With these relatively lax attitudes, families of the recently deceased had to take it upon themselves to keep watch of the burial sites of their loved ones.
Some families chose lead-weighted, steel and iron coffins to make an attempted body snatching too time-consuming. Some cemeteries employed night watchmen, some of whom used large dogs to detect intruders. The wealthiest could afford private watchmen and even wired alarms that would go off if the coffin was disturbed. This device could be placed in the casket before it was closed.
Any attempt to force the coffin open would release a spring that struck a percussion cap and set off a bomb. This would mean almost sure death to the unsuspecting grave robber. When a grave robbed of its corpse was discovered in a cemetery, it invariably set off tremendous anxiety among the loved ones of those who had relatives recently buried in that cemetery.
This frequently set off a round of grave openings to see if any other recently interred bodies had been robbed. Cincinnati was home to an infamous professional body snatcher named William Cunningham.
Cunningham was said to be notably fearless, even once returning to the same gravesite in which he had been caught digging. In that incident, when he was caught, his comrades fled the scene, but Cunningham willingly went with his captors, bought them a drink at a local tavern, and promised to leave the grave alone.
He was released and went directly back to the gravesite to finish his work. He was said to be able to exhume enough bodies to provide for the needs of an entire medical school. Cunningham was a heavy drinker and notably vindictive. He once gave human cadavers that had died of smallpox to some medical students simply because these same students had offended him. Cunningham was also fearless in the way he would transport his cadavers. If he expected to run into people, Cunningham would take the cadaver he had exhumed, dress it in fresh clothing, and sit it next to him in the wagon.
If he encountered any passers-by, Cunningham would talk to the cadaver to further normalize the situation. The late s saw American graverobbing reach its height. Instead, they found John Scott Harrison, hanging nude from a rope in a dark chute.
Washington Cemetery was also the site of a body snatching in Harriett F. Bellville died on Wednesday, January 5, after an illness of only a couple of days. The doctors had not been able to determine the cause of the illness before she died.
She was buried in Mt. Washington Cemetery on Saturday, January 8. The following Friday, her bereaved husband, James Bennett Bellville, paid a visit to her grave only to find the grave had been rifled and the body stolen.
Due to circumstantial evidence, the family concluded her body had been robbed the very night she was buried. Bellville had received an anonymous note telling him to go to the Ohio Medical College with the proper authorities to recover the body of his wife.
A chase similar to a Keystone Cops episode ensued with poor Mr. Throughout the s, body snatchers in the United States and England sold corpses to anatomists for medical dissections. The practitioners of this unsavory art came to be known as "resurrectionists. He was also, despite his political prestige, the victim of body snatchers. Body snatching was a problem at the time; doctors craved corpses for anatomy lessons, and it was not yet legal to use unclaimed bodies for dissection in Ohio.
Today, voluntary body-donation programs allow medical students to learn anatomical lessons from corpses. To protect Harrison's body, his family interred him in a heavy vault and covered the vault with soil mixed with large rocks.
But that didn't deter the resurrectionists. On the day of Harrison's funeral, mourners noticed that a nearby fresh grave that had contained the body of a man named Augustus Devin was empty. One of Harrison's sons was a friend of Devin's; he joined with a second friend and headed to Cincinnati's medical schools in search of the body. Instead, they found John Scott Harrison, hanging nude from a rope in a dark chute.
Harrison's body had been snatched, too. Devin's body was later found preserved in a vat of brine at the University of Michigan medical college.
Silent film icon Charlie Chaplin died in December Several months later, in March , his grave was found open, a pile of fresh earth piled next to the hole. According to a contemporary report by the Associated Press , Chaplin's entire coffin was missing, and drag marks in the grass suggested it had been dragged to a nearby alley and whisked away by truck.
At first, there was no hint as to who had stolen the famed body. Some speculated that crazy fans had stolen the body to repatriate it to Chaplin's native England. It took more than two months to discover the body snatchers — a Bulgarian and a Polish immigrant who demanded a ransom of , British pounds — equivalent to approximately 1.
Chaplin's widow had no interest in paying the ransom. A police spokesman told The Glasgow Herald : "For her, her husband was in heaven and in her heart, and nowhere else. In the larger scope of history, this is a very small thing. In the smaller scope of conscience, it may be the biggest thing we have ever done. In , new NAGPRA rules allowed for the repatriation of culturally unaffiliated remains as long as they were found on tribal lands.
That means bones that are thousands of years old—uniquely valuable in studying North American prehistory and human migration—could be taken from the scientific community and given to tribes that might not have a proven direct ancestral connection to the remains.
As vindication, she cites the case of Kennewick Man—the 8,year-old skeletal remains found in Washington State in A more recent case went all the way to the U. Supreme Court. Three scientists at the University of California sought to block the repatriation of a pair of 9,year-old skeletons—among the oldest ever found in the Americas.
The Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee, representing 12 tribes, filed a claim for the remains in , prompting a decade-long court battle that ended when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, allowing the decision of the lowers courts in favor of repatriation to stand.
I see so many of our younger bioarchaeologists who are just coming up who understand the issue. They are quite willing to work with Native Americans and many of them have been provided with more access than they ever imagined. Still, Gould wonders whether she will see the issue resolved in her lifetime. But that number represents less than 10 percent of all Native American remains in museum and federal collections. Why do we care so much about the rights of the dead, who, by virtue of their non-living status, have no apparent opinion on the matter?
Some academics portray the issue as one of religion versus science. Even the Church of England, which concedes there is no theological basis for the protection of human remains, nevertheless feels obliged to safeguard them.
Yet, he adds, time is relative in human affairs. For others, the treatment of human remains taps into historic injustices; an extension of racist, colonialist policies inflicted on indigenous peoples. Our views are also shaped by tradition. This is something that only became widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries. All rights reserved. Davis later shared the video with his Greek archaeology students at Luther College.
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