The Golden Age of Grave Robbing: Stuff You Should Know Live in London

afternoon drinking, you know. Yeah, oh, you know, a couple of drinks, maybe ma'd be bloody Mary. What were we talking about. Oh yeah, we're promoting our show. Oh that's right. So we're doing that show on January. Uh. You can go to the s F Sketch Fest website to get tickets and it's awesome. It's a great, great comedy festival. Lots of awesome shows that weekend and for the following weeks. So I encourage you, like to buy lots of tickets

just by ours first. Yeah, and hurry, hurry, because they're selling out fast. No joke, that's not a ploy. It's not a marketing ploy. No, they're really selling fast. We get emails every time. Guys. He told me to hurry. I didn't hurry. I'm shut out. And since this promos petered out, it ends right now. Welcome to stuff you should know from how stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Cherry's not here, but we are in beautiful London,

England at Union Chapel. It's not bad, It's not bad. I have a good feeling about this. Guys. It was the S word. For those of you at home just tuning in, you have no idea what we're talking about. Boy, the acoustics in this room, it's almost like they built it for that reason. We should have done this from up there, And now that I think about it, I don't think so. Yeah, I've worked out of you say what No, no, don't respond. Please come up here and tell the crowd what you just said. So we're we're

doing a podcast. We'd like to start it out, get you all laughing and then bring you down. And that's what we're gonna do right now, because we're talking about Grave robbing tonight. Yeah, there's a long rich history this country. Actually, there really is. As you will see, you probably already know this. You guys are probably taught this from like third grade on or year three. Yeah, I don't know. We're from America and I think Germany's landlock for God's say.

So there's We did a lot of research on this show, um, and we found that actually grave robbing is this huge, huge amorphous topic. Like the Egyptians were really big into into burying people with these elaborate graves, and then they were equally into breaking in and robbing those graves. Right, Um, the field of archaeology is basically grave robbing and academia.

There's this really really great video that I really strongly want to recommend to anybody who has a dark and interesting grave robbing that yes, sure, But alternately, if you have a very dark sense of humor, you will love grave robbing for more. It's this weird bootleg video from like the eighties maybe nineties, where this very disturbing young man is explaining how to extort money from people by robbing their family's graves, and he holds up jawbones and

stuff while he's doing it. It's just right. When you leave here, go watch grave robbing for morons. But we realized, like, this is two unweel it is like a five hour show. It's not. They may they may sit there for five hours, but by god, they're going to be really unhappy after hour or two. So we decided we were gonna whittle

it down to two hours. And it was kind of easy because it turns out that there has never been a period in human history where a dead body has had more monetary value and hence more likely to be dug up from a fresh grave than in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the Aisles and in America. And I like to call it the Golden Age of

grave row me. Josh did this research and he put this together and he actually capitalized that, so I thought it was really called the Golden Age of Gray Robin. He fooled me and said, well, that's remarkable. Let it know. You could have a Golden Age of something terrible, but I'll go with it. And you said, no, I just capitalized it. Well, if you capitalize it, it legitimizes it

for share exactly. I bought it. So we're gonna go back in time, we're gonna all get in the way back machine, which is the stone edifice right here, everyone filing. There's plenty of room, believe me, lots of room in the other dimension. This leads to, so we're gonna go back to the mid sixteenth century and pretty much anything before that, uh, to what. I don't know what they called it back then. It wasn't called um medicine or

practicing medicine or being a doctor. Uh. In fact, I don't even think they had the word doctor yet, did they or did they? No? No, they were barbers and surgeons. Surgeons stuck. Barber's did not for obvious reasons. Well barber's stuck. Yeah, there's still barbers around, but just not in the way that you think of. If you're barbera's cutting you open. He's not doing his job very well. Lists and apothecaries and witches and that's who was practicing early medicine, and uh,

things were going pretty well for a while. They figured out that the human body ran on the four humors, and they were wrong because the four humors are blood, as we all know. That's right. Like that was pretty pretty sharp of them back then. Not too bad flim. It is the thing we can all agree, uh. And then the two bials yellow bile and black pile and that was it. That was the human body. You had the four humors and that's how all this stuff worked out. Well.

That that and they figured out that the kidneys may be right, and they were like, it was actually this guy named Galen. He was working in the first century CE, and he figured all this out and said, job well done, and this is human anatomy. And for four hundred years they said, we don't need to go back and double check his work. Let's just take his word for it. This is how the human body works. And then finally

one day somebody who's like, I'm not sure this is correct. Sure, maybe the kidneys make pea and maybe blood is kind of important, but black by don't. I don't even know what that is. I think we need to cut open more people. And they looked around and they said, who's who are the people who should be doing this? Who should we entrust cutting open dead bodies too? And they said, Barbara Surgeons, you guys amputate people without any sort of anesthesia.

We should probably let you do it. Yeah, because if you want to know how this works. You need to open it up and see what's in there, kind of like just lifting the bonnet or the boot bonnet. Well, what the hell is the boot? I think the boots the trunk. Yeah, we got that on our big tour announcement. And remember that that's not surprising. Yeah. I've said a few other words on the podcast that means something different here all apologies. Yeah, trust me, I get the emails.

I understand these words means something different. Now, no offense. Uh So they realized you needed to peek under the hood, as we would say in the States, and see what's going on. Let's just stick to that. It's just what we know. Uh So eventually they were doing this a little bit, and they realized they needed more bodies if they were really going to advance medicine and learn things. And so in fifteen forty there was a king you might have heard of and read the Eighth I I

and he said, here's what I'll do. I'm gonna grant the monopoly on uh cadavers on bodies to the barber's and surgeons. And he said, oh my gosh, it's great, thank you so much. How many do we get a year? Four four, thank you bodies a year. I don't know if that's gonna do it, but thinks it was a pretty good start, and um, but it clearly wasn't nearly enough.

And these early dissections amounted to not much more than just kind of opening the body up and looking to see what was in there and lifting organs out and showing people because they don't learn Galen. Yeah, pretty much. So like the dissections amounted to this, Yeah, what was that? The appendix? Appendix? You call it funny? And then they get to the intestines and like this is like magic never and it just keeps coming. So it was it

was a little bit just like early surgical theater. They would display these organs and no one really knew how how things work. Back then, it was pretty clear that you needed more bodies if we were going to get anywhere. Everyone wanted to live longer, and they knew a few people knew that this was kind of the way to do it. So they were like, who do we hate?

Who do we hate? Murderers? Everybody hates murderers. And King George a third another King King George I I he said, I'm going to pass this thing called the Murder Act, and the Murder Act basically said if you were convicted of murder, not only were you going to be hung, but we're gonna hanged. Is it? Yeah? Two different meanings. Yeah, I guess if you get to be hung, we're going to dissect you after your day, because I'm not I'm Georgia. Third.

Uh is that a fact? No? No, no, no no. I just made that up, as I do from time and time again. I said, Germany is landlocked. You know, Donald Trump has small hands. Apparently so apparently has been recently proven. Somebody figured out to go to Madame Tussod's wax museum and measure the hands because apparently the whole thing is anatomy anatomically accurate. Yeah, small, it's oh oh yeah.

I just realized how we got on that. So you would be hanged if you were convicted of murder, and then after that they would dissect you as like an additional like we hate you that much, that's how, that's how despicable we find you. So it really kind of opened the floodgates of the bodies a little more. We're

talking like thirty forty more bodies. And we found out actually in researching this that you could and during certain periods of time, you could say, I don't want to be executed, send me to America instead, when you were convicted of murder and we're like, wait, wait, wait, I thought Australia was a penal colony. No, apparently both were. Did you guys know that? No? Okay, good, because I was gonna say, they don't teach us that in America.

There's all sorts of like rebellion and we're not paying taxes and you're crazy easy, we don't like you, you're not hung king and all that stuff. That's how they teach us. We're in a church, sent me to the coast of California for my punishment exactly, you got any suntan lotion. So eventually things were progressing a little bit medically, and uh, they actually started founding medical schools. The first medical schools rose out of the hospitals. They dropped the barber's.

The surgeon said, I think the word surgeon is going to be the one that people are gonna I think is legit. So barber's, you just go cut your hair and maybe do a little bleeding on the side for a little while, and we're going to found these medical schools, and these students, um were expected to show up with bodies. UM. I don't know how they do it in university over here, when you start school, if you have to buy your books. Uh. In the United States, you have to buy your books

each semester um. But back then it was b y O B in medical school and you had to show up with your own body. And there was a weird loophole at the time, uh in English law where it was not actually illegal to steal a body. Grave robbing had been going on for a long long time, but

it wasn't for the bodies. It was for jewels or any kind of valuables that the humans were buried with, and which happened all the time, you know, because people would like most like the treasures of the family would be buried with the body a lot of times, you know, other people wanted those treasures exactly, so they would steal those. But now, for the first time, bodies were valuable. But there was this loophole. As long as you returned the valuables,

you could actually steal the body. And technically, technically it wasn't illegal because the body couldn't own itself. It wasn't property exactly, so therefore it couldn't be stolen. So if you were caught with just the body and it was totally naked and it's clothes were back in the grave, they kind of be like, why no law broken. Students didn't quite dig this though. They were like, you know, I'm one day this is gonna be a respectable profession to be a surgeon, and I know there's a loophole,

but something about this doesn't feel quite right. It makes me fainty. Fainty. Um. The problem was that all these students, there are more and more students being attracted to the profession of surgery and of anatomy and studying this kind of stuff. So the more students that came, the more bodies were needed. Because back then there was no embalming, there was no refrigeration, and so after a very short

period of time, a body would get gamey. Right, So you come in one day with your saw and you go to saw it and like always in your arm would just keep going and you'd say I need another body, and there were no more bodies. They'd say, go dig it up. And then you would say, I'm fainty and they'd say, fine, who else can we get to do this? Criminals, criminals would love to fulfill this. We have a black

market that's establishing itself before very eyes. Why not get criminals to steal the bodies and we'll get the money for it. And that is how this whole thing erupted in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, this weird convergence of scientific inquiry, social morays against the idea of dissection, and a lot of organized criminals that were like, sure, we'll dig up your dead bodies and sell them to you for money. And it all happened right here in London. Congratulations.

So one of the first gangs that emerge was called the London Borough Gang Borrow Gang. We've been instructed how to say this. Yeah, we were been saying burrow like dumb Americans. And our lighting guy last night said, fell let's come over here, and he said it with a great accent. But I'm not gonna try and get pulled Chuck's beard. He has a great beard too, So we

rubbed beards together and it's spelled Bara. It did. So the londonburg Gang was operating right here, and there was a man who started this gang named Ben Crouch and he crosses in the audience. That's probably good. No, no crouches. No one's gonna admitted at least. And he worked at Guy's Hospital, and I was right next to that today, but anywhere, No, I didn't realize that. We Emily and now were just walking along and I looked up and there was Guy's Hospital, and I say, I know what

used to happen here many years ago. You know, great things. But this one dude, he was kind of a rat. He uh, he worked at Guy's hospital, and he had met somebody's in the Peninsular Wars fighting Napoleon, and what they were really good at and on the battlefield was um ravaging bodies and like pulling out gold teeth and fillings and kind of just robbing these bodies. And he said, I think I can take this back home, fellas, and we can get a gang together and we can really

make good use of all this stuff. So he got his buddies and they kind of found their go to graveyards and he was for a grave robber, a pretty underhanded dude, which is super super underhanded, believe it or not, but he was good at it. He would find out what graves were, Um, like, other grave robbers are robbing, and he would go to them and he would desecrate the graves and basically draw a lot of attention to those graveyards so they wouldn't be able to operate in

those graves. So he was he was trying to just kind of keep the cottage industry in house right exactly, and he was really good at it. He actually came to be known as the corpse King. And he would even make his wife call him that. He'd be like, don't you mean do you want shepherd's pie for dinner tonight? Corpse King? And she'd be like, that's what I meant, and he say so. Ben Crouch was so good at what he did that was good. Uh. He was so good at what he did that he actually was able

to retire a wealthy man from Gray Ribbing. But that was not the end of the Borough Gang. He passed the reins onto one Patrick Murphy. Murphy, Oh you should have heard it in Dublin. There's one Murphy here. Come on. He's like, no, no, yeah, they're all over Dublin. Uh. So Murphy was even a bigger creep. He would do things like. Uh. He had a bunch of looks like

underhanded things he would do. He would, let's say, sell a body to a hospital and then go back in and break in and steal that body from that hospital that night, and then sell it to another hospital the next day before it had a chance to be dissected. Underhanded. He was very underhanded. Um. He also would keep surgeons

in line right like um. He found out that some surgeon had bought like a bunch of bodies for some students, and he and his gang broke into the the anatomy school that night and you related the body so they would be unusable. This is not cool. Uh. And then there was this one anatomist who I've never gotten to the bottom of. Why didn't they didn't like this guy?

But they didn't. They once delivered a body to the guy that he had ordered, and it was delivered naked in a sack, as they customarily were, because you couldn't steal anything from the grave. Um. And the guy put the body on the on the slab, and the anatomist came over and was about to cut into him, and

the body sat bolt upright. It turned out it was just a man that the gang had knocked unconscious and delivered and sold to this guy, and apparently he ran out of the house naked, scared to death down the street. I'm not dead yet. You will be soon feeling much better. That's too money. Python references. I'm gonna go for three. There was fair enough to then a mint that was meaning of life, right. The big guy at the restaurant maybe eats them and blows up and his rib cages left. Classic.

Well that's three. Let's try and work in five. Okay, five? Could someone be in charged officially? Account Monty Python references. Um, this was happening all over the UK, by the way, and it was also happening right in our own United States, And in fact, it was happening in our very home state of Georgia in Augusta, at the Medical College of Georgia, which is still there today. And there was there was a man, well, I was about to say, working there. He was a slave, uh, and he was owned by

the Medical College of Georgia. It's all very sad. He he was a slave owned by the medical school and he it was illegal to teach a slave to read at the time, which is even more sad. But they taught grandson Harris to read because they wanted him to keep up with the obituaries because he was really good at digging up graves and bringing in cadavers and keeping them in good supply. This guy had a knack for it,

as a matter of fact. Yeah, and this um kind of points out a thread that you'll see running through this whole history that as long as bodies were being stolen from minority graveyards and marginalized people or mentally ill like mental hospitals, the white establishment didn't much care. So only when things started happening in the white communities did people really start to get upset. And you'll you'll see that a little later, but this is definitely what was

going on with Grams and Harris. So everybody, if you will reach under your pew, you'll find a little pad of paper and a pen, because this is a part where we teach you how to rob a grave. There is no pad of papers. By the way, you get a pet, you get a pen. Was that Oprah? It was? It was a halfhearted Oprah. But yeah, well you don't want to go full Oprah. It's it's embarrassing unless you're Oprah.

Uh So, here's how you do it. Typically this happens um at night and you would think duh, of course, but um, there was a member of the Borough Gang named Tom Light who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he was actually arrested in broad daylight walking through London with a cart full of dead bodies, and the cops came up. And you know this is highly illegal. Tom Lights like, oh can't you see the naked Yeah, I didn't steal any jewels. So you go at night.

You use a wooden shovel because a metal shovel against rock will make noise. Your whole job there is to be really quiet, so you can get away with this. So you got your wooden shovel, you're there at night. And I didn't know before we researched this that I just figured you just dug up the whole grave and raised the casket and pulled out the body. That's a lot of work. No, you want to work smarter, not harder, exactly.

So you would just dig that first third. You would find the headstone, which ideally is where the head of the body is unless your family has a weird since the fume, and you would you would dig down that first third only, and you would dig down, dig down until you reach the casket, and you would expose the casket and you would pry that up and snap the lid off of that first third because all the dirt is on the lower two thirds. And then there's this or or this. Yeah, I don't think the eyes are

open if they were alive when they were buried. They were, I've seen movies. You do like that, and then the eyes glows unless you bury them while they're alive. So the body's there, Why are the arms like this? I don't know. I'm not sure how they do it. What did you do? That's not bad? They were happy or something. Either way, they would run a rope under the body, under the arms, and they would just pull the body out the upper third and then you've got your body,

you would. Um. I imagine they stole valuables. I mean, come on, I know there was a loophole that there were valuables. They probably took him. But the thing was, if they were caught stealing the valuables, they would be hanged. Hanged. Um. If they were caught with the body, no, they wouldn't be that's right. So they would strip the body down and put it in the sack, but everything back in the grave, and rebury it as best of good, so no one would ever know they were there. That is

ideally how it would go down. And our buddy Grandison Harris actually was supposedly so good at this that he would memorize the floral arrangements before he desecrated the grave, so that when he reburied it he could remember exactly what it looked like when he put it all back together. Because if you were a decent resurrectionist, which is what they call these guys, and now they say decent is probably not the best word, if you were good at

what you did as a resurrectionist. Um, the whole point was is that no one would ever know that you'd broken into this grave. And we we're saying guys a lot. We try to keep things in our show, like say men and women, But let's be honest, women were always way more decent. They wouldn't do something like this even back been like they're doing it now. I just realized when I said that, how that sounded. The most most grave overcense days are women. Ever since the seventies, come

a long way, baby, so uh was that add Never mind? Um, here's what also happened. People are stealing bodies out of graves, but there's a lot of work. So some enterprising dude said, here's what we'll do. Let's just forget the graveyards and

let's just find out when people have died. They kind of live out in the sticks in rural areas, and we'll just go pretend to be a family member and they're really poor and they won't know, and we'll say we'll take care of the body for you, and they would just take the body right away from the family and then that's it. They would have the body, no must, no fuss, And somebody be like, who is that that took the body. I don't care. They took the body.

I don't have to bury the body, So do you care? No, I don't care. Well I don't care either. Then shut up. That's how those conversations went. Yeah, we found actual texts. You could you could also go into. Um, the hospitals, the big hospitals, like guys in London City Hospital had like their own graveyards, so indigent patients who died there would just be buried. They're free of charge and I'm sure the grave robbers were like, what are you doing?

Because they would break into these graveyards that were very largely unpatrolled, and they would dig up the body and

then go sell the body to a different hospital. So the body would be a patient one day, die, be buried, be dug up, and then be sold into another hospital within twenty four hours sometimes Yeah, But what that does do is underscores how they revered the body, and they respected the dead body, because you would think the hospital would just think, no, one's claiming, this body, got a cadaver on my hands, we can use this for medical research. But no, they would still bury the body, which kind

of was the tone of what was going on. So this was I know, uh Murphy's contemporary or predecessor, at least retired wealthy Mr Crouch. Murphy himself at one point made a hundred forty four pounds and one day, which is about ten thousand dollars in today's dollars, by stealing twelve corpses in one I guess overnight period, which was amazing. And the London cops figured they had two hundred grave robbers working in London alone, and ten of those were

full time grave robbers. They were able to quit their other job, which was probably a big day in the household. Honey, I have really big news. You're gonna be so proud. I can stop robbing orphans. I can just do grave robbing full time stand up guys. So, uh, this was going on way back then, obviously, but evidence of this we have found over the years, kind of recently, um and at the Medical College of Georgia. Well, here's the thing.

If you go to renovate the basement of your really old hospital, just get ready for what you're gonna find down here. It's not just a matter of tearing up the tile floors and ripping down the dry wall. You start digging around in the basement of an old hospital, you're gonna find some horrors going on. And they did this in nine at the Medical College of Georgia and found ten thousand bones just scattered in the basement of

who knows who and so like. At some point, the idea that surgery and anatomy was based on stolen body was lost to humanity, right, So when this kind of thing comes out these days, everyone's like, all they're serial killers, serial killers, And then somebody who's actually studied history comes forward and says, no, actually, they got some weird news about surgery and anatomy. They would steal the bodies, come them open, and then just mass bury the bones and say,

oh my god, that's crazy. And then they'd sit there for a second and then you forget what they just heard and go back to normal. And then a few years later somebody else would discover some bones somewhere else, like on Craven Street, in the house where Ben Franklin rented for like twenty seven years. Right, yeah, whereas Craven Street is there no longer the street. We just assume because you all live in the city, you know where Craven Street is it not around? Is there no more

Craven Street? It's NICs, thank you. I thought they buried Craven Street. They well, they found fifteen people, the bones of fifteen people in this house on Craven Street that Ben Franklin right in. And of course everyone said Franklin was a serial killer. And the same guy came forwards like I told you this before. Um, they used to dig up bodies, cut them open basis of anatomy. I'm going back here, look at the bones. Monty python reference.

No someone, that's four. I don't know what that one was, but that was number four. That's from Holy Grail. What what part when the rabbit and the cave remember, and uh, he's talking about the rabbit with the huge point of teeth and he goes look at the bones. No one, all right. I don't know if that's a legitimate quote like it may have been said in the movie, but it's a quote for me, like we say, neat, that's a quote. Yeah, that's true, to look at the bones.

That's what I thought. That was very funny line. Not tonight when it's terrible, but when I saw the movie back then, I thought it was great. When I saw that movie nineteen times. So most recently right here in London in two thousand six, uh, at London Hospital. You

might this might have been on the news. They discovered two hundred and sixty two burials at London Hospital and five hundred individuals in the yard there that we're missing their skull caps and they had basically skeletons that still had wires connecting themselves. It seems wrong if you're gonna if you're gonna steal a body articulate the skeleton and then go to the trouble of reburying it, disarticulate the skeleton. At the very least, just clip the wires off. At

least that's a T shirt. It's not a good T shirt, but that's two hundred sixty two burials and five hundred bodies. You do the math. Not everyone has their own plot, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I know what you're saying. Hey, hey win quick nudge nudge. So if that's five, oh wow, yeah we did it. But we did get out everyone nice time. So uh, this was going on the States, like we said, but as we implied earlier, as long as these were kind of marginalized people or they were

slave graveyards, no one really got their hackles up. But something happened in New York City in su called the Doctor's Riot of New York of se I think that's the full title. And there's two ways the story goes down. One is is way funnier than the other one. Um. The first is that these boys were playing in a hospital in New York and they saw him just an arm, a white arm hanging in the window guests to cure or dry or whatever, and they were disturbed and went home.

This is this's the stupid one. It's not very good. The other version is these boys were playing near a hospital in New York and they looked in a window and the anatomus took a white arm and waved with it. He hello, young man, come here. He's my favorite anatomists. And so that that's the version we like to believe.

And at any rate, they went home and they told their parents, and and one of their fathers had just recently lost his wife, and he got worried that it might be her because he knew grave robbing was a thing, and he went and found that her grave had in fact been dug up, and was a little angry to say, and he spun in a circle of rage that managed to attract five thousand other people in New York at the time, and they started one hell of a riot. It went over for I think like two three days.

Twenty people died and they called it an anatomy riot. And the reason it was an anatomy right, because they tried to find every dead body they could in the hospital, which they found a few, and they beat some doctors along the way, and then afterwards they went to the Medical College, and apparently word had gotten from the hospital to the Medical College x NA on the Oddies Bay, and they got rid of all of them, right and um.

So when they went and stormed the Medical college, they didn't find anything, and they're like, well, our rage is is not satiated, and what like a little known footnote to this whole thing. When they got to the Medical College, Alexander Hamilton was standing there. They all said, Alexander Hamilton, what are you doing here? He said, peace brothers, peace sisters, go back home. And they pushed his space out of the way and stormed the building pretty much. But again

they didn't find anything. So they found out that all the doctors and all the students were hiding out at the jail, and they're like, no jail can hold us. We're five thousand strong. There's a guy circulating in the middle, just filled with rage keeping us going. We're eating stuff from time to time to keep our energy up. It was a bad scene. They were literally shouting bring out your doctors. On mass in New York City in seventeen

bring out your doctors so we can kill them. This was the tone of the time, and this was not an isolated incident. There were like dozens of anatomy riots all over the United States back then. It's really very disturbing. It was kind of a thing and you guys did it too, but like we really did it, you know what I mean, like Texas style or something like that. All Right, So because all this was going on, um, it became pretty clear that people should take action um

on their own. If you're going to bury a family member, maybe you should take some steps to ensure that you, uh, they would be late to rest for eternity. Yeah, it was a very inventive time. It was a Georgian period. And I don't know why I said it, like that you have to the Georgian period some tea. I don't have any tea, so, uh, I don't have any gent. You can lie. I just covered my tooth on this mine.

That's your new thing. If you get your finger like stuck in there, it's happened, no now, but my daughter had her finger stuck. So this was a very inventive time. So they thought, let's come up with some ways to ensure this doesn't happen. Let's start kind of basically by just staggering sticks and things as we pile the dirt on the casket because again they're they're using wooden shovels. Yeah, let's just make it harder to dig up the body basically,

which is pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Another one was the mort stone, which was invented by a guy named mort Stone, and it was just basically like putting a huge rock on a grave and they're like, well, they'll never get into that grave, and they hadn't thought it through because all you have to do is dig around the stone and downward at an angle and you get to the grave. That's that not too bad. They actually still use more

stones every now and then today. Just a few years ago in two thousand thirteen on Treadworth Road, Terry and whoa, that's all right. We needed music for that way we did now where was I still don't know music too Weirdly, that was a weird ring tone, dude, I still don't know how to pronounce this as you do too, You do too, gluster cluster cluster bluster? Is that right? So we did our first show in Manchester, which apparently you're supposed to say murr because we said Gloucester. Now I

said it. You're being kind and like this audience had been going like this all night. Suddenly we're pointing and laughing, like they were townspeople in Springfield on the Simpsons and somebody had just pants us. It was like that, the biggest reaction anyone has ever gotten from a crowded Manchester we got and it was at our expense, pointing and laughing because we said gloud Chester, which is just so funny. And they moved to Scotland and they said it's close

on flem came up. Didn't point and laugh when they did it. So Treadworth wrote, cemetery and cluster, uh one, Miss Betty Brazil and Henry Brazil were buried together, and apparently the word had gotten around that they were They were buried with a lot of valuables, so um, someone tried to dig him up because the jewels down there. And I don't think they actually got finished at night.

So the sun started to rise and they put a recycling bend over the whole and said we're gonna come back later tonight, and that worked for a little while, but I don't think they got the body right. No, they worked for like ten minutes until the sun came fully upright and someone saw there was cling ben and said, someone just tried to rob this grave. In two thousand, still going on. So the next thing they invented was called the mork House. Uh, invented by a guy named

no Wrong. It was more stone again. Uh. This was basically just a mausoleum that you could not break into. It was heavy stone, and it was a place where you put your body where it was temporarily interred until it could find its final resting place right for like three weeks. Because that was the rule of thumb was it took about three weeks for a body to become unusable by an anatomist, and therefore it was out of danger of being stolen by a grave robber. And if

you had a mort house, most people said, impenetrable. Maybe I'm gonna guard it and be armed while I do. So. A lot of people stood watching cemeteries at this time, and as a result, cemeteries were places where there were a lot of shootouts between families standing watch and protecting graves and grave robbers who were so brazen that they wouldn't run, they'd shoot back. I'd be like, no, that's my body. Uh no, that's my aunt well, we're taking

your aunt. No you're not. And it would just go like that for a while, or they would get in shootouts with other family standing watch that they've mistaken for grave robbers, which happened a surprising amount of time. Yeah, graveyards, it wasn't a place to be back then at night. Uh, if you wanted to remain safe and alive. And it's still not so they had this. They had this other

thing called a set gun. It's been around since about the fifteenth century, and a set gun is basically, or in this case, a grave gun, a gun that you don't need to man um. You set it up or woman. Yeah, that's true. You had set it up on top of the of the grave and it could spin in a circle. It's like in a tripod. And it had a triangulated

trip wire. So if you're walking along with your wooden shovel and you go to steal a body, it would trip it and then this gun would just start randomly firing and his sorball and you would get and I quote the article we're working from, a grave robber who tripped the wire would get an ass full of musket ball. That's what I said. An arshal, excuse me, this is from the guy who capitalized the golden age of grave robbery.

Another version of that was, um, a shotgun inside the casket so they would pride open and look inside and literally get shotgunned in the face. And the best, if you were like a family who knew where they were doing, you put the shotgun in the in the corpse, which should be that's not what you want to see. When you get shot in the face of the shotgun, that's your last believe we were from America and then what does that mean? We got shotguns all over the past.

Another little enterprising idea was called the torpedo, the grave torpedo and the grave torpedo. And our same friend who said no, it's pronounced Bara Bara pointed this out to me after the show. He came up to me after the show and said, let me correct you guys on a few things, which I loved. Again he grab Chuck's beard, and uh, I just thought it was funny. It's called a grave torpedo because what it is is a land mine.

You would just go walking toward the grave and you'r you would be exploded, and which it makes you feel like bad for a second. Then you're like, oh wait, this is against grave. But he pointed out that the early torpedoes were really just mines and it just kind of got morphed eventually to be something that you would shoot out of a submarrate. So now it's a colloquialism torpedo,

the grave torpedo coming soon. So one of the things that somebody was inevitably going to hit on was, Yeah, it's all fine and good breaking into a grave, having a dig past six maybe around him more stone. I could possibly get a shotgun blast of the face from a shock um held by a corpse that I'm trying to steal. I'm getting shot at by the family members.

It's an honest day's work, but is it worth it? So, like I said, it's inevitable that somebody was eventually gonna be like, why don't I just murer somebody and sell their body. I don't have to deal with any of that other stuff. I just have to kill him. I'm robbing graves already, it's not a huge step to just

go ahead and murder somebody. And there were two guys in particular who were really famous for this kind of thing, for hitting upon this idea, and they were named William Burke and William Hare, or the two bills as we call them. Someone just wooed in the back. Yeah, you're not supposed to move those guys. You could maybe woo the Simon peg film, but we didn't reference that. So Burke and Hair they were born in an Ulster and uh, they immigrated to Edinburgh to work on the Union Canal.

And they met each other there and said, hey, are you a disgusting creep? I am too, I could sell, I could tell in your eyes. Let's pinky does be pinky swear buddies, And they stabbed each other in the back as forever, and uh, I think which one we're in? The boarding house? Hair owned the boarding house. Burke was a cobbler sometimes that right space there, that's right so here he was, he's working at the boarding house, and he said, I've got this guy living there named Old Donald.

He died, which happens to the guy's name, Old Donald's. Eventually it was a weird nickname when he was four years old, but now now he's living up to it. Old Donald died owing four pounds, and background Asy said, all right, here's what we'll do. I know, a good body can fetch some money these days. Let's find some other creep who's a doctor that we can sell it to. And they found a surgeon named Dr Robert Knox, who

I don't know. You've seen the picture of this guy, right, Have you guys ever heard of this guy, Dr Robert Knox. He is I think the um the archetype for the mad scientists, the creepy man scientists. Like there's one very famous like wood engraving of him. He's wearing like black leather gloves up to his elbow and those creepy sunglasses from the nineteenth century. It's like, what are you wearing

those four? Doc? Where are you hiding? And he was hiding plenty, believe me, right, So if you look at a picture of this guy, you're like, that's where that came from. And this guy was a real living guy who gained a reputation for being a ghoul eventually. And he was the man who was like, boys, I'll give you seven shillings, no, seven pounds, ten shillings for old Donald, and keep them coming. I don't care where they come from, just keep them coming. You see these sunglasses, I don't

care where you get them. I just see more bodies, and Birke and Harmer like that's great, We'll just go back to the boarding house and wait for somebody else to die. Is to set around for about like five six minutes, and they're like, oh, six A six days, very sick. Maybe we should just hasten six days death, six days the place where the person dying was living. And so they went in right. But on the other side, no, no,

this just starts there at six a. UM. So they went in and said six A. Good to see you here, some gin um. Just close your eyes while we do something real quick, okay, And one of them I don't know who did one. Well, all right, let's say we're working here. Okay. I would be the one to lay on the body to make sure it doesn't move. So I would just climb. I would lumber up on the body and just do this, show him, show him the tooth. That is not what you want to see, is you expected,

and wink knowingly you're about to die. And then I would come in and my job would be to close the nostril in the mouth, maybe say something reassuring like you sleep, now, get little jewel going and then that's how these people would die, which is a terrible, terrible way to go. And they became so prolific and well known for this eventually that this process of murdering people and actually murdering people for their body to sell it for dissection became known as burking. It's not what you

want named after you a method of murder. Now, if your last name becomes a verb for murder for anything, unless it's really great, well, yeah, sure, there's plenty of great things. Name one like somebody coming up to you on the street and giving you like a bunch of free candy, candying well, clarking that guy just Clark man, Oh, I love it when I get Clarke down this street. Realize you have to do that to make that happen. I'm going to do you have a new life mission

to make your last name a burb. I need to get my hands on candy. You do what do you call candy? Here? Sweets? Oh that's why they joke didn't go over quite as well. Now I understand, Like I just clarked me, he gave me some sweets, fries or chips? Chips are crisps? Candy? Is sweets. Pudding is all dessert, right, and pork pies, by the way, are the greatest thing you people have ever invented. You have some last higher right? Oh yeah, I can't get enough. Somebody clarked me with

some pork pies. Please, I'm dead serious. We'll wait, We'll wait while you go to the store. What's up with the pork pie hat? Is it shape like a pork pie? Now? I guess hopefully maybe like the pork it was? It was around within it folded in on the edges, and I think pork bye hat does that, so they might be it. Who cares? You can't eat a pork by hat? Well that's what you think. No, I'll try. I'm gonna go to hab it Asher tomorrow. I'm gonna inspect this firsthand.

All right, there's another money pinefone red friends? Have it? Really okay? I thought you would know where I was going with it, and they I have no idea. I just got lost. Where are we? All right? So they're barking people left and right. They killed about fifteen people at least in Edinburgh over a ten month period, and they got their girlfriends involved. They each found some nice ladies he said, are you are you creepy? Because we are.

And Burke hooked up with Helen and Hair hooked up with Margaret, and they started including them in their little game of death. And they said, here's what we'll do. We'll just go out to a bar and we'll find some old woman who loves Jim and loves gin and we'll just say, you know, have another drink, have another drink, and you know what, you know where we have lots of gin is at my boarding house. So just come

back with me late at night. And they apply these old ladies and old men with booze bringing back to the boarding house. I would lay on them, She's sleep. And it was. It was a cottage industry and things were going along swimmling for a while until they got a little greedy, as things go when there's money involved, and they started to Yeah, money and murder. I've seen the movie Shallow Grave. It's a bad combination. I know how that goes. So, uh, you guys haven't seen the

movie Shallow Grave or have you know? Oh, you see it. It's good. They're British people in it. So they started burking people who were actually a little well known in town, and Edinburgh wasn't the biggest city at the time, so people kind of knew one another, and they got in real trouble when they finally picked off this dude named Jamie who everybody knew in the town and it was bad news. Well, they didn't call him Jamie. They called

him daft Jamie. And today you would call him savant with autism Jamie, but they weren't quite as sensitive as we are today, so they called him daft Jamie. Yes, we've advanced since then. And Jamie was actually he was this very beloved figure in the town. Um. He would just kind of hang out in the downtown old town and people would say, hey, Jamie, here's a bunch of matches I just threw onto the ground. Can you count him real quick? And he would calculate it and they

would say that's amazing. Here was a port pie buddy, and he'd say thanks a lot. But he wasn't a bagger or anything like that. He just kind of hung out downtown. It was a fixture in town. His mother and his sister cared for him very well, and he was just beloved. So he ended up on Dr Knox's table and he was very recognizable, so much so that a colleague of Dr Knox is like, that's deaf Jamie. I didn't know he was sick. And Dr Knox is like,

first of all, it's savant with allaism Jamie. Secondly, no, it's not. And he started cutting the head off right then serious and like threw it out and they're like, no, it is def Jamie has a club foot, and Dr Knox started cutting off the club foot and then he said okay, let's begin a great new year and started cutting open jet def Jamie. Um. And that was not the only one. There were several other people that were recognized on the table. So Dr Knox kind of fell

under suspicion. But it wasn't that that that ultimately led to their undoing. They just grew more and more careless over time, and more and more suspicious of one another, so much so that um, it was Burke and Helen right. Burke and Helen said, Hair and Margaret, we think you're killing people without cutting us in. So I'm gonna go open my own boarding house so we can kill in peace Burke's house and murder that's what they called it.

And then they were like, oh, it's terrible, and they crossed out murder and wrote fun underneath, and they started attracting borders after that. So Burke's House with murdering fun is going on and tea and biscuits, and uh, they're drawing in people and they're killing people on their own as a duo, and uh, they're not very good at keeping things quiet. They're good at the killing part. It's

the covering up afterward partly. Secondly, at one point they had a body in the boarding house that they just covered up with straw and hay, and one of the other boarders was just kind of cruising through the house and they said, I've noticed that that big pile of hey has an arm coming out of it. It's a little weird and I'm gonna go call the cops. And they said, no, don't do that. Here's what we'll do. And here's what we're doing. Let's give you a little dough.

We're selling these bodies. It's for medicine, and we'll we'll cut you in on this deal as long as you promised to not go to the police. And the lady backed slowly out of the room and said, sure, that sounds great. Just write a check and leave it under my door and I'll be back soon. I have to go and mail something because the sames dot com was an inventor, right, so she went right to the costs and the Lord Advocate I wish. So the Lord Advocate in the charge of Hair's case said, you know what,

I'm gonna give you immunity. Here's a big offer if you will turn King's witness against your pal Burke. And Uh, Hair quickly accepted and I don't think the words were out of his mouth. He said, Hurt, I'm on board. I will testify against him. And that's what he did. And to this day, of the four including girlfriends, only one was actually tried and Uh hanged. Hanged, just Burke, yep. And he was a very hated figure, as you can imagine. I think twenty thousand people showed up for his hanging.

His hanging and no, it's just hanging. And um when he was hanged, Uh, afterward they gave his body to the University of Edinburgh for a dissection. Yeah, cruel, irony, and forty people turned out to see his dissected body. Actually again they just lift into the organs out everyone. So here after a few years he kind of tried to disappear, as you do when you're a creepy ghoul.

And um, he went to work at a lime quarry and the dudes that he worked with found out who he was, and kind of a mob justice took over and they shoved him into the lime quarry. He was blinded for the rest of his life. And we don't we don't know if he was like blinded from the line or they threw him into the corny like landed on his eyes on sharp rocks, but either way he was blinded. He was blinded by the line, you don't know.

And then he actually eventually moved to the streets of London, which is what you do when you're blinded for life, when you're trying to reinvent yourself. And uh, doctor Knox as well, even he was ruined in Scotland and he moved to the streets of London to try and pick up his medical profession, which he did with pretty poor results. But he did write a very well received book on fishing. It's not a joke. I know it's true, it's hilarious, but it's not a joke. All right, So people are

being killed, people are digging up bodies. There's anatomy murder. Years before Birke in here, I think like a decade before, there was a guy named Thomas Wakefield who was a surgeon in the publisher of the Lancet, a great medical journal that we use is still around today. We're coming for us. So he was a publisher of the Lancet, and he said, this anatomy murder is going on. This is like an eight twenty. And he said everyone should be afraid because there are dudes out there that will

kill you just to sell your body. Uh, And so be be very afraid. And there are a lot of surgeons too who were fairly liberal minded, who are saying, we need better laws than what we have now. We need more bodies because people are robbing graves, people are murdering for these bodies. There's this huge demand that's being fulfilled and terribly illicit ways. We have to get better laws.

But the problem is these surgeons, as prominent as they were, were in this weird position where they look like ghoules, like can we have some more bodies? Bleeds? These just delivering them fresh to our door. So anytime they were challenged they would back off. Very quickly because they all had stolen bodies back in their in their labs right, So the status quo remained the same until Burke and Hair came out and you guys, actually you should be very proud you had your own group of Burker's here

in London. They were known as the Lon and Burger Trio. And they killed a bunch of people, uh what came to be called anatomy murder or burking um. And the one that undid them was they killed a fourteen year old boy who had recently emigrated from Italy, and they delivered him to I think Guy's hospital. And the porter at Guy's hospital said, that's pretty weird. We don't usually get warm dead bodies delivered to us. It seems a

little sloppy. Maybe I should follow up. So he took the boy to one of the anatomists and said, what do you think about this? The anatomist said, well, I think this boy's neck was broken about forty five minutes ago. It's probably murder. So luckily the porter knew who had delivered the body, and the cops found the guys. They were hanging themselves in between the Burger Trio and Burking hair before them, that the public's eyes were finally totally

open to this. There was no avoiding this any longer. Like people were being murdered to supply bodies for anatomists, and they didn't know who to blame, Like there were some anatomists who were convicted of dissecting cadavers. But for the most part, people I think got that maybe the law is a little weird right now, you know, maybe we have this weird prohibition that we should rethink. Parliament sort this out. And Parliament did, actually exactly who do

you turn to? So the House of Comment gets involved, they get things done, and the whole hearings and they said, here's what we'll do. Let's get some of these resurrectionists and they'll trot them up. Let's give him immunity and say you can if you testify, get away scott free. And they're like, oh, you mean immunity. What'd I say?

You said immunity, okay, and uh, they trotted him out and they toward the told these sort of tales of digging up bodies, and it was very salacious in the news and everybody was like, yeah, the public was very interested.

And then tell us more and then they got surgeons and they said, well, let's hear from you, and they talked about the need for cadavers, and it was kind of a big deal because you know, everyone wants to live longer, and in order to do that, we need to cut people open still, so it's like a double edged sword. It totally was. So finally Parliament said, all right,

here's what we'll do. We're gonna take action. Just picture me in a powdered wig and and it'll allow makes sense, which is hilarious by the way, every every couple of months chuckles, just walk into the studio wearing a powdered way. I'm like, it's a powdered wig day. The Parliament says, here's we're gonna do. We're gonna provide some legitimate bodies

by passing the Anatomy Act of two. It's a very big deal because right out of the gate, on paper, at least, it got rid of the black market on cadavers because it said anyone who has legal possession of a dead body, um, and the body is dead. Uh, the body never said while they were living that they didn't want to be dissected, and no spouse or family

members saying you can't cut open that dead body. You can take that body down to your local anatomists and say, here you go, just roll them up the steps, walk away, and they'll cut them upen for you. Right, And this was really radical. It really flew in the face of the sentiment at the time, because again, remember the Murder Acts of seventeen fifty one said not only are we gonna hang you for being a murderer, we're gonna dissect

you afterwards. That's how disgusting we think you are. And that really took kind of an unspoken social stigma and codified it. And this went a long way to undoing the damage that the Murder Acts had done. As far as the public view of dissection. The problem is is if you were wealthy your middle class at the time, you weren't exactly running out and saying like, yes, dissect me,

dissect me. And the whole problem with with the idea of being dissected is that at the time you thought that when judgment day came and you were in your grave and God stood you up and you're just standing there like, what do you think, huh, Well, it wasn't so bad, right, God would look you up and down and be like you look all right, you can come in. But if you saw that you were missing your eyes, maybe your guts, or you were just an articulated skelty,

but like you look terrible, laid back down. And that was the sentiment behind not being dissected at the time. So the the Anatomy Act kind of governmentalized this idea that no dissections. Actually, okay, forget your religious beliefs, just listen to us Parliament, and it actually kind of worked.

But at the same time, what it really did and what it was criticized for, was that it put the burden of supplying cadavers to science onto the poor, which is kind of already the process, but in this sense, it really kind of codified the whole thing. Yeah, but like you said, it didn't make a difference. I think between eighteen thirty two and nineteen thirty two more than fifty seven thousand cadavers were legitimately donated to medical science and the United Kingdom alone, So it really made a

big impact. And science was advancing in medicine was advancing, so it wasn't to the close of the ninth teenth century that dissection really came to be accepted by the public, and people started to say, you know what, this is actually a good thing. Donating organs, donating bodies is something that we should kind of try and embrace a little bit more, right. Uh, And to this day, sadly, it's still kind of goes on in a weird way, right

it does. So Like if you go into an anatomy lab or medical school in the United States and you come across an articulated skeleton, those skeletons are mostly made up of individual bones that were stolen from rob graves in India, which means the U S outsourced grave robbing. Yeah, and it is currently outsourcing gray rowing. So uh. To finish up the show tonight, we and True Stuff you should know Fashion are going to do a top five robbed graves that only has four. I don't know why

we do that. One of them doesn't even count. Wow, that's true. But we're gonna start with a dude named Charlie Chaplin, very famous, born here in London, allegedly, that's right. Do you guys know that. I think they did. That's good. Uh, born in London, died on Christmas Day. Very sad because

he loved Christmas. He died in nineteen seventy seven, and just a few months later, in March of ninety Charlie Chaplin's grave was robbed, stole his body, called his wife, Lady Una Chaplin, and said I want four hundred thousand pounds for Charlie's body, and she said, nope, Charlie would have thought this rather ridiculous, was her quote. And they went, Oh, they went, I ever thought of that. No, don't hang up, hang up, I'm thinking to uh, we have Charlie Chaplin's body, now,

let me call you back. Pretty much. So there were multiple like staying operations at the cops would try to set up to try and catch these dudes. Ever worked out, They never showed up. They kind of chickened out, and eventually they realized that there was one phone call that they were supposed to make to the police, so they tapped the phone of Lady Una Chaplin and m staked out two hundred phone boots in the area and they

actually caught the guy's red handed. A couple of the mechanics, one of them had the best name I may have ever heard. Yeah, there were two guys, uh roman Wardists and Gancho Ganev. I want a horse named Ganto Ganev. One. Somebody clarked me a horse named Ganto Ganev Clark you a horse? Oh man, I love that term. Now I'm making it happen, baby, Why do you want a horse? I love horses, but a horse named Ganto it just fits like Ganto. Gonna have the horse. What's your horse's name?

Cancer Gonase? He was clarked to me in fact. So eventually they did catch these guys and they led him to Chaplin's remains, which were about ten miles from the original graveyard, and then they reburied Charlie Chaplin. And you'll see a thread here. When you rebury a body after it's been stolen, you tend to cover it with like seven or eight feet of cement on top. Pretty sensible. Yeah, So the next one, I personally don't think this one counts,

but we've included anyway, Abraham Lincoln. Have you guys ever heard of the president name Abraham Lincoln from where we live? He? Uh again, he was a president from where we live. Anyway, A B. Lincoln died and uh something like eleven I think eleven years later, some robbers attempted to break into his grave, and the robbers head a rat in their midst and the rat had told the cops that this is gonna happen. So the cops staked out the graveyard

waiting for the robbers. And apparently the cops were the Keystone Cops because one of their guns went off and alerted the robbers that they were there, and the robbers turned and ran and the Keystone cops like ran into each other and fell down, and it was weird, but it happened. And um, they didn't actually steal Lincoln's body, which is why I'm like, he shouldn't be on this list. What's sad is I actually made this one. I didn't

think it through clearly. Well, they got away for a little while, and after the robbery, his remains were reburied in the same mausoleum, but in the basement of the mausoleum, which which which? Do you know how rich you have to be for your mausoleum to have its own basement? It's like six rooms. Do you guys have basements here? Okay, all right, well fine, you can imagine that pretty rich. Wait, what do you call a basement here? A barsement, a basement,

bars do you call it a bars a basement? Actually in New England that's what they call it too. That's where we live. Well, it's north of where we live. Put in America, south of New England. What are you talking about? So they reburied him in the basement, and then eventually in nineteen one, his son, Robert Todd Lincoln said, you know what, let's take him up from down there and let's rebury him proper and put the steel cage over him and bolt that to the floor. Andy safe.

And they poured the man over him, which is what you do as customary. You see, So what do you want to hear? It was quite sure. So Gladys Hammond a lady, and this was recently you might have heard of this one. This is in two thousand four. Um, she was dug up and held for ransom, but not for money, but to get the family to stop experimenting on guinea pigs. They were raising guinea pigs and selling

them to medical science. And these animal rights activists stole hard body and help basically held her for ransom for this family to stop the family does and it worked while it works sort of, no, well it did works. The family, Um, the group of activists were called to save the new church guinea pigs, who you may have heard of, and have you guys heard of them? No, you haven't. They just thought it was funny. It's a

cute name, but they were dead serious. Yeah, so they still the body, hell it for ransom, and the family said, okay, fine, we'll get out of the business. We're not gonna breed guinea pigs for medical research anymore. We'll breed them to be dressed up like cowboys for children's parties. Surely you have no problem with that, the original purpose for guinea pigs. So so they actually did get out of the business.

And the people who robbed the grave and stole the woman's body, the family member's body, didn't give it back. They just never got back in touch. They were like, we moved on to Wales now, we don't care about guinea pigs anymore. So it took eighteen months before they finally caught these people and said where's the body And they're like, oh, she's in some heathland. That's it. What's a heathland country? No, no, heathland. Is it a more? Yes, it's a more? What's a more? I think there's quicksand

on the moors. Isn't there boggy area? A field? Is it a field? Why did we feel the need to rename everything? Those are great? We renamed it. These kids were here first. No, that's what I'm saying. Oh we yeah, wells are a wonderful words. Heathland is beautiful. We don't know what it is, but it sounds great. Stupid Americans. Uh. So we're gonna finish up the list with Joseph Findon.

By the way, we we have a microphone right there after this, we're gonna have about ten or fifteen minutes left to do a little Q and A. If anyone has any questions, you can do so. If you don't, you can leave. If you have to pee, you can leave. It won't hurt our feelings. We understand. We both have the pe right now to speak to yourself. Uh. I have to pete totally. Uh. And we're gonna finish up with Joseph Hyden Franz Joseph Hyden, very famous Austrian classical

composer and uh he died. This was during the phrenology movement. We've talked a little bit about phrenology on the show. This is when you thought that you could look at a human skull and really tell a lot about the person and about where the smarts were and where the genius was. Perhaps, so it was a big deal to get your hands on the skull of someone like Hayden. So they went to the grave digger and they said, we'll give you some money if you cut off his

head and give it to us. And the grave digger said, you had me at money pretty much. Uh So he did so, and he gave him the head and they macerated the skull, which means you make the rest of the head disappear through magic until you're just left with a skull maceration. It's not magic though, pretty much, just so good the liquid it's really gross. Eventually everything goes

away but the skull, which is what you want. And the dudes Joseph Rosenbaum and Johann Peter looked at the skull and said, oh my gosh, when you look at this, look at the musical bump on that skull. And the other one was like, wait, wait, wait, it's you say musical bump. He made that up just now, it didn't I think, yeah, totally. But it's gonna stick. I think it's probably just a deformatal pump. It's hide, and of course he is a musical pump. So they had the skull,

and they weren't too shy about keeping it quiet. They went one of them even for a little while, kept it in his home. They would have dinner parties and it was hiding skull and he kept it in a glass case like musical notes and compositions and like an ink and pill and ink and pill, quill and pin and uh. It was prominently displayed. And then the cops eventually he found out about this. Well, somebody went to go reberry Hyden because he wanted to be moved to

the family flat. Right. Yeah, he died during wartime and it was kind of hastily buried, and in a couple of decades later they finally went to rebury him. And when they did, they were like, I didn't know Hiden didn't have a head you had last time I saw him. So they go and they someone says, you know what, I totally knew who has his skull Because they're not too shy about it. It's over at the Sky's House, over at Rosenbombs. So they go over to Roasta Balm's house.

This is really awful. His plan was to hide it in the mattress to get his wife to lay on the bed and tell the cops that she's menstruating, and the cops were like blo blah blah blah, and they like all just ran out of the house pretty much, did you keep your skull? That's basically out went down, and uh again, we've come a long way since then, and the skull was eventually reunited. Well, they gave them

a fake skull at the time. Here's his skull. They knew the jig was up, but they really really wanted Hyden skool. Yeah, so they gave him a fake. They reburied that with Hyden thinking it was hide and skull. And then years later, in nineteen fifty four, in fact, not that long ago. Uh well, sort of a long time ago, but not on the grand scheme of things,

they eventually find Hyden's real skull and rebury it. But they didn't know what to do with the old skull so to this day, not even not only that, I don't think it was that they didn't know what to do. I think they took the Hyden's actual skull into his tomb, set it down. I went to go shut the door and turned around, was like, oh right, which one was? Which one is the musical bump which? And then they said, forget it, let's just bury both of them. Pretty much

so to this day Hyden Skull is still buried. His grave still has two skulls buried in the same grave. If you went and dug it up today, it's very little known fact. So that is grave robbing. And that is the end of our show. Yes, M you know what. Thank you for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? M