by Bob Curran
The carousing and whiskey-drinking at Burke’s house continued until well after midnight, but in the early hours of the morning, a man passing by the dwelling heard a woman screaming and shouting “murder!” several times. He ran to fetch a policeman but, finding none in the surrounding streets, he returned to find the house quiet. Assuming that he might have imagined it or that it was simply an argument that had now subsided, he went on about his business.
In the morning, the Grays returned to find Mary Docherty gone. Burke told them that she had left early that morning, which they found odd, because she had departed without saying goodbye. However, when Ann Gray went up to their room to fetch some woollen stockings, Burke ran after her and persuaded her not to go—he would fetch them himself. Similarly when she went past the back staircase to fetch some potatoes, Burke lingered at the foot of the steps. When he was gone, Ann slipped up and peered into their bedroom. In the bed she saw the body of an old woman whom she believed to be Mary Docherty, lying half-covered by blankets. She went down and confronted Helen MacDougal, who begged her not to say anything, because the body was worth 10 pounds to her and her partner, and she offered to share the money with the Grays. Ann was not convinced and revealed what she had seen to her husband James, who was outraged by MacDougal’s confession. The couple went to the police and informed them of what they knew.
By the time the constables arrived, however, the bed in the back room was empty. Two men, later identified as Burke and Hare, had been seen leaving the premises carrying a large tea chest between them. The police immediately took Burke and MacDougal into custody for questioning. Almost immediately a discrepancy began to emerge in their stories, although presumably both had compared notes. Burke said that Mary Docherty had left at 7 a.m., after spending the night in his house, whereas Helen MacDougal confidently stated that she had left at seven o’clock the previous evening and had not spent the night with them at all. This 12-hour discrepancy was enough to arouse police suspicions and they questioned the couple further. They also received a tipoff that took them to Dr. Robert Knox’s anatomy rooms, where they found the body of Mary Docherty stretched out on a table. Knox himself was unable to explain how it had got there, but, being an eminent surgeon, he was never charged—even as an accomplice.
Faced with this admittedly circumstantial evidence, the stories of Burke and MacDougal began to unravel. MacDougal claimed that she had never even met Mary Docherty, even though the Grays testified that they had seen the two women together; Burke claimed that a stranger (whom he later named as William Hare) had called with him to have boots mended and had been carrying a large tea chest. Hare was also brought in, and he seemed so nervous that the authorities were sure he was concealing something. Besides, his detention had begun to throw up a number of stories—how he had been seen with Daft Jamie Wilson and a couple of others who had disappeared. Moreover, some women’s clothing had been found at his house that clearly didn’t belong to his wife. At this point, the prostitute Janet Brown came forward and identified them as belonging to Mary Paterson who had finished up on the anatomists’ table.
Hare told police that Burke was the leader of the two men, and Hare was told that if he provided evidence and implicated Burke, he would receive a pardon. This he did, and Burke and Helen MacDougal were brought to trial at the end of 1828. Burke was found guilty, but MacDougal was released under the unique Scottish verdict of “not proven.” William Burke went to the scaffold in Edinburgh on January 28, 1829. By then most of the citizens of Edinburgh knew of his crimes, and the names Burke and Hare had passed into popular folklore. Many of those who had come to see him hang called for Hare and Dr. Robert Knox to join him on the scaffold.
William Hare himself was released from prison, where he’d been detained for his own safety, and eventually disappeared. He did not attempt to join his wife Margaret who may have fled to Ireland; Helen MacDougall, it was believed, took passage to Australia to avoid the wrath of the various mobs that regularly attacked Burke’s house. One story states that Hare was blinded by a mob in Carlisle (where he was last seen) and was finally reduced to begging on the streets of London. Dr. Robert Knox continued to lecture in anatomy, but he had been ruined by the scandal. Gradually, his classes began to diminish and he was the object of abuse by mobs. He was forced to apply for a post in the medical school, but was unsuccessful. He finished his days as a general doctor in a London hospital before dying in 1862.
The case of Burke and Hare became famous throughout Scotland, and, thanks to the printing presses, word of it even reached the shores of America. Writers painted the most lurid pictures of the two, often giving false or misleading accounts of their crimes. Some pamphlets that circulated shortly after Burke’s trial spoke of “half-strangled corpses” rising from the dissection table to the horror of the surgeons and onlookers. Others spoke of the Resurrectionists being surprised and terrified when the corpses they were seeking to exhume rose up in front of them in the style of Mrs. Constance Whitney, mentioned earlier. One pamphlet—The Terrible but Wonderful Revelation of the Crimes of the Resurrectionists Burke and Hare and Many Others—probably published anonymously some time in the 1830s, spoke of revived “corpses” rising from their coffins in dramatic style in order to thwart the best attempts of the sack-’em-ups. None of these accounts bore even the slightest scintilla of truth, but were generally accepted by most people. Burke and Hare were styled as “ghouls,” and even became equated with the corpses that they were said to “resurrect.” Their murders began to assume less importance than their ghostly reputations. Indeed, an old Edinburgh children’s skipping song of uncertain date and origin served to keep their names alive and linked them to Dr. Robert Knox:
Up the close and down the stair,
But an’ ben wi’ Burke and Hare,
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,
Knox is the boy that buys the beef.
American Grave-Robbing
In America, too, grave robbing had been implanted in the colonial consciousness. As early as 1655, a court in Rhode Island passed a law that stated: “If any person shall be accused of robbing any, if ye Corte (sic) shall be satisfied of ye probation of it, ye party or parties shall be fined or suffer corporall punishment or both.” The reason for digging up bodies in colonial America was, however, slightly different from that in the United Kingdom. There were no great anatomy schools in the early Colonies to which the Resurrectionists could sell the corpses, but there were other people: black magicians. This was demonstrated when, in 1662, the Massachusetts Assembly passed “An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits.” It included a section providing the death penalty for any person who “shall take up any dead man, woman or child out of his or her grave or any other place where the dead body resteth or the skin or bone or any other part of a dead person to be used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm or enchantment.” This was a response against a perceived growth of witchcraft in the colonies following the alleged outbreak at Salem. There was, however, a strong belief that elements from dead bodies could be used for necromantic practices—the summoning of evil spirits to inhabit cadavers and reanimate them with a kind of pseudo-life.
An anonymous pamphlet dated around the late 1670s, supposedly printed in Boston and entitled “A Wonderful Discoverie of Doubtful Magicks in the Village of Ipswich or The Heathen’s Purpose Discover’d” relates how Robert Rudd of Ipswich Village, Massachusetts, enlisted the aid on a “heathenish Indian conjurer” in order to restore life to his wife, who had predeceased him. Using a powder made from crushed human remains and Indian magic, he revived the woman “but briefly and without her wits,” but was brought before the courts for taking part in an act of witchcraft. Although he was found guilty, he was not executed, but rather confined to prison for a time “because he was old and had previously been of a good Christian character as many attested. And because he had been misled by an Indian.” Such stories would place the idea of the wal
king dead—in particular the Haitian zombie—at the forefront of American thinking and imagination.
Even up until the 20th century, the idea of “goofer dust,” made from the powdered remains of long-dead corpses, was common in many forms of American hill and mountain magic. It was said that the dust, which could be purchased from mountain wizards and granny women, could cure most ailments and restore the dead to life. This is a central theme in a series of pamphlets attributed to John George Hohman, who also wrote Der Lange Verborgene Freunde (The Long Lost Friend, published in Pennsylvania in 1820), a celebrated compendium of mountain magic, pow-wows, and hoodoos. In the realms of hill sorcery, the dead, it seemed, could also raise the dead.
Although it is true to say that early America did not boast anatomical schools on the grandiose level of Edinburgh with whom grave-robbers could trade their grisly wares, this didn’t mean that there were not prominent anatomists in a later period. William Shippen, Jr., of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for example, had studied under the celebrated English surgeon John Hunter; when he returned home in 1762, he instituted anatomical classes and lectures that continued until the Revolution in 1777. Similar to some of his predecessors Thomas Cadwalader, also in Philadelphia (1750), and John Bard and Peter Middleton in New York (1752), he drew his supply of corpses from the numbers of dead Indians who had been executed for various “crimes,” such as defending their property.
However, Shippen’s supply was sporadic, and often ran out; there was a suspicion that he was obtaining fresh supplies by digging them up from the Potter’s Field (a burying ground for the poor and destitute, and for those who had been infected with disease). His dissecting rooms were attacked several times by mobs that stoned the windows; when he went out his carriage was the target of a number of projectiles including several musket balls. However, nothing against him could be proven. Similar treatment was meted out to Dr. Jonathan Knight, who was the first professor of anatomy and physiology at the medical institution of Yale College. Knight had kept the body of a young woman in his cellar, lightly covered in soil and presumably for anatomical purposes. According to two letters written by the town constable, Erastus Osborn, following a search of Knight’s surgery in January 1824, the girl’s body had been found resting under a flagstone in the cellar in a hole that was about 3 feet deep and 2 feet in diameter. Knight quickly blamed one of his students, Ephria Colborn, basing his accusation on some gossip that he’d heard among the college assistants. Colborn was later arrested, charged, and convicted of grave robbery for the purposes of anatomical research. He was sentenced to nine months in jail with a fine of 300 pounds.
Although America never boasted the same organized bodysnatching that characterized the likes of Edinburgh and London, individual occurrences were to be found throughout several states from the early 1800s onward. The Revolutionary War had given up enough bodies, but even that bounteous supply was not inexhaustible. And although there were no established criminals gangs in the style of Ben Crouch or Israel Chapman, there were nevertheless groups of individuals who sporadically raided graves and raised the dead for their own purposes. In 1770, for example, a group of Harvard students founded the Anatomical Society and the Spunker Club; the objectives of the latter were to secure bodies for anatomical dissection by any available means. Their main client seems to have been a Professor Church, a lecturer in anatomy at Harvard.
And the idea of corpses in the use of black magic had not gone away either, even in the mid-19th century. In 1852, for instance, a ramshackle cabin, sometimes bearing the misspelled sign “Chemical Labaratary,” was to be found along the road that led from Cincinnati to Walnut Hills in Ohio. Locals tended to stay away from the place, and, when the police eventually raided the shack in response to complaints late in the year, they found that it had been used as a kind of a “factory” for the “preparation” of dead bodies and skeletons. In fact, parts from roughly 20 bodies were found—being used in the preparation of “goomer” (witchcraft) charms to relieve sickness or cast curses. Others were being sold to anatomists in Cincinnati itself. Although the hut itself was deserted (the inhabitants having fled), a number of dark robes and cloaks were found, and a number of “strange books” were also discovered, which in the eyes of Puritan Ohio were counted as “devil work.” It is not clear as to whether anybody was actually arrested for it, but the incident certainly gave Ohio anatomists an extremely bad name.
Indeed, of all the states, Ohio seems to have been a particularly fertile ground for certain Resurrectionists. This was largely due to the activities of one particular individual: the colorfully named “Old Cunny,” an Irishman of somewhat dubious ancestry. He made a moderate living selling freshly “resurrected” bodies to the Ohio Medical College. An extremely vindictive person, when some of the students played a trick on him, he slipped them a corpse that had died from smallpox, managing to fatally infect two or three of them with the disease.
Goomer Charms
Indeed, as the looting of individual graves increased slightly in the later 1800s, some rural communities and the families of deceased employed armed guards to keep watch near the graves of the recently departed. This followed a pattern that had already been established in the Old Countries, and reflected some of the horror with which ordinary people viewed the nocturnal activities of some of these “ghouls.” The atrocities of Resurrectionist Roderick Clow in Hoosick, New York, who sold his bodies to Dr. P.M. Armstrong, a noted dissectionist, prompted the relatives of Ruth Sharague (died 1846) to pen the following verses that later appeared on her tombstone:
Her body stolen by fiendish men,
Her bones anatomised,
Her soul we trust has risen to God,
Where few physicians rise
The notion of Resurrectionists formed a powerful figure in the psyche of the mid- to late-19th century, nearly everywhere in the West, even sporadically appearing in the literature of the period. The father of Jerry Cruncher for instance, who appears in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities dabbles in the gruesome business, as does Jerry himself, whereas the poet Robert Southey (1774–1843) refers to the practice in his poem “The Surgeon’s Warning.” He even goes into some detail on the activities of the sack-’em-ups and the money that they could command. But the greatest and most popular work on the subject came from the pen of Robert Louis Stevenson whose celebrated short story The Body Snatchers was a thinly veiled reference to the activities of Burke and Hare, and, Dr. Robert Knox in particular. The story became established in the minds of many readers, and the idea of corpses being torn from their graves or rising from some cataleptic trance sent a thrill of horror through the 19th-century mind. Add to this a widely read article that appeared in the London Magazine in 1827, attributed to a certain “L.R.,” which was entitled “The Pleasures of Body Snatching,” and the idea of the resurrected corpse was well emblazoned on the public mind. But there were other strands that made up the image of the returning corpse as well—among them were the half-hanged.
The Half-Hanged
Death by hanging was usually caused by the breaking of an individual’s neck after a sudden drop—in most circumstances using a rope noose tied about the throat. In some instances, however, and for one reason or another, the neck did not break, and the person was slowly strangled or suffocated to death. Sometimes the hanging failed altogether, and the individual was cut down still more or less alive. Because the sentence had been carried out, the failed hanging was counted as an “act of God”; these people could not be rehanged unless they or their families actually requested it. In medieval and early modern times, some hangmen pulled the legs of the hanging corpse to ensure that the neck broke immediately, but, as the law became more formalized (particularly in England), these men could have been charged with murder, so few attempted this merciful action. Those who were cut down were known as the “half-hanged,” and there were more of them than might be imagined. But escaping the rope in such a manner was perhaps not as great a fortune as it seemed.
In many cases, the blood supply to the brain had been interrupted by near strangulation, and a good number of those who were cut down were left mentally incapable, unable to resume normal lives. In the majority of cases, they had to be cared for, and, as one writer pointed out, it would have been far better for them had they actually been executed. The word half-hanged became a term of abuse or ridicule, denoting that the person concerned was mentally incompetent or had limited faculties.
In fact there were even a number of ribald songs, sung in public houses and taverns, concerning the half-hanged. For example, in 1728, Margaret Dixon was hanged in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket for the murder of her own child. The body was cut down and placed on a cart, which was then driven over the cobbled streets on the way to the mortuary. Halfway there, the hangman and the carter stopped at a tavern for a drink, and although they were inside having a refreshment, the “corpse” sat up to the astonishment and terror of those around. The jogging and bumping of the cart seemed to have revived Margaret, who had not been completely dead. She was taken home and after a few days had made an almost full recovery, although she was never quite the same. Her husband, however, had been declared a widower at the time of her execution and the two were forced, under Scottish law, to remarry. This story was the catalyst to a number of rather bawdy but extremely popular songs all across Scotland and beyond concerning “half-hangit Maggie Dixon” or “Half Hangit Meg.” But the notion of the hanged corpse rising from the mortuary cart had nevertheless left a terrified mark on the consciousness of the Edinburgh population. Nor was Margaret Dixon the only one of the “half-hanged” to be so celebrated.
In 1736, two murderers, Vernham and Harding, were publicly hanged at St. Michael’s Hill in Bristol. When cut down, both were found to be still alive. Vernham was taken to the house of a local surgeon, where he revived, rubbed his knees, and shook hands with several of those in attendance. He did not linger long, however, but died before the day was out. His partner, Joshua Harding, however, was also revived and remained in reasonable health for a number of years, becoming known as “Half-Hanged Harding.” He remained in the local Bridewell Prison where he became an object of curiosity, receiving many visitors, some of whom gave him money. But, similar to Maggie Dixon, he too was the victim of scurrilous and ribald rhyme.