A gravedigger has become an unlikely social media star after posting macabre videos of the exhumations he carries out on his YouTube channel, earning him tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of views.
The gravedigger of 15 years, Fabricio da Silva Pascoal, boasts an astonishing 66,200 subscribers to his YouTube channel ‘Videos Aleatorios do Coveiro’ (‘The Gravedigger’s Random Videos’).
As part of his job, Fabricio has to perform burials and exhumations. The latter takes place mostly to make room for new burials but also sometimes so that the tomb can undergo renovations.
One such exhumation video, which the 45-year-old man posted in February last year, has garnered a staggering 3.4 million views to date.
Another posted in July last year, which shows Fabricio exhuming the mortal remains of a person who died young, has racked up 1.8 million views, with netizen Denis Fernandes Campelo commenting: “This quarantine is taking me to all sorts of strange places.”
On his YouTube channel, Fabricio, who works at the Sao Joao Batista (Saint John the Baptist’s) Cemetery in the Brazilian city of Guarapari, also shares his thoughts on what it’s like to be a gravedigger.
He revealed that when he first started out, he had weekly nightmares. He said: “It was a bit like that Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ clip.”
However, he later came to realise that they were just dreams about work. He said: “You know when you dream about something at work that’s bothering you? It’s the same thing.”
Fabricio, who has a tattoo of a skull with the word ‘Coveiro’ (‘Gravedigger’) written underneath, says his nightmares have now become a yearly, rather than weekly event.
Fabricio’s videos are accompanied by his calm narration explaining what he is doing and why. Of his viewers, he said: “Most are attracted by the fear of the unknown, but there are those who watch it as if it was on Netflix.”
However, he denied disturbing the peace of the dead. He said: “This here is the material that decomposes, I’m not disturbing anyone’s rest. Their soul is already resting.”
