When it comes to history’s most notorious serial killers, Ted Bundy is nothing short of murderous royalty. Between 1974 and 1978 he killed more than 30 people, often using good looks and charm to lure good samaritans to their deaths. According to Men’s Health, his January 24, 1989 execution was the sort of event that everyone stopped, watched, and waited for news on. Bundy had actually gotten the death penalty for three separate trials, and still, he spent nine years in prison before someone actually flipped the switch on the electric chair at the Florida State Penitentiary, and when he was taken out of the prison, the crowds lining the streets outside cheered as the car bearing his body drove past. (They’d previously been cheering, “Burn, Bundy, burn!”)

Esquire says Bundy’s brain was examined for any physical explanations that might give researchers a clue just why he had been driven to kill so many people in such terrible ways, but his brain had none of the abnormalities or signs of trauma scientists expected to see.

Afterwards, Bundy’s very eerie final request was fulfilled: he was cremated, and his ashes were returned to Washington state, where they were scattered in the Cascade Mountains. Why is that eerie? That’s where he had disposed of (at least) four of the people he’d killed.

John Wayne Gacy — the serial killer that proves clowns are the worst — ultimately confessed to killing 33 people over the course of about six years in the mid-1970s. He was executed by lethal injection in 1994, and according to The New York Times, his body count made him the worst confirmed serial killer at the time.

What happened after his execution is partially up for debate. According to Find A Grave, Gacy was cremated. The “debated” part is whether or not his ashes were actually given to his sister, as is often claimed. That’s not the weirdest part, though.

In 2004, the Chicago Tribune reported that psychiatrist Helen Morrison had finally revealed that not only had she had Gacy’s brain stored safely in her basement for the previous decade, but that she also had preserved slices of his organs, too. Morrison had spent much of her career studying serial killers, and had been in touch with Gacy for the decade prior to his execution. He’d wanted her to have his brain, she said, so she had been there for his autopsy, then just simply took the brain with her when she left. It was perfectly normal, she reported, and she kept it in the hopes that new techniques would be developed to study it further.

Jeffrey Dahmer‘s parents have spoken out about what they felt about having a convicted serial killer for a son, and Dahmer’s father, Lionel, even wrote a book about it. Dahmer himself was killed in 1994, by an inmate who later said he’d pretty much done everyone a favor, because Dahmer was beyond creepy — and liked to sneak up on fellow inmates and remind them, “I bite.”

In the immediate aftermath of Dahmer’s jailhouse slaying, The Associated Press reported that he’d been taken for an autopsy, and his brain had been removed and preserved. The idea was that it was going to be studied by experts in abnormal behavior, but according to The New York Times, Dahmer’s parents were at odds over whether or not they wanted that to happen. About the same time, Dahmer’s body — which had been kept on ice until the trial of the man who killed him — was cremated, and his ashes were divided between his parents. 

Dahmer’s mother, Joyce Flint, continued to petition to have her son’s brain studied to see if there were physical or biological reasons for his crimes. According to the Los Angeles Times, that wasn’t destined to happen: a judge ultimately ruled in favor of Dahmer’s father (who said he was hoping to keep with his son’s final wishes), and ordered his brain cremated as well.

Ed Gein’s story has been told and retold so many times that he’s become the embodiment of the fictional characters — like Norman Bates — that he’s inspired, but when he died in 1984, he had been living peacefully and quietly at the Mendota Mental Health Institute for years.

His official cause of death was complications from cancer, and Gein was buried alongside his mother and brother (who he may or may not have killed) in their family plot at the Plainfield Cemetery in Plainfield, Wisconsin. It could be argued that was in questionable taste, considering it’s the same cemetery where Gein exhumed an unknown number of graves in order to find body parts for his infamous home furnishings. 

Gein’s grave is unmarked, and according to Cult of Weird, that’s because his headstone was stolen in 2000. It wasn’t until the following year that it turned up in Seattle, as the centerpiece of a punk music and art show called the “Angry White Male Tour.” In spite of the fact that the tour organizer — and founder of the official Ed Gein Fan Club — insisted it was fake, it was quickly determined to be real. He later claimed he was “providing a service” to the stone, and it was never returned. Gein’s grave is still unmarked.

Albert Fish‘s preferred victims were children, and it’s not clear just how many he killed and ate. He was convicted of the murder of 10-year-old Grace Budd, and when he was told he was going to be executed on January 16, 1936, he was pretty psyched about it. He described his immediate future in the electric chair as “the supreme thrill,” and by that time, those who knew him best had already washed their hands of him.

According to The New York Times, Estella Wilcox was Fish’s ex-wife. She’d perhaps unsurprisingly only been married to him for a few short weeks — from February 6 to April 2, 1930 — and said she really just didn’t care what happened to him. 

And what happened to him is a little unclear. Fish was executed in Sing Sing, and according to Find A Grave, inmates who died at the prison and were never claimed tended to get buried at the cemetery on the grounds. However, they also say that in the 1940s, all the bodies that had been buried in the prison cemetery were moved. It’s unclear where Fish ended up, although he seems to have been buried in New York City, with at least one source putting his final gravesite in the Flushing Cemetery.

Eddie Leonski was a good-looking American GI who was sent to Australia during World War II… where he killed several women during power outages, and became known as the Brownout Strangler. After his capture — and a confession in which he said he strangled women to “get at their voices,” — he was court-martialed and was the recipient of a dubious honor: according to Executed Today, he’s the only foreign national to be tried and executed in Australia based on the laws of another country (his native US). 

It was Douglas MacArthur himself who signed the execution orders, and Leonski reportedly went to the hangman’s noose pretty happily, singing “It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow” as he went. Find A Grave says that even though he was cremated, he was buried three different times in about seven years: the first two were in Australia, and then he was moved to the Schofield Barracks Post Cemetery in Honolulu. If it seems odd that a serial killer executed for murder would get a military burial, there’s a footnote: the cemetery includes areas for not just POWs and soldiers, but “executed military criminals,” as well.