Different cultures have different traditions, even regarding burials. While Europeans would rather bury dead people under the ground or exhume them to keep their ashes, Buddhist and Hindu countries have other methods of bringing their deceased into the next world.
The ritual of sky burial plays an important role in their culture. This involves round towers built without roofs, also known as Dakhma. The corpses are brought into these towers, and are then decorated, anointed and left alone. Hawks, buzzards and vultures eat the corpses so that they can be brought to heaven and transported to the next world.
Due to hygenic reasons, sky burial has been forbidden in many places. Only parsers and Zoroastrians still perform this ritual, and even then, they only do so in secluded areas of Tibet.
In relation to this, an extremely horrifying event once occured in India – after several people had disappeared, local police sent search parties into the jungles, and here’s what they discovered: a “fresh” Dakhma full of corpses that had already started to decay. The area surrounding this tower was barren of animals for miles around, save for huge flies and maggots digging their way through the dead bodies.
The smell must have been brutish and almost unbearable. But here comes the real shocker: after the police had recovered the bodies, none of them turned out to be any of the those reported missing. Does that mean that there are more of these towers out there? Does this involve a cult that seeks out human victims? What other evil secrets does the dense jungle hide?
After some research, people discovered that this series of events was merely a hoax – all evidence had been based on manipulated images.
But who knows what other dark rites still lurk out there today?
Image Source: http://thehorrortree.blogspot.de/2012/06/tower-of-silence.html
