Century old liquor and human decomposition: Would this work?

I'm giving away a major major plot twist when I ask for this advice, but I gotta know.

In my WIP, one character is a bootlegger in the 1920s. He keeps barrels of whiskey in the secret room underneath the garage.

His angry girlfriend kills him (in 1924). She is later arrested, but the police have no evidence against her and let her go. She soon steals his body from the morgue to prevent any further inspection.

She takes the body into the room in the garage and stuffs it into an empty liquor barrel (she's strong) and fills it with whiskey and seals it.

Flash forward to modern day when a character unwittingly drinks from this barrel, which still contains the whiskey, and dies almost immediately.

Here are the questions. Can whiskey preserve a body like this? Would the body decompose at all? Assuming the barrel was sealed tight and none escaped or evaporated, what would the body look like after nearly a century? Could someone die from alcohol poisoning this way?

Pretty twisted, I know, but it works in the story very well.

allen

You know, I think I had heard the urban legend before, and had forgotten all about it. I hadn't even thought of googling it.

The links were helpful, yes, thanks. I'm reading through them now.

Given that it's an old urban legend, should I not use it?

allen

Thanks for the responses. I did check out all the links, and then read the similar information given in Jan Harold Brunvand's The Choking Doberman (referenced on the webpages, and present on my bookshelf). So, I suppose I had "internalized" the story of the "corpse in the cask" and had forgotten it was an old urban legend.

The stories were similar: a corpse was stored inside a barrel full of whiskey, rum, whatever, then drunk by a group of people. Then the corpse is discovered, and everyone is horrified.

But that's where the story ends. Nowhere does it say what the whiskey tasted, looked, or smelled like, and if there were any ill effects from drinking it.

As writers, we are generally told to avoid cliches, but I can't say I've ever come across a story that has used this urban legend. I'm going to go ahead and leave it in and go with my original plan. Perhaps what happens to my character would happen in real life after drinking century-old whiskey that had a body stored inside.

allen

That's an excellent notion, and I may be able to use the concept. Thanks!

allen

Matt,

That's a good point. The body was stolen from the morgue the day after it was brought there. I'm going to have to call a funeral home to find out how these procedures work. If the body had been full of enbalming fluid, then it most certainly could have poisoned the whiskey.

allen

Wordmonkey,

Actually, that would work very well. In my book, the reason that the character drinks from the barrell is because she has been possessed by a ghost of a person who lived in the 1920s. Everything she sees (in our modern world) she actually perceives as 1924. She's repeating actions she did when she was alive. In this case, it was drinking that alcohol. To her, the alcohol looks perfectly clear. But the reality (the reader sees) is that the alcohol could be filled with nasty gunk, which would be invisible to the character.

So, it's a very good point that works nicely with the plot.

Thanks for pointing it out!

allen