Was Aaliyah's casket made of pure gold?

Answer 1

Press photos taken in black & white showing Aaliyah's shining metallic casket can give the impression that it was made of pure gold. But actually it was a silver plated copper deposit coffin. After the death of American singer Aaliyah Dana Haughton (caused in 2001 as a result of a plane crash on the Bahamas), the renown Frank E. Campbell funeral home of Manhattan provided the casket for her funeral. Aaliyah's relatives chose a very rare and exclusive model - one of the last available copper deposit models manufactured by the former National casket company of Boston, Mass. The type designation was # 20761, a double lid model with lavish ornamental corners and a silver plated exterior. Unlike standard copper caskets which are welded from 32 oz or 48 oz (ounces per square foot) sheets of wrought copper (resulting in an empty weight between 200 and 300 lbs), copper deposit casket are made in a time consuming process by which copper molecules are deposited on a casket form. The National copper deposit caskets had no joints or welding seams nor did the attachments of the handles penetrate the casket walls. Copper deposit caskets have unusually thick walls of 1/8" (3 mm) resulting in a weight between 600 and 800 lbs. The funeral pictures show that at least eight pall bearers were needed to carry Aaliyah's casket. In the 1970s, the price of copper deposit caskets, which are no longer manufactured in the US, was about 10 to 12 times that of a standard 32 oz copper casket. The optional silver plating of the exterior added around 25 % to the basic price of the luxury casket. Other celebrities buried in National copper deposit caskets were for example President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and religious leader Elijah Muhammad. If manufactured today, one of these National copper deposit caskets would be much more expensive than Michael Jackson's "golden" casket, which actually was a polished 48 oz bronze Batesville "Promethean" casket with 14 karat gold plated handles.