Stuff You Should Know - The Golden Age of Grave Robbing: Stuff You Should Know Live in London

Episode Date: December 20, 2016

There was a brief period in the US, UK and Ireland when a dead body could fetch a pretty penny for a person willing to dig it up and sell it to surgeons for dissection. It turns out that there was no shortage of ghoulish types willing to do just that. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. San Francisco, the S.Y.S.K. treat. Yes, San Francisco, Oakland, the entire Bay Area, and dare I say, all of Silicon Valley. We love you, and we're coming back to Sketchfest this year in January.

Yeah, we're gonna be there on Sunday, January 15th at 1 p.m., a very rare afternoon show. Yeah. And we will be ready to go. So you guys better be drunk from the night before or getting drunk for that evening. However, it crosses over. I think it'll be proof positive

that we endorse afternoon drinking. You know? Yeah. Oh, you know, a couple of drinks maybe. Sure. Maybe Bloody Mary. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, we're promoting our show.

Oh, that's right. So we're doing that show on January 15th. You can go to the SF Sketchfest website to get tickets, and it's awesome. It's a great, great comedy festival. Lots of awesome shows that weekend, and for the following weeks. Yeah.

So I encourage you to buy lots of tickets just by ours first. Yeah, and hurry, hurry, because they're selling out fast. No joke. That's not a ploy. That's not a marketing ploy. No.

They're really selling fast. We get emails every time. Guys, you told me to hurry. I didn't hurry. I'm shut out. And since this promo is petered out, it ends right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,

from house.works.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here, but we are in beautiful London, England at Union Chapel. YES! Not bad.

Not bad. I have a good feeling about this stuff! You're the man. guys. It was the S word. For those of you at home just tuning in, you have no idea what we're talking about. Boy, the acoustics in this room. It's almost like they built it for that reason. We should have done this from up there now that I think about it. No, I don't think so. I've worked out a deal. Say what? No, no. Don't respond. Please, come up here and tell the crowd what you just said. So we're doing a podcast. We like to start

it out, get you all laughing, and then bring you down. That's what we're going to do right now because we're talking about grave robbing tonight. Yeah. There's a long rich history in this country, actually. There really is. As you'll see. You probably already know this. You guys were probably taught this from like third grade on, or year three. I don't know. We're from America. I think Germany's landlock for God's sake. So there's, we did a lot of research on this show, and we found that actually grave robbing is this huge, huge amorphous topic. The Egyptians were really big into burying people with these elaborate graves, and then they were equally into breaking in and robbing those graves. The field of archaeology

is basically grave robbing in academia. There's this really, really great video that I really strongly want to recommend to anybody who has... An interest in grave robbing? That? Yes, sure. Okay. But, alternately, if you have a very dark sense of humor, you will love grave robbing for morons. It's this weird bootleg video from the 80s, maybe 90s, where this very disturbing young man is explaining how to extort money from people by robbing their family's graves, and he holds up jaw bones and stuff while he's doing it. It's just right when you leave here, go watch grave robbing for morons. But we realize this is too unwieldy. This is like a five-hour show. It's not. They may sit there for five hours,

but by God, they're going to be really unhappy after hour or two. So we decided we were going to whittle it down to two hours, and it was kind of easy because it turns out that there has never been a period in human history where a dead body has had more monetary value, and hence, more likely to be dug up from a fresh grave than in the late 18th and early 19th century, in the Isles and in America. And I like to call it the Golden Age of Grave Robbing. Josh did this research, and he put this together, and he actually capitalized that. So I thought it was really called the Golden Age of Grave Robbing. He fooled me. I said, no, well, that's remarkable. I didn't know he could have a Golden Age of something

terrible, but I'll go with it. And he said, no, I just capitalized it. Yeah. Well, if you capitalize it, it legitimizes it for sure. Exactly. I bought it. So we're going to go back in time. We're going to all get in the way back machine. Which is the stone edifice right here. It is. Everyone file in. There's plenty of room, believe me. Lots of room in the other dimension this leads to. So we're going to go back to the mid-16th century and pretty much anything before that to what I don't know what they called it back then. It wasn't called medicine or practicing

medicine or being a doctor. In fact, I don't think they had the word doctor yet. Did they or did they? No. No. They were barbers and surgeons. Surgeons stuck. Barbers did not for obvious reasons. Well, barbers stuck. Yeah, there's still barbers around, but just not in the way that you think of. If your barber is cutting you open, he's not doing his job very well in the States. And apothecaries and witches. And that's who was practicing early medicine. And things were going pretty well for a while. They figured out that the human body ran on the four humors and they were wrong because the four humors

are blood, as we all know. Well, that's right. That was pretty sharp of them back then. Not too bad. Flem. It is a thing. We can all agree. And then the two vials, a yellow vial and black vial. And that was it. That was the human body. You had the four humors. And that's how all this stuff worked out. Well, that and they figured out that the kidneys made pee. Right. And they were like, it was actually this guy named Galen. He was working in the first century CE. And he figured all this out and said, job well done. This is human anatomy. And

for 1400 years, they said, we don't need to go back and double check his work. Let's just take his work for it. This is how the human body works. And then finally, one day somebody was like, I'm not sure this is correct. Sure, maybe the kidneys make pee and maybe blood is kind of important, but black vial, I don't even know what that is. I think we need to cut open more people. And they looked around and they said, who are the people who should be doing this? Who should we entrust cutting open dead bodies to? And they said, Barbara Sergeants, you guys amputate people without any sort of anesthesia. We should probably let you do it.

Yeah, because if you want to know how this works, you need to open it up and see what's in there. Kind of like just lifting the bonnet or the boot. Bonnet. Well, what the hell is the boot? I think the boot's the trunk. Yeah, we got that wrong in our big tour announcement. Remember that? Oh, that's not surprising. Yeah. I've said a few other words on the podcast that mean something different here. All apologies. Oh, yeah.

Trust me, I get the emails. I understand these words mean something different. Now. No offense. So they realized you needed to peek under the hood, as we would say in the States and see what's going on. Yeah, let's just stick to that. Yeah, stick to what we know. So eventually they were doing this a little bit and they realized they needed more bodies if they were really going to advance medicine and learn things.

And so in 1540, there was a king. You might have heard of Henry VIII, very famous dude. Or VIII. And he said, here's what I'll do. I'm going to grant the monopoly on cadavers, on bodies to the barbers and surgeons. And he said, oh my gosh, it's great. Thank you so much. How many did we get a year? Four. Oh. Okay, thank you.

Four bodies a year. I don't know if that's going to do it, but thanks. It was a pretty good start, but it clearly wasn't nearly enough. And these early dissections amounted to not much more than just kind of opening the body up and looking to see what was in there and lifting organs out and showing people. Because they'd all learned Galen. Yeah, pretty much. So like the dissections amounted to this?

Yeah. What was that? The appendix? Appendix. Oh, okay. You call it, buddy. And then they get to the intestines and they're like, this is like magic. Never ending. It just keeps coming.

So it was a little bit just like early surgical theater. They would display these organs and no one really knew how things worked back then. It was pretty clear that you needed more bodies if we were going to get anywhere. Everyone wanted to live longer. And they knew a few people knew that this was kind of the way to do it. Right. So they were like, who do we hate? Who do we hate? Murderers. Everybody hates murderers.

And King George III, another king, King George III, he said, I'm going to pass this thing called the Murder Act. And the Murder Act basically said, if you were convicted of murder, not only were you going to be hung, but we're going to die hanged. Is it, yeah, two different meanings. Oh, yeah, I guess. If you get to be hung, we're going to dissect you after you're dead because I'm not. I'm George III.

Is that a fact? No, no, no, no. Oh, okay. I just made that up as I do from time to time. Again, I said Germany is landlocked. You know, Donald Trump has small hands. Apparently so. Apparently he's been recently proven. Somebody figured out to go to Madam Tussaud's wax museum and measure the hands because apparently the whole thing's anatomy. Oh, really?

Anatomically accurate, yeah. Oh, wow. Small hands. Oh, yeah, I just realized how we got on that. So you would be hanged if you were convicted of murder, and then after that, they would dissect you as like an additional, like, we hate you that much. That's how despicable we find you. So it really kind of opened the floodgates of the bodies a little more.

Sure. We found 30, 40 more bodies. And we found out, actually, in researching this, that you could, during certain periods of time, you could say, I don't want to be executed. Send me to America instead when you're convicted of murder. And we're like, wait, wait, wait. I thought Australia was a penal colony. No, apparently both were. Did you guys know that? No? Okay, good. Because I was going to say, they don't teach us that in America. There's all sorts of like rebellion, and we're not paying taxes, and you're crazy. We don't like you. You're not Hong Kong and all that

stuff. That's how they teach us. We're in a church. Send me to the coast of California for my punishments. Exactly. You got any suntan lotion? So eventually things were progressing a little bit medically, and they actually started founding medical schools. The first medical schools rose out of the hospitals. They dropped the barbers. The surgeon said, I think the word surgeon is going to be the one that people are going to think is legit. So barbers, you just go cut your hair and maybe do a little

bleeding on the side for a little while. And we're going to found these medical schools and these students were expected to show up with bodies. I don't know how they do it in university over here when you start school, if you have to buy your books. In the United States you have to buy your books each semester. But back then it was BYOB in medical school, and you had to show up with your own body. And there was a weird loophole at the time in English law where it was not actually illegal to steal a body. Grave robbing had been going on for a long, long time, but it wasn't for the bodies. It was for jewels or any kind of valuables that the humans were buried with, which happened all the time. The treasures

of the family would be buried with the body a lot of times. And other people wanted those treasures. Exactly. So they would steal those, but now for the first time bodies were valuable. But there was this loophole, as long as you returned the valuables, you could actually steal the body. And technically, technically, it wasn't illegal. Because the body couldn't own itself, it wasn't property. Exactly. So therefore it couldn't be stolen. So if you were caught with just the body, and it

was totally naked, and its clothes were back in the grave, they'd kind of be like, hey, no law broken. Students didn't quite dig this though. They were like, you know, one day this is going to be a respectable profession to be a surgeon, and I know there's a loophole, but something about this doesn't feel quite right. It makes me feinty. Feinty? Feinty.

The problem was that all these students, there were more and more students being attracted to the profession of surgery and of anatomy and studying this kind of stuff. So the more students that came, the more bodies were needed. Because back then there was no embalming, there was no refrigeration. And so after a very short period of time, a body would get gamie. So you'd come in one day with your saw, and you'd go to saw it, and like always in your arm would just keep going. And you'd say, I need another body. And there were no more bodies.

No. They'd say, go dig it up. And then you would say, I'm feinty. And they'd say, fine. Who else can we get to do this? Criminals. Criminals would love to fulfill this. We have a black market that's establishing itself before our very eyes. Why not get criminals to steal the bodies and give them money for it? And that is how this whole thing erupted in the late 18th century and early 19th century. This weird convergence of scientific inquiry, social mores against the idea of dissection.

And a lot of organized criminals that were like, sure, we'll dig up your dead bodies and sell them to you for money. And it all happened right here in London. Congratulations. So one of the first gangs that emerged was called the London Borough Gang. Borough Gang. We've been instructed how to say this. Yeah. We were saying borough, like dumb Americans, and our lighting guy last night said, fellas,

come over here. And he said it with a great accent, but I'm not going to try and do it. He pulled Chuck's beard. He has a great beard, too. So we rubbed beards together. And it's spelled borough. It did. So the London Borough Gang was operating right here, and there was a man who started this gang named Ben Crouch. Any Crouches in the audience? That's probably good. No. No Crouches. No one's going to admit it at least.

And he worked at Guy's Hospital. And I was right next to that today, by the way. Oh, yeah? Did you dig around anywhere? No, I didn't realize that Emily and I were just walking along, and I looked up, and there was Guy's Hospital. That's neat. And I say, I know what used to happen here many years ago. You know, great things. Sure, sure.

But this one dude, he was kind of a rat. He worked at Guy's Hospital, and he had met some buddies in the Peninsular Wars fighting Napoleon. And what they were really good at on the battlefield was ravaging bodies, and like pulling out gold teeth and fillings, and kind of just robbing these bodies. And he said, I think I can take this back home, fellas, and we can get a gang together, and we can really make good use of all this stuff. So he got his buddies, and they kind of found their go-to graveyards, and he was, for a grave robber, a pretty underhanded dude.

Which is super, super underhanded. Yeah, believe it or not. But he was good at it. He would find out what graves were, like other grave robbers were robbing, and he would go to them, and he would desecrate the graves and basically draw a lot of attention to those graveyards so they wouldn't be able to operate in those graves. Right. So he was trying to just kind of keep the cottage industry in house. Right, exactly.

Yeah. And he was really good at it. He actually came to be known as the Corpse King, and he would even make his wife call him that. And she'd be like, don't you mean do you want Shepard's Pie for dinner tonight, Corpse King? And she'd be like, yes, that's what I meant. And he'd say, yes. So Ben Crouch was so good at what he did. That was good.

He was so good at what he did that he actually was able to retire a wealthy man from grave robbing. But that was not the end of the burrow gang. He passed the reins on to one Patrick Murphy. Any Murphy? Oh, you should have heard it in Dublin. There's one Murphy here. Come on. He's like, nope. Yeah, they're all over Dublin.

So Murphy was even a bigger creep. He would do things like he had a bunch of like underhanded things he would do. He would, let's say, sell a body to a hospital and then go back in and break in and steal that body from that hospital that night and then sell it to another hospital the next day before it had a chance to be dissected. Underhanded. He was very underhanded. He also would keep surgeons in line, right?

Like he found out that some surgeon had bought like a bunch of bodies for some students. And he and his gang broke into the anatomy school that night and mutilated the body so they would be unusable, which is not cool. And then there was this one anatomist who, I've never gotten to the bottom of why they didn't like this guy, but they didn't. They once delivered a body to the guy that he had ordered and it was delivered naked in a sack as they customarily were because you couldn't steal anything from the grave. And the guy put the body on the slab and the anatomist came over and was about to cut into

him and the body sat bolt upright. It turned out that it was just a man that the gang had knocked unconscious and delivered and sold to this guy and apparently he ran out of the house naked, scared to death down the street. I'm not dead yet. You will be soon. I'm feeling much better. That's two Monty Python references.

I'm going to go for three. Can I have for an afternoon of mints, sir? That was meaning of life, right? Oh, okay. The big guy at the restaurant and then he eats the mitten, blows up and his rib cage is left. Classic. Well, that's three.

Let's try and work in five. Okay. Five. Can someone be in charge officially of counting? Monty Python references. This was happening all over the UK, by the way, and it was also happening right in our own United States. And in fact, it was happening in our very home state of Georgia in Augusta at the Medical

College of Georgia, which is still there today. And there was a man, well, I was about to say working there, he was a slave and he was owned by the Medical College of Georgia. It's all very sad. He was a slave owned by the medical school and it was illegal to teach a slave to read at the time, which is even more sad. But they taught Grannis and Harris to read because they wanted him to keep up with the obituaries because he was really good at digging up graves and bringing in cadavers and keeping

them in good supply. Let's go ahead and knack for it, as a matter of fact. Yeah, and this kind of points out a thread that you'll see running through this whole history that as long as bodies were being stolen from minority graveyards and marginalized people or mentally ill, like mental hospitals, the white establishment didn't much care. So only when things started happening in the white communities did people really start to get upset. You'll see that a little later.

Yeah. That's definitely what was going on with Grannis and Harris. So everybody, if you'll reach under your pew, you'll find a little pad of paper and a pen because this is the part where we teach you how to rob a grave. There is no pad of paper, by the way. You get a pad. You get a pad. Was that Oprah?

Mm-hmm. It was a half-hearted Oprah, but it was Oprah. Well, you don't want to go full Oprah. No. It gets loud. Unless you're Oprah. So here's how you do it. Typically, this happens at night, and you would think, duh, of course, but there was

a member of the Burra gang named Tom Light, who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he was actually arrested in broad daylight walking through London with a cart full of dead bodies, and the cops came up and said, you know, this is highly illegal. Tom Light's like, oh, can't you see they're naked? Yeah. Yeah, I didn't steal any jewels. So you go at night. You use a wooden shovel because a metal shovel against rock will make noise, and your whole

job there is to be really quiet so you can get away with this. Right. So you got your wooden shovel. You're there at night. And I didn't know before we researched this that I just figured you just dug up the whole grave and raised the casket and pulled out the body. That's a lot of work. No, you want to work smarter, not harder.

Exactly. So you would just dig that first third, you would find the headstone, which ideally is where the head of the body is, unless your family has a weird sense of humor, and you would dig down that first third only, and you would dig down, dig down until you reach the casket, and you would expose the casket, and you would pry that up and snap the lid off of that first third because all the dirt is on the lower two thirds. And then there's this. Or this.

I don't think the eyes are open. If they were alive when they were buried, they were. I've seen movies you do like that, and then the eyes close. Unless you bury them while they're alive. So the body's there. Oh. Why are the arms like this? I don't know.

I'm not sure how they do it. What did you do? That's not bad. They were happy or something. Either way, they would run a rope under the body, under the arms, and they would just pull the body out to the upper third, and then you've got your body, you would, I imagine they stole valuables. I mean, come on.

I know there was a loophole, but if there were valuables, they probably took them. But the thing was, if they were caught stealing the valuables, they would be hanged. If they were caught with the body, no, they wouldn't be. That's right. So they would strip the body down, put it in a sack, put everything back in the grave, and re-burry it as best it could so no one would ever know they were there. That's ideally how it would go down. And our buddy, Grandis and Harris, actually, was supposedly so good at this that he would

memorize the floral arrangements before he desecrated the grave so that when he re-buried it, he could remember exactly what it looked like when he put it all back together. Because if you were a decent resurrectionist, which is what they called these guys, and now that I say decent, that's probably not the best way. If you were good at what you did as a resurrectionist, the whole point was, is that no one would ever know that you'd broken into this grave. Yeah. And we're saying guys a lot.

We try to keep things in our show, like, say, men and women. But let's be honest, women were always way more decent. They wouldn't do something like this even back then. Like they're doing it now. I just realized when I said that, how that sounded. Most grave robbers these days are women. Ever since the 70s. Come a long way, baby.

So was that ad? Never mind. Here's what also happened. People were stealing bodies out of graves, but it was a lot of work. So some enterprising dude said, here's what we'll do. Let's just forget the graveyards and let's just find out when people have died. They kind of live out in the sticks in rural areas, and we'll just go pretend to be a family member, and they're really poor, and they won't know, and we'll say, we'll take care

of the body for you, and they would just take the body right away from the family, and then that's it. They would have the body, no must, no fuss. Right. And somebody would be like, who is that? That took the body. I don't care. They took the body.

I don't have to bury the body. So did you care? No, I don't care. Well, I don't care either. Then shut up. That's how those conversations went. Yeah, we found actual texts. You could also go into the hospitals, the big hospitals, like guys in London City Hospital

had their own graveyards, so indigent patients who died there would just be buried there free of charge, and I'm sure the grave robbers were like, what are you doing? Because they would break into these graveyards that were very largely unpatrolled, and they would dig up the body and then go sell the body to a different hospital. So the body would be a patient one day, die, be buried, be dug up, and then be sold into another hospital within 24 hours sometimes. Yeah, but what that does do is underscores how they revered the body and they respected the dead body, because you would think the hospital would just think, no one's claiming

this body, I've got a cadaver on my hands, we can use this for medical research, but no, they would still bury the body, which kind of was the tone of what was going on. So this was, I know Murphy's contemporary, or predecessor at least, retired, wealthy Mr. Crouch, Murphy himself at one point made 144 pounds in one day, which is about $10,000 in today's dollars, by stealing 12 corpses in one, I guess, overnight period, which was amazing. And the London cops figured they had 200 grave robbers working in London alone, and 10 of those were full-time grave robbers, they were able to quit their other job, which was probably

a big day in the household. Honey, I have really big news. Yeah. You're going to be so proud. I can stop robbing orphans. I can just do grave robbing full-time. Get up guys. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, uh, this was going on way back then, obviously, but evidence of this we have found over the years, kind of recently, um, at the Medical College of Georgia, well, here's the thing. If you go to renovate the basement of your really old hospital, just get ready for what you're going to find down here.

It's not just a matter of tearing up the tile floors and ripping down the drywall. You start digging around in the basement of an old hospital. You're going to find some horrors going on. And they did this in 1989 at the Medical College of Georgia and found 10,000 bones just scattered in the basement of Who Knows Who. And so, like at some point, the idea that surgery and anatomy was based on stolen bodies was lost to humanity, right? So when this kind of thing comes out these days, everyone's like, oh, there's serial

killers, serial killers, and then somebody who's actually studied history comes forward and says, no, actually, I've got some weird news about surgery and anatomy. They would steal the bodies, cut them open, and then just mass bury the bones. And everyone would say, oh, my God, that's crazy. And then they'd sit there for a second, and then they'd forget what they just heard and go back to normal. And then a few years later, somebody else would discover some bones somewhere else, like on Craven Street in the house where Ben Franklin rented for like 27 years, right?

Yeah. Where is Craven Street? Is there no longer on Craven Street? We just assume because you all live in this city, you know we're Craven Street. Is it not around? Is there no more Craven Street? It's nice to change across. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. I thought they buried Craven Street. Well, they found 15 people, the bones of 15 people in this house on Craven Street that Ben Franklin rented, and of course everyone said Ben Franklin was a serial killer, and the same guy came for us like, I told you this before, they used to dig up bodies, cut them open, basis of anatomy, I'm going back here. Look at the bones, Monty Python reference, no? Someone?

That's four. I don't know what that one was, but that was number four. That's from Holy Grail. What part? Then the rabbit in the cave, remember, and he's talking about the rabbit with the huge pointy teeth, and he goes, look at the bones, no one? All right. I don't know if that's a legitimate quote, like it may have been said in the movie, but

it's a quote for me. Like we say, neat, that's a quote. Yeah, that's true. Look at the bones. I thought that was a very funny line. Not tonight. It's terrible. But when I saw the movie back then, I thought it was great when I saw that movie 19 times.

So most recently, right here in London in 2006 at London Hospital, this might have been on the news, they discovered 262 burials at London Hospital and 500 individuals in the yard there that were missing their skull caps, and they had basically skeletons that still had wires connecting themselves. This seems wrong. It does. If you're going to steal a body, articulate the skeleton, and then go to the trouble of rebaring it, disarticulate the skeleton.

At the very least. Yeah, just clip the wires off at least. That's a T-shirt. It's not a good T-shirt. But that's 262 burials in 500 bodies. You do the math. Not everyone has their own plot. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I know what you're saying. Hey. Hey. Hey, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. So that's five. Oh, wow, yeah. We did it, buddy. We did it.

Good night, everyone. Nice job. So this was going on in the States, like we said, but as we implied earlier, as long as these were kind of marginalized people or they were slave graveyards, no one really got their hackles up, but something happened in New York City in 1788 called The Doctor's Riot of New York of 1788. I think that's the full title. And there's two ways the story goes down.

One is way funnier than the other one. The first is that these boys were playing at a hospital in New York, and they saw just an arm, a white arm, hanging in the window, a guest to cure or dry or whatever, and they were disturbed and went home. That's the stupid one. That's not very good. The other version is these boys were playing near a hospital in New York, and they looked in a window, and the anatomist took a white arm and waved at them with it.

Hello. Hello, young man. Come here. He's my favorite anatomist, for sure. And so that's the version we like to believe. And at any rate, they went home, and they told their parents, and one of their fathers had just recently lost his wife, and he got worried that it might be her because he knew grave robbing was a thing, and he went and found that her grave had in fact been dug

up and was a little angry to say the least. He's fun in a circle of rage that managed to attract 5,000 other people in New York at the time, and they started one hell of a riot. They went over for, I think, like two, three days, 20 people died, and they called it an anatomy riot, and the reason it was an anatomy riot is because they tried to find every dead body they could in the hospital, which they found a few, and they beat some doctors along the way. And then afterwards, they went to the medical college, and apparently word had gotten from

the hospital to the medical college, and they got rid of all of them, right? And so when they went and stormed the medical college, they didn't find anything, and they were like, well, our rage is not satiated. And like a little known footnote to this whole thing, when they got to the medical college, Alexander Hamilton was standing there. They all said, Alexander Hamilton, what are you doing here? He said, peace, brothers, peace, sisters, go back home, and they pushed his face out of the way and stormed the building.

Pretty much. But again, they didn't find anything, so they found out that all the doctors and all the students were hiding out at the jail, and they were like, no jail can hold us. We're 5,000 strong, there's a guy circulating in the middle just filled with rage, keeping us going, we're eating stuff from time to time to keep our energy up. It was a bad scene. They were literally shouting, bring out your doctors en masse in New York City in 1788. Bring out your doctors so we can kill them.

This was the tone of the time, and this was not an isolated incident. There were dozens of anatomy riots all over the United States back then. It was really very disturbing. It was kind of a thing, and you guys did it too, but we really did it, you know what I mean? Yeah, we know how to write. Or something like that. All right, so because all this was going on, it became pretty clear that people should

take action on their own if you're going to bury a family member. Maybe you should take some steps to ensure that they would be laid to rest for eternity. Right. The precautions. Yeah, it was a very inventive time. It was a Georgian period, and I don't know why I said it like that. You have to. The Georgian period.

Right. Now drink some tea. I don't have any tea. Drink some gin. I don't have any gin. You lie. I just covered my tooth on a smile. That's your new thing.

It'd be funny if you got your finger stuck in there. It's happened. No. No, but my daughter had her finger stuck in there. No. I'm just kidding. So this was a very inventive time, so they thought let's come up with some ways to ensure this doesn't happen.

Let's start kind of basically by just staggering sticks and things as we pile the dirt on the casket. Because again, they're using wooden shovels. Yeah, let's just make it harder to dig up the body, basically. Which is pretty simple. Pretty straightforward. Sure. Another one was the mort stone, which was invented by a guy named Mort Stone, and it was just

basically like putting a huge rock on a grave, and they're like, well, they'll never get into that grave. And they hadn't thought it through, because all you have to do is dig around the stone and downward at an angle, and you get to the grave. That's that. Not too bad. They actually still use mort stones every now and then, today, just a few years ago, in 2013, on Treadworth Road Cemetery in...

Where? Whoa. That's right. We needed music for that one. Yeah, we did. I still don't know. Horno music, too, weirdly. That was a weird ringtone, dude.

I still don't know how to pronounce this. You do, too. You do, too. Gluster? Gluster. Gluster. Is that right? So we did our first show in Manchester, which apparently you're supposed to say Myrrh.

Because we said Glauchester. No, I said it. You're being kind. It was like this audience who'd been going like this all night. Suddenly, we're pointing and laughing like they were townspeople in Springfield on the Simpsons, and somebody had just pantsed us. It was like that. The biggest reaction anyone has ever gotten from a crowd in Manchester, we got.

And it was at our expense, pointing and laughing, because we said Glauchester, which is just so funny. And then we went to Scotland, and they said it's Glauchester. Flynn came up. But they didn't point and laugh when they did it. So Treadworth Road Cemetery and Gluster. One Miss Betty, Brazil, and Henry, Brazil were buried together, and apparently the word had gotten around that they were buried with a lot of valuables.

So someone tried to dig them up, because the jewels down there. And I don't think they actually got finished at night, so the sun started to rise. And they put a recycling bin over the hole and said, we're going to come back later tonight. And that worked for a little while, but I don't think they got the body, right? No, they worked for like 10 minutes until the sun came fully up, and someone saw the recycling bin and said, someone just tried to rob this grave. In 2013. Yeah.

Still going on. So the next thing they invented was called the Mork House, invented by a guy named? No wrong. It was Mort Stone again. This was basically just a mausoleum that you could not break into. It was heavy stone, and it was a place where you put your body where it was temporarily interred until it could find its final resting place. For like three weeks.

Yeah. Because that was the rule of thumb, was it took about three weeks for a body to become unusable by an anatomist, and therefore it was out of danger of being stolen by a grave robber. And if you had a Mork House, most people said impenetrable, maybe. I'm going to guard it and be armed while I do. So a lot of people stood watch in cemeteries at this time. And as a result, cemeteries were places where there were a lot of shootouts between family

standing watch and protecting graves, and grave robbers who were so brazen that they wouldn't run, they'd shoot back. Be like, no, that's my body. No, that's my aunt. Well, we're taking your aunt. No, you're not. And it would just go like that for a while. Or they would get in shootouts with other family standing watch that they'd mistaken

for grave robbers, which happened a surprising amount of time. Yeah, graveyard wasn't a place to be back then at night if you wanted to remain safe and alive, and it's still not. So they had this other thing called a set gun. It had been around since about the 15th century, and a set gun is basically, or in this case a grave gun, a gun that you don't need to man. You set it up. Or woman.

Yeah, that's true. You would set it up on top of the grave, and it could spin it in a circle, like in a tripod, and it had a triangulated trip wire. So if you're walking along with your wooden shovel and you go to steal a body, it would trip it, and then this gun would just start randomly firing in a circle. And you would get, and I quote the article we're working from, a grave robber who tripped the wire would get an ass full of musket ball. Yeah.

That's what it said, an arseful, excuse me. This is from the guy who capitalized the golden age of grave robbery. Another version of that was a shotgun inside the casket. So they would pry it open, and look inside, and literally get shotgunged in the face. If you were like a family who knew what they were doing, you'd put the shotgun in the corpse box. Which would be, that's not what you want to see when you get shot in the face, it's a shotgun.

Yeah, that's your last thing. Believe me, we're from America. And then, what does that mean? We got shotguns all over the place. Another little enterprising idea was called the torpedo, the grave torpedo. And the grave torpedo and our same friend who said, no, it's pronounced borah, pointed this out to me after the show. He came up to me after the show and said, let me correct you guys on a few things, which

I love. Again, he grabbed Chuck's beard. And I just thought it was funny, it's called a grave torpedo, because what it is is a land mine. You're walking toward the grave and you would be exploded. It makes you feel like bad for a second and then you're like, oh wait, this is against Grave Robbers. Exactly.

But he pointed out that the early torpedoes were really just mines and it just kind of got morphed eventually to be something that you would shoot out of a submarine. So now it's a colloquialism, the grave torpedo. Coming soon. So one of the things that somebody was inevitably going to hit on was, yeah, it's all fine and good, breaking into a grave, having to dig past sticks, maybe around a mort stone, I could possibly get a shotgun blast to the face from a shotgun being held by a corpse that I'm trying to steal, I'm getting shot at by the family members.

It's an honest day's work, but is it worth it? So like I said, it's inevitable that somebody was eventually going to be like, why don't I just murder somebody and sell their body? I don't have to deal with any of that other stuff, I just have to kill them. I'm robbing graves already, it's not a huge step to just go ahead and murder somebody. And there were two guys in particular who were really famous for this kind of thing, for hitting upon this idea. And they were named William Burke and William Hare, or the two bills as we call them.

Someone just wooed in the back. Yeah, you're not supposed to woo those guys. You could maybe woo the Simon Pegg film, but we didn't reference that. So Burke and Hare, they were born in Ulster, and they immigrated to Edinburgh to work on the Union Canal, and they met each other there and said, hey, are you a disgusting creep? I am, too. I could tell, I could tell in your eyes.

Let's pinky, just be pinky swear buddies. And they stabbed each other in the back as they pinky swore to. However, and I think, which one ran the boarding house? Hare owned the boarding house. Burke was a cobbler sometimes that ran the space there. That's right. So Hare, he was, he was working at the boarding house, and he said, I've got this guy living there named Old Donald.

He died. Which happens to guys named Old Donald, eventually. It was a weird nickname when he was four years old. But now he's. He's so wrinkly. Now he's living up to it. Old Donald died owing four pounds in back rent. He said, all right, here's what we'll do.

I know a good body can fetch some money these days. Let's find some other creep who's a doctor that we can sell it to, and they found a surgeon named Dr. Robert Knox, who, I don't know, you've seen a picture of this guy, right? Have you guys ever heard of this guy? Dr. Robert Knox? He is, I think, the archetype for the mad scientist, the creepy mad scientist. There's one very famous, like, wood engraving of him. He's wearing, like, black leather gloves up to his elbow, and those creepy sunglasses

from the 19th century. It's like, what are you wearing those for, Doc? What are you hiding? And he was hiding plenty, believe me, right? So if you look at a picture of this guy, you're like, that's where that came from. And this guy was a real living guy who gained a reputation for being a ghoul, eventually. And he was the man who was like, boys, I'll give you seven shillings, no, seven pounds ten shillings for old Donald.

And keep them coming. I don't care where they come from, just keep them coming. You see these sunglasses? I don't care where you get them, I just see more bodies. And Burke and Harrow are like, that's great, we'll just go back to the boarding house and wait for somebody else to die. They sat around for about, like, five, six minutes, and they're like, oh, oh, six A. Six A is very sick.

Maybe we should just hasten Six A's death. Six A is the place where the person dying was living. And so they went in and said... It's right next to Six B. Right. Uh-huh. But on the other side, no, no, this just starts there at Six A. So they went in and said, Six A, good to see you, here's some gin.

Just close your eyes while we do something real quick, okay? And one of them, I don't know who did what. Well, all right, let's say we're Burke and Harrow. Okay. It might be the one to lay on the body to make sure it doesn't move. So I would just climb, I would lumber up on the body and just do this. Show them the tooth. Yeah.

Yeah. That is not what you want to see as you expire. That's the last thing you would see. And wink knowingly. You're about to die. And then I would come in. And my job would be to close the nostril in the mouth, maybe say something reassuring like, you're asleep now, you're asleep forever, get a little drool going, you're asleep forever.

And then that's how these people would die, which is a terrible, terrible way to go. And they became so prolific and well-known for this eventually that this process of murdering people and actually murdering people for their body to sell it for dissection became known as Birking. Yeah. It's not what you want named after you. A method of murder. Now, if your last name becomes a verb.

For murder. Well, for anything, unless it's really great. Well, yeah, sure, there's plenty of great things. Name one. Like somebody coming up to you on the street and giving you like a bunch of free candy. Candy? Sure. Well, clarking.

That guy just clarked me. Oh, I love it when I get clarked down the street. You realize you have to do that to make that happen. I'm going through now. Good. You have a new life mission to make your last name a verb. I need to get my hands on some candy. You do.

What do you call candy here? Sweet. Sweet. Oh, oh, that's why that joke didn't go over quite as well. Now I understand. Like I just clarked me. He gave me some sweets. Fries are chips.

Chips are crisps. Candy is sweets. Pudding is all dessert, right? And pork pies, by the way, are the greatest thing you people have ever invented. You had some last night, right? Oh, yeah. I can't get enough. Somebody clarked me with some pork pies.

Please. I'm dead serious. We'll wait. We'll wait while you go to the store. What's up with the pork pie hat? Is it shaped like a pork pie? No? I guess, roughly, maybe.

Like the pork pie, it was round, but then it folded in on the edges. And I think a pork pie hat does that, so that might be it. Who cares? You can't eat a pork pie hat. Well, that's what you think. No, I've tried. I'm going to go to Habit Asher tomorrow. I'm going to inspect this firsthand.

All right. It was another Monty Python reference. Habit Asher? Really? No. Okay. I thought you would know where I was going with it, and they would. I have no idea.

I just got lost. Where are we? All right. So they're Birking people left and right. They killed about 15 people, at least in Edinburgh, over a 10-month period. And they got their girlfriends involved. They each found some nice ladies. They said, are you creepy?

Because we are. And Birk hooked up with Helen, and the hare hooked up with Margaret. And they started including them in their little game of death. And they said, here's what we'll do. We'll just go out to a bar, and we'll find some old woman who loves gin. Loves gin. And we'll just say, you know, have another drink. Have another drink.

And you know what? The reason why we have lots of gin is at my boarding house. So just come back with me late at night, and they would ply these old ladies and old men with booze, bring it back to the boarding house. I would lay on them. Yeah, I would come in. And you sleep. And it was a cottage industry, and things were going along swimmingly for a while until

they got a little greedy as things go when there's money involved. And they started to. Well, money and murder. Yeah. Money and murder. I've seen the movie Shallow Grave. That's a bad combination. I don't know how that goes.

So you guys haven't seen the movie Shallow Grave, or have you? No? Oh, you used to see it. It's good. There are British people in it. So they started burking people who were actually a little well-known in town. And Edinburgh wasn't the biggest city at the time, so people kind of knew one another. And they got in real trouble when they finally picked off this dude named Jamie, who everybody

knew in the town. And it was bad news. Well, they didn't call him Jamie. They called him Daft Jamie. And today you would call him Savant with Autism Jamie, but they weren't quite as sensitive as we are today, so they called him Daft Jamie. Yes. We've advanced since then.

And Jamie was actually, he was this very beloved figure in the town. He would just kind of hang out in the downtown, old town. People would say, hey, Jamie, here's a bunch of matches that I just threw onto the ground. Can you count them real quick? And he would calculate it, and they would say, that's amazing. Here's a pork pie, buddy. And he'd say, thanks a lot. But he wasn't a beggar or anything like that.

He just kind of hung out downtown. It was a fixture in town. His mother and his sister cared for him very well, and he was just beloved. So we ended up on Dr. Knox's table, and he was very recognizable, so much so that a colleague of Dr. Knox is like, that's Daft Jamie. I didn't know he was sick. And Dr. Knox is like, first of all, it's Savant with Autism Jamie. Secondly, no, it's not.

And he started cutting the head off right then. Seriously. And threw it out. And they're like, no, it is. Daft Jamie has a club foot. And Dr. Knox started cutting off the club foot. And then he said, OK, let's begin a great new year. And started cutting open Daft Jamie.

And that was not the only one. There were several other people that were recognized on the table. So Dr. Knox kind of fell under suspicion. But it wasn't that that ultimately led to their undoing. They just grew more and more careless over time and more and more suspicious of one another. So much so that it was Burke and Helen, right? Yeah. Burke and Helen said, Herr and Margaret, we think you're killing people without cutting

us in. So I'm going to go open my own boarding house so we can kill in peace. Burke's house of murder is what they called it. And then they were like, oh, it's terrible. And they crossed out murder and wrote fun underneath. And they started attracting borders after that. So Burke's house of murder and fun is going on in tea and biscuits. And they're drawing in people, and they're killing people on their own as a duo.

And they're not very good at keeping things quiet. They're good at the killing parts, the covering up afterward part. They suck it up. Exactly. At one point, they had a body in the boarding house that they just covered up with straw and hay. And one of the other boarders was just kind of cruising through the house. And they said, I've noticed that that big pile of hay has an arm coming out of it.

It's a little weird. And I'm going to go call the cops. And they said, no, don't do that. Here's what we'll do, and here's what we're doing. Let's give you a little dough. We're selling these bodies. It's for medicine. And we'll cut you in on this deal as long as you promise to not go to the police.

And the lady backed slowly out of the room and said, sure, that sounds great. Just write a check and leave it under my door. And I'll be back soon. I have to go mail something, because shams.com wasn't invented yet. So she went right to the cops. And the Lord Advocate... We each get $15 for that. I wish.

So the Lord Advocate in charge of Hare's case said, you know what, I'm going to give you immunity. Here's a big offer. You will turn King's witness against your pal, Burke, and Hare quickly accepted. And I don't think the words were out of his mouth. He said, sure, I'm on board. I will testify against him. And that's what he did.

And to this day of the four, including girlfriends, only one was actually tried and hanged. Hanged. Just Burke. Yep. And he was a very heated figure, as you can imagine. I think 20,000 people showed up for his hanging. And... No, just hanging.

And when he was hanged, afterward, they gave his body to the University of Edinburgh for a dissection. Yeah. Real irony. And 40,000 people turned out to see his dissected body, actually. Yeah, and they just lifted the organs out, toward everyone. So Hare, after a few years, he kind of tried to disappear, as you do, when you're a creepy ghoul.

And he went to work at a lime quarry, and the dudes that he worked with found out who he was, and kind of a mob justice took over, and they shoved him into the lime quarry, and he was blinded for the rest of his life. And we don't know if he was, like, blinded from the lime, or they threw him into the quarry, and he, like, landed on his eyes on sharp rocks. But either way, he was blinded by the incident. You don't know that. And he actually eventually moved to the streets of London, which is what you do when you're

blinded for life. When you're trying to reinvent yourself. And Dr. Knox, as well, even, he was ruined in Scotland, and he moved to the streets of London to try and pick up his medical profession, which he did with pretty poor results. But he did write a very well-received book on fishing. It's not a joke. I know. It's true.

It's hilarious, but it's not a joke. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. You know, life in relationships, life in general, can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so people are being killed. People are digging up bodies.

There's anatomy murder years before Burke and Hare. I think like a decade before, there was a guy named Thomas Wakefield, who was a surgeon in the publisher of The Lancet, a great medical journal that we use that's still around today. They're coming for us. So he was a publisher of The Lancet, and he said, this anatomy murder is going on. This is like in 1820. And he said, everyone should be afraid, because there are dudes out there that will kill you just to sell your body.

And so be, be very afraid. And there were a lot of surgeons too, who were fairly liberal minded, who were saying, we need better laws than what we have now. We need more bodies, because people are robbing graves. People are murdering for these bodies. There's this huge demand that's being fulfilled in terribly illicit ways. We have to get better laws. But the problem is these surgeons, as prominent as they were, were in this weird position

where they looked like ghouls, like, can we have some more bodies, please? They just delivered them fresh to our door. So anytime they were challenged, they would back off very quickly, because they all had stolen bodies back in their labs, right? So the status quo remained the same until Burke and Hare came out. And you guys actually, you should be very proud, you had your own group of Burkeers here in London. They were known as the London Berker Trio, and they killed a bunch of people, what came

to be called the anatomy murder, or Burkeing. And the one that undid them was they killed a 14-year-old boy who'd recently emigrated from Italy. And they delivered them to, I think, Guy's Hospital. And the porter at Guy's Hospital said, hmm, that's pretty weird. We don't usually get warm dead bodies delivered to us. It seems a little sloppy. Maybe I should follow up.

So he took the boy to one of the anatomists and said, what do you think about this? The anatomist said, well, I think this boy's neck was broken about 45 minutes ago. It's probably murder. So luckily the porter knew who had delivered the body, and the cops found the guys. They were hanging themselves. And between the Berker Trio and Burke and Hare before them, the public's eyes were finally totally open to this. There was no avoiding this any longer.

People were being murdered to supply bodies for anatomists, and they didn't know who to blame. There were some anatomists who were convicted of dissecting cadavers. But for the most part, people, I think, got that maybe the law's a little weird right now. Maybe we have this weird prohibition that we should rethink. Parliament sort this out. And Parliament did, actually.

Exactly. Who do you turn to? So the House of Commons gets involved. They get things done. And they hold hearings, and they said, here's what we'll do. Let's get some of these resurrectionists, and they'll trot them up. Let's give them immunity, and say, if you testify, you get away scot-free. And they're like, oh, you mean immunity?

What'd I say? You said immunity. Oh, OK. But they trotted them out, and they told these sordid tales of digging up bodies, and it was very salacious in the news. Yeah, and everybody was like, oh, man. The public was very interested. Oh, that's more.

And then they got surgeons, and they said, well, let's hear from you. And they talked about the need for cadavers, and it was kind of a big deal, because everyone wants to live longer. And in order to do that, we need to cut people open still. So it was like a double-edged sword. It totally was. So finally, Parliament said, all right, here's what we'll do. We're going to take action.

Just picture me in a powdered wig, and it'll all make sense. Which is hilarious, by the way. Every couple of months, Chuck will just walk into the studio wearing a powdered wig, and I'm like, it's a powdered wig day. So Parliament says, here's what we're going to do. We're going to provide some legitimate bodies by passing the Anatomy Act of 1832. It was a very big deal. Yeah, because right out of the gate, on paper, at least, it got rid of the black market on

cadavers, because it said, anyone who has legal possession of a dead body and the body is dead, the body never said, while they were living, that they didn't want to be dissected, and no spouse or family member is saying, you can't cut open that dead body, you can take that body down to your local anatomist and say, here you go. Just roll them up the steps, walk away, and they'll cut them open for you, right? And this was really radical, it really flew in the face of the sentiment at the time, because again, remember, the Murder Act of 1751 said, not only are we going to hang you for being a murderer, we're going to dissect you afterward.

That's how disgusting we think you are. And that really took kind of an unspoken social stigma and codified it, and this went a long way to undoing the damage that the Murder Act had done as far as the public view of dissection. The problem is, is if you were wealthy or middle class at the time, you weren't exactly running out and saying, like, yes, dissect me, dissect me, and the whole problem with the idea of being dissected is that at the time, you thought that when Judgment Day came and you were in your grave and God stood you up and you were just standing there like, what do you think, huh?

Well, it wasn't so bad, right? That's not how it works. God would look you up and down and be like, you look all right, you can come in. But if you saw that you were missing your eyes, maybe your guts, or you were just an articulated skeleton, you'd be like, you look terrible, lay back down. And that was the sentiment behind not being dissected at the time. So the Anatomy Act kind of governmentalized this idea that no, dissection's actually okay. Forget your religious beliefs.

Just listen to us, parliament. And it actually kind of worked. But at the same time, what it really did and what it was criticized for was that it put the burden of supplying cadavers to science onto the poor, which is kind of already the process. But in this sense, it really kind of codified the whole thing. Yeah, but like you said, it didn't make a difference. I think between 1832 and 1932, more than 57,000 cadavers were legitimately donated to medical

science in the United Kingdom alone. So it really made a big impact and science was advancing and medicine was advancing. So it wasn't to the close of the 19th century that dissection really came to be accepted by the public. And people started to say, you know what, this is actually a good thing. Donating organs, donating bodies is something that we should kind of try and embrace a little bit more. And to this day, sadly, it still kind of goes on in a weird way.

It does so like if you go into an anatomy lab or a medical school in the United States and you come across an articulated skeleton, those skeletons are mostly made up of individual bones that were stolen from robbed graves in India, which means the U.S. outsourced grave robbing. Yeah, and it's currently outsourcing grave robbing. So to finish up the show tonight, we, and true stuff you should know fashion, are going to do a top five robbed graves that only has four. I don't know why we do that.

One of them doesn't even count. Well, that's true. But we're going to start with a dude named Charlie Chaplin, very famous actor. Born here in London, allegedly. That's right. Do you guys know that? I think they did. That's good.

Born in London, died on Christmas Day. Very sad. It is because he loved Christmas. He did. He died in 1977 and just a few months later, in March of 1978, Charlie Chaplin's grave was robbed, stole his body, called his wife, Lady Una Chaplin, and said, I want 400,000 pounds for Charlie's body, and she said, nope. Charlie would have thought this rather ridiculous, was her quote, and they went, oh.

They went, never thought of that. No, don't hang up. Hang up. You have Charlie Chaplin's body now. Let me call you back. Yeah. Pretty much. So there were multiple, like, sting operations that the cops would try to set up to try and

catch these dudes. Never worked out. They never showed up. They kind of chickened out. And eventually they realized that there was one phone call that they were supposed to make to the police. So they tapped the phone of Lady Una Chaplin. And staked out 200 phone booths in the area, and they actually caught the guys red-handed.

Yep, they did. A couple of auto-mechanics. One of them had the best name I may have ever heard. Yeah, there were two guys, Roman Wardis and Gancho Ginev. I want a horse named Gancho Ginev one day. Somebody clarked me a horse named Gancho Ginev. Clark you a horse? Yeah.

Oh, man, I love that term now. I do too. I'm making it happen, baby. Why do you want a horse? I love horses. But a horse named Gancho Ginev, it just fits like Gancho Ginev, the horse. I love it. What's your horse's name?

Gancho Ginev. He was clarked to me, in fact. So eventually they did catch these guys, and they led him to Chaplin's remains, which were about 10 miles from the original graveyard. And then they reburied Charlie Chaplin, and you'll see a thread here. When you rebury a body after it's been stolen, you tend to cover it with like seven or eight feet of cement on top. Pretty sensible.

Yeah. So the next one, I personally don't think this one counts, but we've included it anyway. Abraham Lincoln. Have you guys ever heard of President Abraham Lincoln from where we live? He, again, he was a president from where we live. Anyway, Abe Lincoln died, and something like 11, I think 11 years later, some robbers attempted to break into his grave. And the robbers had a rat in their midst, and the rat had told the cops that this is

going to happen. So the cops staked out the graveyard, waiting for the robbers, and apparently the cops were the Keystone cops, because one of their guns went off and alerted the robbers that they were there. So the robbers turned and ran, and the Keystone cops ran into each other and fell down. It was weird, but it happened. And they didn't actually steal Lincoln's body, which is why I'm like, he shouldn't be on this list.

Yeah. What's sad is I actually made this list, but I didn't think it through clearly. Well, they got away for a little while, and after the robbery, his remains were reburied in the same mausoleum, but in the basement of the mausoleum, not actually. Rich, do you know how rich you have to be for your mausoleum to have its own basement? It's like six rooms. Do you guys have basements here? Okay, all right, well, fine.

You can imagine it. Pretty rich. Wait, what do you call a basement here? A barcement. A basement? A barc... Do you call it a barc... A basement?

Seller. Seller. Okay. Actually, in New England, that's what they call it, too. That's where we live. Well, it's north of where we live, but in America, south of New England. What are you talking about? I don't know anymore.

So they reburied him in the basement, and then eventually, in 1901, his son, Robert Todd Lincoln, said, you know what, let's take him up from down there and let's rebury him proper and put the steel cage over him and bolt that to the floor, and he's safe? No, and they poured cement over him. Oh, yeah, which is what you do as customary. And he's safe? So what do you want to hear? I wasn't quite sure.

So Gladys Hammond, a lady, and this was recently, you might have heard of this one. This was in 2004. She was dug up and held for ransom, but not for money, but to get the family to stop experimenting on guinea pigs. They were raising guinea pigs and selling them to medical science, and these animal rights activists stole her body and basically held her for ransom for this family to stop the family biz. And it worked?

Well, it worked, sort of. No, well, it did work. The family, the group of activists were called to save the new church guinea pigs who you may have heard of. And have you guys heard of them? No, you haven't? They just thought it was funny. It's a cute name, but they were dead serious, you know?

So they stole the body, held it for ransom, and the family said, okay, fine, we'll get out of the business. We're not going to breed guinea pigs for medical research anymore. We'll breed them to be dressed up like cowboys for children's parties. Surely you have no problem with that. The original purpose for guinea pigs. So they actually did get out of the business, and the people who robbed the grave and stole the woman's body, the family member's body, didn't give it back.

They just never got back in touch. They were like, we moved on to whales now. We don't care about guinea pigs anymore. So it took 18 months before they finally caught these people and said, where's the body? And they're like, oh, she's in some heathland. And that's it. What's a heathland?

Country? No, no, heathland. Is it a moor? Yes, it's a moor. What's a moor? I think there's quicksand on the moors, isn't there? Boggy area? No?

A field? Is it a field? Why did we feel the need to rename everything? Those are great words. I think we renamed it. These guys were here first. No, that's what I'm saying. Oh, we?

Yeah. Those are wonderful words. Heathland is beautiful. We don't know what it is, but it sounds great. Stupid Americans. So we're going to finish up the list with Josephine, and by the way, we have a microphone right there. After this, we're going to have about 10 or 15 minutes left to do a little Q&A.

If anyone has any questions, you can do so. If you don't, you can leave. If you have to pee, you can leave. It won't hurt our feelings. We understand. We both have to pee right now, too. Speak for yourself. I have to pee, totally.

We're going to finish up with Joseph Haydn, Franz Joseph Haydn, a very famous Austrian classical composer. He died. This is during the phrenology movement, and we've talked a little bit about phrenology on the show. This is when you thought that you could look at a human skull and really tell a lot about the person and about where the smarts were and where the genius was, perhaps. So it was a big deal to get your hands on the skull of someone like Haydn.

So they went to the grave digger, and they said, we'll give you some money if you cut off his head and give it to us. And the grave digger said, you had me at money. Pretty much. So he did so, and he gave him the head, and they macerated the skull, which means you make the rest of the head disappear through magic until you're just left with a skull. What? That's maceration.

Oh, okay. It's not magic, though. Pretty much just so good in a liquid. It's really gross. I got you. Eventually everything goes away about the skull, which is what you want. And the dudes, Joseph Rosenbaum and Johann Peter, looked at the skull and said, oh my gosh.

Look at this. Look at the musical bump on that skull. The other one was like, wait, wait, did you say musical bump? You made that up just now, didn't you? I was like, yeah, totally. But it's going to stick, I think. It's probably just a deformity. Musical bump.

It's Haydn. Of course he has a musical bump. So they have this skull, and they weren't too shy about keeping it quiet. They won one of them even for a little while, kept it in his home. They would have dinner parties, and it was Haydn's skull, and he kept it in a glass case, like musical notes and compositions, and like an ink and pill, and quill and pen. And it was prominently displayed, and then the cops eventually found out about this. Well, somebody went to go rebury Haydn.

Yeah, because he wanted to be moved to the family flat, right? Yeah. He died during wartime, and it was kind of hastily buried. And a couple of decades later, they finally went to rebury him. And when they did, they were like, I didn't know Haydn didn't have a head. He had. Last time I saw him. So they go, and someone says, you know what?

I totally knew who has his skull, because they're not too shy about it. It's over at the sky's house, over at Rosenbaum's. So they go over to Rosenbaum's house. This is really awful. His plan was to hide it in the mattress, to get his wife to lay on the bed, and tell the cops that she is menstruating. And the cops are like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they all just ran out of the house.

Pretty much. You keep your skull. That's basically how it went down. And again, we've come a long way since then. And the skull was eventually reunited, well, they gave them a fake skull at the time. Right. Here's the skull. They knew the jig was up, but they really, really wanted Haydn's skull.

Yeah. So they gave him a fake. They rebury that with Haydn, thinking it was Haydn's skull. And then years later, in 1954, in fact, not that long ago, well, sort of a long time ago, but not on the grand scheme of things, they eventually find Haydn's real skull and rebury it, but they didn't know what to do with the old skull. So to this day. Well, not even, not only that, I don't think it was that they didn't know what to do.

I think they took the Haydn's actual skull into his tomb, set it down, went to go shut the door, and turned around and was like, oh, why? Which one was, which one has the musical bump? Which one? And then they said, forget it, we'll just bury both of them. Pretty much. So to this day, Haydn's skull is still buried, or his grave still has two skulls buried in the same grave.

Yep. If you went and dug it up today. It's a very little known fact. So that is grave robbing. Yep. And that is the end of our show. Yes. I got it.

All right. That's good. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever

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