She’s the queen of the vile.
A Brooklyn “sorceress” is the go-to ghoul for grieving pet owners looking to give their lost loved ones eternal life — by making them into mini mummies.
PD Cagliastro of Brooklyn is one of the only macabre mystics in the country slinging animal mummification services based on the ancient Egyptian art. It took her 20 years to figure out the formula by studying embalming, consulting with chemistry students and reading the few scraps of ancient Egyptian texts out there.
“It was a sick fascination,” said Cagliastro, who works and lives in her “house of death” with her teenage daughter and husband, an exterminator.
The witchy woman has channeled her services for 120 customers, preserving everything from a championship Connecticut racing pigeon to cats cut short by killer cars.
“There was something really special about him,” said Sebastian Duque, 26, a web designer who had his cat, Jake, mummified after it was hit by a car in 2008. His frog, Alice, was also preserved in linen and plaster. Jack is now perched on top of his bookshelf in his Upper East Side apartment, and Alice lives in a drawer.
Cagliastro removes the animal’s organs and dries out the rest by submerging it in a salt mixture for months. The stinky remains are scraped out and stashed in biohazard boxes in her Sunset Park pad.
“We have our putrid days. That’s when we know it’s a labor of love,” said Cagliastro, who is teaching a sold-out mummification class at the Observatory gallery in Brooklyn next Sunday.
After wrapping and plastering, the form is painted. Some customers choose to place the pet in a decorative box or have gems and gold affixed to the remains. The services cost between $100 and $400.
Cagliastro has been tapped to wrap a tarantula, caiman crocodile and snake eggs. She turned a cattle heart into macabre sculpture for a Midwest rancher who wants to use it to woo back his estranged girlfriend.
Her kooky clients come from all over the world, some going so far as to drive their lost pets from Washington and Oklahama to her altar.
Heart-broken men make up 70 percent of her business, she said.
“When my cat died, I had supreme sadness. I was completely destroyed by it,” said Turner, 55, an Upper East Side businessman who refused to disclose his last name for fear of being ridiculed. Cagliastro mummified his cat and mounted it on a black velvet cushion last year, and Turner keeps it tucked away in a glass cabinet in his brownstone.
“It’s very personal. Even people I know well, I can’t say that this is my mummified cat in the corner. They would think you are crazy,” he explained.
Cagliastro’s lifelong dream is to mummify a human, and she’s already got plenty of interest from those looking to be immortalized for eternity, she said.
One woman has built a chapel in her Midwest home in preparation, Cagliastro said. “She wants to be entombed like a pharaoh.”