Inside the gymnasium the body of Korey Stringer lay in a coffin surrounded by flowers.

They are performing the nightly ceremony for her mother and father, whose pictures stand by their elaborately decorated coffins, surrounded by flowers.

Even the gym was functional, bare, little more than an open coffin surrounded by pneumatic weight-simulators.

The heavy-set, bearded man resting on a bed in the second photograph ("Hartford, 1979") is the same man in the 76th ("Hartford, 1980"), lying in an open coffin surrounded by flowers.

As friends paid their respects, next to a coffin surrounded by a dozen flower arrangements and bouquets, they remembered Miss Williams as a kind, self-possessed person and earnest student.

His body lay peacefully last month in the Gomez funeral home at the edge of Park Slope, Brooklyn, his coffin surrounded by a wreath and two small potted plants.

They cannot cross the ocean unless they are in a coffin surrounded by soil from their homeland.

She also confessed to the police that on occasion she liked to sit in her armchair amidst the coffins, surrounded by all of her former suitors.

Unbidden came an image from the book she had read earlier, its lurid photograph burned into her brain-the image of a vampire lying in a coffin surrounded by men carrying knives and torches.

Now she sat near the coffins, dressed in a simple black dress, surrounded by members of Lushenska and her uncle's staff.