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What drives someone to steal a corpse, and what becomes of it? It's not just a midnight escapade. In fact, body snatching was once a profitable venture for those daring enough to handle the dead.
10. Corpses for Medical Education
Individuals who died without money and whose families couldn’t afford a proper burial often found themselves interred in poor farms across the nation. These neglected and overlooked burial sites became prime spots for grave robbers to seize the deceased.
In one notable incident, the workers at a poor farm buried a body, only to return days later and discover the grave had been disturbed. They suspected the corpse was taken to a nearby medical school for use in doctor training.
9. Taken to Conceal Evidence
In the late 1800s, mental hospitals were notorious for abusing and even tormenting their patients. One case involved a woman whose husband vanished from the county morgue. He had been a patient at an asylum, and when she last visited him there, his body bore cuts and bruises, though his face was kept hidden from her. The attendants refused to let her see the full extent of his injuries.
Soon after, he passed away from “consumption.” The wife demanded an autopsy, but before it could take place, his body was stolen. She suspected it was done to cover up a crime.
8. Disturbing Halloween Joke
Halloween is the prime time for pulling off the most twisted pranks. The scarier and grosser, the better. In some instances, real dead bodies were stolen as part of a Halloween trick, since everyone knows that fake corpses don’t usually fool anyone. This occurred in 1885 in Toronto, when someone took the body of a man from a medical school and hung it completely exposed on an iron hook at the local market. It was placed right next to the meat at a butcher’s stall.
The report doesn’t mention how long it took for anyone to notice the hanging body, but it was surely a prank that stuck in people’s minds for years.
7. The Headless Trick
In the early 1900s, a legitimate company in Chicago was established to supply medical schools with skeletons and human heads. They even went so far as to dry the heads on the roof of the building. These desiccated heads were then sold to schools for a hefty $5 each. However, one day, 11 of these drying heads were stolen from the rooftop. Medical students were blamed for the theft, and the company offered a $10 reward for their capture.
The newspaper article didn’t mention how the business initially acquired its human specimens.
655. Bodies Buried in the Same Grave
In 1882, an employee at a cemetery in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, was discovered with a wagon full of corpses. During his trial, he confessed that within two months, 55 bodies had been buried in the same plot. After being buried for the families, the bodies were unearthed later and sold. The man had worked at the cemetery for 11 years, and along with two accomplices, had been stealing bodies for the past nine.
The actions of the body snatchers shocked the community so much that a crowd gathered outside the police court, attempting to lynch the criminals. The man and his accomplices were arrested and held until a subsequent hearing could be scheduled.
5. Pranking the Grave Robbers
Resurrectionists, the individuals who stole corpses from graves, held a thankless and risky job that often led to arrest. To make matters worse, they sometimes had to deal with the prank-loving young men from medical schools.
In 1879, a group of medical students decided to prank one of the professional body snatchers. They sent him to retrieve a body from a nearby hiding place. However, the students had secretly tied one of their living friends into a sack, and the rest of the group lay in wait to ambush the resurrectionist. The body snatcher found the sack, hoisted it over his shoulder, and started carrying it across a bridge back to the school.
Suddenly, the sacked prankster began to kick. Terrified, the resurrectionist dropped the sack into the river below the bridge, and the waiting students had to rescue their friend from the water.
4. The Devil Made Me Do It
In 1913, in a small town in Arkansas, a group of people were standing guard over the body of a deceased farmer inside his home. Suddenly, a “creature” entered, draped in a white robe and carrying a chain over his shoulder. With long, red hair, a red-painted face, and two horns on his head, the creature startled everyone (at least, that’s how the story goes).
Terrified, the onlookers fled the house. When they finally mustered the courage to return, the farmer’s body had mysteriously disappeared.
3. Turned to Bone
In 1885, the coroner of San Francisco made a horrifying discovery in a Chinatown basement. Complaints about a foul odor led to an investigation, where decomposing human bodies were found in the basement. In another room, Chinese workers were seen boiling the bodies and scraping the flesh from the bones.
By the time the investigation was complete, over 300 bodies had been found. Most of these had been stolen from cemeteries throughout California.
This sinister operation involved the families of the deceased, who lived back in China. When a Chinese person passed away and was buried, body snatchers would exhume the bodies, boil them down to bones, and ship the bones back to China for a fee.
2. The Business of Body Snatching
In 19th-century England, body snatchers were experts in stealing recently deceased bodies for medical use. While graveyards typically had guards to protect the corpses at night, these guards were often bribed by the body snatchers to turn a blind eye.
When a fresh grave was discovered, the body snatchers worked quickly to exhume the corpse. Rather than digging up the entire coffin, they would only remove the earth from the head or top part of the coffin. Once they reached the coffin, it would be broken open, and a rope was tied around the corpse’s arms. After lifting the body, its clothing was discarded back into the coffin, the dirt was filled back in, and the body was taken away.
It is believed that a skilled body snatcher could remove a corpse in just 15 minutes.
1. Stolen For Ransom
Throughout history, and even today, bodies have been stolen and held for ransom. For instance, in 1881, the Earl of Crawford's body was taken from the family’s mausoleum in Aberdeen. The family feared the body was being held for ransom.
Stealing the bodies of beloved individuals and demanding a ransom for their return became a lucrative crime, especially when the victim was a young child or infant. A notable case in 1910 involved the abduction of a millionaire's infant son in Montana. The family was told they would have to pay a hefty ransom to retrieve the child’s body.
