Free Vampire Forensics by Mark Collins Jenkins

show. Nevertheless, instances piled on instances of last-minute revivals at the graveyard gate, of corpses sitting up in their coffins and looking wonderingly about them. At a time when graves were often only 18 inches deep—and sometimes only six or eight—it was not hard to believe that someone might claw his way out and appear, like Madeline Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a bloody, haggard, shrouded figure returned from the dead.
    Those with a morbid dread of premature burial could obtain all kinds of ingenious survival devices with which to outfit one’s final home. Pipes leading aboveground might be fixed to the coffin so that its inmate would not suffocate should he awaken. Or “Bateson’s Belfry”—a bell attached to the coffin—could be installed, with its cord thoughtfully placed in the corpse’s hand so that he might give it a pull and ring for assistance. An inexpensive measure was to enclose a shovel and crowbar inside the coffin.
    Some people opted to have their hearts cut out—the theory being that whatever can’t revive you on the operating table certainly won’t wake you in the grave. Chopin, for example, was so terrified of premature burial that he had his heart removed; it was preserved in alcohol (rumored to be cognac) and interred in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.
    The idea of premature burial prefigured the larger idea of reanimated corpses, and for that reason, it was inevitably invoked as an explanation for vampirism. Premature burial was also seized upon as the rationale for why some bodies found in graves were better preserved than others: They had somehow remained alive down there. The atrocious concept also came in handy for explaining the blood found in coffins: The victim, buried alive, had understandably severed his veins and arteries in a frantic attempt to claw his way out, finally exsanguinating himself. Indeed, the whole vampire legend might be based on dim memories of living people who had actually returned from the grave. That seemed the rational explanation, for as an 1847 article in Blackwoods magazine put it, “no ghastlier terror can there be than the accredited apprehension of Vampirism.”
    It didn’t help matters, though, if the bodies were missing altogether.
    “As the dark nights of the late autumn came on,” wrote Victorian author Thomas Frost of the early years of the 19th century, “the fears of the timid and nervous were doubled, and persons who lived in lonely places, or in the ill-lighted parts of towns, became afraid to leave their houses after nightfall.” They were afraid not of goblins, but of body snatchers.
    With the growth of medical schools, and in an era before refrigeration, came the need for a constant supply of fresh corpses for dissection. In England, the bodies of executed criminals had traditionally filled this need. After the British penal code was reformed at the turn of the 19th century, however, drastically curtailing capital punishment, that source effectively dried up. The anatomists then quietly circulated word that they would pay for fresh corpses, no questions asked. Body snatchers, known by the grimly ironic sobriquet of “resurrectionists,” met the new demand.
    Bribing cemetery watchmen and wielding quiet wooden spades, they worked in the dead of night. They dug only at the head of a grave and left most of the dirt intact. Using a crowbar, they would snap off the coffin lid, drag out the corpse by hook or rope, strip it of its cerements, sack it, carry it to a waiting hackney coach, and trundle it to the dissecting rooms. Ghoulish, yes, but the work was profitable: A leading resurrectionist once received £144 for 12 subjects in a single night. One body snatcher, when he in turn entered the graveyard (hopefully for good), left his family nearly £6,000.
    The fresher the corpse, the better the pay. This led to burking — the murderous practice of clapping a pitch plaster over a victim’s nose