Body-snatchers & Grave Robbers

[dem]

Martin Fido - Bodysnatchers: A History Of The Resurrectionists 1742-1832 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988)

Nigel Hills

Blurb
All the nefarious activities of the 'sack-'em-up' men ....
The notorious mass-murderers Burke and Hare ....
And a rogues gallery including Terrence and Waldie, Bishop and Head and Eliza Ross ....
The burkers who terrorized Hanoverian Britain.

Fascinating overview of the golden age of graverobbing for fun and profit, featuring all your favourite ghouls: Ben Crouch, Burke and Hare, Robert Liston, Eliza Ross and the Bethnal Green Gang. Much of the action takes place in London and Edinburgh and amidst all the tragedy there are moments of macabre humour as the Resurrectionists fight with medical students, rival operators and - mainly - themselves. Close friends are shopped, graveyards are "spoiled" and break-ins at the mortuary become a commonplace in what has suddenly become a real cut-throat business! This is the stuff of so many horror stories and films, from the early Samuel Warren and Robert Louis Stevenson classics through to the likes of The Flesh & The Fiends and even Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde, that it certainly warrants a place on Vault and I found it far preferable to Fido's earlier, contentious The Crimes, Detection And Death Of Jack The Ripper.

I've long had a morbid fascination with this subject (sic) and it seems to have inspired some decent horror covers too. Here are a few of my favourites.

Peter Haining - Where Nightmares Are (Severn House, 1983). John James' illo for this hardcover reissue of one of Haining's earliest collections.

Brian Bailey - The Resurrection Men: A History Of The Trade In Corpses (MacDonald, 1991). Bailey's non-fiction treatment is a must-have along with Hugh Douglas's Burke & Hare: The True Story of the Bodysnatchers (Nel, August 1974)

Thanks Ripper, wherever you are?

[Craig Herbertson]

I share the fascination Dem. Burke and Hare were local boys to me, although both Irish. It's quite fun walking round Edinburgh graveyards and looking at the elaborate measures to keep the corpse hunters out. Edinburgh's a pretty morbid place

[dem]

Mar 25, 2009 19:43:44 GMT Craig Herbertson said:

I share the fascination Dem. Burke and Hare were local boys to me, although both Irish. It's quite fun walking round Edinburgh graveyards and looking at the elaborate measures to keep the corpse hunters out. Edinburgh's a pretty morbid place

In that case ....

Jan-Andrew Henderson - The Ghost That Haunted Itself: The Story Of The MacKenzie Poltergeist (Mainstream, 2001)

Cover photograph c. Lisa Thomson Cover design: Tina Hudson

Blurb:
Greyfriar's Cemetery in Edinburgh has a centuries-old reputation for being haunted. Its gruesome history includes body-snatching, witchcraft, headstone removal, desecration, corpse dumping, live burial and use as a mass prison.
In 1998 something new and inexplicable began occurring in the graveyard. Visitors encountered 'cold spots', strange smells and banging noises. They found themselves overcome by nausea, or cut and bruised by something they could not see. Over the space of three years, more than a hundred people were knocked unconscious. Homes next to the graveyard wall became plagued by crockery smashing, objects moving and unidentified laughter. Witnesses to these events ran into the hundreds. There were two exorcisms of the area. Both failed.
The section of Greyfriar's where the attacks occur is now chained shut. The entity responsible has been named the 'Mackenzie Poltergeist'. It has become one of the best-documented and most conclusive paranormal cases in history.
This is its story.

Jan-Andrew Henderson, the director of Black Hart Storytellers, is the author of The Town Below the Ground: Edinburgh's Legendary Underground City and The Emperor's New Kilt: The Two Secret Histories of Scotland.

God, but the 'Bludie MacKenzie' Poltergeist saga was fun! The first I heard of it was when everyone's favourite Reverend, Lionel Fanthorpe, was quoted in the Evening Standard's entertainment guide, Hot Tickets, on 28 April 2000. "More recently, I've been looking at the Greyfriars Cemetery in Edinburgh where 40 people have reported being attacked by unseen assailants during the night time City of the Dead tour. Basically, persecuted covenanters were brutalised and executed by a man called MacKenzie, then they were all buried together in communal graves. The feeling is that enmity continues beyond the grave".

Fortean Times picked up the story and there'd be the occasional news update - dark tales of rival tour operators almost coming to blows, the mysterious death of Rev. Colin Grant shortly after his attempt at exorcising the unquiet spirits in the reeking prison - before the BBC got in on the act with The Secret Life of Ghosts & Werewolves aired in November 2001 (for some reason, it had been postponed from the previous month). Presenter Edward Fox narrated the documentary live from the gloomy London cemetery we're all familiar with via Tales Of The Crypt and other Amicus classics. The show was something of a curates egg: footage of a bogus zombie with a hernia, Maurice Grosse reliving his traumatic experience of the Enfield poltergeist in full flow, etc, but the report on the mass ghost-hunt in Edinburgh Castle was engrossing, not least for some very Blair Witch camera work in the haunted vaults and witness Emma Beeby's cameo as a terrified victim desperately trying to make sense of what had so upset her in the crypt.

"Here are some pics of the weird marks that appeared on my leg and hip after the tour (pictures were enclosed of large discolourations) but they don't do it justice. It looks worse in real life… it's actually dark purple, but you can see the size of it with a ruler! --- Satisfied customer "Mrs M." congratulates the City of the Dead tour operators on providing her a bruising encounter with Bludie MacKenzie.

In the unlikely circumstance that anyone has been desperate enough to read this far, I guess you're wondering "where does body-snatching come into all this?" Well, not until three years after the book was published is your answer, but patience, patience. We're there!

Tomb Head 'Was Held Like Puppet' , The Scotsman, March 2004

A TEENAGER held the head of a corpse like a puppet after breaking into a tomb in a historic Edinburgh graveyard, a court has heard.
The High Court in Edinburgh was told how 17-year-old Sonny Devlin put his hand in the neck of the head and began "chucking" it around Greyfriars Kirkyard.
Devlin, from Edinburgh, and a 15-year-old who cannot be named for legal reasons, are on trial accused of disturbing a dead body "and violating a sepulchre".
It is thought to be the first case of its kind for more than a century.
Both are alleged to have forced open the Mackenzie Mausoleum, where Sir George "Bloody" Mackenzie, who was King’s Advocate for Charles II, was laid to rest after his death in 1691.
A 14-year-old schoolgirl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the court yesterday that she had met up with Devlin and others at Bristol Square and Devlin told her "they had taken a head from someone that was dead in the graveyard and that it was still there".
"He said to me he had broken into a tomb and went down and cut it up or something," she said. "I didn’t believe him. "We all went to Greyfriars so he could prove it. We were talking for a while and then I think it was Sonny went behind a gravestone and pulled out a head," she said.
"I didn’t believe it was real to start," the girl said, adding that at one point Devlin was "chucking it around" with another youth or youths.
Writer Andrew Henderson, 42, who runs City of the Dead Tours, which visits Greyfriars Kirkyard, told the court he saw two people running out of the mausoleum.
Mr Henderson, of Candlemaker Row, said they went round the other side of the Kirk. He told them he had seen them coming out of the tomb and was going to call the police.
Detective Constable Graeme Bowie, 43, described how the door to the mausoleum had been damaged, with a panel missing.
Four days later the detective photographed a head with a small gold earring still attached to the left ear.
It is alleged that the teenagers entered the burial chamber, lifted the gate to a lower level tomb and forced open a coffin.
The teenagers are alleged to have pulled out the unidentified body and cut off the head with a knife. They are charged with having taken the head out into the cemetery and played with it, simulated a sex act with it and discarded it.
Devlin, of East Claremont Street, is alleged to have committed the offence while on bail. Both have denied the charges. The trial before Lord Wheatley continues.

Although found guilty of violating a grave and corpse, both youngsters were shown leniency and escaped with non-custodial sentences. I'm sure there must have been further disturbances since, but either I read the wrong newspaper or, down South, they stopped reporting every spectral scratch and hair-pull long ago. As such, Mr. Henderson's book captures the moment perfectly, even if some of the funniest testimonies are the ones you're not supposed to laugh at.

[dem]

Body-snatchers & Graverobbers

John James cover painting for Severn House reissue of Haining's Where Nightmares Are, 1983

A particular favourite subject of mine. Doubt there's much argument that Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body-Snatcher is the most famous horror story of its kind, but there have been several other depictions of the sack 'em up squad going about their grim business.

Here's some;

Samuel Warren - The Resurrectionists: A group of medical students and a stage Irishman named Tip endeavour to steal the corpse of a girl who died from a baffling illness. "It poured with rain to enhance the dreariness and horrors of the time and place, flashes of lightening followed in quick succession, shedding a transient awful glare over the scene, revealing the white tombstones, the ivy grown venerable church, and our own figures, a shivering group come on an unhallowed errand."

That it doesn't turn into the ghoulish tale you're expecting but still manages to be satisfying is due to Warren's decidedly macabre wit.

G. W. M. Reynolds - The Bodysnatchers: A neat thing about the Penny Dreadfuls is that often the chapters are self-contained story from The Mysteries Of London, with Reynolds adopting a documentary approach to his subject-matter. Loosely based on the exploits of the Bethnal Green Gang, the author introduces us to the ghastly crew - The Resurrection Man, The Cranksman and the Buffer - as they set out to meet their client, the surgeon, at the gates of Shoreditch Church. He shows them the grave of a young woman and they set to work with an efficiency born of vast experience.

Guy de Maupassant - The Tomb: Courbataille, a young lawyer, is apprehended in Bezier's cemetery one night as he removes his lover's corpse from her grave. Before an initially hostile court he tells how his anguish at never being able to see the beautiful twenty-year old again had driven him to it. Then he describes the condition of the rotting body he held in his arms ...

Ambrose Bierce - One Summer Night: Henry Armstrong is a victim of premature burial. Lucky for him, within hours of being planted in the soil, two medical students hire big negro Jess the cemetery caretaker to dig him up to furnish their dissecting table. Outrageously ripped off for Vault Of Horror's macabre live-burial comedy, Bargain In Death

Jean Ray - Gold Teeth: England, various cemeteries. The adventures of Abel Teal and Elsa, a husband and wife grave-robbing team whose booty is the golden dental wear of the dead. Non-supernatural, but contains a spookily horrible moment when, during his courtship of Elsa's doomed sister, Abel is at work in Abney Park Cemetery when the teeth of a dead man snap shut on his fingers, cutting through his rubber gloves. His wife-to-be had got there first and placed a trap in the corpses mouth. She just didn't like competition.

Henry Kuttner - The Graveyard Rats: Salem. old Masson, the cemetery caretaker, supplements his income by robbing the dead of their gold teeth and jewellery. Comes the rainy night when he digs up a grave to find the rats have gnawed a hole in it and dragged the corpse off along one of they innumerable tunnels. He crawls in after them ..

An incredibly busy plot - Kuttner even drags an animated, festering corpse into the proceedings. In it's day this was probably as ghastly a full-on horror story as had ever been written.

Raymond Williams - The Coffin-Makers: Set in 1839 just as the groovy body-snatching profession was finally dying out. Samuel Peel and the broody, hulking Thomas Carter are the craftsmen of the title, the one more dedicated than the other. Thomas is mourning the death of family friend Dr. Edmunds while sleazy Samuel is planning to dig up the deceased and relieve him of his jewellery. When Thomas finds out about his colleague's grave-robbing antics he dishes out a decidedly macabre punishment.

Sydney J. Bounds - Homecoming: Michael Wilde overdoses in the bath after his girlfriend leaves him. He’s been a week in the grave and he’s not looking or smelling so pleasant when a mad scientist and his assistant dig him up and revive him, Frankenstein fashion. Pitchfork wielding villagers pursue his festering corpse to the graveyard. No surprises, but much lovely pus oozing, dripping blue flesh and rotting teeth action in this one.

Virgil Finlay.

Mordecai Westhorne bribes the sexton to retrieve his dead loved one from the vault in Susette, Seabury Quinn's French Revolution weird romance (Weird Tales, April 1939).

[dem]

Click on pic to watch trailer

trailers can often mislead, but this, for John Landis's forthcoming horror comedy Burke And Hare, has a decidedly Hammer circa Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde meets The Phantom Raspberry Blower Of Old London Town look about it.

[franklinmarsh]

Hee hee! Quite looking forward to this. Anyone else sat through the Derren Nesbitt/Glyn Edwards Carry On Bodysnatching effort from the early 70s? (Complete with foghorn Scaffold (ho ho) theme song)

[dem]

Sadly not, but pulphack refers to it as "sordid" and "my favourite Burke and Hare film" in Fragments Of Fear which is enough to make me hope it might make it onto TV off the back of the Landis movie.

Not sure if I still have it, but used to keep a scrapbook of press clippings & Xerox's of newspaper reports relating to cemetery desecration and body-snatching (the Norwegian Death Metal era was a fruitful period). Have kept quite a few books written on the subject. NEL knocked out an edition of Hugh Douglas's Burke & Hare: The True Story of the Body snatchers in 1974, and bloody good it is too, reads more like horror fiction in places and gives you some idea of the squalor these poor bastards and their victims were living in.

[Johnlprobert]

Oct 18, 2010 10:48:44 GMT franklinmarsh said:

Hee hee! Quite looking forward to this. Anyone else sat through the Derren Nesbitt/Glyn Edwards Carry On Bodysnatching effort from the early 70s? (Complete with foghorn Scaffold (ho ho) theme song)

Vernon Sewell's picture may well be the only 1970s BritHorror I've not seen, but I did get to catch up with star Francoise Pascal at the Manchester Festival of Fantastic Films this weekend. I chatted with her a bit about Robert Hartford-Davis and her participation in the orgy scene in Incense for the Damned that often gets cut from prints and she commented on how stylishly dressed Lady P & I were.

[franklinmarsh]

Just ordered a copy of the Sewell '71. The version I saw a while back was execrable. Also found out that the nearest cinema to me will be screening the Landis '10 version at 9.30 am on Sunday (Hallowe'en). I hope me and the Mrs will be there. And it'll probably be just us if Dorian Gray was anything to go by.

[dem]

Anonymous - The Body-Snatchers: (Cassells, c. Dec. 1869/ Jan. 1870). Forty years after the Anatomy Act of 1832 effectively killed the trade, Robert Purrell reminisces on his experiences as getaway bargeman to a drunken, brawling crew of graveyard ghouls operating in Mencham churchyard. The very worst of this undisciplined rabble, Steeve Morrak (yes, his first name is spelt like that), very nearly got them all hung when, thwarted by the church wardens, he murdered a vagrant rather than return to London empty handed.

Guy de Maupassant - The Mannerism: (aka, The Spastic Mannerism, The Twitch). A huge 'well done, sir!' to Anthony Horrowitz for exhuming this masterpiece of the morbid for The Puffin Book Of Horror Stories.

H. P. Lovecraft - Herbert West :Reanimator

H. P. Lovecraft - The Hound

John Burke - The Plague Of The Zombies

Anon- The Grave Robbers (The Garland, Christmas 1851). First read this on R. J. Warren's, alas, currently dormant Amalgamated Brotherhood Of Spooks. His find, I just re-jigged it with a different illustration and awful lay-out.

Attachments:

THE GRAVE ROBBERS.pdf (138.06 KB)

[bobby]

    This is probably stretching it, but this EC story has such a great twist ending, I couldn't resist:

A Fatal Caper


    (The issue number may be #20, but this is actually the first issue of Tales from the Crypt. (Note that this story doesn't have a "host".) "A Fatal Caper!" is the only story in this issue that wasn't "swiped" from a published story!)

[bobby]

    Also:

    Cover of Haunt of Fear #5

[ripper]

Cutner's 'The Graveyard Rats' is probably my favourite of his tales. Very claustrophobic atmosphere and a nasty ending.

By the way, the 1972 version of 'Burke and Hare' is currently available on a well-known video streaming site, complete with that wacky title song.

[Dr Strange]

FW Murnau's skull stolen - variety.com/2015/film/news/f-w-murnau-head-stolen-nosferatu-dracula-1201540223/

[dem]

Vault Cuttings Library - Bodysnatcher special!

The Evening Standard for 11 April 1997 claimed Anthony Noel-Kelly faced up to three years imprisonment if found guilty of stealing corpses. He was eventually sentenced to nine months. David Lee, editor of Art Review magazine, said that all the publicity meant it was "probably the best career move in his life."

Assault of the earth is from Sunday People, 6 March 1994.