minutes after IGNITION
 Organs before cooking...
|
-
There are large gaping factures in Jackie's skull and the external layer of her skull is starting to fragment. The bones of her face have calcined and little of her facial
soft tissue remains.
-
Jackie's stomach and chest cavities are exposed. Her internal organs are blackened and shruken, except for her intestentines, which although blackened at the front are
still moist behind. Her guts will burn fairly slowly, but her lungs even more slowly still.
-
Her ribs are calcined at the front.
-
Jackie's forearms have shruken. Her thigh bones are mostly free of soft tissue and her exposed leg bones calcined with extensive fractures and rolled up edges.
|
... By about 40 minutes after IGNITION
-
The back of Jackie's skull has broken and fallen away exposing her brain - a dark fused mass with a rather sticky consistency. Her brain is resistanting complete
combustion, but it cannot resist forever.
-
Her facial bones are free of soft tissue, calcined and disintegrating. The soft tissue of her neck is charred and will soon disappear completely.
-
The organs in Jackie's chest and stomach are shrunken with a sponge like surface.
|
 A fresh brain, it won't look this after 40 minutes in the
incinerator.
|
... By about 45 minutes after IGNITION
There is a dramatic decline in the temperature inside the cremation retort. Although Jackie's remaining soft tissues will continue to burn for some time longer, much of the human
tissue fuel she provided has been consumed.
... By about 50 minutes after IGNITION
-
The base of Jackie's skull is visible.
-
Except for her liver, Jackie's organs are unrecognizable.
-
Jackie's arms are gone and her thigh bones reduced to calcined stumps.
|
|
... By about one hour after IGNITION
|
-
Head, what head? Only the core of Jackie's facial bones and the base of her skull are left.
-
Jackie's organs have been reduced to ash.
About 30% of Jackie's skeleton will eventually be burnt up - the organic non-mineral part. Jackie's bones will break into fragments due to their rapid loss of water as they are
heated. Most of the bone fragments that survive incineration will come from Jackie's heavier bones - her pelvis, lower vertebrae (the bony segments of her backbone), and skull
(about 20% of the total). The bones in the female pelvis are are more delicate (thinner and lighter) than those in the male pelvis, so Jackie will have less pelvis to leave
behind.
|
... By about one hour and a half hours after IGNITION
|
Jackie's remains fall through the perforated main hearth of the cremator into the lower hearth. (Exhaust gases will pass over these remains on their way to the chimney).
From the lower hearth Jackie is raked into a trough called the ash refining hearth. Air supplied to the
ash refining hearth will cool her bone fragments down. Finally a
door in the ash refining hearth is slid open and Jackie is collected in an ash box.
|
|
Disposing of Jackie's ashes
|
How much residue will Jackie leave in the ash box? Cremains typically weigh between 3 and 9 pounds
(1.4 - 4.1 Kg). A person's height is the best predictor of the weight of
their cremains. Jackie is about average female height when standing in stocking feet - so she'll
probably leave behind the average amount of "ash" for a woman - 5.8 pounds (2.6 Kg). The final volume of Jackie's residue depends on how finely it is ground down (see Ashes to Ashes for details of this stage) and how tightly it is packed in its container. A very small portion of Jackie's residue will be
irritrievably lost during the pulverization process - a pity since there will be so little of her left.
|
Jackie will probably be scattered in the crematorium grounds by a member of the crematorium staff. Or maybe she'll get a little columbarium niche for a few years... 
|
|
References
|
The outline of the stages of cremation comes from Forensic Pathology by Vincent DiMaio and Dominick DiMaio pages 379 to 380. I have translated the technical
medical language - hopefully without too much loss of accuracy. The timings are appropimate. Factors such as body size, type of coffin and type of retort affect
cremation time. Information also came from Encyclopedia of Cremation (edited Douglas Davies and Lewis Mates) pages 132 to 135, and Death to
Dust by Kenneth Iserson (Chapter 6).
|
|
|
The ignition of fat in a corpse may occur at a different point to the one given here. The books give a time between 5 and 20 minutes from the start of cremation.
I also found some infromation Google Booking cremation. The following all provided some useful material: The Corpse: A History (Christine Quigley),
Rising from the Flames (Albert Carter and Jane Petroand), The Archaeology of Human Bones, and Human Remains (Andrew Chamberlain).
Although these books are not primarily about cremation, they do contain some interesting notes on the topic.
|
Image this
|
You can't trust images on the Internet. Not all fakes are as obvious as this one. The images on this page were found on various dubious mordid / gore / horror news
groups. The girls in the furnace ones are almost certainly fake, the charring is too smooth and the flames look as though they have been added in front of the girl.
|
|
|
The ones of bones in the furnace are probably real. A contact from Canada tells me "Often the operator will use the rake to pull the remains to the area directly under the burner or
airjets or in other units the remains are raked onto a secondary finishing hearth to finish burning down
with the supplied heat from the next loaded case." It is likely that the
bones in the incinerator images were photographed this point.
The images of cremains are also likely to be real, they look like irregular pieces bones. Processed cremains
can be more easily faked (see Ashes to Ashes for details).
|
Jackie
|
Fear not, it will be a long time before Jackie is fed to the incinerator. (Although none of us can be sure when Death will take us).
Not so your webmaster. I will probably soon be loaded into the retort, dressed in nothing but a nice pair of shiney sheer tights. Another perv up the chimney.
So if you don't see any more updates, it might be because your webmaster - or what is left of him - is in a little box
at the crematorium.
|
|
Death
|
Hey I'd love to hear from you - if only to say how sick you find this page!
Fill in my simple anonymous form or contact me by
electronic mail or drop in and see if I'm in the Cremation Chat Room.
But, I know how hard it is. One minute you are viewing my page, thinking how glad you are that
it's Jackie's stocking feet that are roasting rather tan your own nyloned
soles. (They could probably incinerate your platforms too). Then someone comes in, and all of a sudden you are tied up for hours or maybe days.
Well, get in touch when you are free again.
|
|
Hit Count: 41157
|