From Aretha Franklin's posthumous outfits to Janis Joplin's all-night wake party, these weird celebrity funeral requests all have interesting stories behind them.
Death is a sad but inevitable part of life, and throughout history, people have come up with meaningful ways of honoring the dead. Whether it’s through special burial and disposition customs or personalized funeral services, there are so many ways people can customize a loved one’s sendoff to reflect who they were in life.
Often, families will attempt to honor the funeral requests of the dead — even if those requests are admittedly rather strange. The deceased might have wanted their ashes sprinkled in a place that was meaningful to them, or to be buried next to a loved one. But they also might want their remains fired up into space, or mixed with concrete and shaped into a memorial reef to be placed at the bottom of the ocean.
Of course, it helps to be famous. Wealthy celebrities certainly have more means to afford extravagant funerals than the average person, and that means their odd requests have a better chance of being fulfilled.
These are 11 celebrity funerals that stand out among the others as some of the strangest of all time:
Tupac Shakur’s Friends Smoked His Ashes
Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesTupac Shakur, pictured with fellow rappers Notorious B.I.G. (left) and Redman (right) at Club Amazon in New York in 1993.
When hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur died just six days after being shot by an unknown gunman, the world was in shock.
While fans worldwide mourned the loss of a great artist, those closest to Shakur suffered worst of all. Devastated by the death of their friend, the other members of Shakur’s group Outlawz chose to commemorate the late rapper’s memory in a unique way.
In a 2011 interview with DJ Vlad, the Outlawz confirmed a long-running rumor that they had rolled some of Tupac Shakur’s ashes into a joint after he died and smoked them.
“I came up with that,” said Outlawz member E.D.I. Mean. “If you listen to [Tupac Shakur’s song] ‘Black Jesus,’ he says, ‘last wishes n****, smoke my ashes.’ You know what I mean? So, that was a request that he had. Now, how serious he was about it? We took that s*** serious.”
According to the Outlawz members, on the night of Shakur’s memorial, they went together to the beach and threw a number of things Shakur liked into the ocean, including weed and chicken wings. They said it was their own way of giving him a farewell.
They then mixed Shakur’s ashes with “some of that great granddaddy California kush” so that he would be “flowing through [their] system.”
Hunter S. Thompson Had His Ashes Blasted Out Of A Cannon
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesHunter S. Thompson’s had one of the most extravagant celebrity funerals of all time.
Hunter S. Thompson was a pioneer of “gonzo journalism,” a style of reporting that places the reporter at the center of the story. In order to write his book on Hell’s Angels, for example, Thompson famously embedded himself within the biker group. In 1971, Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a semi-autobiographical novel that was later adapted into the hit film starring Johnny Depp as the fictionalized version of Thompson.
Thompson was certainly worthy of being turned into a Hollywood character — the man was quite the character himself. He lived a wild, drug and alcohol-fueled life. In fact, E. Jean Carroll once chronicled Thompson’s daily routine, noting that his days began at 3:00 p.m. with whiskey and ended at 8:00 a.m. with prescription sleeping pills.
Still, Thompson had a surprisingly long life considering his numerous run-ins with law enforcement, his constant consumption of drugs, and the fact that he once kept his ashtray on top of a crate of live dynamite. He lived to be 67 years old before tragically dying by suicide in February 2005 after battling multiple medical conditions.
Six months after his death, a private funeral was held in Thompson’s honor.
During the ceremony, his ashes were catapulted into the sky from a 153-foot tower amid a fireworks display as Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” provided a soundtrack to the spectacle.
In total, the funeral cost $3 million — a price paid by Thompson’s good friend, Johnny Depp. John Kerry, Bill Murray, Sean Penn, George McGovern, Jack Nicholson, Charlie Rose, and Benicio del Toro were among the celebrities in attendance.
