Lying in a Tomb: The Mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico: A Memoir

In 1979, seventeen-year-old Jeannette traveled with her family to Guanajuato, Mexico, and visited a makeshift museum of the city’s accidentally preserved dead. In the 19th and 20th centuries, when families could not pay the perpetual burial fee, cemetery workers opened the graves and sometimes, unexpectedly, found naturally mummified remains. Without consent from kin, those bodies became unauthorized museum exhibits.

Mummies like…

“La Bruja” (the witch), who was an herbalist and healer in life, but in death, the museum imprisoned her mummified remains behind iron bars, with a thick chain and a padlock sealing the cage.

“San Martincito” (little Saint Martin), an infant displayed with a black rosary hanging from his frozen, tiny fingers and draped across his body. His mother says, “I’ve tried to get him out, tried to get him properly sepulchered…But I am nobody.”

“World’s Tiniest Mummy,” a six-month-old fetus with a rusty thread of metal snaked around its neck, securing it to the mother’s wrist.

These mummies became movie stars. In 1979, the same year Jeannette first encountered them, Werner Herzog opened his film Nosferatu with a slow, visual progression across these naturally mummified corpses, propped against the stone wall of the catacomb.

In 1983, as a Fulbright Fellow, Jeannette returned to study these accidental mummies. Granted unprecedented access, she spent nights alone among the mummies, touching, learning, and sketching them in the quiet darkness.

The men in the Mexican patriarchy praised Jeannette’s brilliance and then tried to pose her, too, as a submissive exhibit. After her fairytale romance and engagement to a 53-year-old businessman turned brutal, she fled what had become a gilded prison, a place steeped in alcoholism and violence. She left Mexico for her Ohio home, and rebuilt her life as a medical student, mother, and—eventually—a physician.

In 2024, Jeannette’s passion for the mummies endured. She returned to Mexico to revisit the Guanajuato mummies and complete the work she started.

Lying in a Tomb is her story, and she welcomes you inside.