The Peruvian Man Who Was Arrested For Carrying Around A Centuries-Old Corpse

If you stop some random people on the street and say, "Hey, whatcha got in your bag?" most folks will probably reply, "Oh you know, my laptop, water bottle, eyeliner," or something like that. Maybe some folks are carrying groceries back home from the store, or totting an extra, eco-friendly bag to the store to begin with. Others might be carrying some private or weird stuff they might not want to talk about, but really, how bad could it get? And then there's that one guy — because there's always that one guy — who's carrying around a 600-to-800-year-old human corpse. And the corpse is a mummy curled up like a baby.

But before you go offering up excuses about why it's so rational and totally not a big deal at all to carry around the desiccated and fleshless corpse of a once-living person, let's provide some details. As CNN says, the mummy was wrapped up in a "red delivery bag" — hopefully not the world's most nauseating Uber delivery order — next to three dudes sitting in a "deserted park" in the city of Puno, Peru. 26-year-old Julio Cesar Bermejo fessed up to owning the corpse, calling it "Juanita" and saying, "At home, she's in my room, she sleeps with me. I take care of her." Um. Also, the red delivery bag? It actually was a food delivery bag from the Uruguayan delivery app Pedidos Ya. There's no word yet on how many Pedidos Points the mummy cost.

Police took Julio Cesar Bermejo into custody, but on what charges is anyone's guess. NBC News goes on to say that the mummy belonged to Bermejo's family, who loaned it out to Bermejo for the day as an apparent picnic companion. That being said, it wasn't Bermejo's first encounter with the mummy. Bermejo said that he typically keeps the mummy in his bedroom, saying, "There's my bed, the TV set and next to it, there's Juanita ... It's like, if you'll pardon the expression, as if it were my spiritual girlfriend." For the curious, Bermejo states this all himself, rather bright-eyed and cheerfully, while standing next to a stone wall overlooking the city of Puno. Noticias Sin Filtro Puno TV did the interview, and it bears noting that the cameraman seems rather amused by the whole thing. Also, the mummy is male.

Peruvian authorities find less absurd humor in this tale, and it's true that carrying the dead in red delivery bags is something of an act of desecration. Authorities asked the general public to help "in the defense and protection of our precious heritage, communicating to us any finding or attack on movable or immovable cultural heritage." In other words: please inform us if your neighbor also carries around a mummy, and also don't carry around mummies. Per CNN, the mummy itself has been deemed a "national cultural asset" and passed along to the Ministry of Culture.