Phrenologists stole Haydn's head after burial, and it was reunited with his body 145 years later

Joseph Haydn died in Vienna while French troops occupied the city. He was buried in the Hundsturm cemetery. Days later, Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, a former secretary to the Esterházy household, and prison official Johann Nepomuk Peter had the head taken from the grave to study it for phrenology^†. In 1820 Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II exhumed the body to move it to Eisenstadt and found it headless. The thieves were identified but went unpunished. Rosenbaum handed over a substitute skull. When doctors rejected it, Peter supplied the skull of an older man, which they accepted. The real skull passed through several owners and reached the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the Vienna music society. The Esterházy family built a tomb in Eisenstadt's Bergkirche in 1932, but the society kept the skull. After 1945 the body lay in the Soviet zone of Austria and the skull in Vienna's international zone. The skull was reunited with the body in 1954, on 5 June or 5 July by different accounts. The substitute was never removed. In 2026 the tomb holds two skulls.