by Tony Locke
The Irish branch was founded in Dublin in 1735 by the Earl of Rosse, 1st Grand Master of the Irish Freemasons, a position he held twice. However, upon inheriting £1 million from his grandmother, he resigned his position. He then did what most well-to-do young men did at that time: the Grand Tour. Europe and Egypt and all their mysteries fell open to him and he began to further his interest in the ‘dark arts’, quickly making a name for himself as a ‘sorcerer and a practitioner of black magic’.
In 1735, he emerged on the Irish social scene and founded the Hellfire Club. The details of what the members got up to are still open to conjecture but the rumours would make you shiver. It was even said that servants were doused in brandy and set alight. Some said black cats and even dwarves were sacrificed on an altar.
Lord Rosse never lost his sense of humour. In 1741, as he lay dying at his house on Molesworth Street, he received a letter from Dean Madden, the vicar of St Anne’s, lambasting him as a blasphemer, scoundrel, gambler, etc., and imploring him to repent of his sins without delay. Noting that the dean simply addressed the letter to ‘My Lord’, Rosse put the letter into a fresh envelope and instructed a footman to deliver it to Lord Kildare, who lived at nearby Leinster House. The ruse worked and Lord Kildare, one of Dean Madden’s most pious and generous parishioners, was mortified to think the letter was addressed to him. Lord Rosse died before anybody discovered his deceit and was probably laughing as he drew his last breath. The Hellfire Club disbanded following his death.
What follows are a few stories that concern a couple of Hellfire Club members.
DARKEY KELLY
Darkey Kelly was burned as a ‘witch’ 250 years ago, but was really a serial killer.
Darkey Kelly, whose real name was Dorcas Kelly, ran a brothel in Copper Alley, off Fishamble Street. She was supposed to have become pregnant with the child of the city sheriff and member of the Hellfire Club Simon Luttrell (Lord Carhampton) and she demanded he support her financially. Folklore suggests that he responded to her demands by accusing her of witchcraft and sacrificing her baby in a satanic ritual. The baby’s body was never found. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. She was partially hanged and then burned at the stake in a public execution on Baggot Street in Dublin. The date was 7 January 1761.
However, it has been suggested that the real reason for her execution was murder. She was actually accused of the murder of John Dowling, a shoemaker. Those investigating the murder found the bodies of five other men hidden in the brothel. Reports of rioting in Copper Alley by prostitutes were recorded after her execution. She may even be Dublin’s first female serial killer. It has been said that in eighteenth-century Ireland women were second-class citizens. This was reflected in the manner in which they were executed. Men found guilty of murder were simply hanged whereas women were first half-throttled then cut down and burnt alive.
In the 1780s Simon Luttrell’s son Henry, who also had the title Lord Carhampton, was in the news. He was accused of raping a young teenage girl in a brothel (like father, like son). The girl was supplied to him by the brothel keeper, Maria Llewellyn. By a strange twist of fate, Llewellyn was the sister of Darkey Kelly. Henry Luttrell had the young girl and her parents imprisoned. The girl’s mother died in prison. Luttrell’s charges against the girl and her family were later dismissed in court.
Simon Luttrell was created Baron Irnham (of Ireland) in 1768 and Earl of Carhampton in 1785. After the usual fashion of satirising any unpopular character, the first Lord Irnham was woven into a satirical ballad, in which the devil is represented as summoning before him those who had the strongest claim to succeed him as king of hell. Irnham, the base, the cruel and the proud, eagerly cried, ‘I boast superior claim to hell’s dark throne; Irnham is my name.’
LORD SANTRY
The Lord Santry Trial chronicles events that took place in eighteenth-century Dublin at the Hellfire Club. The club had acquired the name, ‘The Devil’s Kitchen’, and its members were called ‘bucks’. They were often the bored sons of the aristocracy who engaged in drunken sexual orgies. One of the leading lights of the Hellfire Club was Lord Santry, an infamous 29-year-old aristocrat. He caused outrage when he stabbed a servant named Laughlin Murphy to death with his sword.
Following the incident, Santry simply tossed the landlord of the tavern where the incident had occurred a coin and implied that the whole thing was better hushed up. However, that didn’t happen. Santry was tried for the death of Murphy and found guilty by his peers, causing a major scandal in those times. However, Santry never went to the scaffold. He was awarded a full pardon thanks to the Duke of Devonshire, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who had been largely responsible for petitioning King George II.
If Santry had gone to meet his death, he would have been beheaded. Instead he continued living his rakish life. He was attainted, which meant he had to forgo his estate, but it was returned to him after the pardon in 1740. A year after his pardon, Santry travelled to see George II in person and thanked him face to face. On Lord Santry’s death his title became extinct.
THE BLACK CAT OF KILLAKEE
In the early 1960s, workmen renovating a derelict eighteenth-century farmhouse near the notorious Hellfire Club in Rathfarnham witnessed strange phenomena culminating in the appearance of a gigantic black cat. Artist Tom McAssey, who was helping to convert the house into an arts centre, said the temperature in the old ballroom plummeted suddenly and a locked door swung open, revealing a hideous black cat with blazing red eyes. Afterwards the house was exorcised and no sightings were reported for several years. Then in 1969, a group of actors staying at the centre held a mock séance and apparently invoked the spirits of two women. The women had assisted at the Hellfire Club’s satanic rituals, during which black cats were worshipped and sacrificed. The arts centre was replaced with Killakee House, in which a portrait of the hellish cat painted by Tom McAssey glowered down upon brave diners. The house was demolished in 1947.
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THE IRISH RESURRECTION MEN
NATIONWIDE
Not that long ago, we had a certain class of criminal who preyed upon the dead. In some parts of the world such criminals still carry out their macabre trade. Thankfully it is no longer the case in Ireland, but at one time their name would cause fear to many grieving families. They were the Irish resurrection men.
Body snatching was a morbid way of making money. In the nineteenth century body snatching was a lucrative business for those who chose it as a profession. The resurrection men robbed the graves of the recently deceased and sold their corpses to medical schools. It became so common that it was not unusual for relatives and friends of the deceased to watch over the grave after the burial to stop it being violated. Iron coffins were also used and sometimes graves were protected by iron railings known as mortsafes. They came in a variety of different designs and sizes and could be reused after six to eight weeks.
One method the body snatchers used was to dig at the head end of a recent burial, using a wooden spade (quieter than metal). When they reached the coffin (graves used to be quite shallow), they broke open the coffin, put a rope around the corpse and dragged it out.
Another method used by the grave robbers was to remove a square of grass about twenty feet away from the head of the grave. They would then tunnel down (about four feet) to intercept the coffin. A small boy would be employed to crawl down the tunnel and the end of the coffin would then be pulled off. He would place a noose around the neck of the corpse and it would be pulled up slowly through the tunnel. The square of grass would then be replaced and no one would be any the wiser. This method was used if the grave was protected by an iron cage or railings as it allowed the grave robbers access without disturbing the actual area of the grave site.
During 1827 and 1828 William Burke and William Hare took bodysnatching one step further. They began to murder people in order to keep up with the demand for fresh corpses from the medical profession. This was to lead to the passage of the Anatomy Act o
f 1832. Burke and Hare were both from Ulster and had gone to Edinburgh in Scotland to work as navigational engineers, or ‘navvies’, on the New Union Canal. This they did during the day but at night they took to their other more sinister and profitable trade: grave robbing, at first, and later murder. Their victims were usually those who wouldn’t be missed: the homeless, orphans, travellers. Soon they began to target drunks and others who roamed the dark streets at night. They would follow them and then strangle them when they got the chance, thus ensuring an undamaged corpse.
Another Irish connection led to the eventual end of these gruesome activities. Mrs Docherty had recently arrived from Ireland. Burke met her in a local shop and befriended her. He invited her home to his lodgings for a bite to eat and it was there he murdered her. It was believed that Burke and Hare murdered up to thirty people, but Burke was the only one prosecuted
Hare turned ‘king’s evidence’ and appeared as a witness for the prosecution when Burke was tried for the murder of Mrs Docherty. On his testimony, Burke was found guilty and was hanged on 28 January 1829. Hare was reported to have died a penniless pauper in London in 1858. The final twist in the story was that Burke’s body was donated to medical science for dissection and his skeleton is still displayed in Edinburgh’s University Medical School. His skin was used to make a wallet and this is displayed at the Police Museum in Edinburgh.
In Ireland, the medical schools of Dublin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were constantly looking for new corpses. The Bully’s Acre, or Hospital Fields, at Kilmainham was a rich source of new corpses as it was a communal burial ground and easily accessed. Soldiers attached to the nearby Royal Hospital were always on the alert for grave robbers, mainly because many of their comrades were buried there. In November 1825 a sentry captured Thomas Tuite, a known resurrectionist, in possession of five bodies. When searched, his pockets were found to be full of teeth – in those days a set of teeth fetched £1.
Many other graveyards were targets of the medical students or those who made robbing graves their profession. The largest cemetery in Ireland – Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, which was laid out in the eighteenth century – had a high wall with strategically placed watchtowers, as well as bloodhounds, to deter body snatchers. Even as late as 1853, a pack of Cuban bloodhounds was on patrol in Glasnevin cemetery.
Dublin’s proximity to the sea meant that Irish corpses were exported to England and Scotland in barrels and crates so they could be sold to their medical schools.
Once corpses were dug up they were stripped of everything and just the body was taken. The reason for this was that if you took anything from the corpse it was considered a theft. The government tended to turn a blind eye to grave robbing as it was seen as a way of advancing medical science. The corpse would be placed on a cart and hauled away. Some of the body snatchers would wrap cloth around the horse’s hoofs to muffle the noise and some would put an old coat on the corpse and walk it out of the graveyard, pretending it was a drunken friend.
A full-size display of the techniques used by body snatchers can be found in the museum at Glasnevin Cemetery, now calling itself ‘Ireland’s Necropolis’. As you descend into the basement, aptly named ‘The City of the Dead’, you will see many exhibits illustrating this macabre trade in the dead.
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MARGORIE MCCALL
COUNTY ARMAGH
One of the hazards of grave robbing was finding corpses that showed evidence of having been buried alive. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cholera was rife. It left its victims looking wasted and lifeless. So many sufferers were buried alive that it was the subject of a painting by Antoine Wiertz, a contemporary of Edgar Allen Poe. However, accounts of live burial have been recorded throughout history. In the thirteenth century the philosopher John Duns Scotus was reportedly found outside his coffin with his hands torn and bloody after attempting to escape.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘The Premature Burial’, which was published in 1844. It contained accounts of supposedly genuine cases of premature burial, as well as detailing the narrator’s own perception of interment while still alive.
The general fear of premature burial led to the invention of many safety devices which could be incorporated into coffins. Many of the designs were patented during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and variations on the idea can still be found today. Most consisted of some way of communicating with the outside world, such as a cord attached to a bell that the interred person could ring should he or she revive after the burial. A safety coffin of this type appears in the 1979 film The First Great Train Robbery. I wonder if this is where the old saying ‘Saved by the bell’ came from?
Some designs included ladders, escape hatches and even feeding tubes, but many neglected to think of the need for fresh air.
The first recorded safety coffin was constructed for Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick before his death in 1792. He had a window installed to allow light in, an air tube to provide a supply of fresh air and instead of having the lid nailed down he had a lock fitted. In a special pocket of his shroud he had two keys, one for the coffin lid and a second for the tomb door.
In 1995 a modern safety coffin was patented by Fabrizio Caselli. His design included an emergency alarm, intercom system, a torch, breathing apparatus and both a heart monitor and stimulator.
If you get the chance to visit Dublin and have a few hours to spare then you could pay a visit to Mount Jerome. This nineteenth-century cemetery has a fantastic atmosphere and contains the graves of Sheridan Le Fanu (writer of gothic novels, including one about a female vampire), Oscar Wilde’s father, Bram Stoker’s father and, most recently, the Dublin gangster known as the ‘General’. Wander around the older part of the cemetery and you will see Greco-Roman temples, angels, urns and a fantastic variety of monuments to those buried there. The Victorians certainly took death seriously.
Have a look at the Harvie memorial; on top of the granite tomb you will see the figure of a grieving dog standing on a cloak. He is howling at the moon, crying out for his master who died by drowning. Later, when the dog died, he was buried in the tomb with his master. Another interesting tomb that brings us back to the fear of being buried alive is the Gresham tomb. It’s a large, flat-top, pyramid-style structure made of granite. The cast-iron door bears the family name and coat of arms. The lady buried within had a terrible fear of being buried alive. There is a chain leading from the coffin to a bell on the top of the tomb, which would allow the occupant to raise the alarm if she woke up. Just in case no one was around to hear the bell she also had her coffin constructed with a spring-loaded mechanism that would allow her to escape from within.
Despite the fear of burial while still alive, there are no documented cases of anybody being saved by a safety coffin.
The fear of being buried alive is as old as the hills. Famous bards, such as Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe, have written grisly stories on the subject – macabre tales of grave robbers opening coffins only to find that the people within had been buried alive; contorted, petrified bodies of poor unfortunates who, upon waking, found themselves trapped in a box, doomed to die a horrific death. Here follows the story of one such woman …
Margorie McCall was married to a doctor and the couple lived in Lurgan, County Armagh. They were very happy and content with their lot in life. Unfortunately Margorie became ill and even though her husband was a doctor, he was extremely worried. This was the early 1700s and medical science was not what it is today and simple illnesses could prove fatal. Sadly poor Margorie was to succumb to her fever. She passed away and she was buried in Shankhill Church of Ireland cemetery, not far from where they lived in Church Place. Her burial was a speedy one for at that time fever was feared as it was known to spread. This should have been the end of the story.
Margorie was buried wearing a beautiful gold wedding ring. Her husband could not remove it from her finger as her fingers had swollen since her death. People talked of the buried treasure and the
resurrection men were listening. Here was a chance to make some easy money; they could sell the body and the ring. That evening, before the earth she had been buried in had time to settle on poor Margorie’s coffin, the boys paid her grave a visit. In the cemetery they worked under cover of darkness, digging down silently until they heard the scrape of the spades upon the lid of her box. They reached down and prised off the lid.
They saw the glitter of gold upon her finger. They attempted to remove the ring, it would not budge. Well, times were hard and money was as tight as that ring, so they decided they were not about to let such a prize go so easily. She was dead already so she wouldn’t need her finger, would she? It was agreed that they would cut off the finger to free the ring.
Unfortunately for them, the shock of the knife slicing through her finger was just what she needed to wake her up from the catatonic state she had been in. She sat up, eyes wide, and screamed like a banshee. Some say that one of the body snatchers had a heart attack and dropped dead on the spot while others say they took off like the devil himself was after them, never to be seen again. They were even reported to have given up their rather profitable trade. Margorie rose from her grave and began to stagger to her home nearby.
Back at the house her husband was talking to some relatives who had remained behind after the burial when he heard a bang at the door. He stood up, went to the door and opened it. There, as if in a scene from a horror film, stood his wife. She was still wearing her dirt-covered death shroud and she was dripping blood from where her finger had been severed. Some stories claim that he dropped dead from fright and was buried in the plot of ground his wife had recently vacated. The poor relatives are not mentioned and it’s unsure whether they were pleased to see her alive or upset to see him drop dead.