When 58 year-old Gordon Deacon lost his battle with cancer last month, his family knew that he would want to be remembered in style.

So the late Star Wars superfan had a funeral procession flanked by Stormtroopers, complete with a horse-drawn hearse which made its way to St Margaret's Church in Roath.

More and more people are opting for more personal funerals to celebrate their life rather than dark, sombre affairs. Take a look at our selection of wacky funerals:

Genghis Khan's Top Secret Burial

It seems the Mongolian warlord was quite eager to keep his resting place secret: After he died in 1227, soldiers transported his body through the land, slaughtering everyone in their path, killing everyone present at the funeral and eventually killing themselves. They also diverted a river away from where he was buried so Khan's spirit could rest in peace, and then had horses trample over his grave to obscure it for good measure. I guess you could say he was kind of a big deal.

A Party To Remember

A New Orleans family decided that, instead of putting Miriam in a boring old coffin, they would have her body dressed and sitting up at a table with cans of beer, R&B music and spinning discoballs. Apparently this was more a more suitable send-off for the woman that celebrated who she was when she was alive; the life and soul of the party.

Bowling Alley Funeral

In the TLC series morbidly named 'Best Funeral Ever,' mourners for the late Judy Sunday honoured her by throwing a party at her favourite bowling alley with the help of Golden Gate Funeral Home - who specialise in unusual send-off services in the show. It culminated in her family rolling her casket down the lane and striking ten pins that had "R.I.P Judy" painted on them - her final strike.

Design Your Own Casket

In Ghana there is a belief that, if you're going to spend thousands of pounds on a box for your dead body, you may as well have it made to represent who you were in life. Basically, for the cost of a family's income for a whole year, you can have your coffin painted and carved into mostly anything you want - like a giant fish if you worked at sea, a bottle of Coca Cola or, in one case, a giant uterus - a bespoke design for a late gynaecologist. This trend reached British shores and a company called 'Crazy Coffins' started manufacturing their own designs, including a spaceship, an egg or a Rolls Royce.

Funeral for a Housefly

In comedy reality show Nathan For You, Nathan pretends to be a professional business expert offers struggling firms really questionable advice to help them improve. In the episode 'Pet Store/Maid Service', he asks a Rabbi to bury his fly Buzz at the pet cemetery in an authentic Jewish burial... before erecting its six foot tombstone engraved with an advert and contact details to promote a local pet shop.

Will There Be Strippers?

In Mid-Noughties rural China, it was considered auspicious for the deceased and their families to have as many people at your funeral as possible. So relatives chose to hire striptease troupes to dance at the service to attract more attendees. The police started cracking down on this by insisting that funeral plans were submitted to local authorities beforehand. They even offered a helpline for whistleblowers (A.K.A those who weren't invited). This is still popular in Taiwan, where mourners hire 'Electric Flower Cars' - basically trucks converted into a stage - with showgirls dancing to "appease the wandering spirits..." Or so they say.

Hunter S Thompson's explosive send-off

There are some people in this world that just want to go out with a bang - rebellious binge-drinking, drug-taking writer Hunter S Thompson was one of them. Best known for his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a surreal adventure filled with acid trips, stolen cars and debauchery, he grew close with Johnny Depp who starred as trainwreck journalist Raoul Duke in the film adaptation. When Thompson died, Depp held an extravagant funeral with a massive fireworks display, and shot his ashes out from a cannon on top of a 150ft statue build in the dead writer's name… to the tune of Mr Tambourine Man.