Casket-a-go-go, Part 3

thrashing about inside your your grave sealed for doom forever. Uh. And in the last episode we focused mainly on well, we we looked at length of the fist coffin the f I s K. How can you say fisk coffin. That's almost impossible. Yeah, I'm surprised that it sold so well with a name like that, which was a strange

and elegant invention. And it's all right, But a lot of what we talked about was stuff to prevent people from having their bodies stolen by resurrection men or resurrectionists who took bodies from graves in order to sell them to medical colleges and dissection rooms and anatomists. Yeah so so yeah, we talked about ways to to safeguard the the the casket, the burial ground, putting cages over them, having specially designed caskets to keep people out, weird gadgets

to go around your neck, etcetera. But now we're going to get into Uh, I guess what we would call active measures? Right? A casket or a coffin that fights back. Right, So what if all the last solutions we are, all the previous solutions we talked about were just too wimpy. Here is a possible solution. If you want to keep people from stealing your corpse, turn them into a corpse and then they'll have their own and they won't need yours. Uh,

you're talking about a casket that kills. Like if it were like a seventies or eighties horror film, it would be instead of being death Spa or deathback the beat it kills, it would be death casket, the casket that killed. Maybe that's too close, are it is too on the nose?

So you know, one thing I was thinking about is if you go by Indiana Jones as your main source, you would think that the booby trapping of tombs with deadly mechanisms for crushing, impaling, fatally desiccating, plucking out the eyeballs of grave robbers was sort of a time honored tradition, right that this goes back into the ancient world. Lots

of tombs are like this. But the sad fact is that I can find almost no real evidence of booby trapped tombs from the ancient world, with essentially one possible exception, and that only exception is rumors about the unexcavated tomb of the ancient Chinese emperor Chin chi Huang, which we already did an episode of our other podcast, Stuff to Blow your mind about, So if you want a whole episode on that subject, you should look up our Chin

chi Huang episode. But the short version is some ancient accounts claim that the tomb of Chin chi Huong is rigged with weapons and poisons to slaughter any potential looters. And I've got a description of the tomb here from the first century b c. Chinese historian uh Sima Cuyon, and it's translated by Burton Watson. Uh So it goes like this. It says they dug down to the third layer of underground springs and poured in bronze to make

the outer coffin. Replicas of palaces, scenic towers, and the Hundred Officials, as well as rare utensils and wondrous objects were brought in to fill the tomb. Craftsmen were ordered to set up crossbows and arrows rigged so that they

would immediately shoot down anyone attempting to break in. Mercury was used to fashion imitations of the Hundred Rivers, the Yellow River, and the Young Sea, and the seas, constructed in such a way that they seemed to flow above or representations of all the heavenly bodies below the features of the earth. Whale oil was used for lamps, which were calculated to burn for a long time without going out. That is nice. They're like, this is really top shelf

when it comes to tombs. Yeah, and tomb technology. I mean, you got your mercury, you got your automatic crossbows. Uh, you'd assume maybe the mercury works kind of like a toxic poison to fill the room with fumes. Very interesting stuff. But of course the tomb remains unopened, to which on one level means I mean, granted, it's unopened for a

variety of reasons. But you could say that, hey, just just the idea that there are crossbows in there there in there, that they are deadly traps in there, could have contributed to its protection over the centuries. That's a very good point that it could could be like a mimetic protection um. And of course the thing is, we don't know if there's anything to these stories, and even if it was true when the tomb was crafted, I strongly doubt that like crossbow mechanisms from two thousand years

plus ago would still work today right now. It will be interesting though, because, as we discussed in that episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind, we may have actually we find out what what is going on in that tomb. There's been talk of of actually entering it or sending in you know, the drones to explore it a little bit, uh, you know, as much as exploration, but also to to make sure that the area is protected, that that the the artifacts inside are not destroyed in due course due

to say seismic events or something like that. Right, but maybe we'll send that first drone in and it'll get hit by a crossbow bowls, you never know. That would be very cool. But like I said, the kind of strange and disappointing thing is this seems to be the only case I can find of a booby trapped tomb from the ancient world. But I would say, on the other hand, the general lack of Indiana Jones style traps does not mean that ancient people's weren't very keen on

keeping their graves undisturbed. Of course, one thing is just standard type security features like you would find on the tombs we've already talked about in the previous episodes, you know, seals, gates, things being filled in, or having huge slabs placed on top of or in front of them, that kind of thing, just to keep people out. But the other thing I would say, picking up on the idea of mimetic security is like the idea of the mythical curse of the Pharaohs. Now.

Of course, that is more or less a twentieth century mythical invention, but it does take slight inspiration from reality in that some ancient tombs are marked with like curses or warnings against people who might disturb them. I was reading a really interesting thing about tomb curses on the National Museum Scotland blog and a post by assistant curator Dr Dan Potter with a translation that I'll get to

in a second. Uh. Now, when I imagine ancient tomb curses and warnings and stuff, I often imagine really vividly violent threats, the like may your teeth turn into bees kind of thing, or may rot erect, you know, the the poe poe kind of direction. But as an example of the kind of two mornings, you're more likely to actually find an ancient Egypt. Potter translates a stone with an inscription from roughly between twelve to ten sixty nine b C. And it's from the necropolis of sheik Abbot Alcerna,

which is in where ancient Thebes would have been. And this is Potter's translation. It is to you that I speak all people who will find this tomb passage. Watch out not to take even a pebble from within it outside. If you find this stone, you shall not transgress against it. Indeed, the gods since the time of pre who rest in the midst of the mountains, gained strength every day even though their pebbles are dragged away. Look for a place worthy of yourselves and rest in it, And do not

constrict gods in their own houses. As every man is happy in his place, and every man is glad in his house. As for he who will be sound, beware of forcefully removing this stone from its place. As for he who covers it in its place, great lords of the West will reproach him very very very very very very very very much. That is a stern tongue lashing. I really like that. At the end though, it's kind of quaint and polite. It's like, don't mess with my tomb.

I'm dead, I'm a god. Now you go find your own tomb, become a god in your own way, and please, please, please, please, please please please don't mess with it. I love this. Yeah, the excessive use of the very here, because that would not be considered you know, proper in English, modern English anyway to to use that. But but really it gets the point across. The more varies, the better it reminds me.

I had a professor once of I believe it was a uh, you know, Canterbury Tales classes that I was taking. He was the professor, and he he liked to stress that while we're not fond of double negatives now, uh, there was a time when you would just quote Negate the hell out of something if you wanted to to make sure it was negated. They're great old instances of word repetition in in older languages, especially like from the ancient world. I think about the idea of holy, holy holy.

You know, it's just saying like, you don't say extremely holy, you say holy, holy holy. You keep repeating the word to emphasize the superlativeness of work. But yeah, I like this idea of thinking about the mythology that surrounds two warnings is a kind of meme based security invention. And you could think of that in a religious context as

it's invoked here, like you're gonna upset the gods. Things are going to be very bad for you if you disturb this tomb, or you could think about it in a chin chi huang kind of context where you could seed stories out with the historians, or you know, just throughout the culture that there's some mega like killer robots in this tomb you don't want to go inside. Yeah. One thing I was thinking about is if you just have the the curse posted, it depends on literacy for

what to really convey its meaning. Uh. Not everyone may be able to read, but everyone speaks the language crossbow. Um. But then again, if you're if it's not just about making sure that you have a sign posted, but to spread the word of it, to make sure that the curse is known, that's a different thing altogether. Well, should we take a quick break and then come back to discuss some gorrier, more modern versions of active measures protecting it to him? Let's do it. Alright, we're back, so

let's let's get into the gory details. Right. So we were discussing previously that even when ancient tombs have curses, it seems like they're often less gruesome than you would expect. But leave it to modern Americans and Europeans to take tomb security to ridiculously nasty, violent places. As exhibit A, I would like to read a report from the Stark County Democrat, which was a Canton, Ohio newspaper, the addition of January one. This is this article is called a

torpedo blows them up. This is wonderful days pleasuated this in its entirety Mount vernon January nineteen, So you got your dateline. A report reaches here that on Monday night, three body snatchers, while attempting to rob a grave of near Gan this county met with a fatal accident. The story goes that while excavating the grave, the Picks came in contact with a torpedo, which exploded, killing one of the ghouls named Dipper, and mangling the leg of another

whose name could not be learned. The third part, the third party was occupying a sleigh as a lookout and after the accident, succeeded in getting his disabled companion in the sleigh and driving off. This is one of This is like a page from you know, Coran McCarthy book that we can only find the Library of Babble. Yeah, Dipper, they only know one of their names. And again I love the description as ghouls because I think we mentioned this in the last episode. But Google's, of course, are

aditionally monsters of a necrophageous persuasion. They lurk in graveyards and they scavenge the flesh of the dead. But let's come back to that other detail that I meagined. A lot of people latched onto, uh the idea that a torpedo exploded, right, Yeah, a torpedo blows them up. So I'm thinking like a torpedo on a submarine, Like did somebody bury an explosive charge among their great uncle's grave goods,

which exploded when the ghoul's broke in. No, this was not an accidental explosion of something that happened to be down there. This apparently was a specific technology designed to protect graves by maiming and murdering resurrection men and grave robbers. Yeah, that the coffin torpedo. I ran across this as well. I was not familiar with it previously, and when I read it, of course, the thing that entered my mind is the idea that you have a casket that is

fired out of a torpedo tube on a submarine. I thought, well, that's what it is. How weird that I've run across such an invention. But no, it's even weirder. Yes, So I've come across two major records of booby trap coffin inventions. Uh so. One is that on October eight eight, an Ohio inventor named Philip K. Clover received a patent for what he called a coffin torpedo. It was designed to

quote prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies. To presume the authorized one would be the end times one, right, Yeah, it would need to be Jesus or you know, an accepted uh spokesperson for Jesus, or a sufficiently powerful necromancer. Uh. The torpedo would be loaded with a shotgun style spray of lead balls, and then we would be buried facing up inside the lid of the coffin, and if triggered, the Coffin torpedo would of course blast the thief and

possibly killed them. Okay, so in a way it gets even grizzlier because what we're talking about he is really more comparable with a land mine or or a shotgun trap. The probably a landmine is the more accepted comparison here. Yes, actually one person I'm going to sit in a minute makes exactly that comparison. So another coffin torpedo came out a few years later. This one was patented by a

guy named Thomas In Howell, also of Ohio. So it seems like maybe Grave like unauthorized resurrection was happening a lot in Ohio at the time. Howell says in his patent that other Grave torpedoes already exist, but that he's improved the Grave torpedo design by including quote exterior nipples on the shell and quote pivoted swinging hammers combined with a rotary disc or collar for engaging the hammers and by its rotary movement, release the hammers, which constitute the

essential and important feature of my invention. So he's all about nipples and hammers. Yeah, I don't really have a clear vision of what these hammers are accomplishing. You can look up a diagram on the I've got a link here to the to the patent for you. But basically it ends up working sort of the same. It's like

a landmine thing. In fact, I was reading a blog post about this invention by an anthropologist named Katie Myers Emery, who has written a lot on like a Burial of the Dead, traditions and stuff, in which she says that Howell's model was really more like a landmine than a gun. But she also quotes a contemporary advertisement for one of these grave torpedoes. I think it's for Howell's model, which reads sleep well, sweet angel, Let no fears of ghouls

disturb thy rest. For above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo ready to make minced meat. If anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat I think it's really also drives home that the use of the word torpedo has has shifted some in our in our usage. I think so too, because I think of essentially an underwater missile, like a run for Red October or something. But I love this this pitch here, sleep well, sweet angel, let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest. It's it's

good copy, but it's also not catchy. I mean, I feel like the Howell's model needs a catch your jingle, Like they won't use me for science. I'd rather stay here and rot. You know. The other thing I'm thinking is that at this point in our history, like an undisturbed grave is so normal, you know. I feel like I almost I want to attract the ghoules, like it would kind of make my death more of a celebration.

But it's just just a thought. Yeah, why not have another boring burial like everybody else, you know, why not get things of popping around your grave? Uh So. In fact, the strangest thing of the story is that this torpedo was not even the first lethal trap for grave robbers of the Resurrectionist age. It seems that since the eighteenth century, there had been what are known as cemetery guns. Uh, that's not a trick name. That just means guns used for cemeteries. So I found a link to one in

particular being auctioned at Southeby's in January of sixteen. It is an eighteenth or early nineteenth century flintlock gun, originally made out of ash would steel and wrought iron by the Jurgenson Machine Company of New York. I've got a picture of it for you here, Robert. I think this gun being sold at auction is one of the same ones I've read about elsewhere, being displayed at a museum called the Museum of Mourning Art at Arlington Cemetery in Pennsylvania.

And so this gun would have been positioned on a swivel mount and then it would be mounted at the site of the grave that needed to be protected, and then it would be fired by trip wires. So you'd place trip wires that linked to the triggering mechanism, and if somebody pulls the trip wire, if the tension you know, goes up on the wire, it triggers the gun and the shot or the ball I guess, goes out at

in the direction of the grave. This seems excessive yeah, I'd have to imagine that if these were ever deployed at any kind of scale, they would kill innocent people. Right. And if people just happened to be going through the graveyard and they you know, trip over the trip, are they you know, kicked the wrong thing? Oh? Yes, her squirrels would set them off birds, I mean small children. It's yeah, this is this is this is ridiculous. Well, now you might wonder if like, okay, this sounds excessive.

So maybe things like this were made but never actually used. But there are accounts of them being used. I found a couple in a book by an author named Susie Lennox. The book is called Body Snatchers, Digging Up the Untold Stories of Britain's Resurrection Men from Pin and Sword, which is a history press published in and So Lennox says, uh, this following account was reported in The Times, I mean the Times of London in eighteen seventeen. So apparently there

was a really tall guy. There was a British grenadier who was seven feet tall, and he passed away and for some reason, his very tall body was highly coveted by an atomis. Maybe they just I don't know, they wanted to see what made him so taller, and there was a standard fee increase were for you know, excessively tall or excessively short specimens. Maybe, oh, maybe in the medical college it's easier to see a larger specimen from the sitting up in the gallery. Or maybe they saw

him in half and sell him as too. I don't know, but for some reason, yeah, his very tall body was highly desired by the resurrection men. So his body was buried in the cemetery of St Martin in the Fields, which is this Anglican church in Westminster's in London. And because the seven foot corps was known to be of great value to the body snatchers, the sexton of the church quote put together a number of gun barrels so as to form a magazine that they might all be

discharged together. So he set up a bunch of grave guns, all aimed at this grave. And apparently the trip wire that pulled the trigger on the gun battery was attached to a piece of wood, and then the wood was buried just under the surface of the grave. So if you start digging down to access the coffin, you would hit the wood and you'd have to remove it, so

in removing it you would pull on the wood. This would pull the triggers of the gun battery and the person standing over the grave would get hit by a volley of bullets. And according to this Times report, one night after the burial, at about four thirty am, the

sexton of the church heard a tremendous report. So he goes out to the churchyard and the sexton finds a bunch of picks and shovels lying around on the ground, and to quote from the Lennox's retelling here quote, he also found a man's hat with a bullet hole in one side of it. As there was no exit hole. The sexton concluded that it must have lodged in the head of one of the body snatchers, killing him instantly, with his friends taking his lifeless body away with them.

So immediately I was wondering, wait a second, now, if you are a group of resurrection men, you're trying to dig up a body and one of your buddies gets killed, I mean for the other ones, isn't that just as good? Like you just run off and you sell this fresh dead body. Now, yeah, I wonder if new racket was born that night they're like, hey, we just keep we just need to keep hiring new guys into our gang, and we'll just kill them and sell their bodies. Yeah, hey, Jeff,

you move the wood. Yeah, well better yet, we don't even have to kill them ourselves. We just bring them to the cemetery. We have this crazy gun that shoots people. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You always get the new guy to move the wood and pull the string, and you get a fresh body every night. Now, needless to say, this would be quite illegal if you were to sit try and set something

like this up today. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the risk that these guns posed too obviously innocent people would be a clear thing that would make them illegal over time. But even so, I mean, even if you're aiming them at criminals, I don't know, I don't know if it seems right to just like shoot people when they're trying to do something in the kind of gray area space of digging up dead bodies at the time. Now, on the other hand, of course, the

guns didn't always work. Lennox also recounts the story from Camden Town in eighty three, where body snatchers succeeded in breaching a gun protected grave just by dismantling the trip wire. So they saw what was going on there and they just took the system apart. So maybe we should take a quick break and then when we come back we

can discuss something like the end of the resurrection Men period. Alright, we're back, So yeah, obviously this threat comes to an end because I mean, imagine, like most people out there, if you've ever been to a funeral or helps to put one together, the resurrectionist men did not come up. None of these features were offered to you at your local funeral home. Nobody was telling you about how you might need to invest in a torpedo for that expensive

new casket. Right, So I think there were multiple things that brought about the end of this phenomenon, and of course the phenomenon came in different waves of different places, different times. Uh, it would be against subject to kind of economic demands like where and when are there anatomists that need these bodies? Is where and when can they

not get bodies through other legitimate means? But one blow to the trade and dead bodies like this came with changes not in technology but in social norms and laws. And this this first shift, I think would be in the UK occurring around eighteen thirty two when Parliament passed the Anatomy Act, and this acted several things, but one of them was that it expanded the range of categories of unclaimed bodies that could be used legally for medical

education and research. So now it's not just like executed criminals, but lots of different kinds of bodies can be used. And similar laws were passed in the United States later on, so that was one change, but it obviously didn't completely do away with this fear because again, some of the stories we were just looking at were people in the eighteen eighties in Ohio who were afraid of getting their bodies stolen and and and there seemed to be people

out to steal the bodies. Yes, absolutely, uh so, so that doesn't fully do away with it, but that's that's one dent I would say in another big thing is actually a further round of technological changes, and I think specifically it's the most important thing is when body preservation technology changed, so you'd get embalming, which became common in the second half of the nineteenth century. I think it became common in the United States around like the eighteen eighties.

I've read that it was in a large part kind of a post civil war thing too, because this is certainly a situation where he had a lot of of of dead young people who needed to then be shipped back home. Right. But another big thing, of course, coming soon after that in the in the nineteen hundreds would be chemical refrigeration and body freezers, and back to a previous invention that we've touched on exactly, yeah, air conditioning

for the dead. So when human bodies could be stored and protected against decay for a long time or even indefinitely, I think much of the body supply problem went away, but you could probably also say that there might be a I don't know exactly how demand changed over time. I mean, obviously human dissections still occur, and you know that that still can be a part of medical research and education, but it might not be as prevalent a

necessity as it once was. But certainly the supply issue has been changed by technology, because now you can just have frozen bodies on hand, right, And again the culture has changed to like more people, it's it's not this, uh, this taboo thing for the anatomist to eventually have your body and make use of it. And yet at the same time, you know, obviously graves are still robbed from time to time, grave desecrations do still occur. They just

they don't have the the economic factor behind them. It's got just it's left going to be left to the domain of just pure uh pure ghouls uh pure you know, necromantics and so forth, individuals who are probably doing this as a passion, as a hobby, but not as you know, their primary means of earning a living. Now, one thought that comes to mind is there was an old Clark Ashton Smith short story I read. It took place in kind of like a you know, a dark, darkly fantastic kingdom.

And in this kingdom, if I remember correctly, you have the ghouls, the supernatural ghouls, the creatures that feast on the dead, and you know, inevitably worship some dark uh you know, uh, you know, necromatic deity underneath the city. And then you have humans living in the city above. And they've simply established a funerary practice where the dead are handed over to the ghouls and uh and I've

made arrangements. They made arrangements and and it works. Uh. I think that in the story, if I remember correctly, the intrigue is because you have some outsiders who show up and they don't know what's going on, and then they inevitably, you know, run a foul with the ghouls. But I was I think that's a clever solution here, Like the the ghouls need the bodies, the living no longer need them. And here the ghouls and the mortals have worked out a deal. They've worked out an arrangement

and it works for everyone. But that's essentially that is essentially the original arrangement, that is the original arrangement between the living, living beings and the natural world as well. Uh yeah, that's right. Like if your when your body is is finished, when life leaves it, uh, there is a process that will take care of it, that will return it to the sort. Well yeah, I mean I think there's also there's an interesting cultural and emotional thing

going on about the desire for preservation. Again, the desire for preservation of the of the physical body after death not being a totally new thing there. There's it kind of comes and goes at different times and places in history, Like it seems like it was less of a concern, you know, five hundred years ago in the United States or Europe. But uh is more of a concern after the reintroduction of embalming as a common procedure. But of course you find it as this hugely important and desirable

thing in the ancient world. I mean, it was an attractive thing that pulled them in. Yeah, and like why is it so attractive? It doesn't occur to me naturally to find a good reason for that, but but there must be something going on there for a lot of people. Yeah, there's this idea of you know, of of of of creating this unlife. You know, this the space between that

is uh, at least perceived to be incorruptible. Right. I also wonder too, in our modern celebrity culture, you look at like, what are some of the examples of celebrities that are the most worshiped. There are people who died young and left a beautiful corpse, right, Um, And I wonder if we get into that that similar idea there, Like, there's this idea that if you know, this particular Hollywood star, they died young and in a way they remain young forever.

They're they're kind of embalmed. The idea of them is embalmed in our popular culture. They get on the Forever twenty seven poster. Yeah exactly, Uh, yeah, which is which is? I think it's it's a it's a different thing. It's not a physical embalming procedure, but it it essentially accomplishes the same thing. Play your cards right, and you get to come back as a hologram or you know, a

character and a TV commercial as well. Well. You know, one thing I think we might be doing is using our social media accounts to create embalmed versions of ourselves as earlier, younger versions of ourselves to survive as we and our decrepit bodies grow old. You know, you don't even have to wait to grow old. I think every social media embodiment of ourselves is essentially a version of ourselves, that is, that has been deprived of any natural essence and value. It is already a uh, you know, a

wraith we have unleashed on the world. The me on the Internet is the me I was when I was twenty five. It just like doesn't go anywhere after. Yeah, but of course this is this is of course we're cracking some jokes here, but of course this is a big concern for the future as the as the number of the dead on social media will inevitably outlive outnumber the living. Oh, I'm never thought of that before. But yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's I forget the exact date on it,

but it's definitely going to happen. And um yeah, it's and uh and and and then we're going to find that our social media accounts, or at least the ones that have been around for any number of years, are going to be it's going to be an acropolis. It

would be the underworld. Yeah, okay, should we call it there? Yeah, we'll have to call it there, but it but it, I mean, it really does go to show that, you know, with new technology comes new ways of having to confront mortality and deal with death and grieving and bereave in all these things. You know, even something like Facebook, which when it was developed, I doubt anyone was thinking, yeah, we're gonna have to look death square in the eyes

over this one, but inevitably you do. Like that's just technology is a part of living and death is a part of life as well. So there we have it. You know, hey, maybe we'll come back to caskets in the future, come back to embalming. Uh, you know, I'm not sure. There's plenty within the broad world, the broad spectrum of invention, there are plenty of inventions that revolve around death. Um. If you want to check out other episodes of the show, head on over to invention pod

dot com. That is where you will find them. And if you want to support our show, rate and review us wherever you have the power to do so. That really helps the show out huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, for just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is

production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, this is the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.