The Golden Age of Grave Robbing: Stuff You Should Know Live in London

There was a brief period in the US, UK and Ireland when a dead body could fetch a pretty penny for a person willing to dig it up and sell it to surgeons for dissection. It turns out that there was no shortage of ghoulish types willing to do just that.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
San Francisco, sy s K Tree, Yes, San Francisco, Oakland,
the entire Bay area and dare I say all of
Silicon Valley. Yeah, we love you. And we're coming back
to Sketch Fest this year in January. Yeah, we're gonna
be there on Sunday, January at one pm, a very

(00:21):
rare afternoon show. Uh, and we will be ready to go.
So you guys better be drunk from the night before
or getting drunk for that evening. Yeah, however it crosses over,
I think it'll be proof positive that uh we endorse
afternoon drinking, you know. Yeah, oh, you know, a couple
of drinks, maybe ma'd be bloody Mary. What were we

(00:42):
talking about. Oh yeah, we're promoting our show. Oh that's right.
So we're doing that show on January. Uh. You can
go to the s F Sketch Fest website to get
tickets and it's awesome. It's a great, great comedy festival.
Lots of awesome shows that weekend and for the following weeks.
So I encourage you, like to buy lots of tickets

(01:03):
just by ours first. Yeah, and hurry, hurry, because they're
selling out fast. No joke, that's not a ploy. It's
not a marketing ploy. No, they're really selling fast. We
get emails every time. Guys. He told me to hurry.
I didn't hurry. I'm shut out. And since this promos
petered out, it ends right now. Welcome to stuff you
should know from how stuff Works dot com. Hey, and

(01:32):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. Cherry's not here, but we are in beautiful London,
England at Union Chapel. It's not bad, It's not bad.

(02:06):
I have a good feeling about this. Guys. It was
the S word. For those of you at home just
tuning in, you have no idea what we're talking about. Boy,
the acoustics in this room, it's almost like they built
it for that reason. We should have done this from
up there, And now that I think about it, I
don't think so. Yeah, I've worked out of you say

(02:34):
what No, no, don't respond. Please come up here and
tell the crowd what you just said. So we're we're
doing a podcast. We'd like to start it out, get
you all laughing and then bring you down. And that's
what we're gonna do right now, because we're talking about

(02:54):
Grave robbing tonight. Yeah, there's a long rich history this country. Actually,
there really is. As you will see, you probably already
know this. You guys are probably taught this from like
third grade on or year three. Yeah, I don't know.
We're from America and I think Germany's landlock for God's say.

(03:19):
So there's We did a lot of research on this show, um,
and we found that actually grave robbing is this huge,
huge amorphous topic. Like the Egyptians were really big into
into burying people with these elaborate graves, and then they
were equally into breaking in and robbing those graves. Right, Um,
the field of archaeology is basically grave robbing and academia.

(03:43):
There's this really really great video that I really strongly
want to recommend to anybody who has a dark and
interesting grave robbing that yes, sure, But alternately, if you
have a very dark sense of humor, you will love
grave robbing for more. It's this weird bootleg video from

(04:03):
like the eighties maybe nineties, where this very disturbing young
man is explaining how to extort money from people by
robbing their family's graves, and he holds up jawbones and
stuff while he's doing it. It's just right. When you
leave here, go watch grave robbing for morons. But we realized, like,
this is two unweel it is like a five hour show.

(04:25):
It's not. They may they may sit there for five hours,
but by god, they're going to be really unhappy after
hour or two. So we decided we were gonna whittle
it down to two hours. And it was kind of
easy because it turns out that there has never been
a period in human history where a dead body has
had more monetary value and hence more likely to be

(04:47):
dug up from a fresh grave than in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the Aisles and in America.
And I like to call it the Golden Age of
grave row me. Josh did this research and he put
this together and he actually capitalized that, so I thought
it was really called the Golden Age of Gray Robin.

(05:10):
He fooled me and said, well, that's remarkable. Let it know.
You could have a Golden Age of something terrible, but
I'll go with it. And you said, no, I just
capitalized it. Well, if you capitalize it, it legitimizes it
for share exactly. I bought it. So we're gonna go
back in time, we're gonna all get in the way
back machine, which is the stone edifice right here, everyone filing.

(05:30):
There's plenty of room, believe me, lots of room in
the other dimension. This leads to, so we're gonna go
back to the mid sixteenth century and pretty much anything
before that, uh, to what. I don't know what they
called it back then. It wasn't called um medicine or
practicing medicine or being a doctor. Uh. In fact, I

(05:51):
don't even think they had the word doctor yet, did
they or did they? No? No, they were barbers and surgeons.
Surgeons stuck. Barber's did not for obvious reasons. Well barber's stuck. Yeah,
there's still barbers around, but just not in the way
that you think of. If you're barbera's cutting you open.
He's not doing his job very well. Lists and apothecaries

(06:13):
and witches and that's who was practicing early medicine, and uh,
things were going pretty well for a while. They figured
out that the human body ran on the four humors,
and they were wrong because the four humors are blood,
as we all know. That's right. Like that was pretty
pretty sharp of them back then. Not too bad flim.

(06:34):
It is the thing we can all agree, uh. And
then the two bials yellow bile and black pile and
that was it. That was the human body. You had
the four humors and that's how all this stuff worked out. Well.
That that and they figured out that the kidneys may
be right, and they were like, it was actually this
guy named Galen. He was working in the first century CE,

(06:56):
and he figured all this out and said, job well done,
and this is human anatomy. And for four hundred years
they said, we don't need to go back and double
check his work. Let's just take his word for it.
This is how the human body works. And then finally
one day somebody who's like, I'm not sure this is correct. Sure,

(07:19):
maybe the kidneys make pea and maybe blood is kind
of important, but black by don't. I don't even know
what that is. I think we need to cut open
more people. And they looked around and they said, who's
who are the people who should be doing this? Who
should we entrust cutting open dead bodies too? And they said,
Barbara Surgeons, you guys amputate people without any sort of anesthesia.

(07:41):
We should probably let you do it. Yeah, because if
you want to know how this works. You need to
open it up and see what's in there, kind of
like just lifting the bonnet or the boot bonnet. Well,
what the hell is the boot? I think the boots
the trunk. Yeah, we got that on our big tour announcement.

(08:01):
And remember that that's not surprising. Yeah. I've said a
few other words on the podcast that means something different
here all apologies. Yeah, trust me, I get the emails.
I understand these words means something different. Now, no offense.
Uh So they realized you needed to peek under the hood,
as we would say in the States, and see what's
going on. Let's just stick to that. It's just what

(08:22):
we know. Uh So eventually they were doing this a
little bit, and they realized they needed more bodies if
they were really going to advance medicine and learn things.
And so in fifteen forty there was a king you
might have heard of and read the Eighth I I
and he said, here's what I'll do. I'm gonna grant
the monopoly on uh cadavers on bodies to the barber's

(08:48):
and surgeons. And he said, oh my gosh, it's great,
thank you so much. How many do we get a year?
Four four, thank you bodies a year. I don't know
if that's gonna do it, but thinks it was a
pretty good start, and um, but it clearly wasn't nearly enough.
And these early dissections amounted to not much more than

(09:09):
just kind of opening the body up and looking to
see what was in there and lifting organs out and
showing people because they don't learn Galen. Yeah, pretty much.
So like the dissections amounted to this, Yeah, what was that?
The appendix? Appendix? You call it funny? And then they

(09:32):
get to the intestines and like this is like magic
never and it just keeps coming. So it was it
was a little bit just like early surgical theater. They
would display these organs and no one really knew how
how things work. Back then, it was pretty clear that
you needed more bodies if we were going to get anywhere.
Everyone wanted to live longer, and they knew a few
people knew that this was kind of the way to

(09:53):
do it. So they were like, who do we hate?
Who do we hate? Murderers? Everybody hates murderers. And King
George a third another King King George I I he said,
I'm going to pass this thing called the Murder Act,
and the Murder Act basically said if you were convicted
of murder, not only were you going to be hung,
but we're gonna hanged. Is it? Yeah? Two different meanings. Yeah,

(10:20):
I guess if you get to be hung, we're going
to dissect you after your day, because I'm not I'm Georgia. Third.
Uh is that a fact? No? No, no, no no.
I just made that up, as I do from time

(10:41):
and time again. I said, Germany is landlocked. You know,
Donald Trump has small hands. Apparently so apparently has been
recently proven. Somebody figured out to go to Madame Tussod's
wax museum and measure the hands because apparently the whole
thing is anatomy anatomically accurate. Yeah, small, it's oh oh yeah.

(11:04):
I just realized how we got on that. So you
would be hanged if you were convicted of murder, and
then after that they would dissect you as like an
additional like we hate you that much, that's how, that's
how despicable we find you. So it really kind of
opened the floodgates of the bodies a little more. We're

(11:26):
talking like thirty forty more bodies. And we found out
actually in researching this that you could and during certain
periods of time, you could say, I don't want to
be executed, send me to America instead, when you were
convicted of murder and we're like, wait, wait, wait, I
thought Australia was a penal colony. No, apparently both were.

(11:49):
Did you guys know that? No? Okay, good, because I
was gonna say, they don't teach us that in America.
There's all sorts of like rebellion and we're not paying
taxes and you're crazy easy, we don't like you, you're
not hung king and all that stuff. That's how they
teach us. We're in a church, sent me to the
coast of California for my punishment exactly, you got any

(12:12):
suntan lotion. So eventually things were progressing a little bit medically,
and uh, they actually started founding medical schools. The first
medical schools rose out of the hospitals. They dropped the barber's.
The surgeon said, I think the word surgeon is going
to be the one that people are gonna I think
is legit. So barber's, you just go cut your hair

(12:33):
and maybe do a little bleeding on the side for
a little while, and we're going to found these medical schools,
and these students, um were expected to show up with bodies. UM.
I don't know how they do it in university over here,
when you start school, if you have to buy your books. Uh.
In the United States, you have to buy your books
each semester um. But back then it was b y

(12:55):
O B in medical school and you had to show
up with your own body. And there was a weird
loophole at the time, uh in English law where it
was not actually illegal to steal a body. Grave robbing
had been going on for a long long time, but
it wasn't for the bodies. It was for jewels or
any kind of valuables that the humans were buried with,

(13:17):
and which happened all the time, you know, because people
would like most like the treasures of the family would
be buried with the body a lot of times, you know,
other people wanted those treasures exactly, so they would steal those.
But now, for the first time, bodies were valuable. But
there was this loophole. As long as you returned the valuables,
you could actually steal the body. And technically, technically it

(13:41):
wasn't illegal because the body couldn't own itself. It wasn't
property exactly, so therefore it couldn't be stolen. So if
you were caught with just the body and it was
totally naked and it's clothes were back in the grave,
they kind of be like, why no law broken. Students
didn't quite dig this though. They were like, you know,

(14:02):
I'm one day this is gonna be a respectable profession
to be a surgeon, and I know there's a loophole,
but something about this doesn't feel quite right. It makes
me fainty. Fainty. Um. The problem was that all these students,
there are more and more students being attracted to the
profession of surgery and of anatomy and studying this kind

(14:23):
of stuff. So the more students that came, the more
bodies were needed. Because back then there was no embalming,
there was no refrigeration, and so after a very short
period of time, a body would get gamey. Right, So
you come in one day with your saw and you
go to saw it and like always in your arm
would just keep going and you'd say I need another body,

(14:47):
and there were no more bodies. They'd say, go dig
it up. And then you would say, I'm fainty and
they'd say, fine, who else can we get to do this? Criminals,
criminals would love to fulfill this. We have a black
market that's establishing itself before very eyes. Why not get
criminals to steal the bodies and we'll get the money

(15:10):
for it. And that is how this whole thing erupted
in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, this
weird convergence of scientific inquiry, social morays against the idea
of dissection, and a lot of organized criminals that were like, sure,
we'll dig up your dead bodies and sell them to
you for money. And it all happened right here in London. Congratulations.

(15:36):
So one of the first gangs that emerge was called
the London Borough Gang Borrow Gang. We've been instructed how
to say this. Yeah, we were been saying burrow like
dumb Americans. And our lighting guy last night said, fell
let's come over here, and he said it with a
great accent. But I'm not gonna try and get pulled
Chuck's beard. He has a great beard too, So we
rubbed beards together and it's spelled Bara. It did. So

(16:02):
the londonburg Gang was operating right here, and there was
a man who started this gang named Ben Crouch and
he crosses in the audience. That's probably good. No, no crouches.
No one's gonna admitted at least. And he worked at
Guy's Hospital, and I was right next to that today,
but anywhere, No, I didn't realize that. We Emily and
now were just walking along and I looked up and

(16:23):
there was Guy's Hospital, and I say, I know what
used to happen here many years ago. You know, great things.
But this one dude, he was kind of a rat.
He uh, he worked at Guy's hospital, and he had
met somebody's in the Peninsular Wars fighting Napoleon, and what
they were really good at and on the battlefield was

(16:44):
um ravaging bodies and like pulling out gold teeth and
fillings and kind of just robbing these bodies. And he said,
I think I can take this back home, fellas, and
we can get a gang together and we can really
make good use of all this stuff. So he got
his buddies and they kind of found their go to
graveyards and he was for a grave robber, a pretty

(17:05):
underhanded dude, which is super super underhanded, believe it or not,
but he was good at it. He would find out
what graves were, Um, like, other grave robbers are robbing,
and he would go to them and he would desecrate
the graves and basically draw a lot of attention to
those graveyards so they wouldn't be able to operate in

(17:27):
those graves. So he was he was trying to just
kind of keep the cottage industry in house right exactly,
and he was really good at it. He actually came
to be known as the corpse King. And he would
even make his wife call him that. He'd be like,
don't you mean do you want shepherd's pie for dinner tonight?
Corpse King? And she'd be like, that's what I meant,

(17:51):
and he say so. Ben Crouch was so good at
what he did that was good. Uh. He was so
good at what he did that he actually was able
to retire a wealthy man from Gray Ribbing. But that
was not the end of the Borough Gang. He passed
the reins onto one Patrick Murphy. Murphy, Oh you should

(18:13):
have heard it in Dublin. There's one Murphy here. Come on.
He's like, no, no, yeah, they're all over Dublin. Uh.
So Murphy was even a bigger creep. He would do
things like. Uh. He had a bunch of looks like
underhanded things he would do. He would, let's say, sell
a body to a hospital and then go back in

(18:36):
and break in and steal that body from that hospital
that night, and then sell it to another hospital the
next day before it had a chance to be dissected. Underhanded.
He was very underhanded. Um. He also would keep surgeons
in line right like um. He found out that some
surgeon had bought like a bunch of bodies for some students,
and he and his gang broke into the the anatomy

(18:58):
school that night and you related the body so they
would be unusable. This is not cool. Uh. And then
there was this one anatomist who I've never gotten to
the bottom of. Why didn't they didn't like this guy?
But they didn't. They once delivered a body to the
guy that he had ordered, and it was delivered naked
in a sack, as they customarily were, because you couldn't

(19:19):
steal anything from the grave. Um. And the guy put
the body on the on the slab, and the anatomist
came over and was about to cut into him, and
the body sat bolt upright. It turned out it was
just a man that the gang had knocked unconscious and
delivered and sold to this guy, and apparently he ran
out of the house naked, scared to death down the street.

(19:42):
I'm not dead yet. You will be soon feeling much better.
That's too money. Python references. I'm gonna go for three.
There was fair enough to then a mint that was
meaning of life, right. The big guy at the restaurant

(20:02):
maybe eats them and blows up and his rib cages left. Classic.
Well that's three. Let's try and work in five. Okay, five?
Could someone be in charged officially? Account Monty Python references. Um,
this was happening all over the UK, by the way,
and it was also happening right in our own United States,
And in fact, it was happening in our very home

(20:24):
state of Georgia in Augusta, at the Medical College of Georgia,
which is still there today. And there was there was
a man, well, I was about to say, working there.
He was a slave, uh, and he was owned by
the Medical College of Georgia. It's all very sad. He
he was a slave owned by the medical school and
he it was illegal to teach a slave to read
at the time, which is even more sad. But they

(20:46):
taught grandson Harris to read because they wanted him to
keep up with the obituaries because he was really good
at digging up graves and bringing in cadavers and keeping
them in good supply. This guy had a knack for it,
as a matter of fact. Yeah, and this um kind
of points out a thread that you'll see running through
this whole history that as long as bodies were being
stolen from minority graveyards and marginalized people or mentally ill

(21:12):
like mental hospitals, the white establishment didn't much care. So
only when things started happening in the white communities did
people really start to get upset. And you'll you'll see
that a little later, but this is definitely what was
going on with Grams and Harris. So everybody, if you
will reach under your pew, you'll find a little pad
of paper and a pen, because this is a part

(21:33):
where we teach you how to rob a grave. There
is no pad of papers. By the way, you get
a pet, you get a pen. Was that Oprah? It was?
It was a halfhearted Oprah. But yeah, well you don't
want to go full Oprah. It's it's embarrassing unless you're Oprah.

(21:56):
Uh So, here's how you do it. Typically this happens
um at night and you would think duh, of course,
but um, there was a member of the Borough Gang
named Tom Light who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer,
and he was actually arrested in broad daylight walking through
London with a cart full of dead bodies, and the
cops came up. And you know this is highly illegal.

(22:18):
Tom Lights like, oh can't you see the naked Yeah,
I didn't steal any jewels. So you go at night.
You use a wooden shovel because a metal shovel against
rock will make noise. Your whole job there is to
be really quiet, so you can get away with this.
So you got your wooden shovel, you're there at night.
And I didn't know before we researched this that I

(22:40):
just figured you just dug up the whole grave and
raised the casket and pulled out the body. That's a
lot of work. No, you want to work smarter, not harder, exactly.
So you would just dig that first third. You would
find the headstone, which ideally is where the head of
the body is unless your family has a weird since
the fume, and you would you would dig down that

(23:03):
first third only, and you would dig down, dig down
until you reach the casket, and you would expose the
casket and you would pry that up and snap the
lid off of that first third because all the dirt
is on the lower two thirds. And then there's this
or or this. Yeah, I don't think the eyes are

(23:23):
open if they were alive when they were buried. They were,
I've seen movies. You do like that, and then the
eyes glows unless you bury them while they're alive. So
the body's there, Why are the arms like this? I
don't know. I'm not sure how they do it. What
did you do? That's not bad? They were happy or something.

(23:48):
Either way, they would run a rope under the body,
under the arms, and they would just pull the body
out the upper third and then you've got your body,
you would. Um. I imagine they stole valuables. I mean,
come on, I know there was a loophole that there
were valuables. They probably took him. But the thing was,
if they were caught stealing the valuables, they would be hanged. Hanged. Um.

(24:08):
If they were caught with the body, no, they wouldn't
be that's right. So they would strip the body down
and put it in the sack, but everything back in
the grave, and rebury it as best of good, so
no one would ever know they were there. That is
ideally how it would go down. And our buddy Grandison
Harris actually was supposedly so good at this that he
would memorize the floral arrangements before he desecrated the grave,

(24:30):
so that when he reburied it he could remember exactly
what it looked like when he put it all back together.
Because if you were a decent resurrectionist, which is what
they call these guys, and now they say decent is
probably not the best word, if you were good at
what you did as a resurrectionist. Um, the whole point
was is that no one would ever know that you'd
broken into this grave. And we we're saying guys a lot.

(24:52):
We try to keep things in our show, like say
men and women, But let's be honest, women were always
way more decent. They wouldn't do something like this even
back been like they're doing it now. I just realized
when I said that, how that sounded. The most most
grave overcense days are women. Ever since the seventies, come

(25:12):
a long way, baby, so uh was that add Never mind? Um,
here's what also happened. People are stealing bodies out of graves,
but there's a lot of work. So some enterprising dude said,
here's what we'll do. Let's just forget the graveyards and
let's just find out when people have died. They kind
of live out in the sticks in rural areas, and

(25:36):
we'll just go pretend to be a family member and
they're really poor and they won't know, and we'll say
we'll take care of the body for you, and they
would just take the body right away from the family
and then that's it. They would have the body, no must,
no fuss, And somebody be like, who is that that
took the body. I don't care. They took the body.
I don't have to bury the body, So do you care? No,

(25:56):
I don't care. Well I don't care either. Then shut up.
That's how those conversations went. Yeah, we found actual texts.
You could you could also go into. Um, the hospitals,
the big hospitals, like guys in London City Hospital had
like their own graveyards, so indigent patients who died there
would just be buried. They're free of charge and I'm

(26:19):
sure the grave robbers were like, what are you doing?
Because they would break into these graveyards that were very
largely unpatrolled, and they would dig up the body and
then go sell the body to a different hospital. So
the body would be a patient one day, die, be buried,
be dug up, and then be sold into another hospital

(26:40):
within twenty four hours sometimes Yeah, But what that does
do is underscores how they revered the body, and they
respected the dead body, because you would think the hospital
would just think, no, one's claiming, this body, got a
cadaver on my hands, we can use this for medical research.
But no, they would still bury the body, which kind
of was the tone of what was going on. So

(27:02):
this was I know, uh Murphy's contemporary or predecessor, at
least retired wealthy Mr Crouch. Murphy himself at one point
made a hundred forty four pounds and one day, which
is about ten thousand dollars in today's dollars, by stealing
twelve corpses in one I guess overnight period, which was amazing.

(27:24):
And the London cops figured they had two hundred grave
robbers working in London alone, and ten of those were
full time grave robbers. They were able to quit their
other job, which was probably a big day in the household. Honey,
I have really big news. You're gonna be so proud.
I can stop robbing orphans. I can just do grave

(27:48):
robbing full time stand up guys. So, uh, this was

(28:18):
going on way back then, obviously, but evidence of this
we have found over the years, kind of recently, um
and at the Medical College of Georgia. Well, here's the thing.
If you go to renovate the basement of your really
old hospital, just get ready for what you're gonna find
down here. It's not just a matter of tearing up
the tile floors and ripping down the dry wall. You

(28:39):
start digging around in the basement of an old hospital,
you're gonna find some horrors going on. And they did
this in nine at the Medical College of Georgia and
found ten thousand bones just scattered in the basement of
who knows who and so like. At some point, the
idea that surgery and anatomy was based on stolen body

(29:00):
was lost to humanity, right, So when this kind of
thing comes out these days, everyone's like, all they're serial killers,
serial killers, And then somebody who's actually studied history comes
forward and says, no, actually, they got some weird news
about surgery and anatomy. They would steal the bodies, come
them open, and then just mass bury the bones and say,
oh my god, that's crazy. And then they'd sit there

(29:22):
for a second and then you forget what they just
heard and go back to normal. And then a few
years later somebody else would discover some bones somewhere else,
like on Craven Street, in the house where Ben Franklin
rented for like twenty seven years. Right, yeah, whereas Craven
Street is there no longer the street. We just assume
because you all live in the city, you know where

(29:43):
Craven Street is it not around? Is there no more
Craven Street? It's NICs, thank you. I thought they buried
Craven Street. They well, they found fifteen people, the bones
of fifteen people in this house on Craven Street that
Ben Franklin right in. And of course everyone said Franklin
was a serial killer. And the same guy came forwards

(30:05):
like I told you this before. Um, they used to
dig up bodies, cut them open basis of anatomy. I'm
going back here, look at the bones. Monty python reference.
No someone, that's four. I don't know what that one was,
but that was number four. That's from Holy Grail. What

(30:27):
what part when the rabbit and the cave remember, and uh,
he's talking about the rabbit with the huge point of
teeth and he goes look at the bones. No one,
all right. I don't know if that's a legitimate quote
like it may have been said in the movie, but
it's a quote for me, like we say, neat, that's
a quote. Yeah, that's true, to look at the bones.

(30:50):
That's what I thought. That was very funny line. Not
tonight when it's terrible, but when I saw the movie
back then, I thought it was great. When I saw
that movie nineteen times. So most recently right here in
London in two thousand six, uh, at London Hospital. You
might this might have been on the news. They discovered
two hundred and sixty two burials at London Hospital and

(31:12):
five hundred individuals in the yard there that we're missing
their skull caps and they had basically skeletons that still
had wires connecting themselves. It seems wrong if you're gonna
if you're gonna steal a body articulate the skeleton and
then go to the trouble of reburying it, disarticulate the skeleton.
At the very least, just clip the wires off. At

(31:33):
least that's a T shirt. It's not a good T shirt,
but that's two hundred sixty two burials and five hundred bodies.
You do the math. Not everyone has their own plot,
you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I know what you're saying. Hey,
hey win quick nudge nudge. So if that's five, oh wow,

(31:56):
yeah we did it. But we did get out everyone
nice time. So uh, this was going on the States,
like we said, but as we implied earlier, as long
as these were kind of marginalized people or they were
slave graveyards, no one really got their hackles up. But

(32:16):
something happened in New York City in su called the
Doctor's Riot of New York of se I think that's
the full title. And there's two ways the story goes down.
One is is way funnier than the other one. Um.
The first is that these boys were playing in a
hospital in New York and they saw him just an arm,

(32:39):
a white arm hanging in the window guests to cure
or dry or whatever, and they were disturbed and went home.
This is this's the stupid one. It's not very good.
The other version is these boys were playing near a
hospital in New York and they looked in a window
and the anatomus took a white arm and waved with it.

(33:00):
He hello, young man, come here. He's my favorite anatomists.
And so that that's the version we like to believe.
And at any rate, they went home and they told
their parents, and and one of their fathers had just
recently lost his wife, and he got worried that it
might be her because he knew grave robbing was a thing,

(33:23):
and he went and found that her grave had in
fact been dug up, and was a little angry to say,
and he spun in a circle of rage that managed
to attract five thousand other people in New York at
the time, and they started one hell of a riot.
It went over for I think like two three days.

(33:45):
Twenty people died and they called it an anatomy riot.
And the reason it was an anatomy right, because they
tried to find every dead body they could in the hospital,
which they found a few, and they beat some doctors
along the way, and then afterwards they went to the
Medical College, and apparently word had gotten from the hospital

(34:05):
to the Medical College x NA on the Oddies Bay,
and they got rid of all of them, right and um.
So when they went and stormed the Medical college, they
didn't find anything, and they're like, well, our rage is
is not satiated, and what like a little known footnote
to this whole thing. When they got to the Medical College,

(34:28):
Alexander Hamilton was standing there. They all said, Alexander Hamilton,
what are you doing here? He said, peace brothers, peace sisters,
go back home. And they pushed his space out of
the way and stormed the building pretty much. But again
they didn't find anything. So they found out that all
the doctors and all the students were hiding out at
the jail, and they're like, no jail can hold us.

(34:49):
We're five thousand strong. There's a guy circulating in the middle,
just filled with rage keeping us going. We're eating stuff
from time to time to keep our energy up. It
was a bad scene. They were literally shouting bring out
your doctors. On mass in New York City in seventeen
bring out your doctors so we can kill them. This

(35:11):
was the tone of the time, and this was not
an isolated incident. There were like dozens of anatomy riots
all over the United States back then. It's really very disturbing.
It was kind of a thing and you guys did
it too, but like we really did it, you know
what I mean, like Texas style or something like that.
All Right, So because all this was going on, um,

(35:33):
it became pretty clear that people should take action um
on their own. If you're going to bury a family member,
maybe you should take some steps to ensure that you, uh,
they would be late to rest for eternity. Yeah, it
was a very inventive time. It was a Georgian period.
And I don't know why I said it, like that
you have to the Georgian period some tea. I don't

(35:56):
have any tea, so, uh, I don't have any gent.
You can lie. I just covered my tooth on this mine.
That's your new thing. If you get your finger like
stuck in there, it's happened, no now, but my daughter
had her finger stuck. So this was a very inventive time.

(36:22):
So they thought, let's come up with some ways to
ensure this doesn't happen. Let's start kind of basically by
just staggering sticks and things as we pile the dirt
on the casket because again they're they're using wooden shovels. Yeah,
let's just make it harder to dig up the body basically,
which is pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Another one was the
mort stone, which was invented by a guy named mort Stone,

(36:45):
and it was just basically like putting a huge rock
on a grave and they're like, well, they'll never get
into that grave, and they hadn't thought it through because
all you have to do is dig around the stone
and downward at an angle and you get to the grave.
That's that not too bad. They actually still use more
stones every now and then today. Just a few years

(37:07):
ago in two thousand thirteen on Treadworth Road, Terry and whoa,
that's all right. We needed music for that way we
did now where was I still don't know music too Weirdly,
that was a weird ring tone, dude, I still don't

(37:30):
know how to pronounce this as you do too, You
do too, gluster cluster cluster bluster? Is that right? So
we did our first show in Manchester, which apparently you're
supposed to say murr because we said Gloucester. Now I
said it. You're being kind and like this audience had
been going like this all night. Suddenly we're pointing and laughing,

(37:56):
like they were townspeople in Springfield on the Simpsons and
somebody had just pants us. It was like that, the
biggest reaction anyone has ever gotten from a crowded Manchester
we got and it was at our expense, pointing and
laughing because we said gloud Chester, which is just so funny.

(38:17):
And they moved to Scotland and they said it's close
on flem came up. Didn't point and laugh when they
did it. So Treadworth wrote, cemetery and cluster, uh one,
Miss Betty Brazil and Henry Brazil were buried together, and
apparently the word had gotten around that they were They
were buried with a lot of valuables, so um, someone

(38:38):
tried to dig him up because the jewels down there.
And I don't think they actually got finished at night.
So the sun started to rise and they put a
recycling bend over the whole and said we're gonna come
back later tonight, and that worked for a little while,
but I don't think they got the body right. No,
they worked for like ten minutes until the sun came

(38:58):
fully upright and someone saw there was cling ben and said,
someone just tried to rob this grave. In two thousand,
still going on. So the next thing they invented was
called the mork House. Uh, invented by a guy named
no Wrong. It was more stone again. Uh. This was

(39:20):
basically just a mausoleum that you could not break into.
It was heavy stone, and it was a place where
you put your body where it was temporarily interred until
it could find its final resting place right for like
three weeks. Because that was the rule of thumb was
it took about three weeks for a body to become
unusable by an anatomist, and therefore it was out of

(39:40):
danger of being stolen by a grave robber. And if
you had a mort house, most people said, impenetrable. Maybe
I'm gonna guard it and be armed while I do. So.
A lot of people stood watching cemeteries at this time,
and as a result, cemeteries were places where there were
a lot of shootouts between families standing watch and protecting

(40:01):
graves and grave robbers who were so brazen that they
wouldn't run, they'd shoot back. I'd be like, no, that's
my body. Uh no, that's my aunt well, we're taking
your aunt. No you're not. And it would just go
like that for a while, or they would get in
shootouts with other family standing watch that they've mistaken for
grave robbers, which happened a surprising amount of time. Yeah, graveyards,

(40:26):
it wasn't a place to be back then at night. Uh,
if you wanted to remain safe and alive. And it's
still not so they had this. They had this other
thing called a set gun. It's been around since about
the fifteenth century, and a set gun is basically, or
in this case, a grave gun, a gun that you
don't need to man um. You set it up or woman. Yeah,

(40:48):
that's true. You had set it up on top of
the of the grave and it could spin in a circle.
It's like in a tripod. And it had a triangulated
trip wire. So if you're walking along with your wooden
shovel and you go to steal a body, it would
trip it and then this gun would just start randomly
firing and his sorball and you would get and I
quote the article we're working from, a grave robber who

(41:10):
tripped the wire would get an ass full of musket ball.
That's what I said. An arshal, excuse me, this is
from the guy who capitalized the golden age of grave robbery.
Another version of that was, um, a shotgun inside the
casket so they would pride open and look inside and

(41:32):
literally get shotgunned in the face. And the best, if
you were like a family who knew where they were doing,
you put the shotgun in the in the corpse, which
should be that's not what you want to see. When
you get shot in the face of the shotgun, that's
your last believe we were from America and then what
does that mean? We got shotguns all over the past.

(41:56):
Another little enterprising idea was called the torpedo, the grave
torpedo and the grave torpedo. And our same friend who
said no, it's pronounced Bara Bara pointed this out to
me after the show. He came up to me after
the show and said, let me correct you guys on
a few things, which I loved. Again he grab Chuck's beard,

(42:16):
and uh, I just thought it was funny. It's called
a grave torpedo because what it is is a land mine.
You would just go walking toward the grave and you'r
you would be exploded, and which it makes you feel
like bad for a second. Then you're like, oh wait,
this is against grave. But he pointed out that the
early torpedoes were really just mines and it just kind

(42:37):
of got morphed eventually to be something that you would
shoot out of a submarrate. So now it's a colloquialism torpedo,
the grave torpedo coming soon. So one of the things
that somebody was inevitably going to hit on was, Yeah,
it's all fine and good breaking into a grave, having
a dig past six maybe around him more stone. I

(42:59):
could possibly get a shotgun blast of the face from
a shock um held by a corpse that I'm trying
to steal. I'm getting shot at by the family members.
It's an honest day's work, but is it worth it? So,
like I said, it's inevitable that somebody was eventually gonna
be like, why don't I just murer somebody and sell
their body. I don't have to deal with any of

(43:19):
that other stuff. I just have to kill him. I'm
robbing graves already, it's not a huge step to just
go ahead and murder somebody. And there were two guys
in particular who were really famous for this kind of thing,
for hitting upon this idea, and they were named William
Burke and William Hare, or the two bills as we
call them. Someone just wooed in the back. Yeah, you're

(43:39):
not supposed to move those guys. You could maybe woo
the Simon peg film, but we didn't reference that. So
Burke and Hair they were born in an Ulster and uh,
they immigrated to Edinburgh to work on the Union Canal.
And they met each other there and said, hey, are
you a disgusting creep? I am too, I could sell,

(44:00):
I could tell in your eyes. Let's pinky does be
pinky swear buddies, And they stabbed each other in the
back as forever, and uh, I think which one we're in?
The boarding house? Hair owned the boarding house. Burke was
a cobbler sometimes that right space there, that's right so
here he was, he's working at the boarding house, and

(44:20):
he said, I've got this guy living there named Old Donald.
He died, which happens to the guy's name, Old Donald's.
Eventually it was a weird nickname when he was four
years old, but now now he's living up to it.
Old Donald died owing four pounds, and background Asy said,

(44:41):
all right, here's what we'll do. I know, a good
body can fetch some money these days. Let's find some
other creep who's a doctor that we can sell it to.
And they found a surgeon named Dr Robert Knox, who
I don't know. You've seen the picture of this guy, right,
Have you guys ever heard of this guy, Dr Robert Knox.
He is I think the um the archetype for the

(45:02):
mad scientists, the creepy man scientists. Like there's one very
famous like wood engraving of him. He's wearing like black
leather gloves up to his elbow and those creepy sunglasses
from the nineteenth century. It's like, what are you wearing
those four? Doc? Where are you hiding? And he was
hiding plenty, believe me, right, So if you look at
a picture of this guy, you're like, that's where that
came from. And this guy was a real living guy

(45:24):
who gained a reputation for being a ghoul eventually. And
he was the man who was like, boys, I'll give
you seven shillings, no, seven pounds, ten shillings for old Donald,
and keep them coming. I don't care where they come from,
just keep them coming. You see these sunglasses, I don't
care where you get them. I just see more bodies,
and Birke and Harmer like that's great, We'll just go

(45:45):
back to the boarding house and wait for somebody else
to die. Is to set around for about like five
six minutes, and they're like, oh, six A six days,
very sick. Maybe we should just hasten six days death,
six days the place where the person dying was living.
And so they went in right. But on the other side, no, no,

(46:08):
this just starts there at six a. UM. So they
went in and said six A. Good to see you here,
some gin um. Just close your eyes while we do
something real quick, okay, And one of them I don't
know who did one. Well, all right, let's say we're
working here. Okay. I would be the one to lay
on the body to make sure it doesn't move. So

(46:30):
I would just climb. I would lumber up on the
body and just do this, show him, show him the tooth.
That is not what you want to see, is you expected,
and wink knowingly you're about to die. And then I
would come in and my job would be to close

(46:53):
the nostril in the mouth, maybe say something reassuring like
you sleep, now, get little jewel going and then that's
how these people would die, which is a terrible, terrible
way to go. And they became so prolific and well
known for this eventually that this process of murdering people

(47:17):
and actually murdering people for their body to sell it
for dissection became known as burking. It's not what you
want named after you a method of murder. Now, if
your last name becomes a verb for murder for anything,
unless it's really great, well, yeah, sure, there's plenty of
great things. Name one like somebody coming up to you

(47:40):
on the street and giving you like a bunch of
free candy, candying well, clarking that guy just Clark man, Oh,
I love it when I get Clarke down this street.
Realize you have to do that to make that happen.
I'm going to do you have a new life mission
to make your last name a burb. I need to
get my hands on candy. You do what do you

(48:03):
call candy? Here? Sweets? Oh that's why they joke didn't
go over quite as well. Now I understand, Like I
just clarked me, he gave me some sweets, fries or chips?
Chips are crisps? Candy? Is sweets. Pudding is all dessert, right,

(48:30):
and pork pies, by the way, are the greatest thing
you people have ever invented. You have some last higher right?
Oh yeah, I can't get enough. Somebody clarked me with
some pork pies. Please, I'm dead serious. We'll wait, We'll
wait while you go to the store. What's up with

(48:52):
the pork pie hat? Is it shape like a pork pie? Now?
I guess hopefully maybe like the pork it was? It
was around within it folded in on the edges, and
I think pork bye hat does that, so they might
be it. Who cares? You can't eat a pork by hat?
Well that's what you think. No, I'll try. I'm gonna

(49:13):
go to hab it Asher tomorrow. I'm gonna inspect this firsthand.
All right, there's another money pinefone red friends? Have it?
Really okay? I thought you would know where I was
going with it, and they I have no idea. I
just got lost. Where are we? All right? So they're
barking people left and right. They killed about fifteen people

(49:35):
at least in Edinburgh over a ten month period, and
they got their girlfriends involved. They each found some nice
ladies he said, are you are you creepy? Because we are.
And Burke hooked up with Helen and Hair hooked up
with Margaret, and they started including them in their little
game of death. And they said, here's what we'll do.

(49:55):
We'll just go out to a bar and we'll find
some old woman who loves Jim and loves gin and
we'll just say, you know, have another drink, have another drink,
and you know what, you know where we have lots
of gin is at my boarding house. So just come
back with me late at night. And they apply these
old ladies and old men with booze bringing back to
the boarding house. I would lay on them, She's sleep.

(50:20):
And it was. It was a cottage industry and things
were going along swimmling for a while until they got
a little greedy, as things go when there's money involved,
and they started to Yeah, money and murder. I've seen
the movie Shallow Grave. It's a bad combination. I know
how that goes. So, uh, you guys haven't seen the
movie Shallow Grave or have you know? Oh, you see it.

(50:41):
It's good. They're British people in it. So they started
burking people who were actually a little well known in town,
and Edinburgh wasn't the biggest city at the time, so
people kind of knew one another, and they got in
real trouble when they finally picked off this dude named
Jamie who everybody knew in the town and it was

(51:02):
bad news. Well, they didn't call him Jamie. They called
him daft Jamie. And today you would call him savant
with autism Jamie, but they weren't quite as sensitive as
we are today, so they called him daft Jamie. Yes,
we've advanced since then. And Jamie was actually he was
this very beloved figure in the town. Um. He would
just kind of hang out in the downtown old town

(51:22):
and people would say, hey, Jamie, here's a bunch of
matches I just threw onto the ground. Can you count
him real quick? And he would calculate it and they
would say that's amazing. Here was a port pie buddy,
and he'd say thanks a lot. But he wasn't a
bagger or anything like that. He just kind of hung
out downtown. It was a fixture in town. His mother
and his sister cared for him very well, and he
was just beloved. So he ended up on Dr Knox's

(51:45):
table and he was very recognizable, so much so that
a colleague of Dr Knox is like, that's deaf Jamie.
I didn't know he was sick. And Dr Knox is like,
first of all, it's savant with allaism Jamie. Secondly, no,
it's not. And he started cutting the head off right
then serious and like threw it out and they're like, no,
it is def Jamie has a club foot, and Dr

(52:08):
Knox started cutting off the club foot and then he
said okay, let's begin a great new year and started
cutting open jet def Jamie. Um. And that was not
the only one. There were several other people that were
recognized on the table. So Dr Knox kind of fell
under suspicion. But it wasn't that that that ultimately led
to their undoing. They just grew more and more careless

(52:31):
over time, and more and more suspicious of one another,
so much so that um, it was Burke and Helen right.
Burke and Helen said, Hair and Margaret, we think you're
killing people without cutting us in. So I'm gonna go
open my own boarding house so we can kill in
peace Burke's house and murder that's what they called it.
And then they were like, oh, it's terrible, and they
crossed out murder and wrote fun underneath, and they started

(52:55):
attracting borders after that. So Burke's House with murdering fun
is going on and tea and biscuits, and uh, they're
drawing in people and they're killing people on their own
as a duo, and uh, they're not very good at
keeping things quiet. They're good at the killing part. It's
the covering up afterward partly. Secondly, at one point they

(53:15):
had a body in the boarding house that they just
covered up with straw and hay, and one of the
other boarders was just kind of cruising through the house
and they said, I've noticed that that big pile of
hey has an arm coming out of it. It's a
little weird and I'm gonna go call the cops. And
they said, no, don't do that. Here's what we'll do.

(53:37):
And here's what we're doing. Let's give you a little dough.
We're selling these bodies. It's for medicine, and we'll we'll
cut you in on this deal as long as you
promised to not go to the police. And the lady
backed slowly out of the room and said, sure, that
sounds great. Just write a check and leave it under
my door and I'll be back soon. I have to
go and mail something because the sames dot com was

(53:59):
an inventor, right, so she went right to the costs
and the Lord Advocate I wish. So the Lord Advocate
in the charge of Hair's case said, you know what,
I'm gonna give you immunity. Here's a big offer if
you will turn King's witness against your pal Burke. And Uh,

(54:21):
Hair quickly accepted and I don't think the words were
out of his mouth. He said, Hurt, I'm on board.
I will testify against him. And that's what he did.
And to this day, of the four including girlfriends, only
one was actually tried and Uh hanged. Hanged, just Burke, yep.
And he was a very hated figure, as you can imagine.

(54:43):
I think twenty thousand people showed up for his hanging.
His hanging and no, it's just hanging. And um when
he was hanged, Uh, afterward they gave his body to
the University of Edinburgh for a dissection. Yeah, cruel, irony,
and forty people turned out to see his dissected body.

(55:05):
Actually again they just lift into the organs out everyone.
So here after a few years he kind of tried
to disappear, as you do when you're a creepy ghoul.
And um, he went to work at a lime quarry
and the dudes that he worked with found out who
he was, and kind of a mob justice took over

(55:26):
and they shoved him into the lime quarry. He was
blinded for the rest of his life. And we don't
we don't know if he was like blinded from the
line or they threw him into the corny like landed
on his eyes on sharp rocks, but either way he
was blinded. He was blinded by the line, you don't know.
And then he actually eventually moved to the streets of London,

(55:47):
which is what you do when you're blinded for life,
when you're trying to reinvent yourself. And uh, doctor Knox
as well, even he was ruined in Scotland and he
moved to the streets of London to try and pick
up his medical profession, which he did with pretty poor results.
But he did write a very well received book on fishing.
It's not a joke. I know it's true, it's hilarious,

(56:11):
but it's not a joke. All right, So people are

(56:39):
being killed, people are digging up bodies. There's anatomy murder.
Years before Birke in here, I think like a decade before,
there was a guy named Thomas Wakefield who was a
surgeon in the publisher of the Lancet, a great medical
journal that we use is still around today. We're coming
for us. So he was a publisher of the Lancet,

(57:02):
and he said, this anatomy murder is going on. This
is like an eight twenty. And he said everyone should
be afraid because there are dudes out there that will
kill you just to sell your body. Uh, And so
be be very afraid. And there are a lot of
surgeons too who were fairly liberal minded, who are saying,
we need better laws than what we have now. We
need more bodies because people are robbing graves, people are

(57:23):
murdering for these bodies. There's this huge demand that's being
fulfilled and terribly illicit ways. We have to get better laws.
But the problem is these surgeons, as prominent as they were,
were in this weird position where they look like ghoules,
like can we have some more bodies? Bleeds? These just
delivering them fresh to our door. So anytime they were

(57:44):
challenged they would back off. Very quickly because they all
had stolen bodies back in their in their labs right,
So the status quo remained the same until Burke and
Hair came out and you guys, actually you should be
very proud you had your own group of Burker's here
in London. They were known as the Lon and Burger Trio.
And they killed a bunch of people, uh what came
to be called anatomy murder or burking um. And the

(58:07):
one that undid them was they killed a fourteen year
old boy who had recently emigrated from Italy, and they
delivered him to I think Guy's hospital. And the porter
at Guy's hospital said, that's pretty weird. We don't usually
get warm dead bodies delivered to us. It seems a
little sloppy. Maybe I should follow up. So he took
the boy to one of the anatomists and said, what

(58:29):
do you think about this? The anatomist said, well, I
think this boy's neck was broken about forty five minutes ago.
It's probably murder. So luckily the porter knew who had
delivered the body, and the cops found the guys. They
were hanging themselves in between the Burger Trio and Burking
hair before them, that the public's eyes were finally totally

(58:50):
open to this. There was no avoiding this any longer.
Like people were being murdered to supply bodies for anatomists,
and they didn't know who to blame, Like there were
some anatomists who were convicted of dissecting cadavers. But for
the most part, people I think got that maybe the
law is a little weird right now, you know, maybe
we have this weird prohibition that we should rethink. Parliament

(59:13):
sort this out. And Parliament did, actually exactly who do
you turn to? So the House of Comment gets involved,
they get things done, and the whole hearings and they said,
here's what we'll do. Let's get some of these resurrectionists
and they'll trot them up. Let's give him immunity and
say you can if you testify, get away scott free.
And they're like, oh, you mean immunity. What'd I say?

(59:34):
You said immunity, okay, and uh, they trotted him out
and they toward the told these sort of tales of
digging up bodies, and it was very salacious in the
news and everybody was like, yeah, the public was very interested.
And then tell us more and then they got surgeons
and they said, well, let's hear from you, and they
talked about the need for cadavers, and it was kind
of a big deal because you know, everyone wants to

(59:56):
live longer, and in order to do that, we need
to cut people open still, so it's like a double
edged sword. It totally was. So finally Parliament said, all right,
here's what we'll do. We're gonna take action. Just picture
me in a powdered wig and and it'll allow makes sense,
which is hilarious by the way, every every couple of
months chuckles, just walk into the studio wearing a powdered way.

(01:00:18):
I'm like, it's a powdered wig day. The Parliament says,
here's we're gonna do. We're gonna provide some legitimate bodies
by passing the Anatomy Act of two. It's a very
big deal because right out of the gate, on paper,
at least, it got rid of the black market on
cadavers because it said anyone who has legal possession of

(01:00:39):
a dead body, um, and the body is dead. Uh,
the body never said while they were living that they
didn't want to be dissected, and no spouse or family
members saying you can't cut open that dead body. You
can take that body down to your local anatomists and say,
here you go, just roll them up the steps, walk away,

(01:01:00):
and they'll cut them upen for you. Right, And this
was really radical. It really flew in the face of
the sentiment at the time, because again, remember the Murder
Acts of seventeen fifty one said not only are we
gonna hang you for being a murderer, we're gonna dissect
you afterwards. That's how disgusting we think you are. And
that really took kind of an unspoken social stigma and

(01:01:23):
codified it. And this went a long way to undoing
the damage that the Murder Acts had done. As far
as the public view of dissection. The problem is is
if you were wealthy your middle class at the time,
you weren't exactly running out and saying like, yes, dissect me,
dissect me. And the whole problem with with the idea
of being dissected is that at the time you thought

(01:01:45):
that when judgment day came and you were in your
grave and God stood you up and you're just standing
there like, what do you think, huh, Well, it wasn't
so bad, right, God would look you up and down
and be like you look all right, you can come in.
But if you saw that you were missing your eyes,
maybe your guts, or you were just an articulated skelty,

(01:02:07):
but like you look terrible, laid back down. And that
was the sentiment behind not being dissected at the time.
So the the Anatomy Act kind of governmentalized this idea
that no dissections. Actually, okay, forget your religious beliefs, just
listen to us Parliament, and it actually kind of worked.
But at the same time, what it really did and

(01:02:27):
what it was criticized for, was that it put the
burden of supplying cadavers to science onto the poor, which
is kind of already the process, but in this sense,
it really kind of codified the whole thing. Yeah, but
like you said, it didn't make a difference. I think
between eighteen thirty two and nineteen thirty two more than
fifty seven thousand cadavers were legitimately donated to medical science

(01:02:50):
and the United Kingdom alone, So it really made a
big impact. And science was advancing in medicine was advancing,
so it wasn't to the close of the ninth teenth
century that dissection really came to be accepted by the public,
and people started to say, you know what, this is
actually a good thing. Donating organs, donating bodies is something

(01:03:10):
that we should kind of try and embrace a little
bit more, right. Uh, And to this day, sadly, it's
still kind of goes on in a weird way, right
it does. So Like if you go into an anatomy
lab or medical school in the United States and you
come across an articulated skeleton, those skeletons are mostly made
up of individual bones that were stolen from rob graves

(01:03:32):
in India, which means the U S outsourced grave robbing. Yeah,
and it is currently outsourcing gray rowing. So uh. To
finish up the show tonight, we and True Stuff you
should know Fashion are going to do a top five
robbed graves that only has four. I don't know why

(01:03:52):
we do that. One of them doesn't even count. Wow,
that's true. But we're gonna start with a dude named
Charlie Chaplin, very famous, born here in London, allegedly, that's right.
Do you guys know that. I think they did. That's good. Uh,
born in London, died on Christmas Day. Very sad because
he loved Christmas. He died in nineteen seventy seven, and

(01:04:15):
just a few months later, in March of ninety Charlie
Chaplin's grave was robbed, stole his body, called his wife,
Lady Una Chaplin, and said I want four hundred thousand
pounds for Charlie's body, and she said, nope, Charlie would
have thought this rather ridiculous, was her quote. And they went, Oh,

(01:04:36):
they went, I ever thought of that. No, don't hang up,
hang up, I'm thinking to uh, we have Charlie Chaplin's body, now,
let me call you back. Pretty much. So there were
multiple like staying operations at the cops would try to

(01:04:57):
set up to try and catch these dudes. Ever worked out,
They never showed up. They kind of chickened out, and
eventually they realized that there was one phone call that
they were supposed to make to the police, so they
tapped the phone of Lady Una Chaplin and m staked
out two hundred phone boots in the area and they
actually caught the guy's red handed. A couple of the mechanics,

(01:05:19):
one of them had the best name I may have
ever heard. Yeah, there were two guys, uh roman Wardists
and Gancho Ganev. I want a horse named Ganto Ganev. One.
Somebody clarked me a horse named Ganto Ganev Clark you
a horse? Oh man, I love that term. Now I'm

(01:05:39):
making it happen, baby, Why do you want a horse?
I love horses, but a horse named Ganto it just
fits like Ganto. Gonna have the horse. What's your horse's name?
Cancer Gonase? He was clarked to me in fact. So
eventually they did catch these guys and they led him

(01:06:01):
to Chaplin's remains, which were about ten miles from the
original graveyard, and then they reburied Charlie Chaplin. And you'll
see a thread here. When you rebury a body after
it's been stolen, you tend to cover it with like
seven or eight feet of cement on top. Pretty sensible. Yeah,
So the next one, I personally don't think this one counts,

(01:06:22):
but we've included anyway, Abraham Lincoln. Have you guys ever
heard of the president name Abraham Lincoln from where we live? He?
Uh again, he was a president from where we live. Anyway,
A B. Lincoln died and uh something like eleven I
think eleven years later, some robbers attempted to break into

(01:06:43):
his grave, and the robbers head a rat in their
midst and the rat had told the cops that this
is gonna happen. So the cops staked out the graveyard
waiting for the robbers. And apparently the cops were the
Keystone Cops because one of their guns went off and
alerted the robbers that they were there, and the robbers
turned and ran and the Keystone cops like ran into

(01:07:04):
each other and fell down, and it was weird, but
it happened. And um, they didn't actually steal Lincoln's body,
which is why I'm like, he shouldn't be on this list.
What's sad is I actually made this one. I didn't
think it through clearly. Well, they got away for a
little while, and after the robbery, his remains were reburied

(01:07:25):
in the same mausoleum, but in the basement of the mausoleum,
which which which? Do you know how rich you have
to be for your mausoleum to have its own basement?
It's like six rooms. Do you guys have basements here? Okay,
all right, well fine, you can imagine that pretty rich. Wait,
what do you call a basement here? A barsement, a basement,

(01:07:48):
bars do you call it a bars a basement? Actually
in New England that's what they call it too. That's
where we live. Well, it's north of where we live.
Put in America, south of New England. What are you
talking about? So they reburied him in the basement, and

(01:08:10):
then eventually in nineteen one, his son, Robert Todd Lincoln said,
you know what, let's take him up from down there
and let's rebury him proper and put the steel cage
over him and bolt that to the floor. Andy safe.
And they poured the man over him, which is what
you do as customary. You see, So what do you
want to hear? It was quite sure. So Gladys Hammond

(01:08:35):
a lady, and this was recently you might have heard
of this one. This is in two thousand four. Um,
she was dug up and held for ransom, but not
for money, but to get the family to stop experimenting
on guinea pigs. They were raising guinea pigs and selling
them to medical science. And these animal rights activists stole

(01:08:57):
hard body and help basically held her for ransom for
this family to stop the family does and it worked
while it works sort of, no, well it did works.
The family, Um, the group of activists were called to
save the new church guinea pigs, who you may have
heard of, and have you guys heard of them? No,
you haven't. They just thought it was funny. It's a

(01:09:17):
cute name, but they were dead serious. Yeah, so they
still the body, hell it for ransom, and the family said, okay, fine,
we'll get out of the business. We're not gonna breed
guinea pigs for medical research anymore. We'll breed them to
be dressed up like cowboys for children's parties. Surely you
have no problem with that, the original purpose for guinea pigs.
So so they actually did get out of the business.

(01:09:39):
And the people who robbed the grave and stole the
woman's body, the family member's body, didn't give it back.
They just never got back in touch. They were like,
we moved on to Wales now, we don't care about
guinea pigs anymore. So it took eighteen months before they
finally caught these people and said where's the body And
they're like, oh, she's in some heathland. That's it. What's

(01:10:03):
a heathland country? No, no, heathland. Is it a more? Yes,
it's a more? What's a more? I think there's quicksand
on the moors. Isn't there boggy area? A field? Is
it a field? Why did we feel the need to
rename everything? Those are great? We renamed it. These kids

(01:10:26):
were here first. No, that's what I'm saying. Oh we yeah,
wells are a wonderful words. Heathland is beautiful. We don't
know what it is, but it sounds great. Stupid Americans. Uh.
So we're gonna finish up the list with Joseph Findon.
By the way, we we have a microphone right there
after this, we're gonna have about ten or fifteen minutes
left to do a little Q and A. If anyone

(01:10:46):
has any questions, you can do so. If you don't,
you can leave. If you have to pee, you can leave.
It won't hurt our feelings. We understand. We both have
the pe right now to speak to yourself. Uh. I
have to pete totally. Uh. And we're gonna finish up
with Joseph Hyden Franz Joseph Hyden, very famous Austrian classical

(01:11:08):
composer and uh he died. This was during the phrenology movement.
We've talked a little bit about phrenology on the show.
This is when you thought that you could look at
a human skull and really tell a lot about the
person and about where the smarts were and where the
genius was. Perhaps, so it was a big deal to
get your hands on the skull of someone like Hayden.

(01:11:28):
So they went to the grave digger and they said,
we'll give you some money if you cut off his
head and give it to us. And the grave digger said,
you had me at money pretty much. Uh So he
did so, and he gave him the head and they
macerated the skull, which means you make the rest of

(01:11:48):
the head disappear through magic until you're just left with
a skull maceration. It's not magic though, pretty much, just
so good the liquid it's really gross. Eventually everything goes
away but the skull, which is what you want. And
the dudes Joseph Rosenbaum and Johann Peter looked at the
skull and said, oh my gosh, when you look at this,

(01:12:11):
look at the musical bump on that skull. And the
other one was like, wait, wait, wait, it's you say
musical bump. He made that up just now, it didn't
I think, yeah, totally. But it's gonna stick. I think
it's probably just a deformatal pump. It's hide, and of
course he is a musical pump. So they had the skull,
and they weren't too shy about keeping it quiet. They
went one of them even for a little while, kept

(01:12:32):
it in his home. They would have dinner parties and
it was hiding skull and he kept it in a
glass case like musical notes and compositions and like an
ink and pill and ink and pill, quill and pin
and uh. It was prominently displayed. And then the cops
eventually he found out about this. Well, somebody went to

(01:12:52):
go reberry Hyden because he wanted to be moved to
the family flat. Right. Yeah, he died during wartime and
it was kind of hastily buried, and in a couple
of decades later they finally went to rebury him. And
when they did, they were like, I didn't know Hiden
didn't have a head you had last time I saw him.

(01:13:13):
So they go and they someone says, you know what,
I totally knew who has his skull Because they're not
too shy about it. It's over at the Sky's House,
over at Rosenbombs. So they go over to Roasta Balm's house.
This is really awful. His plan was to hide it
in the mattress to get his wife to lay on
the bed and tell the cops that she's menstruating, and
the cops were like blo blah blah blah, and they

(01:13:36):
like all just ran out of the house pretty much,
did you keep your skull? That's basically out went down,
and uh again, we've come a long way since then,
and the skull was eventually reunited. Well, they gave them
a fake skull at the time. Here's his skull. They
knew the jig was up, but they really really wanted
Hyden skool. Yeah, so they gave him a fake. They

(01:13:58):
reburied that with Hyden thinking it was hide and skull.
And then years later, in nineteen fifty four, in fact,
not that long ago. Uh well, sort of a long
time ago, but not on the grand scheme of things,
they eventually find Hyden's real skull and rebury it. But
they didn't know what to do with the old skull
so to this day, not even not only that, I
don't think it was that they didn't know what to do.

(01:14:19):
I think they took the Hyden's actual skull into his tomb,
set it down. I went to go shut the door
and turned around, was like, oh right, which one was?
Which one is the musical bump which? And then they said,
forget it, let's just bury both of them. Pretty much
so to this day Hyden Skull is still buried. His

(01:14:40):
grave still has two skulls buried in the same grave.
If you went and dug it up today, it's very
little known fact. So that is grave robbing. And that
is the end of our show. Yes, M you know what.

(01:15:09):
Thank you for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com? M