What else can you do with a coffin besides use it as a final storage unit for your earthly remains?
Why, you can race it, of course.
If this sounds like a preposterous idea (which, it is, really), consider that the town of Manitou Springs, Colorado, has been hosting an annual coffin race for the past 20 years. It started as a way to commemorate a local figure, a young woman named Emma Crawford, who perished of tuberculosis (Manitou Springs was a spa town, popular with tuberculosis patients). Emma was buried atop Red Mountain until 1912, when due to railroad construction and soil erosion, her coffin became unburied and her remains slid down the slope in a rainstorm. She was reburied in the town cemetery, but legend says you can still see a lonely ghost in Victorian clothes on the top of Red Mountain.
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(via Lost At E Minor)
And, with some generous stretching of the original source material, the coffin races were born in 1994.
Participants, working in teams of five, deck out their coffins with wheels and decorations, don crazy costumes, and race down the street. Four team members pull and push the coffin, usually mounted on wheels, as fast as they can, while the fifth member, or the “Emma,” rides in the coffin. It all generally adds up to a pretty wacky time. Prizes are awarded to the fastest teams, but there are also awards for Best Coffin, Best Emma, and Best Entourage. There’s even a separate division for fire departments.
If you’re out Manitou Springs way in late October, the perfect time of year for this sort of thing, you can check it out for yourself.
