There’s no peace quite like death, a fact that seems to have inspired this coffin-shaped, sensory-dampening hood encouraging you to “say goodbye to everything” no matter how chaotic your environment may be. The ‘Wearable RIP’ fits around your head, with padding for your shoulders and a kangaroo pocket for your hands, so you can get some (hopefully not eternal, just yet) shuteye, even in airports or on the bus.

What kind of burial do you want? That’s a serious question, because the hood will give you three options that change the type of music that auto-plays when you lean back enough to activate the sensor behind your head. Select the glory of a burial by fire, go deep into the silent earth, or float with the echo of the ocean in your ears.

Designers Ting Wu and Yu Ting Chang want you to “cut down the connection between you and reality,” burying yourself in a world of your own choosing. There’s some heavy philosophy in their description of the project: “‘Lived-body’ is the alive body that you can perceive; ‘body as image’ is just the object, the shape of the body. If you can perceive the object, does that mean the object is alive to you? In contrast, if you can’t perceive someone, is he/she still alive?”

The Wearable RIP hood: for when you just want to be a little bit dead.

This billboard, reportedly spotted in a subway station in New York City, may not be the most tactful way to drum up business for a funeral home. But you have to admit, it’s clever. Naturally, the funeral industry doesn’t have too much trouble with supply – everyone dies eventually – but they have to compete with each other just like any other business. Are the ads that manage to stand out in poor taste, or just bringing a much-needed sense of humor to the realities of death?

The Devanny-Condron Funeral Home in Massachusetts raised a few eyebrows with this billboard congratulating a local resident on her 100th birthday. Conflict of interest, anyone? In Florida, the Beckman-Williamson Funeral Home & Crematory used a little dark humor to get attention in the form of ‘Thank You for Smoking’ lighters.

These ads are funny, sure, but probably not helping diffuse the public perception of the funeral industry as a bunch of vultures lurking around waiting to pick at people’s bones. That’s especially true considering the hundreds of suicides and murders that take place on subway tracks, and the millions of smoking-related fatalities. But other ads seen as insensitive – like the one below, touting funeral pre-arrangements as a romantic Valentine’s Day gift – are simply trying to call attention to a basic fact of life that most people ignore until the last possible minute.

Attitudes about death vary wildly between cultures, religions and geographic areas, so it’s no surprise that what one person finds incredibly tacky is greeted with a smile and a shrug by another. The mere existence of cell phone-shaped caskets is enough to testify to that fact.

And while it’s easy to laugh at things like Compton’s drive-thru funeral parlor (complete with bulletproof glass) – which many people see as cheapening the lives of the dead, making the mourning process as casual as grabbing a burger and fries – perhaps there’s more to it than that. After all, your attitude about death would probably be different if you lived in a place where drive-by shootings happen on a near-daily basis, and gang-related cemetery shootouts aren’t uncommon. If you’re interested in the demystification of mortality, check out the Order of the Good Death.

Our modern culture has made the physical process of burial little more than an afterthought, leaving us to numbly choose from a small assortment of wooden boxes in a showroom or catalog in the aftermath of a loved one’s death. But some casket designers literally think outside the box with colorful, celebratory or just plain bizarre creations ranging from coffins shaped like beer bottles and cars to those equipped with warning signals in case you’re buried alive.

6 Amazingly Weird Coffins by Kane Kwei Carpentry in Ghana

In Ghana, the Ga tradition of carpentry includes a fun and colorful array of fantasy coffins unlike anything you’ll see anywhere else in the world. Drawing from local culture and the personalities of those for whom the individual coffins are commissioned, the designs flout worldwide customs of somber funerals. The first one, a pink fish, was made for a fisherman from Accra in the 1950s, and from there the trend took off. Some might represent careers, others vices – you could be buried in a bottle of beer, for example.

Star-Trek Themed Casket

If you’re enough of a Star Trek fan to learn how to speak Klingon, perhaps you’re enough of a fan to be buried in this Star Trek-themed casket inspired by the ‘Photon Torpedo’ design seen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Or, if you’re partial to cremation, there’s always the Star Trek urn.

Coffins with Bells and Whistles – For Indicating That You’re Not Dead

In the centuries before modern medicine made a pronunciation of death much more reliable, people had justifiable fears of being buried alive (which got even worse after Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial.’) Hence the many designs for ‘safety coffins,’ which literally included bells and whistles so if you happened to wake up in the midst of your own burial, you had a chance of getting out alive. Some have handles or strings that can be pulled to activate a signal, while others were mouth-operated. One terrifying spring-loaded ejector coffin will launch you out of the ground (to the heart-stopping terror of anyone who happens to be nearby.) Some cemeteries, like the Williamsport Wildwood, even have escape hatches on the vaults.

Cruisin’ Caskets

Take a stylish ride to your eternal resting place in a ‘Cruisin Casket,’ a car-shaped coffin with functioning wheels that can actually roll down the street. This company will make a custom casket shaped like any model car. It seems like a shame to bury something like this, but if you want to enjoy it for a while before you croak, you can get a cooler insert and use it to keep your drinks on ice.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Bizarre Burial 20 Of The Worlds Weirdest Coffins