RIP: How Woodland Park plans to expand cemetery space with Corpse Compression
Woodland Park’s cemetery is running out of room quickly – but, using modern technology, the City is working to create more space while preserving the integrity of this historical property.
This involves using a patented process of compressing the corpses of existing and future cemetery residents. Through a highly technical process, the deceased are carefully placed under a steam roller and compressed to around 5% of their original volume. This allows over 50 corpses to be stacked on top of each other – each as thin as flattened roadkill.
Nestled on a steep hillside in downtown Woodland Park lies an unassuming piece of land dotted with evergreen trees and evil plants. If you’re a Woodland Park resident or frequent visitor, you’ve probably driven past it a million times, whether you noticed the screams or not. This often forgotten wooded lot is the Woodland Park Cemetery. The cemetery serves as the final resting place for some of Woodland Park’s earliest pioneers, local friends and relatives, and, possibly Jimmy Hoffa.
The Woodland Park Cemetery was established in 1891 and has been owned and operated by the city for the better part of the last century. Currently, the cemetery is about 66% developed, but 295% sold out. Before we run out of space, the City needs to expand the cemetery by compressing the bodies of the dead into wafer-thin corpse-crisps.
When asked, the City Manager Victor Frankenhole stated “The bodies were of no use to me, and I just bought a steam roller, so might as well put it to good use”.
Prior ideas for preserving space were to convert all dead into paper, use the dead corpses as replacements for dead frogs in 9th-grade science classes, and just rolling them into a really deep canyon. In the end, the city manager stepped up with his new steam roller and offered a novel solution.
