REMASTERED – Episode 43: Supply & Demand

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Video as a guy, obtain Wi-Fi in Mazarin with the local with ATNT Fiber with Al-Fi, ATT connected location.

ATNT Fiber can be a visitor to meet those who have visited Wi-Fi extended to TNT with carbon dioxide.

Burial, like death, is supposed to be permanent.

The process and tradition has a weight, a finality.

The very act of placing our dead in a hole in the ground and then covering them with pound after pound of heavy, damp soil-well, it's one of the most powerful metaphors of everyday life.

When we bury our dead, we bury the past.

We dig deep and place something precious, someone precious, out of reach from society.

And the vast majority of the time we do all of this is in graveyards, a place that is itself viewed as sacred and set apart.

Burial for a huge portion of the world is the end.

Graves, for as eternal as they seem, are sometimes disturbed, though.

Most of the time, the buried are unburied by accident.

We assume this when we talk about ancient burial sites in places like Rome or London, often as a result of modern construction projects and development of long-abandoned property.

For example, the Gherkin in London stands on the site of the 1600-year-old grave of a girl from the Roman era of the city.

The remains of King Richard III were found in 2012 beneath a parking lot in the city of Leicester.

And just a few years ago, a similar site was discovered beneath a portion of New York University.

Sometimes the dead are disturbed.

And sometimes it's on purpose.

In ancient times, the goal was often grave-robbing.

Nearly all of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt were robbed of their treasures long before Egyptologists began to study them.

When there are valuables on the line, humans have a way of moving past the sacredness of the grave and digging in, literally.

While most graves have been opened purely by accident or intentionally by curious scholars, some have been dug up for darker reasons.

In the 18th and 19th century, that reason had a noble veneer which concealed a more sinister activity.

They called it body snatching.

I'm Aaron Manke,

and this is lore.

Something was happening in Edinburgh in the late 1700s.

The Scottish Enlightenment had been transforming the culture and attitude of the city, and things were beginning to shift.

Edinburgh, you see, was becoming a major center for learning.

And along with growth in the fields of literature, philosophy, mathematics, and economics, one of the pillars of that growth was medical science.

If you wanted to become a physician in the late 18th century, chances are you were planning to move to Edinburgh.

One of the old medical terms that I think gets glossed over these days is the idea of the operating theater.

Today that's a room in a hospital where surgeons perform sterile medical procedures.

But two centuries ago they looked a lot more like a real theater, which is where the name came from.

Educators would stand in front of a tall table and the students would sit in tiered rows so that they could all have a good view.

And what they'd be watching in most cases was human dissection.

It wasn't sanitary, but nearly all of the subjects were already dead, so sterilization was a lot less important.

The key for all of these medical students was to see the inner workings of the human body up close and personal.

Remember, these were the days before MRIs and radiography.

If you wanted to know how a part of the human body worked, you needed to look inside and that required cutting.

Believe it or not, there was some debate among medical professionals as to whether this was actually a moral thing to do.

But in the end, the need to learn far outweighed the other reasons.

The result was a huge demand for corpses.

If you were going to teach a class that involved dissection, you needed a fresh body.

The trouble was that the laws of the land vastly restricted where teachers could get bodies from.

Thanks to an act of parliament in 1752, the only bodies that could legally be used for dissection were those of executed murderers.

By the early 1800s, though, fewer and fewer executions were happening.

At the same time, demand for corpses was a bit, well, bloated.

Just London itself had over 700 medical students, and each of them was required to dissect at least three human bodies.

You can see the problem, right?

And so to help, a new criminal was born out of this turmoil.

The Resurrectionists.

These were the people who were willing to dig up freshly buried corpses and sell them to the colleges and universities who needed them.

They were a creative bunch, truth be told.

Sure, some of them would do the deed the typical way, digging straight down to the coffin, but that quickly became impossible.

You see, people didn't like it when their loved ones were dug up and dragged away.

To combat the grave robbing, some unique preventative measures were implemented.

Oftentimes, family would organize a team of adults to literally sit beside the grave 24-7 for the first two weeks.

Their goal was to guard the grave while the body beneath had time to decay enough to become undesirable to the resurrectionists.

In other cemeteries, stone watchtowers were built, and guards were hired in place of family, working the literal graveyard shift.

Some buried their dead in metal coffins, locking against thieves and animals alike.

Others were interred in standard graves but were then covered with stone slabs or metal mort safes, a sort of iron cage that protected the grave from being disturbed.

In fact, if you stroll through Greyfriars Cemetery in Edinburgh today, you'll see a number of them still protecting their occupants.

Some internet posts will tell you that those were installed to keep zombies inside their graves.

Those internet posts posts are dumb.

The resurrectionists were able to work around a lot of these techniques though.

Oftentimes they would start digging from a good 20 or 30 feet away and approach the grave through a tunnel from the side.

After removing the headboard of the coffin, they would loop a rope around the head of the occupant and pull them out.

And all of this would happen right under the nose of a hired guard or a grieving family member.

Once they had the body, the clothing and personal belongings were stripped off and returned to the the grave to avoid felony theft charges.

And then these body snatchers would make their way to their favorite medical educator and make the sale.

It was wrong on many levels, but it was also common.

And in Edinburgh, where more physicians trained than most other cities, it was nearly an epidemic.

Despite all that, though, it was still really difficult to get a corpse when you needed one.

The resurrectionists work hard though, and they managed to supply hundreds of fresh bodies each year.

But the educational need was nearly insatiable.

And like any moment in human history, when the market has demand that outpaces supply, people went looking for a creative solution.

And boy, did they find one.

The two Williams met in a boarding house in 1826 and quickly realized how similar their pasts were.

If you stepped back and thought about it, it's as if they were destined to meet and work together.

The younger William, William Hare, was born in 1807 in Northern Ireland.

He grew up in close proximity to the Neary Canal, which cut through the countryside from Carlingford to Loch Nay, where the coalfields were.

He worked for a time at the local canal at Points Pass, driving a team of horses along the route, but that job came to an end when he killed one of his employer's horses in a fit of rage.

As a result, Hare packed up and left Ireland, taking his skills and that temper with him to Scotland.

He'd been working on the Union Canal when he met a local man named Logue Laird, who ran a boarding house for the destitute and the homeless.

Being new to Edinburgh, this seemed like the best chance to get his feet on the ground, so he moved in.

And that's how he met Logue's wife Margaret.

When Logue died in 1826, William married Margaret and the couple stayed in the boarding house.

At the same time, another William was working his way toward the boarding house as well.

William Burke was also from Ulster in Northern Ireland.

He had managed to move through a series of odd jobs and had married and started a family.

In 1817, though, he left them behind and emigrated to Scotland, where he began working on the Union Canal.

During his time in Edinburgh, Burke met a woman named Helen and the pair made plans to move west and start a new life together.

Instead, chance intervened and they were invited by Margaret Laird to stay at the boarding house in one of the spare rooms.

And that's where the two Williams met.

We know very little about their friendship.

They both worked on the canal, so I can imagine them as the stereotypical factory buddies, walking home from work together, stopping at the local pub for a drink on their way.

At the very least, sharing the same home and job brought them together on beyond a casual level.

On November 29th of 1827, Margaret Laird stepped into the room where her husband sat.

She had an expression on her face that was a knot of frustration and horror.

One of their lodgers, an elderly man, had passed away during the night.

Margaret had found him dead in his cot, a horrifying experience for most people.

This tenant had no family that they were aware of and no valuables worth selling, which was a disappointment because the man also owed her for the past few months' worth of rent.

And that's when Hare had an idea.

He approached Burke and told him what had happened, and then presented an idea that required that man's help.

What if they sold the body to a medical teacher?

There were rumors on the streets that physicians were paying good money for fresh bodies, and it was hard to get more fresh than this, no doubt.

They'd be rid of the body and might recoup the lost rent in the process.

It was a morbid win-win scenario, but these were morbid men.

Now, the law required the body to be buried, so they filled the coffin with firewood.

and then snuck the corpse away to Edinburgh University.

There, they were directed to a teaching doctor named Robert Knox.

Knox had been an army physician at Waterloo and had been teaching independently at the university for a little over a year with hopes of obtaining a full-time professorship there.

Knox taught a lot of anatomy classes, all of which required fresh cadavers.

As a result, Knox had a large network of providers, teams of body snatchers all across the city who were robbing graves and bringing him every cadaver they could get their hands on.

Still, the demand from the growing class sizes was outpacing the supply, which left Dr.

Knox with a problem.

When Burke and Hare approached him that night in November of 1827, Knox took full advantage of the opportunity.

He asked no questions, and the men were polite, but you have to imagine that Knox suspected something unusual.

After all, the body was still clothed, and yet, well, he had needs, didn't he?

The two men went home that night with seven pounds in their collective pockets, in modern American money that's close to $1,200.

The rental debt was covered and there was profit left to go around.

But that much money, earned with such relative ease, well, it was hard not to think about the possibilities.

And that gave the men a killer idea.

It wasn't an original idea.

There had been rumors for years of disappearances, horrifying tales that were used to warn children to beware of strangers.

The youth of Edinburgh were disappearing, they would say, and you could be next if you weren't careful, so watch out.

Others whispered about the abduction of transient individuals like Romani, or children spirited away by illegal slavers.

But all of it was just gossip, xenophobic rumor masked as fantasy.

At the core of it, though, was a grain of truth, which is why some members of the medical community, as well as politicians way down in London, were already discussing the warning signs, namely soaring prices for dead bodies meant that someone was bound to cross the line eventually.

I'm telling you all of this to help you understand something important.

Burke and Hare didn't invent what they were about to do.

They weren't the first, although they were arguably the best at it, which is why, years later, their names would become synonymous with the act.

But they weren't pioneers by any means.

They were just early adopters of that famous Wayne Gretzky lesson to skate to where the puck is going, not to where it's at right now.

Except here, the puck was a cadaver.

I know I'm stretching the analogy a bit, but work with me here.

A month after selling their first cadaver to Dr.

Knox, Margaret told the two men of another tenant in the house, a man known as Joseph the Miller, who was sick in his room.

Burke and Hare paid him a visit, and after getting him drunk on whiskey, they smothered him with a pillow.

That body earned them a full 10 pounds from Dr.

Knox and zero zero suspicion.

So they kept going.

With no more sick or dying tenants under their own roof, Burke and Hare started to frequent the local taverns looking for poor, lonely travelers or members of the invisible layer of Edinburgh society.

In February of 1828, they met an elderly woman named Abigail Simpson and offered her a room at the boarding house for the night.

Once behind closed doors, the whiskey and the pillow were used again, with the same results.

Even Margaret got in on the action, apparently by helping to bring victims home to the two men.

They aimed for travelers who appeared poor, alone, and in search of assistance, and then played into those needs.

Each visitor to the house was treated the same, more whiskey and more suffocation, all of which earned Burke and Hare more money.

Sometimes they worked together as a team, as they had with their first victim, and other times they split up and worked alone.

They were in the sort of line of work that required Goldilocks conditions after all.

The right person in the right place with the right needs at the right time.

It wasn't necessarily chance, but it wasn't all skill either.

Still, they were getting good at it, and they had turned it into an art.

The men were dressing well now, and many of the locals near the boarding house had noticed this.

Each new cadaver came with a bigger payday, and both men were living large as a result.

But it wasn't always easy money.

Long stretches of time would go by between victims, and sometimes it was easy to doubt whether their lucky streak would continue.

It was after one of those dry spells that Burke and Hare happened to bump into an old friend named Mary Haldane.

Mary was an older woman who had once lived in the boarding house with them, but had since moved out to find a better life.

But she was also a drunk, and the men knew an opportunity when they saw one.

Here was a victim that would have no problem with glass after glass of whiskey.

After waiting for her to pass out that night, they smothered her to death and then took the body to Dr.

Knox the following morning.

A few days later, though, Mary's daughter Peggy came searching for her missing mother.

A local grocer had told her that he had seen Mary in the company of Hare, and so she had knocked on their door.

Margaret answered the door and recognized Peggy immediately.

Together with Burke's wife Helen, the two women did their best to proclaim complete innocence of Mary's whereabouts, but when the men heard them, they panicked.

If they sent her away, she would only go to the police.

No, they needed to offer her some form of hope, some solution for her desperation.

Hare stepped into the hall and interrupted the conversation.

He could help, he said.

In fact, he knew where Peggy might look to find her mother.

Peggy's eyes opened wide with hope, and then Hare stepped aside with a sweeping arm.

Would you care to come in and talk about it?

Over a drink.

Burke and Hare continued on this way for months, and as they did, the death toll climbed steadily higher.

Then on October 31st of 1828, Burke was in a local grocery store when an elderly woman named Mary Dougherty stepped in.

She was newly arrived from Ireland and had come to Edinburgh looking for her son.

Burke heard her accent and saw how frail she was and knew that he had found his next victim.

He struck up a conversation with her, and after discovering where she'd been born and what her last name was, he pretended to be distantly related through his mother's side.

And Mary fell for it.

She was far from home, after all, and very lonely.

She had no travel companions, no money, and no place to stay.

So Burke kindly offered to lead her to the boarding house where she was welcome to spend the night.

There was a problem, though.

The inn was full, so to speak.

They had actually given the last room to a small family earlier in the week.

James Gray was a former soldier, and he'd brought his wife and small child with him.

So Burke offered to find them temporary lodgings elsewhere for the night so that Mary, his newly discovered relative, could stay.

The Greys agreed and moved out for the night.

After they'd gone, the drinking started.

It was an evening full of dancing, shouting, laughter, and many, many songs sung at the top of their voices.

Mary kept up nicely despite her old age, and each of them got as drunk as possible, which led to a fistfight between Burke and Hare.

Now there's some debate about whether the fight was real or planned, but the outcome worked in their favor nonetheless.

In an effort to stop the fight, Mary stepped between the men and was knocked to the floor.

Too drunk to get back up, she simply passed out where she lay, and that was the opportunity the men had been waiting for.

They strangled her and then hid her body in the women's room between the bed and the wall, where a small pile of straw had been placed.

In the morning, the Greys returned to eat breakfast at the boarding house and asked about the old woman.

Gone, Burke told them.

He claimed that she had gotten a bit too rude thanks to the alcohol and they had been forced to turn her away for the night.

Anne Gray thought it was a shame, but shrugged and then stepped into her room to retrieve the stockings that she'd left on the bed the afternoon before.

And that brought her within sight of the pile of straw.

Burke panicked and demanded that she leave it alone.

She had been smoking a pipe at the time and he shouted something about the straw and fire and Mrs.

Gray didn't like his tone.

Something about it all seemed odd.

And if suspicion were a seed, it took root that very moment.

Later, through a series of mistakes, misunderstandings, and errors in judgment by Burke and Hare, the Grays found themselves in the big house all alone and very, very curious.

So Mrs.

Gray started to search the room again.

Beneath that pile of straw, beside the bed she had planned to sleep in that night, she was shocked to find the cold, dead body of the missing old woman.

As you can imagine, the police were called to the house.

The men managed to get the body out before their arrival, but it was too late.

The Grays later identified Dougherty's corpse in possession of Dr.

Knox, sealing the case.

Burke and Hare were arrested, and their 10-month killing spree, a run of murder that claimed 17 victims in total, was finally brought to an end.

Hare proved to be more open to the police than Burke, and he managed to strike a deal with them.

He turned King's evidence, agreeing to testify against his partner and tell the police everything that happened, all in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

So when the trial began on Christmas Eve of 1828, it was Burke and Burke alone who received the death sentence.

He was hanged a month later.

It was a cold winter day and torrential rain pounded the cobblestones outside the courthouse.

But no one cared about the rain.

A crowd of nearly 25,000 gathered to watch the killer drop and cheered at his death.

The following day, Burke's body was dissected at Old College in front of a sell-out crowd.

For over two hours, Dr.

Alexander Monroe led his anatomy lecture using the former body snatcher's corpse as a teaching tool, while groups of students were led through in waves to give everyone a chance to see the infamous killer.

During the dissection, Monroe stopped for a moment and retrieved a piece of parchment and a quill.

The students watched him in total silence as he dipped the quill and began to scratch out a note.

This is written with the blood of William Burke, he wrote, who was hanged at Edinburgh on 28th January, 1829, for the murder of Mary Dougherty.

This blood was taken from his head.

Some people have referred to Burke and Hare as the most famous grave robbers in history.

But the truth is that they never once opened a grave.

They never even stole a body in the true body snatcher sense.

Faced with a supply and demand problem, Burke and Hare created their own inventory.

Enterprising, yes, but not grave-robbing in the traditional sense.

As a result, 17 people lost their lives, and all but one of them, Mary Dougherty, ended up on the table in a medical theater.

There was a silver lining as a result of their deeds, though.

Just three years after Burke's execution, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act of 1832, which opened the door for medical doctors and anatomy teachers to find enough cadavers for their work.

Bodies could now be donated and unclaimed corpses from prisons and workhouses could also be used.

We know about the last days of Burke and Hare, but what I'm more curious about are the 10 months before their arrest.

How two poor men living in Edinburgh's old town managed to lie to themselves all that time.

to justify their actions and then strut around town in expensive clothing.

I'm interested in the psychology of it all, how they slept at night, because it couldn't have been easy.

These men were engaged in something that came with layer upon layer of moral debt.

They were luring needy people with the promise of help, which was bad enough on its own.

Then they were ending their lives.

And finally, they were denying them the burial they deserved.

How does a person process those deeds and live with themselves after the fact?

William Hare was never tried and convicted for his crimes, so one can assume that he lived for decades with all of this weighing on his conscience.

Maybe though, just maybe, he did try and make things right.

You see, something odd was found in 1836, just seven years after Hare's release.

Outside Edinburgh is a rocky hill known locally as Arthur's Seat, and in June of that year, some boys were on the northeast side hunting for rabbits.

In a moment of distraction, one of them began to scale a part of the rocky face of the hill.

When he lost his footing and slipped, he instinctively reached for a handhold and caught the edge of a slab of stone that had been wedged into a crevice.

When the stone fell away, it revealed a large man-made hole in the hill.

The boy leaned in, trying to make sense of what he could see inside.

There were shadows and moisture and odd shapes, and if he wasn't mistaken, wood.

He reached in and brushed away the cobwebs and pulled one of the objects out.

It was a tiny coffin, a tiny wooden coffin decorated with tin and carved from a single block of wood.

Inside was a wooden doll about four inches long, dressed in a tiny shirt and trousers with a face carved on the round head.

And then the boy put the coffin back and then counted.

There were a lot of them.

All coffins, all occupied by a tiny figure, and all buried with care.

The final total was a curious number, to say the least.

There were 17 of them.

We humans have such a reverence for the dead, as is evidenced by the various rituals of burial that can be found all around the world and throughout history.

Even the hardest of hearts seems moved by death.

brought low by it and made to be still.

And most people would agree that that's a good thing.

But grave robbing goes against that idea, making the stories about it so thrilling to hear.

Which is why we've tracked down one more special tale.

And if you stick around through this brief sponsored break, I'll tell you all about it.

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The nefarious activities perpetrated by Burke and Hare were done out of desperation.

These were two men who wanted nothing more than to dig themselves out of squalor, albeit at the expense of innocent lives.

But not all body snatching was done for profit or personal gain.

Some of it was done for love.

On July 1st, 1822, a group of young Englishmen had convened in Livorno, Italy, with one goal, to launch a new literary journal that they would call The Liberal.

One of the men was toasting his companions at his home with the help of his wife.

He had recently moved to the area and loved the drama of the sea, but his wife hated it.

She often spoke of a sickening feeling of foreboding that cast a shadow over the place.

But the host didn't mind it.

After all, he had gathered his young artistic friends, all in their 20s, all with similar intellectual ideals, to stay with him as they got their new endeavor off the ground.

And because they were still young, they also loved to have fun, usually by partying or racing boats in the bay of Spazia.

The host had his own boat, which he named the Don Juan.

Given his youthful nature and need for speed, he had had the boat modified with additional topmasts and sails.

It did, in fact, make the vessel faster, but it also made it top-heavy and dangerous to operate in strong winds.

About a week after their literary retreat had begun, the host offered to sail two of his guests down the coast to Livorno.

Perhaps their intellectual pursuits only extended to the literary world and not to the realm of common sense, or maybe their youth instilled them with a false sense of invincibility.

Whatever the reason, the three men ignored the warnings of awful weather ahead and pressed onward.

A bad storm bore down on the heavy-masted ship.

It soon capsized, and the men's bodies were lost at sea for 10 days.

When they were finally discovered, the damage was extensive.

The host in particular had suffered the loss of his hands and face to various sea life and elements.

He could only be identified by the clothing he had been wearing and the book of John Keats poetry in his pocket.

He was only 29 years old.

To make matters worse, the men's remains could not be shipped back to their home country.

Italian quarantine law demanded that they be buried in the sand near Via Reggio, where they had been found.

But the surviving friends weren't happy about that outcome.

They wanted to mourn their losses properly.

so they took matters into their own hands.

They dug up the host's body one month after it was interred with nothing but the purest of intentions.

They only wanted to give him the funeral he rightly deserved.

With the host now free from his nameless grave, the friends built a pyre on the beach and burned his body.

The fire's tendrils reached toward the sky as it enveloped his flesh.

One of the companions, a man named Edward John Trelawney, noted how he and the others could hear the host's brain bubbling in the skull.

As the flames died down and the embers diminished into ash, Trelawney saw something in the fire among the bones and skull fragments.

It was the host's heart.

It had not been consumed by the blaze.

Trelawney snatched it from the pyre, burning his hand in the process.

So, why was the heart preserved while the rest of the body went up in flames?

Some believe it was due to calcification caused by the host's previous bout with tuberculosis.

Others think it wasn't the heart at all, but the liver instead, which had become saturated with seawater and was able to hold up against the fire.

And still others think it was neither organ.

It was just some calcified part of the body that the men mistook for the heart.

Regardless of what it may have been, though, the survivors all believe that it was the host's heart.

And so that's what we will refer to it from here on out.

One of their friends, Lee Hunt, begged Trelawney to give him the heart.

He cared for the deceased more than anyone and felt entitled to it, even more so than the man's widow, a point that came up sometime later when she asked for her late husband's remains.

Hunt flat-out refused, telling her that their relationship outweighed the claims of any other love.

Well, Hunt's companions didn't agree.

They urged him to reconsider and give the woman the last surviving piece of her dead husband.

Their peer pressure worked.

Hunt relented and gave the heart to her, which she didn't just keep for the rest of her life.

She treasured it.

Decades later, after the woman's death in 1851, her son was going through her personal effects when he opened her writing box.

Inside, wrapped in a piece of fine silk, was a copy of one of his father's poems, which itself had been wrapped around something precious.

A calcified human heart.

It was no surprise that she had kept it, wrapped in her husband's poetry no less.

After all, she had always had a flair for the macabre.

She used to spend her time as a child at her mother's gravestone, tracing her tiny fingers over the letters of the name that they had shared.

M-A-R-Y.

Mary.

This widow, you see, was none other than Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of the late Percy Byss Shelley.

Percy had been a poet and an influence on scores of poets that came after him, including Robert Browning and W.B.

Yeats.

But Mary didn't settle for defining an existing genre.

She invented one with her legendary novel Frankenstein.

It was a story about loss, longing, and of course, a monster built from human body parts that had been robbed from a grave.

But above all else, it was a story with a heart.

This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with additional help from Jenna Rose Nethercotts and Harry Marks, and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy.

My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical.

You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com.

And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.

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