Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Bodies in the Medical School Basement

Episode Date: December 8, 2024

In the summer of 1989, a construction crew working in the basement of a building at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta stumbled across thousands of human bones. The acquisition and disposal of the remains has been kept secret.  It happens again in 1994, a crew discovered an old well containing human remains while constructing a new medical sciences building on the campus of the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) at Virginia Commonwealth University. The well is called the Limb Pit.  It happened one more time at Harvard in 1999. During renovations at Harvard’s Holden Chapel in 1999, a worker operating a mini bulldozer stumbled across human remains when his machine broke through a wall into an old well. Joseph Scott Morgan explains how it's possible to find human bones that have been hacked, cut with a saw, chisel, or knife, and then hidden so the law can't find them.....and it isn't a crime.      Transcript Highlight00:00.01 Introduction 04:35.58 Resurrection - Grave Robbing 09:40.88 Studying medicine, finding bones14:08.17 Doctors who have never dissected a body 19:18.35 Bones used by medical schools23:17.45 Medical college paying grave robbers28:16.99 Getting rid of bones without getting caught 32:11.18 Doctors had no opportunity to study the human body38:59.35 The Limb Pit - Chris Baker MCV40:17.79 Harvard had name for club that dug up bodies44:00.58 Mass burial of bones, no names 47:27.15 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. Since I was a small child, I have attended church. Now, I've been a member of many different denominations, as I'm sure some of you have out there. It's been, to say that it's a journey is probably an understatement. However, in my experience, there was something that was consistent all the way through. And that is that I was always taught that on the third day, Christ arose from the grave. And the term that is always applied to that event is the resurrection.

I think that we could all agree that that's a seminal event in human history. However, today I want to apply that term to another individual. a term that he actually went by. As a matter of fact, many of the people from around the world that were in the same field as this gentleman were referred to by these titles. The term is resurrectionist. Isn't that an odd term? Does that mean that this individual himself was resurrected?

Oh, no. That's not what it meant. For this individual actually went out and opened graves. And he didn't actually resurrect the dead, but he did, in fact, remove them from their eternal resting spots. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. I'm back together with my buddy, Dave Mack. and i'm telling i gotta tell you my friends listen

if it wasn't for dave i would not be doing this episode because he has been really jazzed about this about this topic because it is it is, um, kind of like Dave, Dave, Dave, you don't really know Dave. Dave's a bit quirky, you know, which is cool. You know, that's, that's why I dig it. A nice way of saying somebody is really weird. No, no, no. It's, it's fantastic. Actually. You are a typical Dave. That's why we love you, man. There's never a boring moment with you. And these cases that we're going to talk about today are kind of right in my wheelhouse. I didn't know that there would necessarily be an interest in this per se. But if I'm to use you as my barometer, I'd say that there probably is an interest in this.

And, and, uh, I'll go ahead and say it. We're, we're going to talk a little bit about grave robbing and the first, you know, who I first thought of young Frankenstein. I did. I did. I thought about Marty Feldman, Frankenstein, and I found out a bit of trivia the other day, and I don't know if you've heard this. I'm going to throw out a little young Frankenstein, young Frankenstein trivia to you. Oh, thank you, Doctor.

Did you know that, and I know that you're going to know this, I just know it, that Aerosmith got the title for their famous song, the original version, Walk This Way, because they all went to Young Frankenstein and saw the movie and that scene where, where Igor played by Marty Feltman hands the cane, uh, back to, uh, Gene Wilder and, you know, after he tells him walk this way and he has to kind of hunch over and stumble down the staircase. But, you know, Igor, that character in the movie, there's interaction between him and Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein. There's a grave robbing episode. And, of course, that's where they get the parts for the creature. The creature was not Frankenstein. It was Frankenstein's monster originally when the book was written by Shelley.

Whose brain did you give me abby somebody abby somebody abby normal yeah yeah and so parts as parts man as i used to say wow of course we're talking about robbing um graves of the uh how do we say this the newly buried or the fresh fresh dead yeah but it's not for the sake of building frankenstein's monster it's actually for educational purposes kind of like granny's medicinal whiskey you know yeah they're finding the they're actually finding poor people you know those who are indigent and those who have been, you know, put to death. Although oftentimes, I don't know what happens, but looking in history that, you know, they would, we're going to kill these guys and you can have them for science, but they never seem to make it. It's like something would happen to the dead on the way.

I mean, there's weird stuff that used to happen, Joe. Oh, yeah, There really are instances. And, of course, down here in the South, I think, you know, where the lineage of this, you know, kind of arises from is an event that took place back in 1989 at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia, which, by the way, is one of the older medical colleges in the U.S. And to give you a little insight, it's actually the first location that a hysterectomy was performed, which is kind of fascinating, I think, because there are many members in our audience that have had to undergo that procedure. And there's been history that has been made there over the years. I don't know that what happened in 1989 was necessarily something they wanted to be known for, but yet it happened. Workers were working on one of the oldest buildings on campus at the Medical College of Georgia

in Augusta. And they happened to stumble upon a large collection of human remains. Of course, skeletal remains is what I'm referring to. And they could see, even with the unaided eye, it didn't take a forensic anthropologist to determine this, that these remains had been in many cases dismembered, or they showed signs of having been dismembered. So when you have a skeletal recovery, particularly if you're talking about a clandestine grave, one of the things that you expect to find is not like, let me see, how can I say this? It's not necessarily like a grave that you would come across that would look like a Halloween skeleton where everything is intact.

You know, the elements of the skeleton will have come apart and dependent upon the ground in which it's settling into there's a process that's referred to as turbation and you don't really see it but the earth actually moves beneath the surface and it's always changing but the top end kind of stays static and that's the appearance you get so and it's it's it can be measured probably in millimeters and it happens over a long period of time and those slight adjustments beneath the surface can impact burials that can impact bodies that are down there and so things shift around but skeletons don't necessarily are intact you know like you like you have something from Halloween that's hanging out in your yard. It's not going to look like that.

But what they were seeing were, first off, commingled remains, which meant that these remains were from a variety of different bodies. The bodies were, in many instances, male and female. Um, and they had, uh, a great deal of postmortem trauma to the bone. And one of the ways people always ask, how can you tell that a, a, a skeletal remain has been traumatized in death when you have no tissue to see hemorrhage and that sort of thing. There's a reactive event that takes place within the bone that you can actually see, you know, even if it approximates death on the living side, as opposed to the, the, you know, those events that occur after death. But anyway, that's a story for another day. But when those workers saw this in 1989, you can imagine it was a head scratcher.

And going back to the dismemberment, Dave, that adds another layer of horror to this, right? You're seeing bones. This is like going through a really bad Halloween haunted house. I would think they're fake. I would think, Joe, you know what? Joe and those guys in forensic are messing with us. That's what they're doing. That's what I'd be telling people, you know?

Yeah, but there's something clinically. I think it's because of the location, Dave. Because even these workers have an awareness that there's people walking all over this campus, and I've been to this campus, they're walking all over the place in white lab coats and scrubs. Right. And you know what they're studying here. They're studying medicine. And, and when you get into this area, you know, I'm really wondering, I'd love to be able to interview like some of the workers that were there that discovered this. The first person to lay eyes on this.

Because for me, having interviewed many people that find bodies, which are some of the most fascinating stories, how they come across bodies. It's always that one person that says, I really didn't believe what I was seeing when I first saw it. I thought that, you know, like you said, I thought that it was a fake. I thought that it was something that was just there to scare people. But then I approached and I noticed, you know, they'll say things like, then the smell hit me or I saw what I could have sworn was blood, or in the case of a bone, their default position with most people that I've encountered that find skeletal remains, Dave, you know what they always say?

I thought it was a deer. I thought it was a dog. Because I think in the human brain, most of us don't want to come to grips with, well, you know what, man, every now and then you're going to come across a human remain that's exposed out there. And, uh, and so this is, you know, it's a, quite a fascinating dynamic here, Dave. I'm just, as you say, fascinated by the people who discovered it and what kind of damage it did to their psyche. You know, that's not. We could actually probably get,

we need to get Bethany Marshall and a couple of the other psychs from Nancy Grace's show and just line a couple of these cats up and say, what happened that day? And what have you seen since then? Like, did you watch any of the old Halloween movies and had skeletons? Do you freak out at that now?

Because I still haven't quite got past the idea that we as a people didn't have a way to actually study the human body firsthand without breaking the law to do it that's something that just amazes me joe and that's what we're doing the show about because when joe sends me this article okay about this huge find from Atlas Obscura is my favorite sources, by the way. If you've never read Atlas Obscura is pretty fascinating stuff. Yeah, it's like it's the OSQ of medicine sports quarterly. But on ESPN, the Ocho, they had a bones throwing contest. You know, that's the kind of stuff I expect to see when you have a bunch of bones that just show up in the building.

But after you get past all the ideas of why and OK, it's a medical building, but still don't the dead deserve to be buried? Don't they? Don't they deserve to be better than this? Yeah. These are real bones. Is this really how we and if they have been used in some kind of a medical learning experience, shouldn't they be given a nicer send-off than just thrown into the bottom of a well or a building or just tossed away like trash? Yeah, you would think so, that that would be the case. But you have to understand, here's that word again, this is a clandestine event because it was against the law. And it had been against the law for forever, as far as people could remember. And this is something that kind of, it was the law in Europe not to do this. And so when the U.S. was settled, like a lot of things, it transferred over. And in Georgia in particular, you know, the school in Augusta opened like in the mid-1820s.

All right. We're really pre-pre-Civil War. We're talking Andrew Jackson era time. That's when this thing was established. And Dave, it was that law prohibiting people from using human cadavers for dissection did not come off the books until the mid 1880s. And so you've got doctors that are being trained at this location. And dude, they've never done a dissection. They've never done a dissection on a human remain. And so it's startling. You know, how is it that, you know, you think about somebody that's called a surgeon can actually try to facilitate the healing of somebody without actually knowing what the anatomy is.

Now, you have detailed drawings that have occurred over the years. Even da Vinci had rendered beautiful anatomical drawings of human remains. But it's just the fact that you're going to go into this environment, open the body up on a living patient, and you don't know what you're going to be looking for. Interestingly enough, just down the road from Augusta, Crawford Long, back in the 1840s, he's the first guy that ever used anesthesia. He's the guy that first applied. And literally, this is in like a little tiny town in Georgia.

They've got the Crawford Long Museum there. I urge anybody that they have an opportunity to go and check this place out. And he used ether on a guy to remove a tumor. Now, ether is very unstable. It's not something we would use today. But before that, people had to endure surgery without any kind of anesthesia whatsoever. So we're in a real, there's a real learning curve here. And, but what physicians or medical students knew back then was that they needed, they needed someone that could facilitate getting bodies for them.

And they might have to do it by oil lamp, a whale oil lamp, or a candle to do these dissections in the middle of the night so that they could understand anatomy. And listen, I'll tell you this. Everybody knew what was going on because the medical students had all been through the program. The faculty were there. It's like the old Monty Python line. Wink, wink, nod, nod. A nod is just as good as a wink. Dave, I'm going to tell you something right now that I don't know that I've ever told anyone else. I was actually involved when I was at the medical examiner's office in Atlanta of having to go back and retrieve human remains from a former employee. This guy had been dismissed from the office office and we were missing two human skulls and myself and another investigator showed up at his house and said look we don't want to involve

anybody else in this uh but we believe that you're in possession of two skulls that we had that were unknown individuals that we had in boxes that were back in an area where we keep box skeletal remains. And sure enough, he produced them. Of course, it was under threat of arrest and being tried and all those sorts of things, but he gave them back to us. This was in days, within days of him being fired for other issues. And it's not like that sort of thing doesn't happen. As a matter of fact, Dave, if you remember, I think it was, yeah, it was in maybe late 22 or early 23, remember we covered a case out of Colorado here on Body Bags about a funeral home proprietor in Colorado who had been dissecting, Hess was the last name, she had been dissecting human remains and selling body parts to whoever would buy them.

And it was a chilling story, you know, because you've got family members there that I think are expecting, if I remember correctly, they were expecting remains. But yet she was taking off body parts and selling those body parts to individuals out there. Yeah. And she would sell them internationally as well. And we had a couple of different stories about that same time, if you remember, a couple of years ago, where we had different members of the funeral director's community that were not doing a way with, they were not doing cremations

or they weren't burying, their bodies just piling up in all sorts of areas. And that's a horrible thing that takes place even now. But at least then, the bones we're talking about in this particular story today, they actually, there was a reason for them being there. There was a purpose. And there was an entire industry built around these medical colleges that is, it's a shame, it's a a stain but i don't know who should take responsibility for it because with i joe i'm thinking as soon as you had the first medical

school you had the first cadaver we could look at you had the first set of bones you know you would have somebody who was into the medical fraternity would say when i die you guys can take a look at what's inside cut me open yeah learn yeah absolutely and the people that sounded really graphic and bad but i don't mean it that way i mean seriously no this is this is body back yeah i mean that's what we talk it just seems like they would do that though right yeah yeah you would think so and there are people that donate their bodies you you might not know this there are people that actually donate their bodies to the body farm at UT. Now, you want to talk about something that's, I guess it's needed, but it's really gruesome because, you know, these bodies will be taken up there and used for decay studies.

Now, you're laying out in the, or not you, but, you know, the people that donate their bodies are laid out in an open area and exposed to the elements. I've actually had people contact me to want to. And I was like, I don't work for UT. You need to reach out to them. And it's like they're curious about it. Could this be done? But all the way back in prior to the Civil War, there was a gentleman by the name of Gratison Harris, and he was a slave. And here's an interesting little factoid.

He was a Gullah person. And I know that you've got family members that live off of Ocracoke. Well, he's a Gullah person, which is kind of in the coastal area of South Carolina. They speak a very distinctive language there. It's a dialect that you don't find anywhere else. It's unique to that one area. It is.

It's very unique. It's kind of like my ancestors in South Louisiana. I've got a whole portion of my family that speaks Cajun French. But he came from that environment. And here's what's really interesting. I hate saying this about anybody, but when he was purchased, he was not purchased by a single individual. He was actually purchased by the medical college. He was owned, and this is the way it's written, he was owned by the faculty.

And he developed quite the reputation. He became what was known as a resurrectionist. Now, resurrectionist, it's not like this is an isolated event relative to Georgia. Okay. They were everywhere, but he made quite the name for himself. And he would appear in group photos at graduation for the students. They knew that he was the person that could go out and acquire remains. He primarily focused on slave burials because no one was watching slave graves.

And there was a huge mortality issue there where people would die very young. And, you know, cadavers now many times are people that are much older. Well, back then, people didn't live to what we now consider a ripe old age. Back then, you'd have people that would pass away in their mid-40s and you'd have children that would have a good life yeah he's an old man mid-40s yeah mid-40s man uh and so he would go out at the behest of of the medical college and let me just give you an idea did you know that it was illegal to teach a slave or enslaved person to read and write? But there was an exception made for Gratison because he would have to read the obituaries. And just lock into that just for a second. So he would read the obituaries in the paper so that he could stay up to date on newly buried remains. And then at night, he would go out. I'm sure that he had

assistants that would help him dig these freshly buried people up, pop the graves open. And the slave population back during that time is not going to say anything about it. They're not going to complain because they know what's going to happen to them if they do. He would remove these bodies and then take them back to the medical school where they would, under the cover of darkness, be dissected in the middle of the night when no one else was around. And these students are there over this cadaver attempting to learn. And Gratison is probably assisting them with these dissections. Gratison is probably having to clean up after them and then dispose of the bodies.

And so there was just an area, a collective area, where it's unclear how they wound up there. Because this was in the basement of the building. Were they doing the dissections in the basement? And then they would just kind of take the cadavers and put them in a big pile. And over a period of time, it would render down. The one thing that strikes me here is how would you get past the smell you know and i know they had lime back then and that sort of thing but lime the presence of lime is not necessarily going to retard or knock down that smell

of decomposition to the point where you're not going to appreciate it at all you're walking by a building and you know people catch a whiff of air and they're wondering, you know, what in the world is going on? And, you know, but continued to work at the university for decades afterwards and actually retired. Well, think about it, Joe. His job is a grave robber. You're not going to be able to do that outside of working for the school. You know, your occupation, unless you become a grave digger, you know. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Unless you're a grave digger, you know, but you're a grave digger you know yeah yeah you're you're right unless you're a grave digger you know but you're a resurrectionist interestingly enough during reconstruction of course

reconstruction failed he had moved to across the the augusta river actually into south carolina and became a judge in south carolina and, uh, reconstruction failed, they had race riots. Yeah. And, um, I think it was, uh, Ham Hamburg. I can't remember the actual name of the town in South Carolina and it got so bad. He left and came back to the university and the students actually kind of reminded him that he needed to keep his place, his proper place, because they saw him trying to ascend into the professional class. And so they referred to him as judge for years and years after that. You know, just as a reminder, this is who you are. You're a resurrectionist and you're working for us. So it's kind of an interesting story. But Dave,

I think if I remember correctly, this is not the only location that this was occurring. No, but let me, before we move on. Yeah, yeah. You've got a resurrectionist who actually, okay, if you look at it from the standpoint of continuing education, learning and helping the living through examining the dead, I get all that. But you would think they would have a better plan. OK, once we you got the body, you know, and we've done what we're going to do. You would think somebody there at the college level would have a suggestion as to what to do with these bones that you now cannot legally have you should have never had to start with so not one of these educated people had any common sense

so the best plan they could come up with was when we're done we're going to throw them on the floor in the basement and we'll cover them with some lime and dirt and just leave them there yeah isn't that something that was the plan yeah and listen i laid the you know who i laid the fault fault to at this and this is nationwide i lay the fault at the propriety of society in the church because they viewed using bodies like this as desecration of the dead. And that seems to run contrary to spiritual beliefs, actually, because if we believe that the human body is a vessel and after after you've passed on to the other side, then what kind of utility does the body have for you at that point in time? And what what better utility might exist than to learn from the dead and to learn from the anatomical specimens that they could render? Here's an interesting question. I wonder how many people died. How many people died as a direct result of some doctor who had never had any kind of anatomical training, and they went in and clipped a vessel that if they had and the person bled out,

there was no way to stop the bleeding during some kind of surgery. How many of these people died as a result of not having any kind of direct anatomical training, gross anatomical training? I think that that's a worthy question. Yeah. And there's no way to take the measure of it. No, they get the guy. Look, don't you have a kid that cuts steaks just perfect down at the meat? Get him and we're going to make him the town surgeon because the old one died.

He at least knows something about cutting beef. Maybe he can help, you know. Right. What's he going to do? Yeah. Well, you know, that's like the origin of the barber pole. Yeah. Right. Barbers cut hair and they did surgery. You know, when you see the red, blue and white spinning part, that was an indication of a surgeon. And so they, you know, all things to all people, I guess. I don't know. But it's an interesting, I think that it's very interesting, you know, kind of following this thread through history, how this evolved as a

practice. What's amazing is that they still held on to this law in the wake of the Civil War. Dave, I've seen pictures, and I don't know if you've ever seen them. There's one in particular of Matthew Brady that Matthew Brady took at a battlefield, I think adjacent to a hospital, and it was stacks of limbs. And these limbs had been amputated, you know, as a result of, you know, battle injuries that, you know, there was no way to salvage the leg. And it seems as though that people would have been screaming out at this point in time. Well, literally, but screaming out that we need proper training for our physicians. Now, listen, a lot of these guys, I'm sure, became fantastic surgeons that had to work

in those field hospitals just with, you know, a pair of scissors, a scalpel, and, of course, the infamous saw that you can see in any of these old medical kits. It's one of the most gruesome things you'll ever see. And they were doing this on many cases with people that had no anesthesia. They didn't have ether on board, particularly in the South. They didn't have anything to apply anesthesia with. So, you know, in the wake of arguably the most horrific human tragedy in our country's history, they still have this prohibitive law that's on

the books. It didn't come off the books until like the 1880s in Georgia, at least. Now, you know, like up in Massachusetts, the laws were a bit more liberal up there. So prior to this, they had made allowances for this. You know, You go to places like Harvard, for instance, probably Yale, those areas up there, and Penn, which interestingly enough is Crawford Long actually spent time at Penn, University of Pennsylvania. They had access to bodies up in those areas, and they could do these dissections. So I don't know. It's, it's a curious thing. You know, when I think about it and, you know, I take many times,

I take for granted the time I spent in the morgue, you know, dissecting all of those bodies for so many years and looking back through time, I think how many of those physicians, young physicians or wannabe physicians back then would have died just to have an opportunity that I had, you know, opening, you know, close to 7000 bodies over the course of my career. They would have loved to have had access to that. You see all manner of things in the morgue. Things that most people, particularly years ago, it's not quite as morbid as it used to be probably. I worked with a guy for a number of years that was also an autopsy assistant. He had been there for years and years.

And he had a collection that he kept on a shelf in a glass mason jar. As a matter of fact, he had several of these jars. And when you looked at them, when you looked at them, they looked like large marbles. Some were small marbles. But they're all black or green in color. And then for those that didn't know what they were, they would approach. It would catch the eye as they'd walk up to the shelf. And they would look and they discovered after, of course, with a grin, he explained to them, those are gallstones.

And every autopsy that he performed where he found a gallstone indwelling the gallbladder, he would retrieve it, wash it, and keep it. It always fascinated me, this idea of retaining things. I've been in, I think, probably the thing that used to unnerve me the most. There was an anatomy lab that I visited as an undergraduate, and I'd go in there regularly. And there were babies in glass jars that went back decades and decades and decades. And there was something about that that just sent a chill up my spine. But we have to understand that specimens many times reveal things that might not otherwise be revealed. They're in rest scientific truth.

And sometimes the truth can be actually quite horrific dave you know somebody gets a body and it doesn't matter if you have the backing of the school or not or if you're some person that kills somebody nowadays and decides well yeah let me say let me get out the jigsaw right yeah what are you going to do with the body now what are you going to do where where is it that you're going to take a body and dump it somewhere where no one is going to find it but i i gotta tell you to uh chris's credit they didn't find it for a while i mean you know they it was years later you know after all this has passed and they've got the limb pit, which I saw it also described, I think, as a well. I'm not really sure.

And the well of souls. I don't know. I'm thinking Raiders of the Lost Ark. But you think about that. You think, what are you going to do with a body, this bloody mess that has been torn to bits? And literally, they are torn to bits you you you ought to see a medical cadaver after the kids are done with it after a year and it is after a year yeah yeah they might have it it depended upon the curriculum they might have it beginning in the fall and it'll

go all the way through spring term or it could just be a single term and you're going to have multiple kids on one body. It's not like every kid gets a body in medical school. You see the worst kid in the class in the very back, and he's getting that foot. He's the last guy in the class with a foot, and he gets it, and there's like 168 bones in the foot. I got four. Excuse me. Which one's the pinky toe?

No, no, no. They're doing the dissection in concert with one another, and that's one of the things that you learn in medical school. You're kind of helping, you know, helping one another along through. You know, gross anatomy is one of those gateway classes, too, that you take. It's the first class you take in medical school. And so it's – but it is fascinating. You know, those bodies that are anatomical specimens like that, they are properly disposed of. They generally go back to their point of origin, and then they're either returned to the families,

or they have a burial area that is already preconceived at that point in time, or the bodies are cremated. But not in this case in Virginia, Dave. I was looking at when they found the limb pit and they cleared it out below it was another capped well, they didn't uncap that one. They just let it sit. So you and I want to go up and have some fun and scare some kids i know where to go i'll pass i'll pass i have no interest in going there whatsoever richmond i'm sure is a fine city but particularly on that little tour let a little jaunt i have i have no interest in doing it but you know it's interesting i think that a lot of this physicians, and we have to understand this, in an academic setting, academics are many times are intellectual vagabonds.

They travel all over the place. And it's no different in the medical community. You think about doctors, physicians that are out there practicing day to day. But, you know, there has to be somebody that educates the physicians. And generally, they are physicians. And you'll have other people with PhDs that are there, you know, teaching pharmacology. You have PhD anatomists that are there as well. But for the most part, you've got doctors that are crisscrossing the country, taking different academic positions. They just don't want to practice medicine in a traditional sense. They want to teach others.

And so with that said, this knowledge of these resurrectionists would travel everywhere. So everywhere that you had a medical school, there was probably some form of resurrectionist that was there. And there would always be these stories that would come along with it. You know, the new faculty member would be there. Oh, where'd you come from? Well, this guy's at Harvard now. And he had been he had been trained at Georgia Medical College of Georgia. And he says, yeah, I was trained at the Medical College of Georgia. And people are leaning in and saying, wait, didn't you guys have this like really wild, you know, really wild resurrectionist down there?

Oh yeah, man, we had all the bodies we could take. At one time, we did the dissections. Boy, did I ever learn anatomy. Well, how do we get our hands on this? What do we have to do? Well, that knowledge travels, doesn't it, Dave? And, you know, the piece to this is this kind of unique situation at Harvard, which is arguably, if not the oldest, one of the oldest institutions in the United States. And they have forever and ever, amen, had a medical school at that location. And they had a similar finding up there, didn't they, Dave, where they uncovered a location. Same thing. It didn't even show up. By the time I got to Harvard, it just was like, you know.

You're numb to it? Yeah, because this one, here's the weird part about Harvard. Yeah. They have like a, well, it wouldn't be even time to go into all of what Harvard has, but they have like a special name, you know, that they give their little club back in the day because where the other guys use you know a former slave or a janitor harvard actually has a little team and they have certain rules that apply to them when they're going into you know they actually eventually have the rules for when they go in to steal a body you know and they're going to do grave robbing and they make fun and grade the others who don't do it as good as them.

And they mock them. And it became a whole thing at Harvard among these students to form a club, to become really good grave robbers. And I'm not knocking Harvard by any stretch of the imagination. it's just it's so funny they could take something there that in every other school they kind of wink and a nod as you said earlier and try to avoid and they're they're like broadcast they probably have a newsletter going out every other month you know and there were recent meetings but they found a place it was at the harvard's holden chapel this one pops up in 1999 and a worker is operating a mini dozer. All I can tell you, can you imagine this guy? Yeah. He's recently recovered alcoholic.

He's 60 days sober. He's moving a little mini dozer and hit something. It's like, what is that? And he moves up a little closer and all of a sudden the bones start coming. I know. Holy smokes. Yeah. Yeah. Show me the way start coming out. I know. Holy smokes. Yeah. Yeah.

Show me the way to go home at that point. Yeah, but. You know, because I got to tell you, I'm heading down to the local pub. Oh, but. Even for me. Because, you know, you think about, and these are average people. Right. You know, with average lives.

They're moving dirt. And then all of a sudden, this guy recovers these remains that are look when a forensic anthropologist gets their hands on this just like they did at uh at georgia medical college they know that these are not recent burials because there is a certain patina which is kind of that that coloration and uh time markers that have been left behind on the bone just by virtue of the fact of their exposure and not being treated. You know, these remains are not what are referred to as cascaded remains. They're not protected. Not that cascaded remains are completely protected,

but the difference between being in a box that's inside of a vault that's in the ground and has a lid on it is there's a world of difference between that and finding remains that are essentially just kind of buried beneath the surface or hidden or obscured in this manner. The fact that he found anything is quite amazing because, you know, you can go to the sites of major battlefields where, you know, a couple of hundred years ago, you're not in the dead were left. You're not going to necessarily find any kind of skeletal remains. You might find a metal button or a buckle or something like that. You're generally not going to find bone shards that are left behind unless you really, really look. This guy is driving a skid steer and he comes across. I guess it's like a skid steer. Yeah.

And he comes across these remains, Dave. And the thing is, is that I was noticing, you know, when we were looking at the other stories and which kind of gives you an idea because these we're talking about from 1989 to 1999 when these three different things took place. Georgia in 89. You had Virginia in 94, five years later. And then here we go, 99 at Harvard. At Harvard, the third place to find a cache of bones. And instead of getting them out, studying them and doing, you know, anything like that, they basically looked at it and went, yeah, we knew they were there somewhere.

Go ahead and let's just, let's move this. Go ahead and put the dirt back over there and let's dig someplace else. Meanwhile, at the other clay in 1998, the bones from the Medical College of Georgia were reinterred in a mass grave. Yeah, yeah, they did what I thought we should do. Look, I can joke around about stuff, but at the end, there's got to be something here. And that showed me a little respect. Yeah, it did. And, you know, interestingly enough, that that grave in which they buried those people, they have no idea who they are.

And they, you know, they put, you know, we started off talking about the resurrection. And it's fitting that, you know, we kind of draw the curtain here that there's, you know, a four-word term that they put there, known but to God. You know, that gives you an idea, you know, of the number of remains that they found, which were significant. And they were all commingled. And after the forensic anthropologist, who I actually met at one point in time, that was a state anthropologist at the time that was called in on this case, after her examinations were done, and she became quite famous as a result of this case, because she wrote several academic papers based upon it. It's one of those things as a practitioner, as a forensic anthropologist, I don't want to be too flippant about this, but it's one of those things that

as a professional, it's a once in a lifetime event. You're not going to find like a cache of bones somewhere. It's generally going to find like a cache of bones somewhere. It's generally going to be like a single bone. They're going in there and they're finding huge collection of elements of skeletons. And this is like, you could do research on this for years and years and years to come from all kinds of different perspectives. But back to what became of Grandison. When Grandison died, and he did, in fact, pass away way back in 1911.

And remember, he had entered Georgia Medical College as a slave that was actually owned by the institution and the faculty. He became a freedman and continued to work for them for years and years to come. Well, you know, he had robbed so many graves, but they were all essentially in what was the Cedar Grove Cemetery. And these were African-American individuals primarily that had been buried there. They were all poor. There were a few poor whites that were there as well. In an interesting turn of events, Gratison, when he passed, was buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery as well. And just a few years later, a great flood took place.

The Augusta River breached the banks, and Cedar Grove Cemetery was no more. And to this day, they have no idea whatever happened to Gratison's remains. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.