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America's Most Famous Pile of Rotting Corpses

Somewhere in the woods of east Tennessee, the Body Farm holds secrets about death.

Somewhere in the woods of east Tennessee lie scads of dead people.

In 2009, Motherboard visited Dr. William Bass, an anthropologist and forensic pathologist at the University of Tennesse, Knoxville. Bass founded UTK's Forensic Anthropology Center in 1971 to, in part, help train students in body identification and outdoor forensic investigative techniques. A decade later, he would become the founder and steward of the nation's oldest open-air collection of rotting corpses.

Bass's Body Farm, as it is known, is an open-air lab on a hectare-sized plot of woods where donated bodies are dropped to experience various weather and environmental conditions so researchers can study how those bodies decompose. It's important research for criminal investigators whose time-of-death calculations are critical.

As gross and macabre as it sounds, there really aren't any other study options that provide reliable, real-world data. The bodies themselves come from medical examiners and family members of the deceased. Individuals can also donate their body in advance to Dr. Bass; over 1,300 people have done so, including, most famously the anthropologist Grover Krantz. But Bass also accepts surprise visitors: of the 100 bodies that are donated to the facility every year, nearly two-thirds come from family members of people who were not pre-registered at the Body Farm.

Bass talked with us about his history developing some of the earliest methods of forensic anthropology, recounts particular murder cases, and fondly remembers asking the dean of UTK for land to let dead bodies rot on. A warning: the footage and archival photos can get grisly. But, science!