Why Freezing Humans Take Off Their Clothes Before Death

Sixty-nine bodies. One Berlin autopsy room. Almost a quarter of them were found with their clothes removed, taken off by themselves in the last minutes of freezing to death. There was no killer. No assault. No robbery. Just the cold, and something the human brain stem does when it knows the body is dying.

This is paradoxical undressing. And the second phenomenon it triggers terminal burrowing is even stranger.

In this video we walk through the forensic record of how the human body behaves in the final stage of hypothermia. The 1995 Berlin autopsy study by Rothschild and Schneider that gave terminal burrowing its name. The 1979 Swedish-Danish-Finnish paper by Wedin, Vanggaard and Hirvonen that first named paradoxical undressing in the literature. The two competing physiological theories that forensic pathology still hasn't picked between.

The 2015 American case where a woman was found undressed and hidden in her own crawlspace and the police initially treated it as a homicide. And the Swedish sub-arctic study where the clothes were strung out along a trail, suggesting the undressing wasn't a single moment at all.

What the body does in those final minutes is older, deeper, and far less verbal than anything the conscious mind would choose. And by the time it begins, you are no longer the one making the decision.

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PRIMARY SOURCES:-

- Rothschild MA, Schneider V. "Terminal burrowing behaviour — a phenomenon of lethal hypothermia." International Journal of Legal Medicine, 1995.

- Wedin B, Vanggaard L, Hirvonen J. "Paradoxical undressing in fatal hypothermia." Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1979.

- Brändström H, Eriksson A, Giesbrecht G, Ängquist KA, Haney M. "Fatal hypothermia: an analysis from a sub-arctic region." International Journal of Circumpolar Health, 2012.

- Schafer EJ, Prahlow JA. "Homicide versus Hypothermia? An Unusual Case of Hypothermia Related to Colloid Cyst of the Third Ventricle." Academic Forensic Pathology, 2015.

- Kettner M, Schnabel A, Ramsthaler F. "Suspected paradoxical undressing in a homicide case." Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology, 2012.

Draev is a weekly channel about the forbidden science of the human body, what we did to ourselves in the name of research, and what the body does to itself when no one is in charge anymore.

#humannature #psychology #anthropology #darkpsychology #hypothermia #humanbody #humanbehavior #scienceexplained

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