A Decaying History

There’s a hot ticket item on the auction block and conspiracy theorists better get their paddles ready.

A Los Angeles auction house is going to sell off the simple pine coffin that for almost twenty years has been the final resting place of suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Bidding will start at $1,000 and because Oswald is thought to be the man that killed president John F. Kennedy auction managers expect interest to be strong.

The coffin was dug up in October of 1981 following a legal battle between Oswald’s widow and his brother. According to the auction house Oswald’s widow believed the body in the coffin was not her husband’s and was instead a look-a-like Russian agent. So she dug up the body and had it examined. Once a medical exam had proved that the body in the coffin was Oswald’s he was put in a new casket and returned to a cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas. So now his slightly used coffin, which has suffered extensive water damage over the years, has been handed over to the auction house for sale. There’s nothing wrong with owning a piece of history, as long as you don’t believe in ghosts.