Status: Probably an urban legend mistaken as news
This could be the next big thing: Soylent Green Human-Flavored Rum.
Reuters reports:
Hungarian builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported... the body of the man had been shipped back from Jamaica 20 years ago by his wife in the barrel of rum in order to avoid the cost and paperwork of an official return. According to the website, workers said the rum in the 300-liter barrel had a "special taste" so they even decanted a few bottles of the liquor to take home.
You could prepare a dinner starting with
human-flavored tofu, seasoned with some
human-hair soy sauce (and a little bit of
bread made from human hair as a sidedish), and then wash it all down with this human-flavored rum. Yum! (Thanks to Big Gary for the link.)
Update: As Joe points out in the comments, this story sounds an awful lot like the
tapping the admiral legend, which involves Admiral Nelson's body being preserved in a cask of rum while at sea, and the cask slowly being drained by sailors on the voyage home. World Wide Words points out that: "Jan Harald Brunvand, the American academic who has made a lifelong study of such legends, has told versions in one of his books, including a related one dating back six hundred years about some tomb robbers in Egypt. Other tales tell of containers holding similarly preserved bodies of monkeys or apes that spring a leak on their way from Africa to museums; the leaking spirits are consumed with a gusto that turns to horror when the truth of the situation emerges." So given the relatively flaky source on the Reuters story (a Hungarian website), it's probable that whoever runs the Hungarian website got taken in by an urban legend, and then Reuters in turn was taken in by it.
Comments
I was also wondering whether rum is even transported in big barrels anywhere these days. I'd think that it'd be bottled at the distillery, packed in cases and shipped to distributers.
However, I still think the whole anecdote is probably a classic urban legend. I thought so when I first read it. It's just too similar to many popular folk tales (some of them ancient, as Jan Harald Brunvand pointed out) to take it at face value without some pretty hard evidence.
Besides, import-export laws being as they are, it's pretty hard to believe the duty on a barrel of rum would really be less than the cost of shipping a dead body.
Unless the builders' taste buds were dead to both the pang of amino rot and the acidity, i'm going to go ahead and agree that this is BS.
some remarks to your remarks. First of all I think it is really an urban legend. The disturbing fact that the article was published in the journal of the Hungarian police. They promised to provide more details later. Chief cops told already that there is no such file.
To Doug: yes a Hungarian construction worker is able to drink a whole barrel of rum even alone 😊)
To Asmo Koste: 1) No, her husband was a diplomat regarding to the original story. 2) Went back when her husband died carrying him in that famous barrel of rum. 3) The iron curtain could not be a problem for a diplomat wife.
What is more interesting that nobody asked the wife about her husband and nobody was looking for a disappeared diplomat.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has already contacted to the police in order to clarify this stupid story.
Reuters issued the following advisory May 9 in regard to a story published May 4 on MSNBC.com:
The disclaimer can be read in Hungarian at http://index.hu/politika/bulvar/rumos0512/