In China and Taiwan it’s believed that a large amount of people at someone’s funerals brings good luck to the family of the deceased. In the effort of rounding up as many people as possible, sometimes exotic dancers are hired.
Old traditions
Mythbusting: guillotine edition
Everybody knows that the most popular method of execution during the French Revolution was the guillotine: there are though quite a few urban legends about it that the majority of people accepts as true.
Joseph Guillotin, for example, did not invent the device at all, he only persuaded the officials to use it as a painless and efficient means of execution, and he was in fact against death penalty.
It is also a myth that he died by the guillotine: a guy named Guillotin was indeed executed at some point, but it was a doctor from Lyons not related to Joseph at all.
Burying it.
The reason why dead people started to be buried six feet under is an outbreak of the plague in 1665 in London. The disease was so contagious that the mayor decided that that was going to be the standard depth of burials in order to avoid further infections.
Nowadays, burials are normally shallower due to the practice of embalming bodies and the use of metal caskets.
Egyptian Cat-astrophe
In ancient Egypt, people used to shave their eyebrows to mourn the death of their cats.
Grim Reaper's Little Helper 