The Violinist Who Couldn't Be Buried

Niccolò Paganini could play twelve notes per second. He could span three octaves across four strings in a single hand. He performed entire concerts from memory, without sheet music, at a time when no one did that. In 1827, the Pope made him a Knight of the Golden Spur.

None of this helped him after he died.

Paganini had spent decades fueling rumors of a demonic pact. He deliberately snapped strings mid-performance and finished pieces on a single remaining one. Audience members in Vienna swore they saw the devil guiding his bow. Others claimed to hear a woman's screams coming from inside the instrument — the soul of a murder victim, they said, trapped in the wood. Paganini did nothing to discourage any of this.

When he died in Nice in 1840, the local church refused to bury him. His embalmed body sat on his deathbed for two months, then was moved to the cellar of the same house. It stayed there for over a year. Then it was transferred to an abandoned leper house. Then to a cement vat in an olive oil factory. Then to a private villa.

The greatest violinist in history spent the better part of a decade being stored in progressively stranger rooms across the south of France.

The Pope finally authorized his burial in 1876.

Thirty-six years after his death.