Happy Thursday Fixers! Wow, did I get sucked down the rabbit hole for this one. My original intent was to showcase the various rigs used in the 19th century to alert people that you weren’t as dead as they thought you were when they buried you. But then I found this picture and was off on a tangent so here we are.
Turns out being dead in a cemetery was just as hazardous as NOT being dead. As the medical community took off, the demand for cadavers to practice on increased. But the problem was Victorians had the mindset that being dissected after death was sure to keep you from Heaven so only the bodies of hanged criminals were given to the universities. Undeterred, the scholars merely started to hire “Resurrectionists” that were paid obscene amounts of money (for the time period) to bring in corpses for study. The above photo was one of many ways average people tried to protect their loved ones.
Digging through six feet of dirt was too obvious and time consuming so many body snatchers would merely dig a tunnel to the end of the coffin, break in the side and use a rope to haul their prize out quickly under cover of darkness. So the wooden plank would be bolted to the coffin floor and the metal collar fastened around the neck of the deceased. Then when the body snatchers busted through the coffin to get the rope around them, the body would stay firmly in place (and in Heaven).
But that was only the beginning of this bizarre war on grave robbing. More after the jump!
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