Speaker 1: San Francisco, sy s K Tree, Yes, San Francisco, Oakland,
Speaker 1: the entire Bay area and dare I say all of
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. Yeah, we love you. And we're coming back
Speaker 1: to Sketch Fest this year in January. Yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: be there on Sunday, January at one pm, a very
Speaker 1: rare afternoon show. Uh, and we will be ready to go.
Speaker 1: So you guys better be drunk from the night before
Speaker 1: or getting drunk for that evening. Yeah, however it crosses over,
Speaker 1: I think it'll be proof positive that uh we endorse
Speaker 1: afternoon drinking, you know. Yeah, oh, you know, a couple
Speaker 1: of drinks, maybe ma'd be bloody Mary. What were we
Speaker 1: talking about. Oh yeah, we're promoting our show. Oh that's right.
Speaker 1: So we're doing that show on January. Uh. You can
Speaker 1: go to the s F Sketch Fest website to get
Speaker 1: tickets and it's awesome. It's a great, great comedy festival.
Speaker 1: Lots of awesome shows that weekend and for the following weeks.
Speaker 1: So I encourage you, like to buy lots of tickets
Speaker 1: just by ours first. Yeah, and hurry, hurry, because they're
Speaker 1: selling out fast. No joke, that's not a ploy. It's
Speaker 1: not a marketing ploy. No, they're really selling fast. We
Speaker 1: get emails every time. Guys. He told me to hurry.
Speaker 1: I didn't hurry. I'm shut out. And since this promos
Speaker 1: petered out, it ends right now. Welcome to stuff you
Speaker 1: should know from how stuff Works dot com. Hey, and
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant. Cherry's not here, but we are in beautiful London,
Speaker 1: England at Union Chapel. It's not bad, It's not bad.
Speaker 1: I have a good feeling about this. Guys. It was
Speaker 1: the S word. For those of you at home just
Speaker 1: tuning in, you have no idea what we're talking about. Boy,
Speaker 1: the acoustics in this room, it's almost like they built
Speaker 1: it for that reason. We should have done this from
Speaker 1: up there, And now that I think about it, I
Speaker 1: don't think so. Yeah, I've worked out of you say
Speaker 1: what No, no, don't respond. Please come up here and
Speaker 1: tell the crowd what you just said. So we're we're
Speaker 1: doing a podcast. We'd like to start it out, get
Speaker 1: you all laughing and then bring you down. And that's
Speaker 1: what we're gonna do right now, because we're talking about
Speaker 1: Grave robbing tonight. Yeah, there's a long rich history this country. Actually,
Speaker 1: there really is. As you will see, you probably already
Speaker 1: know this. You guys are probably taught this from like
Speaker 1: third grade on or year three. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: We're from America and I think Germany's landlock for God's say.
Speaker 1: So there's We did a lot of research on this show, um,
Speaker 1: and we found that actually grave robbing is this huge,
Speaker 1: huge amorphous topic. Like the Egyptians were really big into
Speaker 1: into burying people with these elaborate graves, and then they
Speaker 1: were equally into breaking in and robbing those graves. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: the field of archaeology is basically grave robbing and academia.
Speaker 1: There's this really really great video that I really strongly
Speaker 1: want to recommend to anybody who has a dark and
Speaker 1: interesting grave robbing that yes, sure, But alternately, if you
Speaker 1: have a very dark sense of humor, you will love
Speaker 1: grave robbing for more. It's this weird bootleg video from
Speaker 1: like the eighties maybe nineties, where this very disturbing young
Speaker 1: man is explaining how to extort money from people by
Speaker 1: robbing their family's graves, and he holds up jawbones and
Speaker 1: stuff while he's doing it. It's just right. When you
Speaker 1: leave here, go watch grave robbing for morons. But we realized, like,
Speaker 1: this is two unweel it is like a five hour show.
Speaker 1: It's not. They may they may sit there for five hours,
Speaker 1: but by god, they're going to be really unhappy after
Speaker 1: hour or two. So we decided we were gonna whittle
Speaker 1: it down to two hours. And it was kind of
Speaker 1: easy because it turns out that there has never been
Speaker 1: a period in human history where a dead body has
Speaker 1: had more monetary value and hence more likely to be
Speaker 1: dug up from a fresh grave than in the late
Speaker 1: eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the Aisles and in America.
Speaker 1: And I like to call it the Golden Age of
Speaker 1: grave row me. Josh did this research and he put
Speaker 1: this together and he actually capitalized that, so I thought
Speaker 1: it was really called the Golden Age of Gray Robin.
Speaker 1: He fooled me and said, well, that's remarkable. Let it know.
Speaker 1: You could have a Golden Age of something terrible, but
Speaker 1: I'll go with it. And you said, no, I just
Speaker 1: capitalized it. Well, if you capitalize it, it legitimizes it
Speaker 1: for share exactly. I bought it. So we're gonna go
Speaker 1: back in time, we're gonna all get in the way
Speaker 1: back machine, which is the stone edifice right here, everyone filing.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of room, believe me, lots of room in
Speaker 1: the other dimension. This leads to, so we're gonna go
Speaker 1: back to the mid sixteenth century and pretty much anything
Speaker 1: before that, uh, to what. I don't know what they
Speaker 1: called it back then. It wasn't called um medicine or
Speaker 1: practicing medicine or being a doctor. Uh. In fact, I
Speaker 1: don't even think they had the word doctor yet, did
Speaker 1: they or did they? No? No, they were barbers and surgeons.
Speaker 1: Surgeons stuck. Barber's did not for obvious reasons. Well barber's stuck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's still barbers around, but just not in the way
Speaker 1: that you think of. If you're barbera's cutting you open.
Speaker 1: He's not doing his job very well. Lists and apothecaries
Speaker 1: and witches and that's who was practicing early medicine, and uh,
Speaker 1: things were going pretty well for a while. They figured
Speaker 1: out that the human body ran on the four humors,
Speaker 1: and they were wrong because the four humors are blood,
Speaker 1: as we all know. That's right. Like that was pretty
Speaker 1: pretty sharp of them back then. Not too bad flim.
Speaker 1: It is the thing we can all agree, uh. And
Speaker 1: then the two bials yellow bile and black pile and
Speaker 1: that was it. That was the human body. You had
Speaker 1: the four humors and that's how all this stuff worked out. Well.
Speaker 1: That that and they figured out that the kidneys may
Speaker 1: be right, and they were like, it was actually this
Speaker 1: guy named Galen. He was working in the first century CE,
Speaker 1: and he figured all this out and said, job well done,
Speaker 1: and this is human anatomy. And for four hundred years
Speaker 1: they said, we don't need to go back and double
Speaker 1: check his work. Let's just take his word for it.
Speaker 1: This is how the human body works. And then finally
Speaker 1: one day somebody who's like, I'm not sure this is correct. Sure,
Speaker 1: maybe the kidneys make pea and maybe blood is kind
Speaker 1: of important, but black by don't. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what that is. I think we need to cut open
Speaker 1: more people. And they looked around and they said, who's
Speaker 1: who are the people who should be doing this? Who
Speaker 1: should we entrust cutting open dead bodies too? And they said,
Speaker 1: Barbara Surgeons, you guys amputate people without any sort of anesthesia.
Speaker 1: We should probably let you do it. Yeah, because if
Speaker 1: you want to know how this works. You need to
Speaker 1: open it up and see what's in there, kind of
Speaker 1: like just lifting the bonnet or the boot bonnet. Well,
Speaker 1: what the hell is the boot? I think the boots
Speaker 1: the trunk. Yeah, we got that on our big tour announcement.
Speaker 1: And remember that that's not surprising. Yeah. I've said a
Speaker 1: few other words on the podcast that means something different
Speaker 1: here all apologies. Yeah, trust me, I get the emails.
Speaker 1: I understand these words means something different. Now, no offense.
Speaker 1: Uh So they realized you needed to peek under the hood,
Speaker 1: as we would say in the States, and see what's
Speaker 1: going on. Let's just stick to that. It's just what
Speaker 1: we know. Uh So eventually they were doing this a
Speaker 1: little bit, and they realized they needed more bodies if
Speaker 1: they were really going to advance medicine and learn things.
Speaker 1: And so in fifteen forty there was a king you
Speaker 1: might have heard of and read the Eighth I I
Speaker 1: and he said, here's what I'll do. I'm gonna grant
Speaker 1: the monopoly on uh cadavers on bodies to the barber's
Speaker 1: and surgeons. And he said, oh my gosh, it's great,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. How many do we get a year?
Speaker 1: Four four, thank you bodies a year. I don't know
Speaker 1: if that's gonna do it, but thinks it was a
Speaker 1: pretty good start, and um, but it clearly wasn't nearly enough.
Speaker 1: And these early dissections amounted to not much more than
Speaker 1: just kind of opening the body up and looking to
Speaker 1: see what was in there and lifting organs out and
Speaker 1: showing people because they don't learn Galen. Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 1: So like the dissections amounted to this, Yeah, what was that?
Speaker 1: The appendix? Appendix? You call it funny? And then they
Speaker 1: get to the intestines and like this is like magic
Speaker 1: never and it just keeps coming. So it was it
Speaker 1: was a little bit just like early surgical theater. They
Speaker 1: would display these organs and no one really knew how
Speaker 1: how things work. Back then, it was pretty clear that
Speaker 1: you needed more bodies if we were going to get anywhere.
Speaker 1: Everyone wanted to live longer, and they knew a few
Speaker 1: people knew that this was kind of the way to
Speaker 1: do it. So they were like, who do we hate?
Speaker 1: Who do we hate? Murderers? Everybody hates murderers. And King
Speaker 1: George a third another King King George I I he said,
Speaker 1: I'm going to pass this thing called the Murder Act,
Speaker 1: and the Murder Act basically said if you were convicted
Speaker 1: of murder, not only were you going to be hung,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna hanged. Is it? Yeah? Two different meanings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess if you get to be hung, we're going
Speaker 1: to dissect you after your day, because I'm not I'm Georgia. Third.
Speaker 1: Uh is that a fact? No? No, no, no no.
Speaker 1: I just made that up, as I do from time
Speaker 1: and time again. I said, Germany is landlocked. You know,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump has small hands. Apparently so apparently has been
Speaker 1: recently proven. Somebody figured out to go to Madame Tussod's
Speaker 1: wax museum and measure the hands because apparently the whole
Speaker 1: thing is anatomy anatomically accurate. Yeah, small, it's oh oh yeah.
Speaker 1: I just realized how we got on that. So you
Speaker 1: would be hanged if you were convicted of murder, and
Speaker 1: then after that they would dissect you as like an
Speaker 1: additional like we hate you that much, that's how, that's
Speaker 1: how despicable we find you. So it really kind of
Speaker 1: opened the floodgates of the bodies a little more. We're
Speaker 1: talking like thirty forty more bodies. And we found out
Speaker 1: actually in researching this that you could and during certain
Speaker 1: periods of time, you could say, I don't want to
Speaker 1: be executed, send me to America instead, when you were
Speaker 1: convicted of murder and we're like, wait, wait, wait, I
Speaker 1: thought Australia was a penal colony. No, apparently both were.
Speaker 1: Did you guys know that? No? Okay, good, because I
Speaker 1: was gonna say, they don't teach us that in America.
Speaker 1: There's all sorts of like rebellion and we're not paying
Speaker 1: taxes and you're crazy easy, we don't like you, you're
Speaker 1: not hung king and all that stuff. That's how they
Speaker 1: teach us. We're in a church, sent me to the
Speaker 1: coast of California for my punishment exactly, you got any
Speaker 1: suntan lotion. So eventually things were progressing a little bit medically,
Speaker 1: and uh, they actually started founding medical schools. The first
Speaker 1: medical schools rose out of the hospitals. They dropped the barber's.
Speaker 1: The surgeon said, I think the word surgeon is going
Speaker 1: to be the one that people are gonna I think
Speaker 1: is legit. So barber's, you just go cut your hair
Speaker 1: and maybe do a little bleeding on the side for
Speaker 1: a little while, and we're going to found these medical schools,
Speaker 1: and these students, um were expected to show up with bodies. UM.
Speaker 1: I don't know how they do it in university over here,
Speaker 1: when you start school, if you have to buy your books. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the United States, you have to buy your books
Speaker 1: each semester um. But back then it was b y
Speaker 1: O B in medical school and you had to show
Speaker 1: up with your own body. And there was a weird
Speaker 1: loophole at the time, uh in English law where it
Speaker 1: was not actually illegal to steal a body. Grave robbing
Speaker 1: had been going on for a long long time, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't for the bodies. It was for jewels or
Speaker 1: any kind of valuables that the humans were buried with,
Speaker 1: and which happened all the time, you know, because people
Speaker 1: would like most like the treasures of the family would
Speaker 1: be buried with the body a lot of times, you know,
Speaker 1: other people wanted those treasures exactly, so they would steal those.
Speaker 1: But now, for the first time, bodies were valuable. But
Speaker 1: there was this loophole. As long as you returned the valuables,
Speaker 1: you could actually steal the body. And technically, technically it
Speaker 1: wasn't illegal because the body couldn't own itself. It wasn't
Speaker 1: property exactly, so therefore it couldn't be stolen. So if
Speaker 1: you were caught with just the body and it was
Speaker 1: totally naked and it's clothes were back in the grave,
Speaker 1: they kind of be like, why no law broken. Students
Speaker 1: didn't quite dig this though. They were like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm one day this is gonna be a respectable profession
Speaker 1: to be a surgeon, and I know there's a loophole,
Speaker 1: but something about this doesn't feel quite right. It makes
Speaker 1: me fainty. Fainty. Um. The problem was that all these students,
Speaker 1: there are more and more students being attracted to the
Speaker 1: profession of surgery and of anatomy and studying this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. So the more students that came, the more
Speaker 1: bodies were needed. Because back then there was no embalming,
Speaker 1: there was no refrigeration, and so after a very short
Speaker 1: period of time, a body would get gamey. Right, So
Speaker 1: you come in one day with your saw and you
Speaker 1: go to saw it and like always in your arm
Speaker 1: would just keep going and you'd say I need another body,
Speaker 1: and there were no more bodies. They'd say, go dig
Speaker 1: it up. And then you would say, I'm fainty and
Speaker 1: they'd say, fine, who else can we get to do this? Criminals,
Speaker 1: criminals would love to fulfill this. We have a black
Speaker 1: market that's establishing itself before very eyes. Why not get
Speaker 1: criminals to steal the bodies and we'll get the money
Speaker 1: for it. And that is how this whole thing erupted
Speaker 1: in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, this
Speaker 1: weird convergence of scientific inquiry, social morays against the idea
Speaker 1: of dissection, and a lot of organized criminals that were like, sure,
Speaker 1: we'll dig up your dead bodies and sell them to
Speaker 1: you for money. And it all happened right here in London. Congratulations.
Speaker 1: So one of the first gangs that emerge was called
Speaker 1: the London Borough Gang Borrow Gang. We've been instructed how
Speaker 1: to say this. Yeah, we were been saying burrow like
Speaker 1: dumb Americans. And our lighting guy last night said, fell
Speaker 1: let's come over here, and he said it with a
Speaker 1: great accent. But I'm not gonna try and get pulled
Speaker 1: Chuck's beard. He has a great beard too, So we
Speaker 1: rubbed beards together and it's spelled Bara. It did. So
Speaker 1: the londonburg Gang was operating right here, and there was
Speaker 1: a man who started this gang named Ben Crouch and
Speaker 1: he crosses in the audience. That's probably good. No, no crouches.
Speaker 1: No one's gonna admitted at least. And he worked at
Speaker 1: Guy's Hospital, and I was right next to that today,
Speaker 1: but anywhere, No, I didn't realize that. We Emily and
Speaker 1: now were just walking along and I looked up and
Speaker 1: there was Guy's Hospital, and I say, I know what
Speaker 1: used to happen here many years ago. You know, great things.
Speaker 1: But this one dude, he was kind of a rat.
Speaker 1: He uh, he worked at Guy's hospital, and he had
Speaker 1: met somebody's in the Peninsular Wars fighting Napoleon, and what
Speaker 1: they were really good at and on the battlefield was
Speaker 1: um ravaging bodies and like pulling out gold teeth and
Speaker 1: fillings and kind of just robbing these bodies. And he said,
Speaker 1: I think I can take this back home, fellas, and
Speaker 1: we can get a gang together and we can really
Speaker 1: make good use of all this stuff. So he got
Speaker 1: his buddies and they kind of found their go to
Speaker 1: graveyards and he was for a grave robber, a pretty
Speaker 1: underhanded dude, which is super super underhanded, believe it or not,
Speaker 1: but he was good at it. He would find out
Speaker 1: what graves were, Um, like, other grave robbers are robbing,
Speaker 1: and he would go to them and he would desecrate
Speaker 1: the graves and basically draw a lot of attention to
Speaker 1: those graveyards so they wouldn't be able to operate in
Speaker 1: those graves. So he was he was trying to just
Speaker 1: kind of keep the cottage industry in house right exactly,
Speaker 1: and he was really good at it. He actually came
Speaker 1: to be known as the corpse King. And he would
Speaker 1: even make his wife call him that. He'd be like,
Speaker 1: don't you mean do you want shepherd's pie for dinner tonight?
Speaker 1: Corpse King? And she'd be like, that's what I meant,
Speaker 1: and he say so. Ben Crouch was so good at
Speaker 1: what he did that was good. Uh. He was so
Speaker 1: good at what he did that he actually was able
Speaker 1: to retire a wealthy man from Gray Ribbing. But that
Speaker 1: was not the end of the Borough Gang. He passed
Speaker 1: the reins onto one Patrick Murphy. Murphy, Oh you should
Speaker 1: have heard it in Dublin. There's one Murphy here. Come on.
Speaker 1: He's like, no, no, yeah, they're all over Dublin. Uh.
Speaker 1: So Murphy was even a bigger creep. He would do
Speaker 1: things like. Uh. He had a bunch of looks like
Speaker 1: underhanded things he would do. He would, let's say, sell
Speaker 1: a body to a hospital and then go back in
Speaker 1: and break in and steal that body from that hospital
Speaker 1: that night, and then sell it to another hospital the
Speaker 1: next day before it had a chance to be dissected. Underhanded.
Speaker 1: He was very underhanded. Um. He also would keep surgeons
Speaker 1: in line right like um. He found out that some
Speaker 1: surgeon had bought like a bunch of bodies for some students,
Speaker 1: and he and his gang broke into the the anatomy
Speaker 1: school that night and you related the body so they
Speaker 1: would be unusable. This is not cool. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: there was this one anatomist who I've never gotten to
Speaker 1: the bottom of. Why didn't they didn't like this guy?
Speaker 1: But they didn't. They once delivered a body to the
Speaker 1: guy that he had ordered, and it was delivered naked
Speaker 1: in a sack, as they customarily were, because you couldn't
Speaker 1: steal anything from the grave. Um. And the guy put
Speaker 1: the body on the on the slab, and the anatomist
Speaker 1: came over and was about to cut into him, and
Speaker 1: the body sat bolt upright. It turned out it was
Speaker 1: just a man that the gang had knocked unconscious and
Speaker 1: delivered and sold to this guy, and apparently he ran
Speaker 1: out of the house naked, scared to death down the street.
Speaker 1: I'm not dead yet. You will be soon feeling much better.
Speaker 1: That's too money. Python references. I'm gonna go for three.
Speaker 1: There was fair enough to then a mint that was
Speaker 1: meaning of life, right. The big guy at the restaurant
Speaker 1: maybe eats them and blows up and his rib cages left. Classic.
Speaker 1: Well that's three. Let's try and work in five. Okay, five?
Speaker 1: Could someone be in charged officially? Account Monty Python references. Um,
Speaker 1: this was happening all over the UK, by the way,
Speaker 1: and it was also happening right in our own United States,
Speaker 1: And in fact, it was happening in our very home
Speaker 1: state of Georgia in Augusta, at the Medical College of Georgia,
Speaker 1: which is still there today. And there was there was
Speaker 1: a man, well, I was about to say, working there.
Speaker 1: He was a slave, uh, and he was owned by
Speaker 1: the Medical College of Georgia. It's all very sad. He
Speaker 1: he was a slave owned by the medical school and
Speaker 1: he it was illegal to teach a slave to read
Speaker 1: at the time, which is even more sad. But they
Speaker 1: taught grandson Harris to read because they wanted him to
Speaker 1: keep up with the obituaries because he was really good
Speaker 1: at digging up graves and bringing in cadavers and keeping
Speaker 1: them in good supply. This guy had a knack for it,
Speaker 1: as a matter of fact. Yeah, and this um kind
Speaker 1: of points out a thread that you'll see running through
Speaker 1: this whole history that as long as bodies were being
Speaker 1: stolen from minority graveyards and marginalized people or mentally ill
Speaker 1: like mental hospitals, the white establishment didn't much care. So
Speaker 1: only when things started happening in the white communities did
Speaker 1: people really start to get upset. And you'll you'll see
Speaker 1: that a little later, but this is definitely what was
Speaker 1: going on with Grams and Harris. So everybody, if you
Speaker 1: will reach under your pew, you'll find a little pad
Speaker 1: of paper and a pen, because this is a part
Speaker 1: where we teach you how to rob a grave. There
Speaker 1: is no pad of papers. By the way, you get
Speaker 1: a pet, you get a pen. Was that Oprah? It was?
Speaker 1: It was a halfhearted Oprah. But yeah, well you don't
Speaker 1: want to go full Oprah. It's it's embarrassing unless you're Oprah.
Speaker 1: Uh So, here's how you do it. Typically this happens
Speaker 1: um at night and you would think duh, of course,
Speaker 1: but um, there was a member of the Borough Gang
Speaker 1: named Tom Light who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer,
Speaker 1: and he was actually arrested in broad daylight walking through
Speaker 1: London with a cart full of dead bodies, and the
Speaker 1: cops came up. And you know this is highly illegal.
Speaker 1: Tom Lights like, oh can't you see the naked Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't steal any jewels. So you go at night.
Speaker 1: You use a wooden shovel because a metal shovel against
Speaker 1: rock will make noise. Your whole job there is to
Speaker 1: be really quiet, so you can get away with this.
Speaker 1: So you got your wooden shovel, you're there at night.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know before we researched this that I
Speaker 1: just figured you just dug up the whole grave and
Speaker 1: raised the casket and pulled out the body. That's a
Speaker 1: lot of work. No, you want to work smarter, not harder, exactly.
Speaker 1: So you would just dig that first third. You would
Speaker 1: find the headstone, which ideally is where the head of
Speaker 1: the body is unless your family has a weird since
Speaker 1: the fume, and you would you would dig down that
Speaker 1: first third only, and you would dig down, dig down
Speaker 1: until you reach the casket, and you would expose the
Speaker 1: casket and you would pry that up and snap the
Speaker 1: lid off of that first third because all the dirt
Speaker 1: is on the lower two thirds. And then there's this
Speaker 1: or or this. Yeah, I don't think the eyes are
Speaker 1: open if they were alive when they were buried. They were,
Speaker 1: I've seen movies. You do like that, and then the
Speaker 1: eyes glows unless you bury them while they're alive. So
Speaker 1: the body's there, Why are the arms like this? I
Speaker 1: don't know. I'm not sure how they do it. What
Speaker 1: did you do? That's not bad? They were happy or something.
Speaker 1: Either way, they would run a rope under the body,
Speaker 1: under the arms, and they would just pull the body
Speaker 1: out the upper third and then you've got your body,
Speaker 1: you would. Um. I imagine they stole valuables. I mean,
Speaker 1: come on, I know there was a loophole that there
Speaker 1: were valuables. They probably took him. But the thing was,
Speaker 1: if they were caught stealing the valuables, they would be hanged. Hanged. Um.
Speaker 1: If they were caught with the body, no, they wouldn't
Speaker 1: be that's right. So they would strip the body down
Speaker 1: and put it in the sack, but everything back in
Speaker 1: the grave, and rebury it as best of good, so
Speaker 1: no one would ever know they were there. That is
Speaker 1: ideally how it would go down. And our buddy Grandison
Speaker 1: Harris actually was supposedly so good at this that he
Speaker 1: would memorize the floral arrangements before he desecrated the grave,
Speaker 1: so that when he reburied it he could remember exactly
Speaker 1: what it looked like when he put it all back together.
Speaker 1: Because if you were a decent resurrectionist, which is what
Speaker 1: they call these guys, and now they say decent is
Speaker 1: probably not the best word, if you were good at
Speaker 1: what you did as a resurrectionist. Um, the whole point
Speaker 1: was is that no one would ever know that you'd
Speaker 1: broken into this grave. And we we're saying guys a lot.
Speaker 1: We try to keep things in our show, like say
Speaker 1: men and women, But let's be honest, women were always
Speaker 1: way more decent. They wouldn't do something like this even
Speaker 1: back been like they're doing it now. I just realized
Speaker 1: when I said that, how that sounded. The most most
Speaker 1: grave overcense days are women. Ever since the seventies, come
Speaker 1: a long way, baby, so uh was that add Never mind? Um,
Speaker 1: here's what also happened. People are stealing bodies out of graves,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot of work. So some enterprising dude said,
Speaker 1: here's what we'll do. Let's just forget the graveyards and
Speaker 1: let's just find out when people have died. They kind
Speaker 1: of live out in the sticks in rural areas, and
Speaker 1: we'll just go pretend to be a family member and
Speaker 1: they're really poor and they won't know, and we'll say
Speaker 1: we'll take care of the body for you, and they
Speaker 1: would just take the body right away from the family
Speaker 1: and then that's it. They would have the body, no must,
Speaker 1: no fuss, And somebody be like, who is that that
Speaker 1: took the body. I don't care. They took the body.
Speaker 1: I don't have to bury the body, So do you care? No,
Speaker 1: I don't care. Well I don't care either. Then shut up.
Speaker 1: That's how those conversations went. Yeah, we found actual texts.
Speaker 1: You could you could also go into. Um, the hospitals,
Speaker 1: the big hospitals, like guys in London City Hospital had
Speaker 1: like their own graveyards, so indigent patients who died there
Speaker 1: would just be buried. They're free of charge and I'm
Speaker 1: sure the grave robbers were like, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: Because they would break into these graveyards that were very
Speaker 1: largely unpatrolled, and they would dig up the body and
Speaker 1: then go sell the body to a different hospital. So
Speaker 1: the body would be a patient one day, die, be buried,
Speaker 1: be dug up, and then be sold into another hospital
Speaker 1: within twenty four hours sometimes Yeah, But what that does
Speaker 1: do is underscores how they revered the body, and they
Speaker 1: respected the dead body, because you would think the hospital
Speaker 1: would just think, no, one's claiming, this body, got a
Speaker 1: cadaver on my hands, we can use this for medical research.
Speaker 1: But no, they would still bury the body, which kind
Speaker 1: of was the tone of what was going on. So
Speaker 1: this was I know, uh Murphy's contemporary or predecessor, at
Speaker 1: least retired wealthy Mr Crouch. Murphy himself at one point
Speaker 1: made a hundred forty four pounds and one day, which
Speaker 1: is about ten thousand dollars in today's dollars, by stealing
Speaker 1: twelve corpses in one I guess overnight period, which was amazing.
Speaker 1: And the London cops figured they had two hundred grave
Speaker 1: robbers working in London alone, and ten of those were
Speaker 1: full time grave robbers. They were able to quit their
Speaker 1: other job, which was probably a big day in the household. Honey,
Speaker 1: I have really big news. You're gonna be so proud.
Speaker 1: I can stop robbing orphans. I can just do grave
Speaker 1: robbing full time stand up guys. So, uh, this was
Speaker 1: going on way back then, obviously, but evidence of this
Speaker 1: we have found over the years, kind of recently, um
Speaker 1: and at the Medical College of Georgia. Well, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: If you go to renovate the basement of your really
Speaker 1: old hospital, just get ready for what you're gonna find
Speaker 1: down here. It's not just a matter of tearing up
Speaker 1: the tile floors and ripping down the dry wall. You
Speaker 1: start digging around in the basement of an old hospital,
Speaker 1: you're gonna find some horrors going on. And they did
Speaker 1: this in nine at the Medical College of Georgia and
Speaker 1: found ten thousand bones just scattered in the basement of
Speaker 1: who knows who and so like. At some point, the
Speaker 1: idea that surgery and anatomy was based on stolen body
Speaker 1: was lost to humanity, right, So when this kind of
Speaker 1: thing comes out these days, everyone's like, all they're serial killers,
Speaker 1: serial killers, And then somebody who's actually studied history comes
Speaker 1: forward and says, no, actually, they got some weird news
Speaker 1: about surgery and anatomy. They would steal the bodies, come
Speaker 1: them open, and then just mass bury the bones and say,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that's crazy. And then they'd sit there
Speaker 1: for a second and then you forget what they just
Speaker 1: heard and go back to normal. And then a few
Speaker 1: years later somebody else would discover some bones somewhere else,
Speaker 1: like on Craven Street, in the house where Ben Franklin
Speaker 1: rented for like twenty seven years. Right, yeah, whereas Craven
Speaker 1: Street is there no longer the street. We just assume
Speaker 1: because you all live in the city, you know where
Speaker 1: Craven Street is it not around? Is there no more
Speaker 1: Craven Street? It's NICs, thank you. I thought they buried
Speaker 1: Craven Street. They well, they found fifteen people, the bones
Speaker 1: of fifteen people in this house on Craven Street that
Speaker 1: Ben Franklin right in. And of course everyone said Franklin
Speaker 1: was a serial killer. And the same guy came forwards
Speaker 1: like I told you this before. Um, they used to
Speaker 1: dig up bodies, cut them open basis of anatomy. I'm
Speaker 1: going back here, look at the bones. Monty python reference.
Speaker 1: No someone, that's four. I don't know what that one was,
Speaker 1: but that was number four. That's from Holy Grail. What
Speaker 1: what part when the rabbit and the cave remember, and uh,
Speaker 1: he's talking about the rabbit with the huge point of
Speaker 1: teeth and he goes look at the bones. No one,
Speaker 1: all right. I don't know if that's a legitimate quote
Speaker 1: like it may have been said in the movie, but
Speaker 1: it's a quote for me, like we say, neat, that's
Speaker 1: a quote. Yeah, that's true, to look at the bones.
Speaker 1: That's what I thought. That was very funny line. Not
Speaker 1: tonight when it's terrible, but when I saw the movie
Speaker 1: back then, I thought it was great. When I saw
Speaker 1: that movie nineteen times. So most recently right here in
Speaker 1: London in two thousand six, uh, at London Hospital. You
Speaker 1: might this might have been on the news. They discovered
Speaker 1: two hundred and sixty two burials at London Hospital and
Speaker 1: five hundred individuals in the yard there that we're missing
Speaker 1: their skull caps and they had basically skeletons that still
Speaker 1: had wires connecting themselves. It seems wrong if you're gonna
Speaker 1: if you're gonna steal a body articulate the skeleton and
Speaker 1: then go to the trouble of reburying it, disarticulate the skeleton.
Speaker 1: At the very least, just clip the wires off. At
Speaker 1: least that's a T shirt. It's not a good T shirt,
Speaker 1: but that's two hundred sixty two burials and five hundred bodies.
Speaker 1: You do the math. Not everyone has their own plot,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I know what you're saying. Hey,
Speaker 1: hey win quick nudge nudge. So if that's five, oh wow,
Speaker 1: yeah we did it. But we did get out everyone
Speaker 1: nice time. So uh, this was going on the States,
Speaker 1: like we said, but as we implied earlier, as long
Speaker 1: as these were kind of marginalized people or they were
Speaker 1: slave graveyards, no one really got their hackles up. But
Speaker 1: something happened in New York City in su called the
Speaker 1: Doctor's Riot of New York of se I think that's
Speaker 1: the full title. And there's two ways the story goes down.
Speaker 1: One is is way funnier than the other one. Um.
Speaker 1: The first is that these boys were playing in a
Speaker 1: hospital in New York and they saw him just an arm,
Speaker 1: a white arm hanging in the window guests to cure
Speaker 1: or dry or whatever, and they were disturbed and went home.
Speaker 1: This is this's the stupid one. It's not very good.
Speaker 1: The other version is these boys were playing near a
Speaker 1: hospital in New York and they looked in a window
Speaker 1: and the anatomus took a white arm and waved with it.
Speaker 1: He hello, young man, come here. He's my favorite anatomists.
Speaker 1: And so that that's the version we like to believe.
Speaker 1: And at any rate, they went home and they told
Speaker 1: their parents, and and one of their fathers had just
Speaker 1: recently lost his wife, and he got worried that it
Speaker 1: might be her because he knew grave robbing was a thing,
Speaker 1: and he went and found that her grave had in
Speaker 1: fact been dug up, and was a little angry to say,
Speaker 1: and he spun in a circle of rage that managed
Speaker 1: to attract five thousand other people in New York at
Speaker 1: the time, and they started one hell of a riot.
Speaker 1: It went over for I think like two three days.
Speaker 1: Twenty people died and they called it an anatomy riot.
Speaker 1: And the reason it was an anatomy right, because they
Speaker 1: tried to find every dead body they could in the hospital,
Speaker 1: which they found a few, and they beat some doctors
Speaker 1: along the way, and then afterwards they went to the
Speaker 1: Medical College, and apparently word had gotten from the hospital
Speaker 1: to the Medical College x NA on the Oddies Bay,
Speaker 1: and they got rid of all of them, right and um.
Speaker 1: So when they went and stormed the Medical college, they
Speaker 1: didn't find anything, and they're like, well, our rage is
Speaker 1: is not satiated, and what like a little known footnote
Speaker 1: to this whole thing. When they got to the Medical College,
Speaker 1: Alexander Hamilton was standing there. They all said, Alexander Hamilton,
Speaker 1: what are you doing here? He said, peace brothers, peace sisters,
Speaker 1: go back home. And they pushed his space out of
Speaker 1: the way and stormed the building pretty much. But again
Speaker 1: they didn't find anything. So they found out that all
Speaker 1: the doctors and all the students were hiding out at
Speaker 1: the jail, and they're like, no jail can hold us.
Speaker 1: We're five thousand strong. There's a guy circulating in the middle,
Speaker 1: just filled with rage keeping us going. We're eating stuff
Speaker 1: from time to time to keep our energy up. It
Speaker 1: was a bad scene. They were literally shouting bring out
Speaker 1: your doctors. On mass in New York City in seventeen
Speaker 1: bring out your doctors so we can kill them. This
Speaker 1: was the tone of the time, and this was not
Speaker 1: an isolated incident. There were like dozens of anatomy riots
Speaker 1: all over the United States back then. It's really very disturbing.
Speaker 1: It was kind of a thing and you guys did
Speaker 1: it too, but like we really did it, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, like Texas style or something like that.
Speaker 1: All Right, So because all this was going on, um,
Speaker 1: it became pretty clear that people should take action um
Speaker 1: on their own. If you're going to bury a family member,
Speaker 1: maybe you should take some steps to ensure that you, uh,
Speaker 1: they would be late to rest for eternity. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was a very inventive time. It was a Georgian period.
Speaker 1: And I don't know why I said it, like that
Speaker 1: you have to the Georgian period some tea. I don't
Speaker 1: have any tea, so, uh, I don't have any gent.
Speaker 1: You can lie. I just covered my tooth on this mine.
Speaker 1: That's your new thing. If you get your finger like
Speaker 1: stuck in there, it's happened, no now, but my daughter
Speaker 1: had her finger stuck. So this was a very inventive time.
Speaker 1: So they thought, let's come up with some ways to
Speaker 1: ensure this doesn't happen. Let's start kind of basically by
Speaker 1: just staggering sticks and things as we pile the dirt
Speaker 1: on the casket because again they're they're using wooden shovels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's just make it harder to dig up the body basically,
Speaker 1: which is pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Another one was the
Speaker 1: mort stone, which was invented by a guy named mort Stone,
Speaker 1: and it was just basically like putting a huge rock
Speaker 1: on a grave and they're like, well, they'll never get
Speaker 1: into that grave, and they hadn't thought it through because
Speaker 1: all you have to do is dig around the stone
Speaker 1: and downward at an angle and you get to the grave.
Speaker 1: That's that not too bad. They actually still use more
Speaker 1: stones every now and then today. Just a few years
Speaker 1: ago in two thousand thirteen on Treadworth Road, Terry and whoa,
Speaker 1: that's all right. We needed music for that way we
Speaker 1: did now where was I still don't know music too Weirdly,
Speaker 1: that was a weird ring tone, dude, I still don't
Speaker 1: know how to pronounce this as you do too, You
Speaker 1: do too, gluster cluster cluster bluster? Is that right? So
Speaker 1: we did our first show in Manchester, which apparently you're
Speaker 1: supposed to say murr because we said Gloucester. Now I
Speaker 1: said it. You're being kind and like this audience had
Speaker 1: been going like this all night. Suddenly we're pointing and laughing,
Speaker 1: like they were townspeople in Springfield on the Simpsons and
Speaker 1: somebody had just pants us. It was like that, the
Speaker 1: biggest reaction anyone has ever gotten from a crowded Manchester
Speaker 1: we got and it was at our expense, pointing and
Speaker 1: laughing because we said gloud Chester, which is just so funny.
Speaker 1: And they moved to Scotland and they said it's close
Speaker 1: on flem came up. Didn't point and laugh when they
Speaker 1: did it. So Treadworth wrote, cemetery and cluster, uh one,
Speaker 1: Miss Betty Brazil and Henry Brazil were buried together, and
Speaker 1: apparently the word had gotten around that they were They
Speaker 1: were buried with a lot of valuables, so um, someone
Speaker 1: tried to dig him up because the jewels down there.
Speaker 1: And I don't think they actually got finished at night.
Speaker 1: So the sun started to rise and they put a
Speaker 1: recycling bend over the whole and said we're gonna come
Speaker 1: back later tonight, and that worked for a little while,
Speaker 1: but I don't think they got the body right. No,
Speaker 1: they worked for like ten minutes until the sun came
Speaker 1: fully upright and someone saw there was cling ben and said,
Speaker 1: someone just tried to rob this grave. In two thousand,
Speaker 1: still going on. So the next thing they invented was
Speaker 1: called the mork House. Uh, invented by a guy named
Speaker 1: no Wrong. It was more stone again. Uh. This was
Speaker 1: basically just a mausoleum that you could not break into.
Speaker 1: It was heavy stone, and it was a place where
Speaker 1: you put your body where it was temporarily interred until
Speaker 1: it could find its final resting place right for like
Speaker 1: three weeks. Because that was the rule of thumb was
Speaker 1: it took about three weeks for a body to become
Speaker 1: unusable by an anatomist, and therefore it was out of
Speaker 1: danger of being stolen by a grave robber. And if
Speaker 1: you had a mort house, most people said, impenetrable. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guard it and be armed while I do. So.
Speaker 1: A lot of people stood watching cemeteries at this time,
Speaker 1: and as a result, cemeteries were places where there were
Speaker 1: a lot of shootouts between families standing watch and protecting
Speaker 1: graves and grave robbers who were so brazen that they
Speaker 1: wouldn't run, they'd shoot back. I'd be like, no, that's
Speaker 1: my body. Uh no, that's my aunt well, we're taking
Speaker 1: your aunt. No you're not. And it would just go
Speaker 1: like that for a while, or they would get in
Speaker 1: shootouts with other family standing watch that they've mistaken for
Speaker 1: grave robbers, which happened a surprising amount of time. Yeah, graveyards,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a place to be back then at night. Uh,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to remain safe and alive. And it's
Speaker 1: still not so they had this. They had this other
Speaker 1: thing called a set gun. It's been around since about
Speaker 1: the fifteenth century, and a set gun is basically, or
Speaker 1: in this case, a grave gun, a gun that you
Speaker 1: don't need to man um. You set it up or woman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. You had set it up on top of
Speaker 1: the of the grave and it could spin in a circle.
Speaker 1: It's like in a tripod. And it had a triangulated
Speaker 1: trip wire. So if you're walking along with your wooden
Speaker 1: shovel and you go to steal a body, it would
Speaker 1: trip it and then this gun would just start randomly
Speaker 1: firing and his sorball and you would get and I
Speaker 1: quote the article we're working from, a grave robber who
Speaker 1: tripped the wire would get an ass full of musket ball.
Speaker 1: That's what I said. An arshal, excuse me, this is
Speaker 1: from the guy who capitalized the golden age of grave robbery.
Speaker 1: Another version of that was, um, a shotgun inside the
Speaker 1: casket so they would pride open and look inside and
Speaker 1: literally get shotgunned in the face. And the best, if
Speaker 1: you were like a family who knew where they were doing,
Speaker 1: you put the shotgun in the in the corpse, which
Speaker 1: should be that's not what you want to see. When
Speaker 1: you get shot in the face of the shotgun, that's
Speaker 1: your last believe we were from America and then what
Speaker 1: does that mean? We got shotguns all over the past.
Speaker 1: Another little enterprising idea was called the torpedo, the grave
Speaker 1: torpedo and the grave torpedo. And our same friend who
Speaker 1: said no, it's pronounced Bara Bara pointed this out to
Speaker 1: me after the show. He came up to me after
Speaker 1: the show and said, let me correct you guys on
Speaker 1: a few things, which I loved. Again he grab Chuck's beard,
Speaker 1: and uh, I just thought it was funny. It's called
Speaker 1: a grave torpedo because what it is is a land mine.
Speaker 1: You would just go walking toward the grave and you'r
Speaker 1: you would be exploded, and which it makes you feel
Speaker 1: like bad for a second. Then you're like, oh wait,
Speaker 1: this is against grave. But he pointed out that the
Speaker 1: early torpedoes were really just mines and it just kind
Speaker 1: of got morphed eventually to be something that you would
Speaker 1: shoot out of a submarrate. So now it's a colloquialism torpedo,
Speaker 1: the grave torpedo coming soon. So one of the things
Speaker 1: that somebody was inevitably going to hit on was, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all fine and good breaking into a grave, having
Speaker 1: a dig past six maybe around him more stone. I
Speaker 1: could possibly get a shotgun blast of the face from
Speaker 1: a shock um held by a corpse that I'm trying
Speaker 1: to steal. I'm getting shot at by the family members.
Speaker 1: It's an honest day's work, but is it worth it? So,
Speaker 1: like I said, it's inevitable that somebody was eventually gonna
Speaker 1: be like, why don't I just murer somebody and sell
Speaker 1: their body. I don't have to deal with any of
Speaker 1: that other stuff. I just have to kill him. I'm
Speaker 1: robbing graves already, it's not a huge step to just
Speaker 1: go ahead and murder somebody. And there were two guys
Speaker 1: in particular who were really famous for this kind of thing,
Speaker 1: for hitting upon this idea, and they were named William
Speaker 1: Burke and William Hare, or the two bills as we
Speaker 1: call them. Someone just wooed in the back. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: not supposed to move those guys. You could maybe woo
Speaker 1: the Simon peg film, but we didn't reference that. So
Speaker 1: Burke and Hair they were born in an Ulster and uh,
Speaker 1: they immigrated to Edinburgh to work on the Union Canal.
Speaker 1: And they met each other there and said, hey, are
Speaker 1: you a disgusting creep? I am too, I could sell,
Speaker 1: I could tell in your eyes. Let's pinky does be
Speaker 1: pinky swear buddies, And they stabbed each other in the
Speaker 1: back as forever, and uh, I think which one we're in?
Speaker 1: The boarding house? Hair owned the boarding house. Burke was
Speaker 1: a cobbler sometimes that right space there, that's right so
Speaker 1: here he was, he's working at the boarding house, and
Speaker 1: he said, I've got this guy living there named Old Donald.
Speaker 1: He died, which happens to the guy's name, Old Donald's.
Speaker 1: Eventually it was a weird nickname when he was four
Speaker 1: years old, but now now he's living up to it.
Speaker 1: Old Donald died owing four pounds, and background Asy said,
Speaker 1: all right, here's what we'll do. I know, a good
Speaker 1: body can fetch some money these days. Let's find some
Speaker 1: other creep who's a doctor that we can sell it to.
Speaker 1: And they found a surgeon named Dr Robert Knox, who
Speaker 1: I don't know. You've seen the picture of this guy, right,
Speaker 1: Have you guys ever heard of this guy, Dr Robert Knox.
Speaker 1: He is I think the um the archetype for the
Speaker 1: mad scientists, the creepy man scientists. Like there's one very
Speaker 1: famous like wood engraving of him. He's wearing like black
Speaker 1: leather gloves up to his elbow and those creepy sunglasses
Speaker 1: from the nineteenth century. It's like, what are you wearing
Speaker 1: those four? Doc? Where are you hiding? And he was
Speaker 1: hiding plenty, believe me, right, So if you look at
Speaker 1: a picture of this guy, you're like, that's where that
Speaker 1: came from. And this guy was a real living guy
Speaker 1: who gained a reputation for being a ghoul eventually. And
Speaker 1: he was the man who was like, boys, I'll give
Speaker 1: you seven shillings, no, seven pounds, ten shillings for old Donald,
Speaker 1: and keep them coming. I don't care where they come from,
Speaker 1: just keep them coming. You see these sunglasses, I don't
Speaker 1: care where you get them. I just see more bodies,
Speaker 1: and Birke and Harmer like that's great, We'll just go
Speaker 1: back to the boarding house and wait for somebody else
Speaker 1: to die. Is to set around for about like five
Speaker 1: six minutes, and they're like, oh, six A six days,
Speaker 1: very sick. Maybe we should just hasten six days death,
Speaker 1: six days the place where the person dying was living.
Speaker 1: And so they went in right. But on the other side, no, no,
Speaker 1: this just starts there at six a. UM. So they
Speaker 1: went in and said six A. Good to see you here,
Speaker 1: some gin um. Just close your eyes while we do
Speaker 1: something real quick, okay, And one of them I don't
Speaker 1: know who did one. Well, all right, let's say we're
Speaker 1: working here. Okay. I would be the one to lay
Speaker 1: on the body to make sure it doesn't move. So
Speaker 1: I would just climb. I would lumber up on the
Speaker 1: body and just do this, show him, show him the tooth.
Speaker 1: That is not what you want to see, is you expected,
Speaker 1: and wink knowingly you're about to die. And then I
Speaker 1: would come in and my job would be to close
Speaker 1: the nostril in the mouth, maybe say something reassuring like
Speaker 1: you sleep, now, get little jewel going and then that's
Speaker 1: how these people would die, which is a terrible, terrible
Speaker 1: way to go. And they became so prolific and well
Speaker 1: known for this eventually that this process of murdering people
Speaker 1: and actually murdering people for their body to sell it
Speaker 1: for dissection became known as burking. It's not what you
Speaker 1: want named after you a method of murder. Now, if
Speaker 1: your last name becomes a verb for murder for anything,
Speaker 1: unless it's really great, well, yeah, sure, there's plenty of
Speaker 1: great things. Name one like somebody coming up to you
Speaker 1: on the street and giving you like a bunch of
Speaker 1: free candy, candying well, clarking that guy just Clark man, Oh,
Speaker 1: I love it when I get Clarke down this street.
Speaker 1: Realize you have to do that to make that happen.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do you have a new life mission
Speaker 1: to make your last name a burb. I need to
Speaker 1: get my hands on candy. You do what do you
Speaker 1: call candy? Here? Sweets? Oh that's why they joke didn't
Speaker 1: go over quite as well. Now I understand, Like I
Speaker 1: just clarked me, he gave me some sweets, fries or chips?
Speaker 1: Chips are crisps? Candy? Is sweets. Pudding is all dessert, right,
Speaker 1: and pork pies, by the way, are the greatest thing
Speaker 1: you people have ever invented. You have some last higher right?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I can't get enough. Somebody clarked me with
Speaker 1: some pork pies. Please, I'm dead serious. We'll wait, We'll
Speaker 1: wait while you go to the store. What's up with
Speaker 1: the pork pie hat? Is it shape like a pork pie? Now?
Speaker 1: I guess hopefully maybe like the pork it was? It
Speaker 1: was around within it folded in on the edges, and
Speaker 1: I think pork bye hat does that, so they might
Speaker 1: be it. Who cares? You can't eat a pork by hat?
Speaker 1: Well that's what you think. No, I'll try. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go to hab it Asher tomorrow. I'm gonna inspect this firsthand.
Speaker 1: All right, there's another money pinefone red friends? Have it?
Speaker 1: Really okay? I thought you would know where I was
Speaker 1: going with it, and they I have no idea. I
Speaker 1: just got lost. Where are we? All right? So they're
Speaker 1: barking people left and right. They killed about fifteen people
Speaker 1: at least in Edinburgh over a ten month period, and
Speaker 1: they got their girlfriends involved. They each found some nice
Speaker 1: ladies he said, are you are you creepy? Because we are.
Speaker 1: And Burke hooked up with Helen and Hair hooked up
Speaker 1: with Margaret, and they started including them in their little
Speaker 1: game of death. And they said, here's what we'll do.
Speaker 1: We'll just go out to a bar and we'll find
Speaker 1: some old woman who loves Jim and loves gin and
Speaker 1: we'll just say, you know, have another drink, have another drink,
Speaker 1: and you know what, you know where we have lots
Speaker 1: of gin is at my boarding house. So just come
Speaker 1: back with me late at night. And they apply these
Speaker 1: old ladies and old men with booze bringing back to
Speaker 1: the boarding house. I would lay on them, She's sleep.
Speaker 1: And it was. It was a cottage industry and things
Speaker 1: were going along swimmling for a while until they got
Speaker 1: a little greedy, as things go when there's money involved,
Speaker 1: and they started to Yeah, money and murder. I've seen
Speaker 1: the movie Shallow Grave. It's a bad combination. I know
Speaker 1: how that goes. So, uh, you guys haven't seen the
Speaker 1: movie Shallow Grave or have you know? Oh, you see it.
Speaker 1: It's good. They're British people in it. So they started
Speaker 1: burking people who were actually a little well known in town,
Speaker 1: and Edinburgh wasn't the biggest city at the time, so
Speaker 1: people kind of knew one another, and they got in
Speaker 1: real trouble when they finally picked off this dude named
Speaker 1: Jamie who everybody knew in the town and it was
Speaker 1: bad news. Well, they didn't call him Jamie. They called
Speaker 1: him daft Jamie. And today you would call him savant
Speaker 1: with autism Jamie, but they weren't quite as sensitive as
Speaker 1: we are today, so they called him daft Jamie. Yes,
Speaker 1: we've advanced since then. And Jamie was actually he was
Speaker 1: this very beloved figure in the town. Um. He would
Speaker 1: just kind of hang out in the downtown old town
Speaker 1: and people would say, hey, Jamie, here's a bunch of
Speaker 1: matches I just threw onto the ground. Can you count
Speaker 1: him real quick? And he would calculate it and they
Speaker 1: would say that's amazing. Here was a port pie buddy,
Speaker 1: and he'd say thanks a lot. But he wasn't a
Speaker 1: bagger or anything like that. He just kind of hung
Speaker 1: out downtown. It was a fixture in town. His mother
Speaker 1: and his sister cared for him very well, and he
Speaker 1: was just beloved. So he ended up on Dr Knox's
Speaker 1: table and he was very recognizable, so much so that
Speaker 1: a colleague of Dr Knox is like, that's deaf Jamie.
Speaker 1: I didn't know he was sick. And Dr Knox is like,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's savant with allaism Jamie. Secondly, no,
Speaker 1: it's not. And he started cutting the head off right
Speaker 1: then serious and like threw it out and they're like, no,
Speaker 1: it is def Jamie has a club foot, and Dr
Speaker 1: Knox started cutting off the club foot and then he
Speaker 1: said okay, let's begin a great new year and started
Speaker 1: cutting open jet def Jamie. Um. And that was not
Speaker 1: the only one. There were several other people that were
Speaker 1: recognized on the table. So Dr Knox kind of fell
Speaker 1: under suspicion. But it wasn't that that that ultimately led
Speaker 1: to their undoing. They just grew more and more careless
Speaker 1: over time, and more and more suspicious of one another,
Speaker 1: so much so that um, it was Burke and Helen right.
Speaker 1: Burke and Helen said, Hair and Margaret, we think you're
Speaker 1: killing people without cutting us in. So I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: open my own boarding house so we can kill in
Speaker 1: peace Burke's house and murder that's what they called it.
Speaker 1: And then they were like, oh, it's terrible, and they
Speaker 1: crossed out murder and wrote fun underneath, and they started
Speaker 1: attracting borders after that. So Burke's House with murdering fun
Speaker 1: is going on and tea and biscuits, and uh, they're
Speaker 1: drawing in people and they're killing people on their own
Speaker 1: as a duo, and uh, they're not very good at
Speaker 1: keeping things quiet. They're good at the killing part. It's
Speaker 1: the covering up afterward partly. Secondly, at one point they
Speaker 1: had a body in the boarding house that they just
Speaker 1: covered up with straw and hay, and one of the
Speaker 1: other boarders was just kind of cruising through the house
Speaker 1: and they said, I've noticed that that big pile of
Speaker 1: hey has an arm coming out of it. It's a
Speaker 1: little weird and I'm gonna go call the cops. And
Speaker 1: they said, no, don't do that. Here's what we'll do.
Speaker 1: And here's what we're doing. Let's give you a little dough.
Speaker 1: We're selling these bodies. It's for medicine, and we'll we'll
Speaker 1: cut you in on this deal as long as you
Speaker 1: promised to not go to the police. And the lady
Speaker 1: backed slowly out of the room and said, sure, that
Speaker 1: sounds great. Just write a check and leave it under
Speaker 1: my door and I'll be back soon. I have to
Speaker 1: go and mail something because the sames dot com was
Speaker 1: an inventor, right, so she went right to the costs
Speaker 1: and the Lord Advocate I wish. So the Lord Advocate
Speaker 1: in the charge of Hair's case said, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you immunity. Here's a big offer if
Speaker 1: you will turn King's witness against your pal Burke. And Uh,
Speaker 1: Hair quickly accepted and I don't think the words were
Speaker 1: out of his mouth. He said, Hurt, I'm on board.
Speaker 1: I will testify against him. And that's what he did.
Speaker 1: And to this day, of the four including girlfriends, only
Speaker 1: one was actually tried and Uh hanged. Hanged, just Burke, yep.
Speaker 1: And he was a very hated figure, as you can imagine.
Speaker 1: I think twenty thousand people showed up for his hanging.
Speaker 1: His hanging and no, it's just hanging. And um when
Speaker 1: he was hanged, Uh, afterward they gave his body to
Speaker 1: the University of Edinburgh for a dissection. Yeah, cruel, irony,
Speaker 1: and forty people turned out to see his dissected body.
Speaker 1: Actually again they just lift into the organs out everyone.
Speaker 1: So here after a few years he kind of tried
Speaker 1: to disappear, as you do when you're a creepy ghoul.
Speaker 1: And um, he went to work at a lime quarry
Speaker 1: and the dudes that he worked with found out who
Speaker 1: he was, and kind of a mob justice took over
Speaker 1: and they shoved him into the lime quarry. He was
Speaker 1: blinded for the rest of his life. And we don't
Speaker 1: we don't know if he was like blinded from the
Speaker 1: line or they threw him into the corny like landed
Speaker 1: on his eyes on sharp rocks, but either way he
Speaker 1: was blinded. He was blinded by the line, you don't know.
Speaker 1: And then he actually eventually moved to the streets of London,
Speaker 1: which is what you do when you're blinded for life,
Speaker 1: when you're trying to reinvent yourself. And uh, doctor Knox
Speaker 1: as well, even he was ruined in Scotland and he
Speaker 1: moved to the streets of London to try and pick
Speaker 1: up his medical profession, which he did with pretty poor results.
Speaker 1: But he did write a very well received book on fishing.
Speaker 1: It's not a joke. I know it's true, it's hilarious,
Speaker 1: but it's not a joke. All right, So people are
Speaker 1: being killed, people are digging up bodies. There's anatomy murder.
Speaker 1: Years before Birke in here, I think like a decade before,
Speaker 1: there was a guy named Thomas Wakefield who was a
Speaker 1: surgeon in the publisher of the Lancet, a great medical
Speaker 1: journal that we use is still around today. We're coming
Speaker 1: for us. So he was a publisher of the Lancet,
Speaker 1: and he said, this anatomy murder is going on. This
Speaker 1: is like an eight twenty. And he said everyone should
Speaker 1: be afraid because there are dudes out there that will
Speaker 1: kill you just to sell your body. Uh, And so
Speaker 1: be be very afraid. And there are a lot of
Speaker 1: surgeons too who were fairly liberal minded, who are saying,
Speaker 1: we need better laws than what we have now. We
Speaker 1: need more bodies because people are robbing graves, people are
Speaker 1: murdering for these bodies. There's this huge demand that's being
Speaker 1: fulfilled and terribly illicit ways. We have to get better laws.
Speaker 1: But the problem is these surgeons, as prominent as they were,
Speaker 1: were in this weird position where they look like ghoules,
Speaker 1: like can we have some more bodies? Bleeds? These just
Speaker 1: delivering them fresh to our door. So anytime they were
Speaker 1: challenged they would back off. Very quickly because they all
Speaker 1: had stolen bodies back in their in their labs right,
Speaker 1: So the status quo remained the same until Burke and
Speaker 1: Hair came out and you guys, actually you should be
Speaker 1: very proud you had your own group of Burker's here
Speaker 1: in London. They were known as the Lon and Burger Trio.
Speaker 1: And they killed a bunch of people, uh what came
Speaker 1: to be called anatomy murder or burking um. And the
Speaker 1: one that undid them was they killed a fourteen year
Speaker 1: old boy who had recently emigrated from Italy, and they
Speaker 1: delivered him to I think Guy's hospital. And the porter
Speaker 1: at Guy's hospital said, that's pretty weird. We don't usually
Speaker 1: get warm dead bodies delivered to us. It seems a
Speaker 1: little sloppy. Maybe I should follow up. So he took
Speaker 1: the boy to one of the anatomists and said, what
Speaker 1: do you think about this? The anatomist said, well, I
Speaker 1: think this boy's neck was broken about forty five minutes ago.
Speaker 1: It's probably murder. So luckily the porter knew who had
Speaker 1: delivered the body, and the cops found the guys. They
Speaker 1: were hanging themselves in between the Burger Trio and Burking
Speaker 1: hair before them, that the public's eyes were finally totally
Speaker 1: open to this. There was no avoiding this any longer.
Speaker 1: Like people were being murdered to supply bodies for anatomists,
Speaker 1: and they didn't know who to blame, Like there were
Speaker 1: some anatomists who were convicted of dissecting cadavers. But for
Speaker 1: the most part, people I think got that maybe the
Speaker 1: law is a little weird right now, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: we have this weird prohibition that we should rethink. Parliament
Speaker 1: sort this out. And Parliament did, actually exactly who do
Speaker 1: you turn to? So the House of Comment gets involved,
Speaker 1: they get things done, and the whole hearings and they said,
Speaker 1: here's what we'll do. Let's get some of these resurrectionists
Speaker 1: and they'll trot them up. Let's give him immunity and
Speaker 1: say you can if you testify, get away scott free.
Speaker 1: And they're like, oh, you mean immunity. What'd I say?
Speaker 1: You said immunity, okay, and uh, they trotted him out
Speaker 1: and they toward the told these sort of tales of
Speaker 1: digging up bodies, and it was very salacious in the
Speaker 1: news and everybody was like, yeah, the public was very interested.
Speaker 1: And then tell us more and then they got surgeons
Speaker 1: and they said, well, let's hear from you, and they
Speaker 1: talked about the need for cadavers, and it was kind
Speaker 1: of a big deal because you know, everyone wants to
Speaker 1: live longer, and in order to do that, we need
Speaker 1: to cut people open still, so it's like a double
Speaker 1: edged sword. It totally was. So finally Parliament said, all right,
Speaker 1: here's what we'll do. We're gonna take action. Just picture
Speaker 1: me in a powdered wig and and it'll allow makes sense,
Speaker 1: which is hilarious by the way, every every couple of
Speaker 1: months chuckles, just walk into the studio wearing a powdered way.
Speaker 1: I'm like, it's a powdered wig day. The Parliament says,
Speaker 1: here's we're gonna do. We're gonna provide some legitimate bodies
Speaker 1: by passing the Anatomy Act of two. It's a very
Speaker 1: big deal because right out of the gate, on paper,
Speaker 1: at least, it got rid of the black market on
Speaker 1: cadavers because it said anyone who has legal possession of
Speaker 1: a dead body, um, and the body is dead. Uh,
Speaker 1: the body never said while they were living that they
Speaker 1: didn't want to be dissected, and no spouse or family
Speaker 1: members saying you can't cut open that dead body. You
Speaker 1: can take that body down to your local anatomists and say,
Speaker 1: here you go, just roll them up the steps, walk away,
Speaker 1: and they'll cut them upen for you. Right, And this
Speaker 1: was really radical. It really flew in the face of
Speaker 1: the sentiment at the time, because again, remember the Murder
Speaker 1: Acts of seventeen fifty one said not only are we
Speaker 1: gonna hang you for being a murderer, we're gonna dissect
Speaker 1: you afterwards. That's how disgusting we think you are. And
Speaker 1: that really took kind of an unspoken social stigma and
Speaker 1: codified it. And this went a long way to undoing
Speaker 1: the damage that the Murder Acts had done. As far
Speaker 1: as the public view of dissection. The problem is is
Speaker 1: if you were wealthy your middle class at the time,
Speaker 1: you weren't exactly running out and saying like, yes, dissect me,
Speaker 1: dissect me. And the whole problem with with the idea
Speaker 1: of being dissected is that at the time you thought
Speaker 1: that when judgment day came and you were in your
Speaker 1: grave and God stood you up and you're just standing
Speaker 1: there like, what do you think, huh, Well, it wasn't
Speaker 1: so bad, right, God would look you up and down
Speaker 1: and be like you look all right, you can come in.
Speaker 1: But if you saw that you were missing your eyes,
Speaker 1: maybe your guts, or you were just an articulated skelty,
Speaker 1: but like you look terrible, laid back down. And that
Speaker 1: was the sentiment behind not being dissected at the time.
Speaker 1: So the the Anatomy Act kind of governmentalized this idea
Speaker 1: that no dissections. Actually, okay, forget your religious beliefs, just
Speaker 1: listen to us Parliament, and it actually kind of worked.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, what it really did and
Speaker 1: what it was criticized for, was that it put the
Speaker 1: burden of supplying cadavers to science onto the poor, which
Speaker 1: is kind of already the process, but in this sense,
Speaker 1: it really kind of codified the whole thing. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: like you said, it didn't make a difference. I think
Speaker 1: between eighteen thirty two and nineteen thirty two more than
Speaker 1: fifty seven thousand cadavers were legitimately donated to medical science
Speaker 1: and the United Kingdom alone, So it really made a
Speaker 1: big impact. And science was advancing in medicine was advancing,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't to the close of the ninth teenth
Speaker 1: century that dissection really came to be accepted by the public,
Speaker 1: and people started to say, you know what, this is
Speaker 1: actually a good thing. Donating organs, donating bodies is something
Speaker 1: that we should kind of try and embrace a little
Speaker 1: bit more, right. Uh, And to this day, sadly, it's
Speaker 1: still kind of goes on in a weird way, right
Speaker 1: it does. So Like if you go into an anatomy
Speaker 1: lab or medical school in the United States and you
Speaker 1: come across an articulated skeleton, those skeletons are mostly made
Speaker 1: up of individual bones that were stolen from rob graves
Speaker 1: in India, which means the U S outsourced grave robbing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is currently outsourcing gray rowing. So uh. To
Speaker 1: finish up the show tonight, we and True Stuff you
Speaker 1: should know Fashion are going to do a top five
Speaker 1: robbed graves that only has four. I don't know why
Speaker 1: we do that. One of them doesn't even count. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's true. But we're gonna start with a dude named
Speaker 1: Charlie Chaplin, very famous, born here in London, allegedly, that's right.
Speaker 1: Do you guys know that. I think they did. That's good. Uh,
Speaker 1: born in London, died on Christmas Day. Very sad because
Speaker 1: he loved Christmas. He died in nineteen seventy seven, and
Speaker 1: just a few months later, in March of ninety Charlie
Speaker 1: Chaplin's grave was robbed, stole his body, called his wife,
Speaker 1: Lady Una Chaplin, and said I want four hundred thousand
Speaker 1: pounds for Charlie's body, and she said, nope, Charlie would
Speaker 1: have thought this rather ridiculous, was her quote. And they went, Oh,
Speaker 1: they went, I ever thought of that. No, don't hang up,
Speaker 1: hang up, I'm thinking to uh, we have Charlie Chaplin's body, now,
Speaker 1: let me call you back. Pretty much. So there were
Speaker 1: multiple like staying operations at the cops would try to
Speaker 1: set up to try and catch these dudes. Ever worked out,
Speaker 1: They never showed up. They kind of chickened out, and
Speaker 1: eventually they realized that there was one phone call that
Speaker 1: they were supposed to make to the police, so they
Speaker 1: tapped the phone of Lady Una Chaplin and m staked
Speaker 1: out two hundred phone boots in the area and they
Speaker 1: actually caught the guy's red handed. A couple of the mechanics,
Speaker 1: one of them had the best name I may have
Speaker 1: ever heard. Yeah, there were two guys, uh roman Wardists
Speaker 1: and Gancho Ganev. I want a horse named Ganto Ganev. One.
Speaker 1: Somebody clarked me a horse named Ganto Ganev Clark you
Speaker 1: a horse? Oh man, I love that term. Now I'm
Speaker 1: making it happen, baby, Why do you want a horse?
Speaker 1: I love horses, but a horse named Ganto it just
Speaker 1: fits like Ganto. Gonna have the horse. What's your horse's name?
Speaker 1: Cancer Gonase? He was clarked to me in fact. So
Speaker 1: eventually they did catch these guys and they led him
Speaker 1: to Chaplin's remains, which were about ten miles from the
Speaker 1: original graveyard, and then they reburied Charlie Chaplin. And you'll
Speaker 1: see a thread here. When you rebury a body after
Speaker 1: it's been stolen, you tend to cover it with like
Speaker 1: seven or eight feet of cement on top. Pretty sensible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the next one, I personally don't think this one counts,
Speaker 1: but we've included anyway, Abraham Lincoln. Have you guys ever
Speaker 1: heard of the president name Abraham Lincoln from where we live? He?
Speaker 1: Uh again, he was a president from where we live. Anyway,
Speaker 1: A B. Lincoln died and uh something like eleven I
Speaker 1: think eleven years later, some robbers attempted to break into
Speaker 1: his grave, and the robbers head a rat in their
Speaker 1: midst and the rat had told the cops that this
Speaker 1: is gonna happen. So the cops staked out the graveyard
Speaker 1: waiting for the robbers. And apparently the cops were the
Speaker 1: Keystone Cops because one of their guns went off and
Speaker 1: alerted the robbers that they were there, and the robbers
Speaker 1: turned and ran and the Keystone cops like ran into
Speaker 1: each other and fell down, and it was weird, but
Speaker 1: it happened. And um, they didn't actually steal Lincoln's body,
Speaker 1: which is why I'm like, he shouldn't be on this list.
Speaker 1: What's sad is I actually made this one. I didn't
Speaker 1: think it through clearly. Well, they got away for a
Speaker 1: little while, and after the robbery, his remains were reburied
Speaker 1: in the same mausoleum, but in the basement of the mausoleum,
Speaker 1: which which which? Do you know how rich you have
Speaker 1: to be for your mausoleum to have its own basement?
Speaker 1: It's like six rooms. Do you guys have basements here? Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, well fine, you can imagine that pretty rich. Wait,
Speaker 1: what do you call a basement here? A barsement, a basement,
Speaker 1: bars do you call it a bars a basement? Actually
Speaker 1: in New England that's what they call it too. That's
Speaker 1: where we live. Well, it's north of where we live.
Speaker 1: Put in America, south of New England. What are you
Speaker 1: talking about? So they reburied him in the basement, and
Speaker 1: then eventually in nineteen one, his son, Robert Todd Lincoln said,
Speaker 1: you know what, let's take him up from down there
Speaker 1: and let's rebury him proper and put the steel cage
Speaker 1: over him and bolt that to the floor. Andy safe.
Speaker 1: And they poured the man over him, which is what
Speaker 1: you do as customary. You see, So what do you
Speaker 1: want to hear? It was quite sure. So Gladys Hammond
Speaker 1: a lady, and this was recently you might have heard
Speaker 1: of this one. This is in two thousand four. Um,
Speaker 1: she was dug up and held for ransom, but not
Speaker 1: for money, but to get the family to stop experimenting
Speaker 1: on guinea pigs. They were raising guinea pigs and selling
Speaker 1: them to medical science. And these animal rights activists stole
Speaker 1: hard body and help basically held her for ransom for
Speaker 1: this family to stop the family does and it worked
Speaker 1: while it works sort of, no, well it did works.
Speaker 1: The family, Um, the group of activists were called to
Speaker 1: save the new church guinea pigs, who you may have
Speaker 1: heard of, and have you guys heard of them? No,
Speaker 1: you haven't. They just thought it was funny. It's a
Speaker 1: cute name, but they were dead serious. Yeah, so they
Speaker 1: still the body, hell it for ransom, and the family said, okay, fine,
Speaker 1: we'll get out of the business. We're not gonna breed
Speaker 1: guinea pigs for medical research anymore. We'll breed them to
Speaker 1: be dressed up like cowboys for children's parties. Surely you
Speaker 1: have no problem with that, the original purpose for guinea pigs.
Speaker 1: So so they actually did get out of the business.
Speaker 1: And the people who robbed the grave and stole the
Speaker 1: woman's body, the family member's body, didn't give it back.
Speaker 1: They just never got back in touch. They were like,
Speaker 1: we moved on to Wales now, we don't care about
Speaker 1: guinea pigs anymore. So it took eighteen months before they
Speaker 1: finally caught these people and said where's the body And
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, she's in some heathland. That's it. What's
Speaker 1: a heathland country? No, no, heathland. Is it a more? Yes,
Speaker 1: it's a more? What's a more? I think there's quicksand
Speaker 1: on the moors. Isn't there boggy area? A field? Is
Speaker 1: it a field? Why did we feel the need to
Speaker 1: rename everything? Those are great? We renamed it. These kids
Speaker 1: were here first. No, that's what I'm saying. Oh we yeah,
Speaker 1: wells are a wonderful words. Heathland is beautiful. We don't
Speaker 1: know what it is, but it sounds great. Stupid Americans. Uh.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna finish up the list with Joseph Findon.
Speaker 1: By the way, we we have a microphone right there
Speaker 1: after this, we're gonna have about ten or fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: left to do a little Q and A. If anyone
Speaker 1: has any questions, you can do so. If you don't,
Speaker 1: you can leave. If you have to pee, you can leave.
Speaker 1: It won't hurt our feelings. We understand. We both have
Speaker 1: the pe right now to speak to yourself. Uh. I
Speaker 1: have to pete totally. Uh. And we're gonna finish up
Speaker 1: with Joseph Hyden Franz Joseph Hyden, very famous Austrian classical
Speaker 1: composer and uh he died. This was during the phrenology movement.
Speaker 1: We've talked a little bit about phrenology on the show.
Speaker 1: This is when you thought that you could look at
Speaker 1: a human skull and really tell a lot about the
Speaker 1: person and about where the smarts were and where the
Speaker 1: genius was. Perhaps, so it was a big deal to
Speaker 1: get your hands on the skull of someone like Hayden.
Speaker 1: So they went to the grave digger and they said,
Speaker 1: we'll give you some money if you cut off his
Speaker 1: head and give it to us. And the grave digger said,
Speaker 1: you had me at money pretty much. Uh So he
Speaker 1: did so, and he gave him the head and they
Speaker 1: macerated the skull, which means you make the rest of
Speaker 1: the head disappear through magic until you're just left with
Speaker 1: a skull maceration. It's not magic though, pretty much, just
Speaker 1: so good the liquid it's really gross. Eventually everything goes
Speaker 1: away but the skull, which is what you want. And
Speaker 1: the dudes Joseph Rosenbaum and Johann Peter looked at the
Speaker 1: skull and said, oh my gosh, when you look at this,
Speaker 1: look at the musical bump on that skull. And the
Speaker 1: other one was like, wait, wait, wait, it's you say
Speaker 1: musical bump. He made that up just now, it didn't
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, totally. But it's gonna stick. I think
Speaker 1: it's probably just a deformatal pump. It's hide, and of
Speaker 1: course he is a musical pump. So they had the skull,
Speaker 1: and they weren't too shy about keeping it quiet. They
Speaker 1: went one of them even for a little while, kept
Speaker 1: it in his home. They would have dinner parties and
Speaker 1: it was hiding skull and he kept it in a
Speaker 1: glass case like musical notes and compositions and like an
Speaker 1: ink and pill and ink and pill, quill and pin
Speaker 1: and uh. It was prominently displayed. And then the cops
Speaker 1: eventually he found out about this. Well, somebody went to
Speaker 1: go reberry Hyden because he wanted to be moved to
Speaker 1: the family flat. Right. Yeah, he died during wartime and
Speaker 1: it was kind of hastily buried, and in a couple
Speaker 1: of decades later they finally went to rebury him. And
Speaker 1: when they did, they were like, I didn't know Hiden
Speaker 1: didn't have a head you had last time I saw him.
Speaker 1: So they go and they someone says, you know what,
Speaker 1: I totally knew who has his skull Because they're not
Speaker 1: too shy about it. It's over at the Sky's House,
Speaker 1: over at Rosenbombs. So they go over to Roasta Balm's house.
Speaker 1: This is really awful. His plan was to hide it
Speaker 1: in the mattress to get his wife to lay on
Speaker 1: the bed and tell the cops that she's menstruating, and
Speaker 1: the cops were like blo blah blah blah, and they
Speaker 1: like all just ran out of the house pretty much,
Speaker 1: did you keep your skull? That's basically out went down,
Speaker 1: and uh again, we've come a long way since then,
Speaker 1: and the skull was eventually reunited. Well, they gave them
Speaker 1: a fake skull at the time. Here's his skull. They
Speaker 1: knew the jig was up, but they really really wanted
Speaker 1: Hyden skool. Yeah, so they gave him a fake. They
Speaker 1: reburied that with Hyden thinking it was hide and skull.
Speaker 1: And then years later, in nineteen fifty four, in fact,
Speaker 1: not that long ago. Uh well, sort of a long
Speaker 1: time ago, but not on the grand scheme of things,
Speaker 1: they eventually find Hyden's real skull and rebury it. But
Speaker 1: they didn't know what to do with the old skull
Speaker 1: so to this day, not even not only that, I
Speaker 1: don't think it was that they didn't know what to do.
Speaker 1: I think they took the Hyden's actual skull into his tomb,
Speaker 1: set it down. I went to go shut the door
Speaker 1: and turned around, was like, oh right, which one was?
Speaker 1: Which one is the musical bump which? And then they said,
Speaker 1: forget it, let's just bury both of them. Pretty much
Speaker 1: so to this day Hyden Skull is still buried. His
Speaker 1: grave still has two skulls buried in the same grave.
Speaker 1: If you went and dug it up today, it's very
Speaker 1: little known fact. So that is grave robbing. And that
Speaker 1: is the end of our show. Yes, M you know what.
Speaker 1: Thank you for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Is it how stuff works dot com? M