Famous Final Moments of Personalities Recreated Through Smell

Dutch scientists at the Breda University are recreating some of the world's most famous deaths by capturing their final moments using scents and sounds.

Visitors at the Museum of the Image in the Netherlands who have a taste for the morbid can have a unique and macabre experience of reconstructing historical deaths through the sweet smell of Jacqueline Kennedy's perfume mingled with the scent of John F. Kennedy's blood to Whitney Houston's last drug-fuelled moments in a Beverly Hills bathtub, The Age reported.

"We all have seen the images of JFK's assassination, but what did it smell like?" asks Frederik Duerinck, from the communication and multimedia design faculty of Breda's Avans University of Applied Sciences.

Visitors are invited to lie in a series of four silver metal boxes which are pitch-dark inside. Similar to those found in a morgue, the boxes are fitted with pipes leading to bottles that contain pressurized smells.

To complete the experience, a soundtrack is played as different scents are released into the box. For around five minutes, visitors can relive the smells and sounds believed to have surrounded four people whose deaths are etched into the world's collective memory: John F Kennedy (1963); Princess Diana (1997); Muammar Kadhafi (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), writes Brisbane Times.

"Smell is rarely used in communication and we wanted to explore its uses," said Duerinck. "It's a very powerful means of communication."

One such experience transports those who want to experience Houston's final moments to a bathtub at the upmarket Beverly Hills hotel where the diva died in February 2012 at age 48. They would first get a whiff of generic cleaner with the sounds of splashing water at the background followed by the scent of olive oil the singer used in her bath. A strong chemical smell, similar to that of cocaine, will conclude the experience.

The installation will be taken across Europe in the coming months.

"We've conducted extensive research," said Wander Eikenboom, another lecturer at Avans about the authenticity of the experience.

"There's already a lot of information available on the internet, such as what perfume Jackie Kennedy or JFK were wearing," said Eikenboom.

"Whitney Houston's autopsy report, for instance, is also available," he said.

But the scientists admit battling to recreate the right scent for Jackie's perfume, which is no longer made, according to Brisbane Times.

"We had to rebuild something that resembled it as closely as possible," said scientist Mark Meeuwenoord.

The scientist admitted that their aim is not exact historical accuracy but to explore possibilities for "smelling" old stories.