Do your hair and nails keep growing after you die?
One of the great mysteries is what happens after we die.
While nobody can definitively prove this, we can at least note what happens to the human body after death, metro.co.uk wrote.
A question often asked is whether your hair and nails keep growing after you die.
This urban legend dates as far back to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, when writer Erich Remarque describes the process.
It also makes an appearance in the 1959 movie ‘The Tingler’, where Warren Chapin (played by Vincent Price) stated that they do continue to grow once a person has died.
It’s not just in media either. Some people who have dealings with cadavers (for example, morgue workers) have noticed that it does seem like the hair and nails of people continues to grow. That rumor, however, is false. When you die, your heart stops pumping oxygen around your body. Oxygen is necessary in the production of glucose, which is burned by the body when growing hair and nails.
Since there’s no energy supply to the body after death, it’s impossible for hair and nails to continue to grow. The likely reason that this myth has persisted is due to a reaction in the body during decomposition.
Over time, your skin starts to retract as it dehydrates.
As it does this around the nailbeds and hair follicles it can look as if the nails or hair are longer.
In incidences where someone is having an open casket, morticians will actually apply a large amount of moisturizing cream to the body to ensure this doesn’t happen. Particularly if a man has a beard, it can take a lot of moisture to halt this.
Hopefully it’s a question you’ll never find out the answer to in real life. At least now, you certainly won’t need to.