Free Vampire Forensics by Mark Collins Jenkins Page A

and mouth, ensuring a speedy death that left few or no signs of the violence responsible. It also produced the freshest corpse possible. Burking was named for William Burke, an Irish ne’er-do-well who, between 1827 and 1828, with his accomplice William Hare, murdered 16 people in Scotland and sold their bodies to an esteemed Edinburgh anatomist, Dr. Robert Knox. The doctor escaped prosecution, Hare turned King’s evidence, and Burke was hanged for the crimes in 1829. In a pitiless twist of lex talionis, Burke’s body was then dissected at the University of Edinburgh, and his skin was made into pocketbooks and other macabre trophies. His skeleton still hangs in the college’s medical school today.
    Horrors such as these led to the 1832 Anatomy Act, which expanded the legal options for obtaining cadavers. Body snatching remained a problem, though a lessening one, throughout the century.
    In Canada, meanwhile, resurrectionists didn’t even have to dirty their hands; they simply filched corpses from mausoleums in winter, where they had been stacked up to await the spring thaw. In the United States, body snatchers were equally contemptuous of propriety: After a corpse was stolen from the grave next to that of Ohio congressman John Scott Harrison in 1878—as the son of President William Henry Harrison and the father of President Benjamin Harrison, John lay in a sealed and guarded brick vault—a vigorous search was launched for the missing body. The seekers never found the ordinary citizen, but to their shock, they discovered a loftier cadaver instead: Congressman John Harrison’s body had been suspended from a rope beneath a trap door inside the Medical College of Ohio. Soon afterward, a letter writer to the Zanesville (Ohio) Daily Courier opined:
    …our ghouls are no imaginary demons. They walk about among us in broadcloth and kid gloves; physicians and surgeons, with lawyers to defend them, when caught at their obscene work; nice young men, who clerk in stores during the day, take their girls to places of amusement in the evening, and then replenish their depleted pockets by invading the cemeteries, putting hooks through the jaws of our deceased friends, sacking and carting away the bodies, and selling them to Professors of Anatomy for $25.00 a piece!
    Grave robbing, though, is as old as burial itself. Long before there were professors of anatomy, there were folk healers. In an 1880 issue of the London Daily Mail, there appeared a notice about a “strange and horrible Wendish superstition, which has been handed down from the Pagan ancestors of the Prussians.” The Wends were Slavs living among the Germans of Thuringia, where grave robbing was punishable by life imprisonment:
    It is commonly believed among the poorer peasantry of Wendish extraction that several paramount medicinal virtues and magical charms are seated in the heart or liver of a dead maiden or infant of tender years, and that these organs, brewed with certain herbs into a beverage, will cure diseases or inspire the passion of love in their consumers. The practical result of this barbarous belief is the constantly recurrent violation of the grave’s sanctity, and the mutilation of the corpses secretly disinterred from the consecrated ground in which they have been laid to rest. Last week two graves in the new cemetery of Weissensee were broken open during the night, and the coffins contained in them forced, and the bodies of an unmarried girl and a male infant discovered next morning by the guardians of the burial-ground, mangled in the most revolting manner, the cavity of the chest in both cases having been completely emptied of its contents.
    B URY M E D EEP
    In the mid-1840s, those disinclined to pay 12 pence for each new installment of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son could opt for a far cheaper (in all senses of that word) reading experience. The penny dreadful had arrived, and with it a series of luridly compelling titles: Wagner the Were-Wolf ;