Meet The Heavy Metal Rocker Who Turned His Dead Uncle Into A Skeleton Guitar
From Guitar World:
Meet YouTuber Prince Midnight, who constructed a guitar with a body built from an actual human skeleton.
The skeleton, as Prince Midnight tells Guitar World, belonged to his uncle, Filip, who passed away in the ‘90s in Greece.
“He originally donated his skeleton to the local college and was medically prepared for the school,” Midnight says.
“After 20 years, he ended up in a cemetery my family had to pay rent on. Like, literally in a wooden box. It’s a big problem in Greece because orthodoxy religion doesn’t want people cremated.”
Cutting in for a second here - It really is a huge issue there to the point where the cemeteries are so overcrowded you usually have to get them with a several year lease, and when the lease expires the price goes up & up & up. Why? So the cemeteries can keep re-using that primo real estate for fresh bodies & wallets.
Families also use the temporary burial as a loophole around the whole 'no cremations allowed' rule because they still want an orthodox funeral but the church won't give them one if cremation is involved (though it was finally legalized in 2016 & the country got its first and only crematorium in 2019). This way families can still get that burial funeral, and then years later exhume the body & get it cremated or store the smaller amount of what remains elsewhere. In an interview, one gravedigger there said he was digging up at least 15 bodies per-week.
But back to Prince Midnight who was clearly fed up with that system.
[He] proceeded to contact the proper authorities, including the state department and state attorney’s office, in order to repatriate his uncle’s remains.
“So I got the box of bones from Greece and didn’t know what to do at first – bury them? Cremate them? Put them in the attic? All seemed like poor ways to memorialize someone who got me into heavy metal,” he continues.
And so Prince Midnight decided to turn his uncle into a guitar, which, he says unsurprisingly, “proved to be challenging.” After doing plenty of research – he even consulted with two people at Dean Guitars in Florida, who eventually “got cold feet,” Midnight built the guitar – dubbed the Filip Skelecaster – we see before us.
A "Filip Skelecaster"… I love it. If I had to choose parts of my corpse to become an instrument I'd like to be turned into some sort of drum kit. Dangling finger & toe bone chimes, hi-hat titty symbols, tibia bass drum pedal, ulna drum sticks, butt skin stretched into a snare so I can finally be 'tight as a drum'. The rest of my bones would make up the stands, nothing would go to waste. (Just keep your stepbrothers & their balls away from me.)
If you're feeling particularly morbid today click HERE for a list of other instruments made of all sorts of human & animal bones from bird bone flutes to human femur horns. Rock on Prince Midnight & Felipe, rock on.