They stuff dead bodies in suitcases. For science.

Tennessee’s Body Farm consists of bodies in varied, and educational, states of decay. In the initial years of forensic science, estimating a time of death was done as much by intuition as it was by data. The data, unfortunately, was hard to come by, because no one had ever bothered to time post-mortem body temp, let alone maggots, with a stopwatch. Until 1981, in Knoxville.

The Body Farm will stuff donated corpses in lie, bury them in shallow graves, and every other morbid permutation imaginable. They then study each body, scrutinizing how quickly it decays, and in what fashion. The information they’ve gathered from countless cases of faux cold-blooded killing helped turned forensics into a true science, and series like CSI into a hit.

This 3-acre farm in Tennessee was the first. But body farms also exist in North Carolina, and Texas. Iowa wanted one of their own. And Las Vegas, the site of the original CSI, tried to secure one in 2003: they couldn’t obtain the funding.

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