Take a trip to Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh, and even if graveyards and the macabre aren’t your ‘thing’, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll find yourself wandering through the famous gates of Greyfriars Kirkyard.
I’m sharing with you my top five hidden coastal graveyards that, on first sight, may not look anything special, but if you know me, then you’ll know they’ll all be linked with the dark art of body snatching somewhere along the line.
If you’ve ever seen a cage over a grave, then what you’re looking at is a mortsafe, a cage used to protect the dead from bodysnatchers.
Ever wondered why anatomists stopped raiding graveyards and the professional body snatcher took over the task of acquiring cadavers for the dissecting table…
If you’re doing any research into criminal ancestors and the time they spent in a Victorian prison, chances are you’ll have heard about oakum picking. But what exactly was it? In this post I try to find out.
It took one word from the Miller woman in 1829 and a quiet Midlothian village was awash with resurrection men.
Join me as I look at the stories of three body snatching raids in the County of Gloucestershire and meet the men who were sent to Northleach House of Correction
If a criminal’s sentence consisted of ‘Imprisonment with Hard Labour’, chances are the treadmill would have played a part in their hardship somewhere along the line
This post is dedicated to a by-product that not only came from a battlefield that shares the same name, but also a product that gave the body snatchers a very lucrative sideline.
On 3 June 1862 Sexton Isaac Howard was accused of exhuming cadavers and selling them to Sheffield Medical School. The Reality of his crimes however was much worse.
Some ingeneous forms of body snatching prevention were dreamt up during the body snatching era. In this post I look at my top 5 favourites.
From dungheaps to watery graves, if a body snatcher needed to get rid of a cadaver quickly, they found some pretty ingeneous ways of doing it!
A Short tale about the time notorious London body snatcher Joseph Naples broke out of prison.
If you’ve read my blog before you’ll know that I’m a body snatching historian, at least I think that’s…
After denying his involvement in the theft of 24-year-old Joanna Chinnery from St John’s churchyard in Little Leighs, it would be the smell emanating from this body snatchers cart that would eventually be his downfall.
Mention the watchtower and most people have probably finished with the graveyard’s darker links to the past, but there’s so much more than that if you care to step inside.
Time and stealth were of the essence when removing a cadaver, but just how did body snatchers do it with out being detected?
In 1826 thirty-three cadavers were found stuffed into barrels waiting to be shipped from Liverpool to Leith, Edinburgh. But what happened to the gang responsible for the snatchings?
Just how much money did Burke and Hare make on their ten month killing spree in Edinburgh? In this post, I’ve collected the figures together and taken a look.
No one knows what happened to William Hare following his release from custody in 1829. Put onto a mail coach to Dumfries, Hare disappeared after being recognised.