Zugibe constructed a cross, which has stood—with the exception of several days during 2001 when it was out for repairs (warped stipes)—in his garage in suburban New York for some forty years. Rather than crucifying corpses [as previous researcher Pierre Barbet had done], Zugibe uses live volunteers, hundreds in all. For his first study, he recruited just shy of one hundred volunteers from a local religious group, the Third Order of St. Francis. How much do you have to pay a research subject to be crucified? Nothing. "They would have paid me," says Zugibe. "Everyone wanted to go up and see what it felt like." Granted, Zugibe was using leather straps, not nails. (Over the years, Zugibe has occasionally received calls from volunteers seeking the real deal. "Would you believe? A girl called me and wanted me to actually nail her. . . .")