There's a place in Scotland that has dominated the landscape of my childhood, much as it does the skyline of the city of Edinburgh, having risen three hundred and fifty million years ago, long before such periods of time were expressed in our numbers, longer in fact, than some believe the age of the universe itself to be. Arthur's Seat sits today as a duel in the Scottish capital, having first arisen due to volcanic activity, then later been carved
by a glacier. It is, of course completely and utterly disinterested in the whims of humankind. Over the years, however, it has been gradually interwoven with many of its follies. Just a cursory glance at any map of its surface will reveal our attempts to tame it and claim it for our own names, tattooed across its steep crags and
valleys and the surrounding undulations of Holyrood Park. There on each and every day of the year, walkers can be found trapsing over Haggis, snow gutted Haddie or Hunter's Bog. On the southern edge, you'll find the wells o'weary, a former hub of folk life and tradition. It was there in the eighteenth century that many would come to socialize and wash their clothes, until those with the wealth to avoid such indignities declared that an improper site for a
royal park. And to the west the high ridges of Salisbury Crags, where many a duel was fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was here too, in seventeen seventy, at the foot of the crags, that relatives attempted to bury the body of Mungo Campbell, an excise officer who had committed suicide after being convicted of murdering a local earl. His burial was interrupted by a local mob angered by
the earl's death. Seizing the body, they proceeded to haul it to the top of the crags before throwing it back over the edge. Campbell's bashed and broken body was eventually gathered by his family and taken to be buried at sea. Turning up from Saint Margaret's Lock on the meadow bank side, you'll find yourself approaching Winnie Hill, also known as Fairy No an easy access point to those who lived nearby as it was for the five young boys who ventured onto the hill's northeast face one bright
summer's day in July eighteen thirty six. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McClane Smith. The boys had been out hunting rabbits on the hill, digging into burrows with their trowels, when one of them spotted something unusual in the side of a cliff, three slabs of slate that had clearly been arranged to hide something. Pulling the slabs away, the boys discovered a small cave behind no more than twelve
by eighteen inches, inside of which lay something very unusual. Indeed, Positioned neatly in rows across three shelves were seventeen small wooden boxes. Each were about four inches long and one and a half inches wide, and had been studded with tiny ornaments made from tin and put together with great care. Reaching into the hole, one of the boys pulled out a box and gave it a shake. There was something
inside it. Hurriedly ripping off the lid, the boy, who had been hoping for some kind of treasure, was disappointed to find only a small wooden figurine inside. The enigmatic figure cut from a single piece of wood, was dressed head to toe in cotton clothes with a striking face that had been delicately carved by its maker. Another box was grabbed and quickly emptied, only to reveal yet another
strange wooden figure inside. Dissatisfied with their find, the boys nonetheless grabbed as many as they could and spent the next few minutes throwing them at each other until they became bored and went back home, leaving the figures and the boxes lying broken and exposed under the afternoon sun. It was a few days later when the boys recounted to their schoolmaster, mister Ferguson, what they had found on
Arthur's seat. Intrigued by their description of the figurines, mister Ferguson, who was also an enthusiastic member of a local archeological society, headed up the hill at the first opportunity, grateful to find all the pieces just as the boys had left them, with some still resting inside the cave. It wasn't until Ferguson got all the boxes and figures home that he realized what it was he was looking at. They weren't
just wooden boxes. They were coffins, which would make each of the seventeen figures lying inside bodies of the dead. To this day, the precise meaning and purpose of this extraordinary discovery remains a mystery. Some at the time thought perhaps they had something to do with witchcraft, with even a local paper ascribing them to the infernal hags of Arthur's Seat. More recently, however, a new theory was proposed, with links to a story that began only a few
years before the miniature coffins were first discovered. The ship rocked and rolled about in the waves as any one who wasn't part of the crew crammed themselves into every conceivable space and cowered against the wind and the rain. Up on deck, twenty four year old William Burke sits huddled in a group, sipping whiskey, serenaded by the distress calls of all the cattle, sheep and pigs with whom
they were sharing their journey. It was the year eighteen eighteen, and due to a devastating post war recession, Burke, like everyone else on board, was traveling from Ireland to Glasgow in Scotland in search of work. Most would be hoping to take advantage of the Scottish harvests, where they could make anywhere between eight and twelvepence a day, the equivalent of about two pounds fifty to day, doing all the work that local workers wouldn't and at half the price.
Though mainly men aged between sixteen and thirty six, there were women too, who, like now could look forward to earning on average only eighty percent of what their male counterparts took home. Most followed the harvest as the season dictated, heading first to the border towns, then following the work northwards up to Glasgow, before eventually returning back to Ireland. Others, however, like Burke, might choose to stay on in search of
more regular work. By eighteen eighteen, having been demobbed from the army only a few years before, Burke had made this same trip a number of times, leaving behind his wife and children for months on end. That year, however, something had changed, either she had left him or Burke
had decided to cut ties. In any case, having got wind of a vast new construction job requiring labor the extension of a canal system into Edinburgh, Burke made his way to the capital city, starting at Port Hopetown in the west of the city, Burke, alongside countless others, worked on and off for four years, chipping away at earth and stone with nothing but bare hands, pigs and axes, and the occasional mound of gunpowder to help carve the
ambitious waterway from out of the land, With workers having to follow the progress of the canal sleeping by its banks at night in makeshift huts made from wood and straw. Burke soon found himself in Falkirk, a town some twenty five miles west of Edinburgh. It was here that he met Helen McDougall, with whom he struck up a relationship. Four years later, the canal was finished. With no reason to return to Ireland, William and Helen, now firmly in love,
returned to Edinburgh. To day, Edinburgh is a veritable tourist attraction, being the second most visited city in the United Kingdom. But like any city, Edinburgh is and has always been a tale of two halves, a state that had perhaps never been more pronounced than in the early eighteen hundreds, and as is often the case, it was in the most deprived areas that many immigrant communities were forced to
seek comfort and communality For William and Helen. That place was West Portsborough or Westport, the main thoroughfare of Portsborough, an area of Edinburgh's old town, tucked away under the southern shadows of Edinburgh Castle. It was a place described by a member of the local sanitary committee at the time as one of the most unclean and badly ventilated
areas in this or any adjacent country. It was, however, also one of the most vibrant parts of the city, with many of the cities monetarily poorest, buying for work and space crammed into vast, towering tenements, with some even reaching ten stories high, inside which you might find as many as forty eight families or one hundred and thirty eight people living, with rarely a fireplace between them or anywhere to boil water. Outbreaks of infectious diseases were commonplace.
Out on the street. Grocers, spirit sellers and textile traders sold their wares under the smog of the many tanneries, salt works and paper mills near by. Having found a lodging house, Burke and Madougall became hawkers, selling second hand goods throughout Westport and making do with what they had. In eighteen twenty seven, the pair traveled south to Pennicook to take on some harvesting work, where they came friends
with William Hare. Hare, who had also originally come over from Ireland, had spent the last few years in Edinburgh working as a coalman's assistant. During that time, he'd resided in a lodging house in Tanner's Close, a small business owned by Margaret Laird that was situated just off Westport. After being discovered having an affair with Margaret by her husband, Hare had been kicked out of the house, only to return soon after when Margaret's husband died due to reasons
that are not entirely clear. When the harvest was over, Hare suggested to Burke and Helen that they move in with him and Margaret. Margaret's lodging house, located at the bottom of Tanner's Close, consisted of two relatively large and roomy apartments with seven beds for lodgers, which were little more than a straw mattress and a blanket. The beds would go for as little as threepence a night, often with as many as three people sharing one at a time.
Occupants could range from any age, but most were itinerant workers, picking up jobs wherever they could find them. It was late in November eighteen twenty seven when Margaret noticed one morning that one of her guests, a man named Donald, had failed to get up from his bed. Donald had been suffering from what was then known as dropsy, an excess build up a fluid under the skin and in the cavities of the body. As Margaret soon discovered, Donald
was dead. Having made the necessary arrangements to have the body removed, Margaret had little choice but to leave it in the lodging house until it could be taken away the next day. To make matters worse, Donald had owed her four pounds before he died. That night. With Margaret stewed over the lost revenue, Hair stared at Donald's dead body from the dim light of a doorway, working an idea over in his head. When Burke returned home later
that night, Hair made him a proposition. It was widely known that the Surgical School of Edinburgh University, located only fifteen minutes walk from Tanner's Close, was one of the leading institutions of its kind in the world. In recent years, it had gained an especially vaunted reputation in the burgeoning field of anatomy, and as Hair also knew all too well, it was an industry that was in constant need of
fresh corpses to experiment on corpses like Donald's. The next day, Air and Burke watched carefully as a carpenter constructed a coffin preparation for Donald's body's extraction from the lodging house. After the carpenter had left, with the porter not due to take the coffin away for another hour, Hair took a chisel to the lid and carefully prized it open. Having removed the body, Hair and Burke hurriedly stuffed the coffin with leather, scraps and straw, before replacing the lid.
A short time later. With Donald's body carefully stashed away under a bed, Hair watched expectantly as the porter collected the coffin and took it away. That evening, the two men made the short journey along the Grass Market towards Surgeon's Square in search of doctor Alexander Munroe. At the time, Munroe was well installed as the university's professor of anatomy and medicine. The third in as many generations of Munroe's who had effectively had the position handed down to them.
In this capacity, Monroe was entitled to all the legally procured bodies offered to the university. However, since doctor Monroe wasn't in at the time, her and Burke were instructed to try doctor Robert Knox instead, whose offices were also on Surgeon's Square. Moments later, they were greeted by Knox's assistance, William Ferguson and Thomas Jones, who told the men to wait until it was dark before bringing them their body. That night, the pair threw Donald's corpse into a sack
and hawked it up to Surgeon's Square. Doctor Knox arrived soon after to examine it. Like many surgeons working and teaching at the university at the time, Knox was fiercely competitive and greatly frustrated by Monroe, who many felt was undeserving of his position. In response, he taken to setting up private classes students, which proved immensely profitable, just as long as he could keep a steady supply of bodies
to dissect for them. After taking a quick look at the one in front of him, Knox offered Hair and Burke seven pounds and ten shillings on the spot, with no questions, asked the equivalent of five hundred pounds today, or, to put it another way, what would ordinarily take the
pair the best part of two months to earn. Knox's assistant, Jones, duly counted out the money and handed it over to the pair, adding quickly as they left that the good doctor Knox would be grateful for any more should they ever happen to come across any And with that, the pair left the building and headed back to Westport. Are you always taking care of your family? Do you often take care of others and not yourself? Now it's time to take care of your self, to make time for you.
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Provided a body had died of natural causes and had not been buried, and there were no relatives or dependents interested in collecting it, it was more or less legal to sell it for medical studies. Most executed criminals or any who died in custody were also donated to the university, though there were many known as resurrectionists or body snatches that stalked the cemeteries at night, hunting for fresh flesh
to disinter and sell to the highest bidder. Contrary to popular belief, Hare and Burke were never that they were going to become something far worse. It was a number of months later, in February eighteen twenty eight, with the money from Donald's corpse, well and truly spent that Margaret Hare noticed another of her clients, Joseph Miller, had come
down with a bad fever. Surely, as she explained to her partner, it would only be a matter of time before he too would provide them with a fresh corpse for the good doctor Knox. But Miller clung on to life, and soon his infection was having a drastic impact on
Margaret's ability to attract more customers. Perhaps it was Hare who suggested that they might merely hasten what was already inevitable in any event, one night, having sold Burke on the idea too, Hair and his compatriot shuffled into Miller's bedroom As he tossed and turned feverish in his bed, unsure as to whether the two men that were now standing over him were real or just an ominous fever dream. Then Burke pulled a pillow from another bed and slowly,
forcefully brought it down over Miller's mouth. The man struggled frantically, but Hair was too strong, clambering on top of him and pinning down his arms, putting so much pressure on his lungs there wasn't even room to take a breath, and then he was stilled when Burke pulled the pillow away. Miller's face was frozen in a silent scream of terror, his eyes wide open and bloodshot, as a tiny spittle of blooded mucus collected in the corner of his mouth.
Perhaps things might have ended that night had they taken a different turn, and there was no doubt some apprehension in Hair and Burke as they stuffed Miller's body into a tea box and wheeled it all the way up to Surgeon's Square. When asked where the body, now stiff with rigor mortis, had come from, the men replied simply
that they had purchased it from relatives. Being only the second brought to in four months with obvious signs of illness, there was no reason to suspect otherwise, Such were the circumstances of the day. Hare and Burke had hit on a perverse logic that the bodies of the poor were worth far more dead than alive. Only days later they spied another opportunity when salt seller Abigail Simpson took a
bed at Margaret's lodging house. The men applied her with alcohol until she passed out on a bed, then employing the same technique, as they had to Joseph Miller they murdered her, She too would end up on doctor Knox's dissection table, and now they had a taste for it.
By late October eighteen twenty eight, Hare and Burke, with the apparent complicity of their partners Mark and Helen, had deposited a total of fifteen bodies with doctor Knox, each of them being placed on receipt in water or alcohol to draw out the blood, then kept in storage before
eventual dissection, the youngest being a boy of twelve. The boy had been lodging in Tanners Close with his grandmother when, after being informed that she had left without him, he was taken tenderly to a nearby bed by Burke and given some whiskey to forget his troubles. Not knowing that the body of his dead grandmother was in fact hidden under the very bed he was sitting on, the boy was then also murdered. Soon, however, suspicions would be raised
and Hare and Burke began to get sloppy. A young woman brought to Knox with no obvious signs of death, was believed by his assistant Ferguson to be someone called Mary Peterson, who'd only recently been released from a local asylum.
Though it was never confirmed, the rumors were that Ferguson might have even been romantically linked with Peterson prior to her murder, but since her identity was never confirmed, Ferguson had little choice but to work side by side the body of his possible lover as it was kept in storage, decomposing piece by piece each day, right in front of him. Then, in early October, Ferguson and his colleagues received another body from Here and Burke, which they immediately recognized as Jamie Wilson,
a popular character among the Westport community. Though not homeless and well looked after by his sister Janet, Wilson was prone to wandering the streets barefooted and entertaining passes by with his talent for naming the exact day of any date they could throw at him. But when Knox inspected the body later, he insisted that his assistance had been mistaken.
On hearing that Jamie Wilson had indeed been declared missing, Knox ordered his assistance to bring the body that Here and Burke had last delivered ahead of any others he had in storage. Doctor Knox then ordered its head and feet to be removed before he later used it in class. By October, now earning decent money, Burke and McDougall had moved out of Tanner's Close and into their own lodgings
a little further down the road. It was during this time that Helen's ex husband's daughter, Anne Gray, came to stay along with her husband James, and their newborn baby. Though Anne hadn't suspected anything at the time, having been told to clear out of the apartment. On the night of Halloween, she and James returned to find m'dougall and Burke, who had clearly had a late night in a strange move.
When Anne, who was smoking a pipe at the time, tried to collect some stockings for her child from behind a bed, Burke pushed her away, warning her that the pipe could set the bed on fire. When Burke went out soon after, m'dougall, for no apparent reason, decided to lie down on the bed until his return, while the son of another lodger of theirs, named John, sat watch
on a chair near by. When eventually m'dougall and John left the room for a moment, Anne stole in and searched the bed, recoiling in horror a moment later when she discovered a cold, limp body lying underneath it. Having informed her husband, Anne and James packed their bags immediately, and, despite McDougall's attempts to buy their silence, made their way straight to the nearest police station. With minutes, officers had arrested Burke and Medougal and would soon have William Hare
and Margaret Laired in custody, two accused of murder. The body the sixteenth of their victims was identified as Margaret Docherty, a middle aged woman who had come to Edinburgh from Donegal in search of her son, who had moved on from the city only three days before. She had arrived. With Hair and Burke in custody, the most notorious murder spree related to the city of Edinburgh had come to
an end. Incredibly, such was the carefully constructed method that Hare and Burke used to kill their victims, the police had no evidence with which to convict them. As such, prosecutors, following a well tried and tested method, selected one of the men at Brandam, in this case, William Hair, and offered him complete immunity from prosecution if he merely provided details of Docherty's murder and all the other murders they were suspected of. Unsurprisingly, Hair agreed in what's known as
turning state's evidence or in those days, king's evidence. Hair effectively became the single piece of evidence for the prosecution in a highly publicized trial which began on Christmas Eve in eighteen twenty eight. Despite at first pleading not guilty, William Burke eventually confessed to the killings, his account differing somewhatch from Hair's as both tried to heap the blame on each other. Many have since come to believe that
Hair was most likely the more dominant of the two. Nonetheless, Hair was duly exonerated in return for his earlier confession, while William Burke was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. Both Margaret Laird and Helen m'dougall were also released at the end of the trial and allowed to walk free, though both were later attacked by mobs. They were each given police protection, enabling them to return
to their homes, with Margaret eventually returning to Ireland. Nothing is known about what became of them after William Hare, assisted by the police left Edinburgh in a disguise and was given passage to the town of Dumfries. However, after being recognized by a fellow passenger, Hare was also attacked by a mob on arrival in Dumfries, before police were again forced to help him escape. He was last reported heading over the border to England, from where he was
never heard of again. For his part, doctor Robert Knox was effectively exonerated by Burke's confession and was not required to give any evidence in court. With his reputation tatters, however, with few believing he was unaware of the crimes, he was gradually excluded from academic life. After eventually finding work as a pathological anatomist in London, he died disgraced and debarred from the Royal Society of Surgeons in eighteen sixty two.
On the morning of January twenty ninth, eighteen twenty nine, William Burke was hung at Edinburgh's Lawnmarket in front of a crowd reported to be as big as twenty five thousand and three. Days later, his naked corpse was placed on an operating table in doctor Alexander Munro's anatomy theater, where it was dissected in front of hundreds of gleeful medical students. If you enjoy listening to Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now go to Unexplained
podcast dot com Forward Slash Support. All donations, matter how large or small, are massively appreciating. All elements of Unexplained are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or Twitter at
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