Corpse in the Cask
In this urban legend, an English family discovers a barrel full of rum stored in the basement of the house that they had just bought. Within a year or two, the consume all the rum. When they cut the barrel in half to use it as a planter, they find a corpse of a man who had been shipped home from colonies long ago, having been preserved in spirits.
Throughout history, bodies of fallen military officers, were sometimes returned to England inside barrels of wine and other spirits. Admiral Lord Nelson, was preserved in a barrel of brandy after he died in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. One tradition is that the sailors would drill into the barrel and sip some of the brandy out through straws, coining the phrase “tapping the admiral”.
(Source: Brunvand, Jan. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. 2001.)
