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It might seem obvious that any former president should receive a respectful and fitting final resting place. For many who have served their nation, this has indeed been the case. However, an unexpected number of issues have arisen with the deaths of past leaders. From George Washington to the present, presidents have been remembered in some rather unusual ways. Even more unsettling, some of their remains haven't been allowed the rest they deserve.
Here are ten bizarre stories of the fates of former presidents after their deaths.
10. George Washington
When George Washington passed away in 1799, his will was explicit: he wished to be buried near his Virginia estate. However, the mausoleum at his Mount Vernon plantation needed significant repairs to accommodate the remains of the first President. Washington himself addressed the issue before his death, outlining necessary renovations. In his own words, he wrote about the repairs required for the vault: “I desire that a new [tomb] of Brick, and upon a larger Scale, may be built at the foot of what is commonly called the Vineyard Inclosure… In which my remains, with those of my deceased relatives… may be deposited.”
Unfortunately, Washington's wishes were never fulfilled. Congress disregarded his request and secretly planned to build a crypt in the U.S. Capitol building. Yet by 1830, thirty years after Washington's death, the memorial had still not been constructed. Washington’s remains remained at Mount Vernon, but no repairs had been made to the vault there either.
This is when things took a bizarre turn. In that year, Washington's nephew and last surviving heir, John Augustine Washington II, dismissed a gardener who had worked at Mount Vernon. The gardener, enraged by his firing, sought revenge and broke into the crypt with the intent of stealing the late president’s skull. Luckily, Washington’s body had been sealed in lead to prevent tampering after death. However, the crypt was in such poor condition that the bones of numerous individuals were scattered and mixed together. Rather than taking Washington’s skull, the gardener stole the skull of one of his distant relatives. A year later, Washington’s heir constructed a new crypt in the president’s honor, and—pun intended—the rest is history.
9. James K. Polk
James K. Polk passed away just months after his presidency ended in 1849. The 11th President of the United States succumbed to cholera, which at the time meant a swift burial in a mass grave to curb the rapid spread of the disease. The burial, however, was hardly fitting for a former president. After a year in a public grave at a city cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee lawmakers decided to relocate his remains. The intended final resting place was to be Polk Place, where the president had died. For a time, that seemed to settle the matter. But in 1893, the Polk family sold the large estate. When that occurred, Tennessee officials moved Polk’s remains to the State Capitol in Nashville—and again, for a while, that was the end of the story.
In 2017, doubts about Polk’s final resting place resurfaced. The issue this time concerned the late president’s will. In it, he had requested to be buried at Polk Place. However, that property had been demolished shortly after the Polk family sold it in 1893. As a result, state lawmakers initiated the process of relocating Polk’s remains to a new property in Columbia, an hour’s drive from Nashville.
Polk had also owned that house during his lifetime, and politicians argued that relocating his remains there would fulfill his will's request. In 2018, the Tennessee legislature approved a resolution to move Polk once again. However, six months later, the plan was halted when the Tennessee Historical Commission denied permission to disturb the remains. As of now, Polk remains at the State Capitol Building, for the time being.
8. Zachary Taylor
Shortly after Polk's death, his successor passed away. Zachary Taylor tragically died while in office, just a year into his presidency, in 1850. He was 65 years old, which was considered quite old for the time. However, just days before his death, he had been in good health at a Fourth of July ceremony. His sudden death led many to speculate that he had been poisoned. At the time, Taylor was a strong opponent of allowing slavery in the western territories, and some believed pro-slavery factions may have poisoned the milk and cherries he consumed on that fateful day. Despite this, no definitive proof of poisoning was ever uncovered.
Taylor was buried in his home state of Kentucky, where he rested peacefully for a while. Over the next century, however, the theory of poisoning was frequently revisited. In 1991, the former president’s remains were exhumed for an autopsy. Kentucky’s chief medical examiner conducted the procedure and definitively concluded that Taylor had not been poisoned. In his report, the doctor stated that Taylor died from 'a myriad of natural diseases which could have produced the symptoms of gastroenteritis.' Satisfied with this conclusion, lawmakers had Taylor reburied. Today, he rests in the National Cemetery that bears his name in Louisville.
7. John Tyler
John Tyler, America’s tenth president, served before Polk and passed away in 1862 amidst the Civil War. Before his death, Tyler had been elected to the Confederate legislature. As a result, the Confederacy controlled his remains during the brutal conflict. This stirred controversy on both sides of the war, leading to a dispute over Tyler’s final resting place. In its obituary, The New York Times harshly criticized Tyler’s death, stating that he went 'down to death amid the ruins of his native State.' The obituary added: '[Tyler] himself was one of the architects of its ruin; and beneath that melancholy wreck his name will be buried, instead of being inscribed on the Capitol’s monumental marble, as a year ago he so much desired.'
The obituary’s prediction turned out to be accurate. Tyler had requested a modest funeral at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, but this was not to be. Seeing a chance to honor rebel pride, Confederate President Jefferson Davis organized an elaborate ceremony for Tyler, draping his coffin in a Confederate flag. In retaliation, Union lawmakers refused to acknowledge Tyler’s burial site. Tyler remains interred in Richmond, still the only former president whose resting place is not recognized in Washington, according to cemetery officials.
6. Abraham Lincoln
After Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, his body was transported by train across the country. Americans mourned the loss of their leader, and his body was embalmed for the journey—an emerging process at the time. Unfortunately, the technique had not been perfected. The 19-day journey required morticians to re-embalm Lincoln’s body at each stop. Despite their efforts, the body began to decay. When the train reached New York, a reporter noted: 'It will not be possible, despite the effect of the embalming, to continue much longer the exhibition, as the constant shaking of the body aided by the exposure to the air, and the increasing of dust, has already undone much of the… workmanship.' After three weeks, Lincoln was finally laid to rest in an Illinois tomb.
In 1876, a group of criminals hatched a plot to steal Lincoln’s body and demand a ransom. There were no guards at the tomb, and the marble sarcophagus was only loosely sealed. Unfortunately for the criminals, they revealed their plan to a government informant, who alerted the Secret Service. When the thieves arrived at the tomb, officers were waiting for them. After the foiled heist, Lincoln’s remains were secretly relocated to a vault’s basement. In 1901, Lincoln was disinterred once again and reburied inside a steel cage, ten feet deep beneath concrete.
5. Warren G. Harding
Warren G. Harding passed away suddenly in 1923 while staying at a hotel in San Francisco. At the time, he was in the middle of a national speaking tour and had recently recovered from food poisoning. His death took everyone by surprise. His wife, Florence, was resolute in her decision: no autopsy and immediate embalming. This infuriated Harding’s doctors, who were desperate to understand the cause of the president's sudden death. One frustrated physician even wrote: 'We shall never know exactly the immediate cause of President Harding’s death since every effort that was made to secure an autopsy met with complete and final refusal.' However, Florence remained unmoved, and her husband was quickly buried.
For a time, many blamed Harding’s doctors for his untimely death. However, the truth began to surface a few years later. In 1928, Nan Britton published a book claiming she had an affair with Harding. Then, in 1930, a former staffer from his administration published a book suggesting that Florence Harding had poisoned her husband after discovering the affair. Nearly a century later, Britton’s descendants sought legal action to confirm their connection to Harding. Ancestry records pointed to Harding being their ancestor, and they took the matter to court. Just before the president’s remains could be exhumed for DNA testing, Harding’s descendants agreed that the affair had indeed resulted in a child.
4. Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the most influential presidents in American history, served through much of the Great Depression and World War II. When he passed away in 1945, his health had been declining for quite some time, but his death still came as a shock. Roosevelt had been at one of his vacation homes, reportedly with a mistress, when he suddenly complained of 'a terrific pain in the back of my head' and collapsed. Three hours later, he was dead. Despite the urgency of embalming, officials were slow to respond. It took four hours before an undertaker was called to handle the president’s body, as aides waited for Eleanor Roosevelt, the next of kin, to arrive.
Nine hours after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, the embalming process was finally started. The undertaker, F. Haden Snoderly, recorded a meticulous 15-page memo detailing the significant complications he encountered. 'Rigor mortis had already set in,' he wrote, and Roosevelt’s abdomen was noticeably swollen by the time the embalming began. To make matters worse, FDR’s arteries had hardened, making it almost impossible for Snoderly to inject embalming fluid into his veins. The difficulty of the process fueled accusations in later books that Roosevelt had been poisoned and that his body had turned black upon death. While these claims were ultimately false, the rumors continued to circulate. As for FDR’s wishes after death, he had made it clear he wanted things kept simple. He had detailed instructions specifying a modest coffin, a low-key funeral, and no public lying in state.
3. José Eduardo dos Santos
José Eduardo dos Santos’s death in early July 2022 ignited a series of tense exchanges. Dos Santos had ruled Angola for decades, taking power in 1979, and his regime had overseen a brutal civil war. He passed away in Spain, far from his political adversaries. The timing was particularly difficult, as Angola was on the brink of an already tense election campaign when dos Santos died in Barcelona.
His daughter publicly claimed that foul play had caused the 79-year-old leader’s death and demanded an autopsy in Spain to determine the cause. An autopsy was conducted, but no evidence of wrongdoing was found. Confident that no foul play had occurred, a Spanish judge ruled weeks later that dos Santos had not been the victim of a crime. The judge also decreed that his body would be released to his widow, Ana Paula, and not his children. The grieving widow had his body flown back to Angola just days before the August elections.
The Angolan government objected to this decision but eventually allowed it. Longtime supporters of dos Santos greeted his coffin at the airport in Luanda, mourning as it was transported through the city. Finally, in August, after a lengthy delay, dos Santos was laid to rest in the capital.
2. Tassos Papadopoulos
Tassos Papadopoulos, the former President of Cyprus, passed away in 2008 after a battle with lung cancer. Papadopoulos had been a revered political figure in Cyprus. Following his death, his body was laid to rest in a cemetery in Nicosia. However, on the eve of the first anniversary of his death, an unbelievable crime occurred. Papadopoulos’s remains were stolen. On the morning of December 11, 2009, one of his former bodyguards visited the gravesite to light a candle in remembrance. After a heavy rainfall the night before, he arrived to find the grave completely empty, with only a pile of dirt in its place. Shocked, he immediately contacted the authorities.
The authorities were initially stumped, unable to uncover any suspects for weeks. Then, three months later, an anonymous tip led the police to another cemetery in Nicosia, where Papadopoulos’s body had been reburied. The tip also revealed that the body had been stolen by an individual seeking leverage in an effort to secure his brother’s release from prison. However, the plan unraveled when one of the accomplices contacted Papadopoulos’s family and demanded money. The thieves were quickly apprehended and sentenced to less than two years in prison. Thankfully, Papadopoulos was laid to rest again in peace.
1. John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but his brain is missing. The former president was tragically assassinated in 1963. During the autopsy, his brain was placed in a 'stainless-steel container with a screw-top lid' for safekeeping. Secret Service agents stored the container in a locked file cabinet, and it was later transferred to a secure room within the National Archives. Then, something horrific occurred. Three years after Kennedy’s death, officials discovered that his brain had disappeared. But the mystery remained: no one knew when or how the brain was taken from the National Archives.
In his book End Of Days, author James Swanson delved into the strange disappearance of President Kennedy's brain, writing: “the brain, the tissue slides, and other autopsy materials were missing—and they have never been seen since.” While many conspiracy theories surround Kennedy's assassination, the mystery of his missing brain only fuels the speculation. Swanson even added his own theory to the mix. He suggested that Robert F. Kennedy, JFK's brother, was the one who took the organ. “My conclusion is that Robert Kennedy did take his brother’s brain—not to hide evidence of a conspiracy, but perhaps to cover up the true extent of President Kennedy’s illnesses,” Swanson proposed. “Or perhaps to conceal evidence of the number of medications President Kennedy was taking.”
