This mummified cat not found in Brooklyn. But others, yes.

Some days you wake up without a piece in the hopper, and the past week’s been kinda slim pickin’s as far as mystic Manhattan goes, and so you open up your feeds expecting to find little to run with, and then you find a story about a woman mummifying cats in Brooklyn.

PD Cagliastro [also here, here, and of course, here] has been perfecting her craft of by-the-book ancient Egyptian mummification techniques for the better part of twenty years, according to yesterday’s typically somewhat dismissive and cheeky NY Post article.With a background in forensic reconstruction, Cagliastro has been a trade embalmer and worker for the Chief Medical Examiner. Her own bio says it all:

Blood Sorceress, Necromancer, teacher, author, writer of the Blood Sorcery Bible, embalmer, forensic reconstructionist, mummification practitioner and consigliere to the disincarnate, – Cagliastro spent many years in service to the Dead as a trade embalmer and in years of work at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Cagliastro calls her interest in mummification a “sick fascination” that has lead her to gutting, de-blooding, and wrapping the stiff remains of over 120 customers. Her wish is to someday mummify an actual human being, and apparently the list is growing with potential clients.

Of course—on top of the ball as usual—The Observatory in Gowanus, Brooklyn will be hosting Cagliastro’s sold-out class on mummification two dates in May and June (respectively).

Tell me again why it’s better to live in another city….