Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - Harvard’s Dirty Secret: Bejeweled Skulls and Grave Robbing

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

The manager of Harvard's Medical school was just indicted for selling human remains to oddities shops, but the history of Harvard's involvement in black market corpse dealings goes back over 250 years. Let's travel through the morgue, past the skeletons found in Harvard's walls, all the way back to the most high profile murder to ever happen at the school. Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaelyn Moore.  Music from Artlist Shownotes: https://www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/harvardmorgue      

listener discretion is advised. Cedric Lodge walked out of the morgue at the Harvard Medical School, just like he had almost every day for the last 30 years. He was the manager of the school's anatomical gift program, a program for people who had elected to donate their bodies to medical research. It was a humble job that had the potential to help shape the future of medicine. But that day, May 6, 2023, would be his last. Within a month, Cedric would be walking out of a new

Hampshire courthouse, swarmed by cameras and reporters. He and his wife would be facing federal charges for allegedly snatching bodies from the morgue, bringing them to his new Hampshire home and selling the body parts online. What Cedric was a part of was a much larger black market for the trafficking of human remains, but I would also argue that it was part of a long-standing tradition. See, Harvard has been in the body-snatching game for over 200 years, and the history of medical schools using corpses for research is deep and dark. Today, I want to take you to where my curiosity led me, through the back channels of Cedric's Body Ring, to the dark history of Harvard's medical school, all the way to the most high-profile

murder to ever happen at the university. And just a heads up, this one's a little morbid. It's that feeling when the energy and the room shifts, when the air gets sucked out of a moment, and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's saying, it's when your heart starts pounding. Welcome to Heart Starts Founding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore.

Today's episode definitely falls into the horror category. It's a great example of where dark curiosity can lead you, which is perfect as this is a community for the darkly curious. If you'd like to dive deeper into the community, and I hope you do, you can follow the podcast on Instagram and TikTok at HerdsdartsPounding, and you can support the show on Patreon and our Rogue Detecting Society.

There, you'll have access to some bonus content. To start us off, there's a few more things I want to tell you about what was recently happening at Harvard. After Cedric Lodge was indicted for being a part of an illegal cadaver ring, more information started coming out about what he was doing. At 6am on June 14th, neighbors on Orchard Street, in a small town in New Hampshire, woke to see police officers carrying boxes out of Cedric and his wife Denise's house. The neighbors had always thought the couple was nice, but they definitely had a vibe

that was different from the rest of the neighborhood. The lodges had gargoyles in their yard, skull images on their curtains, and a large wooden coffin in the garage. Strange, sure, but everyone knew that Cedric was a manager at a morgue, so they kind of understood it. But what they didn't know was that since at least 2018, Cedric had been, allegedly, trafficking remains from the morgue where he worked back to his house.

He was indicted on stealing skin, bones, brains, and more, and selling them on the internet. He was selling skin on the internet. I had to tell someone about this part, so this is Leo, my darkly curious sibling. Yeah. Who do you think he was selling all of this too? I, I, I truly, I don't even know. Like that's, I focus, I'm so focused on the skin, that one's throwing me for a loop, but I guess. What do you think someone would be buying skin on the internet for? Making furniture and lampshades.

So your first instinct is not that someone's maybe buying decommissioned human remains for research. It's that they're making lampshades. No, my first thought is if they're buying this stuff on the internet, like decommissioned and the FBI is catching onto this, My first thought is if they're buying this stuff on the internet, like decommissioned, and the FBI is catching on to this, there's something nefarious going on.

Honestly, you're right. Oh my god. He was selling it to people who were reselling on Etsy. They were like bedazzling the skulls and selling them on Facebook, marketplace. I just felt my cortisol spike. Yeah, that's right. These remains were going to private buyers who were largely not using them for medical purposes.

One of these buyers was Katrina McLean of Salem, Massachusetts. Katrina had a store in Peabody Mass called Kat's Creepy Creations, which sold morbid oddities that, quote, shock the mind and soul, end quote. The FBI had already questioned her as part of a bigger investigation in March. Her Instagram didn't even hide what she was doing. Under one post, the caption read, quote, yes, that is a real human skull.

If you're in the market for human bones, hit me up. It's alleged that on October 28th, 2020, Lodge invited her into the morgue, where he let her select the dissected faces of corpses she wanted to sell in her collection. And then, there was Jeremy Polly, a man in Pennsylvania who also sold oddities and human remains, who sent 25 payments, totaling over $40,000 to lodge. I'm going to read you what those PayPal memos were. So he sent a payment in 2019 for $1,000 with the memo, head number seven, and then he sent a $200 payment in 2020 that had the memo, look at this. It says,

Brains, it's like a ton of eyes. How unaware I know. Like, like those are public transactions. Those are public transactions. Even drug dealers know not to write drugs. It's dark, I know. But this isn't the first time Harvard has made headlines for the black market happenings regarding cadavers.

In 1999, Harvard University was undergoing renovations in one of its buildings, Holden Chapel, when the workers noticed that there was a strange texture within the walls. After carefully retrieving the pieces of what was clearly not drywall, they realized that centuries old human skeletons had been hidden in the walls of the chapel. And no, this was not some mysterious Harvard murder as some of the staff started hypothesizing. The chapel actually used to be the medical school, so the body is made sense, but why were they hidden in the walls?

Well, at the time of the medical school's inception, it wasn't common for bodies to be donated for scientific purposes. In the late 1700s, Massachusetts had a law that one cadaver could be dissected every four years. And that was really generous for a state at the time. Doctors were graduating with barely any experience or knowledge of the human body. And you could feel it in society. People didn't trust doctors. You had a way higher chance of dying in the hospital than you had from suffering at home. In order to teach med students the inner workings of the bodies that they would spend their entire career's healing, they knew they needed cadavers. And the school was

determined to get them. So, just like many schools at the time, Harvard started grave robbing. And unlike the modern-day grave robbing happening at Harvard Bicetric Lodge, this grave robbing was a systemic pillar of the school. John Warren, founder of Harvard Medical School, started his career as a grave robber in the name of science. That's the fact you can take to trivia night. Warren was part of the Spunker Club, a secret society of grave robbers interested in surgery and medicine.

They were known for their cleanliness and precision when robbing graves. If you came upon your loved ones grave and it looked like someone had pillaged the site, it was definitely not the work of John Warren. And John Warren's spirit was passed on to the students. At Harvard, just like today, how you would be responsible for retrieving your own books for lectures, students used to be responsible for retrieving their own medical cadavers. So they take to the local graveyards under the cover of night, often in groups, to retrieve the bodies. And this was becoming standard at most med schools

in the country. One snowy evening in early 1824, a man in West Haven, Connecticut, close to Yale University, awoke at 2am to the sound of a wagon passing his home. He knew it was headed in the direction of the local cemetery, where days prior, 19-year-old Bathsheba Smith had been buried. The next day, a constable was summoned to her grave, where he was shocked, but not surprised, to see the packed ground on top of her grave churned up as if someone had redugged the grave hours earlier.

And sure enough, when the constable with the help of two diggers made it down to the wooden coffin, they found it empty, except for a few valuables that Bathsheba had been buried with. The grave diggers clearly had one thing they wanted, and it wasn't jewelry. News quickly spread of the robbed grave, and occurrence that, by that point, was so common, you'd be hard pressed to find someone in town that wasn't affected by it. And everyone knew it was the medical school.

So the constable got a warrant and marched straight to Yale University, where he found the body of Bathsheba still in her burial clothes under the stone flooring of the medical building. She was retrieved and brought back to her final resting place. But by noon, an angry mob had gathered outside of the school. Over the next several days, rioters beat drums, broke windows, and even tried to tar and feather a medical student in retaliation. 81 medical students barricaded themselves in the medical school for protection. And eventually, F.R.I.E.M. Colburn,

a medical assistant at the school, was sentenced to nine months in jail and a $300 fine for the crime, which is almost $10,000 today. It's believed that Colburn was taking the fall for the students that really robbed the grave. Harvard saw this and feared its own students going to jail, or worse, being scared off from becoming doctors. So the university started hiring professional grave robbers called resurrectionists.

One of the men hired by Harvard, who some of the bones in the walls may be from, was Ephraim Littlefield. Ephraim was hired, at least on paper, to attend to the Harvard professors, cleaning their classrooms and fetching their teaching tools. He and his wife lived in the basement of the medical school, among the school's specimen and medical equipment. But on the side, FRI was in charge of the corpse business at Harvard. If he wasn't collecting the bodies himself,

he was instructing the resurrectionists on where to get bodies and making sure they got paid. He distributed the corpses to professors and then made sure they were secretly disposed of when they were no longer in use. It was a booming business in the 1840s when he was working there. Each body made him almost a thousand bucks in today's dollars. But everything was about to come to a head, unbeknownst to Ephraim.

The anger towards medical students for stealing bodies of the community's loved ones, the professors' abuse of power in the situation, the desperate need for bodies by any means necessary. And FRIM would find himself in the middle of it, when one of Boston's wealthiest men went missing under suspicious circumstances at the medical school after the break. Harvard Medical School, 1849. What a time for medicine.

The first anesthesia had recently been used in a dental operation, meaning patients could now be put under during surgery. Before this, you had to be awake and fully aware while being operated on. 1849 was also the year that the first woman, Elizabeth Blackwell, earned a medical degree. But for how progressive the field of medicine was becoming, it still had a long way to go. Germs hadn't been discovered yet. And surgery often meant certain death from infection.

It was during this pivotal time in medicine that George Parkman walked into the Harvard Medical School and never walked out, setting off one of the greatest mysteries in the school's history. George Parkman was one of Boston's elite. His father, Samuel Parkman, was believed to be the richest man in Boston, making his fortune in real estate. He put pressure on his children to be successful as well, and George was trying to live up to his father's high expectations.

George graduated from Harvard Medical School, and after studying in Paris post-grad, he came back to the United States to work on revolutionizing our mental health system. But on the day of his disappearance, November 23rd, 1849, George was working as a landlord and money lender in Boston. At 3pm that day, he arrived to the medical school to visit Professor of Chemistry, Joseph Webster. FRIM Littlefield, the medical school's henchman, watched his George entered the medical school. It was a Friday and classes were out.

Joseph Webster, the professor of which FRIM was attending to that day, typically went out on the town Friday evenings, giving FRIM the weekend to clean up the chemistry lab and reset it for Monday's class. But the work didn't stop for FRIM the weekend to clean up the chemistry lab and reset it for Monday's class. But the work didn't stop for FRIM on Friday evenings. Even when his boss was away at lavish parties, mingling with Boston's upper crust. No.

Now that the weather had cooled and the nights were getting frosty, it was becoming the best time to rob graves. Bodies were better preserved in the winter, being nearly frozen underground. It was around this time that FRIM would have been busiest, securing bodies for the medical school. Around 5.30 pm, FRIM had finished dinner and went over to Webster's lab to begin tidying. When he noticed the door to the lab was bolted shut. Webster always left the door open for him,

and on top of that, there was the sound of rushing water coming from the sink on the other side of the door. A frightened turn to leave when he heard walking down the back stairs, just one pair of feet. He turned around the corner to see who it was when Webster appeared coming down the back stairs. Just one pair of feet. He turned around the corner to see who it was, when Webster appeared coming down the stairs. Webster told Frieme that he was examining the chemical properties of grapevine wood and lost track of time. He then shuffled out of the building and started his walk home. Frieme said that he never remembered seeing George leave. And days after that, George Parkman's family starts putting up flyers.

George never made it home that night, which was unusual for him. The flyers stated that there was a $200,000 reward by today's conversion for information on his whereabouts. It's around this time that F.R.I.M. realizes he had been one of the last people to see George and he realizes this at the same time that the police do. No one had seen George after he arrived at the school. It was the 1840s though, so it took the Boston police a little while to figure this out. As was protocol for the time, first they had to blame the crime on the Irish, then they had to find out

that didn't really make any sense, and only then could they start looking for the real perpetrator. And when they arrived the following week to Harvard Medical School, it was Ephraim's word against websters. And Webster told the police he left the school at 3 p.m. as he typically did on Fridays. Sure, George came and visited, but then they both left together. But Ephraim knew he saw Webster at 5.30 coming down the stairs, but who were the police going to believe? A known grave robber who made a fortune getting bodies for the school and was the last person to see a missing man, or an upper class Ivy League professor.

As the police are searching the chemistry lab, thinking things over, they notice that the door to Webster's bathroom is bolted shut They don't think much of it, but FRIM clocks this as being weird Why was Webster locking all of these doors? Plus FRIM knew why George was coming to see Webster that day Webster owed George money, and George

didn't let any debts go uncollected, not even for his friends. To add fuel to the fire, Webster was notoriously bad with money. He worked around other Harvard professors like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had married into obscene wealth, and Webster felt pressure to keep up appearances. He lived far outside of his means, one time even buying a mastodon for Harvard that he couldn't afford just to try to win favor at the school. So Ephraim had a bad feeling about what happened to George, But he knew that he was probably the police's prime suspect.

So he did what he had to do. He opened a trap door on campus to the main sewer line and walked through chest high waste until he got to Webster's toilet. Once he was down there, he broke through a brick wall separating the chamber from the mainline, and sure enough, through the hole in the brick lit by the lantern that kept going out from the clogged air, was a man's pelvis and two severed legs. Ephraim ran to the police to tell

them what he had found, but this didn't do much to quell their suspicions about him. How did FRIM know exactly where to dig through the brick wall? Was it because he put the body there himself and now wanted to collect the reward money? This evidence that Parkman had been killed at the school sent Boston into a rage. Tensions were already high in Boston at the time. Remember, there were Irish people here now. Something Bostonians really hated.

An influx of Irish immigrants in the 1840s turned America's Athens, a city of ideas, innovation, and industry into America's Dublin, they joked. More importantly, the community was terrified that the school had graduated from robbing graves to killing people for their corpses. They still remembered reading about how 20 years ago, two Irish immigrants in Scotland were caught suffocating people so they could sell their bodies to a local medical school.

Did the atrocities rot by William Burke and William Hare arrive on the shores of Boston? The people rioted in the streets, and Mayor Josiah Quincy had to call the troops to quell them. 25 years after the riots brought on by Bathsheba Smith at Yale. The men went to trial, and it was actually the testimony of George's brother that really cemented Webster's guilt. According to George's brother, Robert Gould Shaw, one day he and George were walking down the street when they came upon Webster.

The three set a friendly hello, and when they continued on, Shaw told his brother that Webster had offered to sell him some minerals. This sent George into a rage. It turns out, Webster had borrowed so much money from George, nearly $100,000 in today's conversion, that Parkman now had a mortgage on all of Webster's belongings. He was not allowed to sell off the minerals that were now technically George's. They knew that Webster was borrowing the money to maintain his lavish lifestyle.

Apparently, it was a not-so-well-kept secret amongst the other Harvard professors. Webster was found guilty of George's murder and was hanged on August 30, 1850. The sheriff sent out engraved invitations for other upper-class Bostonians who wanted to attend the execution. He was buried in secrecy on Cops Hill, and none of his peers were allowed to attend the burial.

This was because grave robbers would be excited to get their hands on a premium body like websters. The notoriety would surely make his body self or more. There used to be a flat stone marking where he was buried. But shortly afterwards, that stone vanished. Perhaps tossed aside while one of Ephraim's henchmen dug through the freshly packed dirt. By the late 19th century, Corp's donation was becoming more widely accepted, and some of the madness surrounding the black market for bodies started subsiding.

Though Harvard has publicly announced that they had no knowledge of what Cedric Lodge and his wife were doing, some could argue that this is the new form the corpse black market has taken on, the selling and trading of corpses not for research, but for collection. After all, it took me all of five minutes to find more human remains on Facebook. And so I want to show you those. Do you want to, are you okay seeing some stuff? Yeah. Yes, for science.

This is, this is research. I want you to describe what you see, but I also want you to describe what you see, but I also want you to describe what you're reading. I'm gonna start crying. Are you kidding me? Yeah, I'm not joking. This took me five minutes to find on Facebook. Can you describe it for people who can't see it?

That's a skull. Yeah, that's a skull. A full intact human skull. That's a full intact human skull. The teeth are missing. There's no ethical way that this was sourced. So this is, but look at, okay, so that's like, those look like animal bones

or parts of like animal bones. These are animal bones, but so antlerscrap, but look at, so this is how they get away with it. So what does that say? It's human, H-O-O-M-A-N, which is like the millennial way that people, like the millennial voice that people used to, yeah, it's like cheeseburger top.

Yeah, it's like millennial cringe. Human, but they're doing it so that way you can't. Oh my God, there's a dislocated jawbone. Yeah, that's a yep That's a well because this part comes apart then Okay, woman skull fragment set in sterling silver earrings So someone made earrings out of human skulls and that's a ring with human skulls stop it knock it off I don't say this to discourage anyone from making the choice to donate their body to science,

which I know sounds silly after all of this. We are so close to better treatment for type 1 diabetes because of pancreatic cells taken from cadavers. These donations do real, important work. And while there are a few bad actors, there's even more doctors doing this ethically. Here's my morbid reminder that death comes for us all. And while Cedric chose to spend his life facilitating the sale of others, one day, just like John Webster. It could be his body that's being passed along the black market, and that's the circle of life.

This has been Heart Starts Founding, written and produced by me, Kaelin Moore, music by Art List. New patrons will be thanked in two weeks. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Journey Inn, the team at WME and Ben Jaffey. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out Heart StartsPounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.

Ooh. Until next time, stay curious. you