Blog Posts by Susan Egner
Inspirations, thoughts by Minnesota author and flight attendant
There were once over 50 burial mounds in St. Paul before the construction of the city destroyed most of them. Seven have been preserved. There’s a large burial mound in the northern part of Minnesota. It’s said that it was once as high as a two-story building. Ignorance and greed caused it to be ransacked and partially destroyed. In some of my research, I read that over 300 bodies have been returned to their original burial place. What’s fascinating is that burial mounds can be found all over the world. Some are thirty-eight miles long, and others are built as an effigy to a muskrat, bear, or something else; this is without backhoes and tractors, folks.
You may be surprised to read that over three thousand people get lost yearly in our National Forests, and you may be relieved to hear that most are found. Those unharmed are called Saves. Then others are found, injured, or deceased by natural causes; heart attack, fatal injury from a fall, etc. But, at the end of calculations, say in the year 2014 for instance, over 700 were still missing. I haven’t seen anything on the news; have you?
In researching the Laurel people, I found that they made burial masks for their deceased. Legend has it that the masks helped them find their spiritual self. Seems like the dark ages? Not true; consider that Abe Lincoln, Stalin, Dillinger, and even a beheaded queen had burial masks. Eek, was the head still attached? And you can, too. People today can make burial asks of their faces, or whole bodies, way before death. Kind of like Roy Rodgers’ Trigger, except you, won’t have to stuff it.