HOUSTON — Inside one of Houston's best-kept secrets, soft music and hushed words are piped over the sound system, the sweet scent of flowers leaves a faint trail in the air — and the business of death is saluted. Welcome to the National Museum of Funeral History, a warehouse-like building in a working-class pocket north of Houston, where exhibits extol everything from the birth of embalming to the mourning rituals of the Victorian Era.

LONDON (AP) - A 1911 payroll sheet bearing the name 'E. Rigby' may fetch $750,000 for a charity that Paul McCartney befriended. Reporting from London -- Eleanor Rigby: fact or fiction? That question, which has bedeviled Beatles' fans for decades, may be answered in part by a 1911 hospital payroll sheet to be auctioned in London today. The document, sent by Paul McCartney in 1990 to the director of a music charity who had asked for funding, contains the signature of a scullery maid named "E. Rigby" who worked in a Liverpool hospital.

Three of Santiago Pérez's relatives lie in the cemetery of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a city just outside Barcelona. Nonbeliever that he is, Pérez doesn't visit their graves often. But he was recently there for a funeral and found himself impressed with the latest addition: a glittering expanse of solar panels that now runs along the top of the grave walls into which Spaniards bury coffins and urns alike. "If you're one of those people who thinks all cemeteries should look like castles, draped in shadows, then maybe you won't like this one," the 46-year-old pet shop owner admits. "But I think it looks modern."

Most visitors barely notice the sign that hangs behind two human bodies -- stripped of skin and posed acrobatically -- in a corner of the Body Worlds exhibition. But Vanessa Bello, 27, pauses when she sees the sign, "Body Donation for Plastination." Bello recently registered to donate her body to the Institute for Plastination in hopes of one day joining the traveling exhibit, now at The Leonardo in Salt Lake City. The exhibit, which has attracted more than 100,000 visitors in Utah, consists of rooms full of preserved human bodies and body parts in glass cases displayed to educate visitors.

FREMONT, OH -- Area historians will have the chance to view a replica of the casket in which President Abraham Lincoln was buried next month. Jason Kinn, co-owner and funeral director at the Herman-Kinn-Karlovetz Funeral Home and Cremation Services, 900 N. Front St., said the replica will be on display during an open house from 4 to 8 p.m. Dec. 11. The casket is one of five made 10 years ago by the Batesville Casket Company, modeled after the only known surviving photograph of the president lying in state in 1865.

PALM DESERT, California (AP) -- Ralph Joseph "Jody" Reynolds, the rockabilly singer and songwriter whose lone hit "Endless Sleep" in the 1950s ushered in a wave of tragic teen pop songs, has died. He was 75. Reynolds, who was inducted into Nashville's Rockabilly Hall of Fame in 1999, died November 7 in Palm Desert, said his musician friend Alan Clark, who toured with Reynolds in the 1980s.