“One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places …
“Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.”
– From Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818)
It's nearing Halloween, and everyone likes a scary story. How about a tale that's horrifying but true? I can't resist telling readers about this investigation into the history of grave robbing during the 19th century. I think it's a tale of horror and death that rivals any good Gothic literature – only this time Doctor Frankenstein operated right here in the Buckeye State.
As with so many PBS television shows, History Detectives is fabulous. The episodes are extremely interesting and full of unique investigation into iconic mysteries from America's past. Each hour long segment captures the imagination of the viewer and deals with solving a puzzle behind historic objects and artifacts.
Such was the case of “Episode 703, Story 3: Cemetery Alarm” that I recently viewed. In this segment, Henry Dorrum of Chesaning, Michigan, believed he had found the 19th century answer to this historic problem of grave robbery. He had been collecting for 25 years, and this strange device was the most unusual object he had ever found. He sent History Detective Wes Cowan on a mission to discover the story of his Grave Torpedo patented by Thomas N. Howell in 1881.
The object, the subject, and the investigation immediately hooked me, and through History Detectives, I discovered a strong Ohio connection. I'd like to encourage you to watch the episode and also read about the ghoulish practice of grave robbing.
Grave robbery is unthinkable; however, through my own investigation, I discovered that today, it seems most valuables stolen in cemeteries are sitting right outside the tombs: the statues – particularly angels – urns, columns, benches and fountains that beautify the grave sites.
Especially across the South these items are being stolen by the hundreds, destined for antique shops and flea markets, where they bring high prices as garden decorations.
“Garden-type statuary has been hot for a few years, and cemeteries are the one place to get it,” said Tom Hoepf, central edition editor of AntiqueWeek. “Any community that has the Victorian country-style cemetery in a rural area or on the edge of town is prone to vandalism or theft.”
(Edith Stanley. “Today’s Grave Robbers Do Lively Business : Thieves are plundering cemeteries for statues, columns and benches. The objects bring high prices as garden decorations.” Los Angeles Times. November 21, 1996.)
Ohio History
During the 1800s, medical schools routinely stole recently buried cadavers to demonstrate medical procedures to their students. Cadavers from across Ohio were illegally exhumed for this purpose.
Perhaps the most famous person illegally exhumed was John Scott Harrison, a former Ohio Congressman, youngest son of President William Henry Harrison and the father of President Benjamin Harrison.
John died of heart problems in May 1878 and was buried in Congress Green Cemetery in North Bend, Ohio.
(“Grave-robbing.” Ohio History Central.)
During his burial on May 29, attendees noticed that the grave of Augustus Devin, who had died 11 days earlier of tuberculosis, had been robbed. “The general impression," stated the Cincinnati Enquirer, "was that a 'stiff' was being smuggled into the Ohio Medical College." Medical schools were prime suspects in grave robbing cases back then, as they were notorious for stocking their anatomy classes with "materiel" (sic) sold by resurrection men.
Horrified and concerned, Benjamin and his brothers John and Carter saw to it that their father's grave – already brick vaulted – was reinforced with three large stone slabs over the casket and covered with cement. After the cement had dried, the grave was filled and the Harrisons paid a watchman $30 to guard the grave for 30 nights.
The next day, John and his cousin George Eaton, armed with a search warrant and backed up by three Cincinnati policemen, began looking for Augustus at the Medical College of Ohio.
During the investigation for Devin, the authorities were met by janitor A.Q. (sometimes J.Q.) Marshall, who escorted them as they searched the building. In the cellar they found a chute connected to a door in the alley, which also connected to a vertical shaft running the height of the building. Elsewhere they encountered boxes of assorted body parts, a student "chipping away" at the breast and head of a black woman, and the body of a 6-month-old baby, but no Augustus Devin.
Mental Floss historian and author of The History Blog Livius Drusus relates the shocking outcome of the story …
“Finally, Marshall insisted that he needed to alert the faculty, so Detective Snelbaker let him go—but put a deputy on his tail. Marshall unwittingly led them to an upstairs room with a windlass and rope running into a square hole in the floor. That hole opened into the shaft they had seen in the cellar; the windlass, it seemed, was used to lift cadavers to the upper stories.
“Snelbaker noticed that the rope was taut. He turned the windlass crank and slowly pulled up the naked body of a man whose head was covered by a cloth. John dismissed it at first. The body was that of a relatively robust old man, not the emaciated 23-year-old consumptive they were looking for. Snelbaker suggested that he check nonetheless, so Harrison lifted the cloth.
“The blood drained from John's face. "It's Father," he gasped. John Scott Harrison, whose burial his sons had attended less than 24 hours before, had been dumped down the chute at 3:00 a.m. – not Augustus Devin.
* (Devin's body was later discovered in the pickling vats of the University of Michigan.)
“Relatives visiting the Harrison grave also discovered the robbery. The stones at the foot of the coffin were displaced, the casket was drilled into, and the lid had been pried up so the body could be roped by the feet and pulled out. The thieves must have witnessed the measures taken at Harrison's burial, or they would have gone for the head and been foiled by the much larger and heavier slab covering that end. The watchman had no explanation.”
(Livius Drusus. “The Body-Snatching Horror of John Scott Harrison.” Mental Floss. May 21, 2015.)
The family had the janitor arrested for receiving and concealing the unlawfully removed body of their revered father, but the college faculty posted the $5000 bond. The Medical College was excoriated in the press, but the faculty was boldly unrepentant – that was the cost of competent doctoring.
On Saturday, June 1, Dr. Robert Bartholow, Dean of the College (who four years earlier had killed a patient named Mary Rafferty by inserting electrodes deep into her brain for an experiment), published a statement in the Cincinnati Times denying knowledge of the theft or responsibility for an anonymous body snatcher taking "this means to replenish his exchequer." That afternoon, Benjamin Harrison published his anguished and furious rebuttal in an open letter.
Drusus relates the outcome of the national scandal dubbed the “Harrison Horror” …
“With neither answers nor indictments against the faculty forthcoming, Benjamin Harrison filed a civil suit. The outcomes of the criminal and civil cases are lost, as all records were destroyed when the Hamilton County Court House burned down in 1884.
“In reaction to the crime, however, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan passed amended Anatomy Acts that increased the penalties for grave-robbing and allowed medical schools to use unclaimed bodies of people who died in the care of the state (paupers, orphans, the insane, prisoners) for anatomical dissection. But enforcement was lax, and with demand still outstripping supply, resurrectionists would ply their lucrative trade in the United States well into the 20th century.”
(Livius Drusus. “The Body-Snatching Horror of John Scott Harrison.” Mental Floss. May 21, 2015.)
* Further Note on “Pickling” of Augustus Devon:
“On January 20, 1878 when Charles Morton, a University of Michigan medical school dropout and notorious ringleader in the grave robbing business, was caught in Toledo transporting corpses in large vats labeled “pickles” …
“Shortly after this confession, Morton was handed a letter confirming that the medical school in Ann Arbor had received his recent shipment of 60 bodies from the Columbus area. He tried to burn the note before anyone could read it, but a quick-thinking prison guard salvaged the paper from the flames.
“As word spread of the scale on which Morton conducted his nefarious operations, public outrage and the threat of mob violence loomed. Before he could be brought to justice, however, the villain secretly covered himself in Croton Oil – a corrosive substance that causes pustules and lesions which mimic the dreaded disease smallpox.
“This tricky little maneuver prevented him from becoming the victim of an angry, but grossed out, mob. It also forced officials to transfer him to a much less secure quarantine, or 'pest house' as they were called at the time.
“From there Morton easily escaped his cell and went on to shock the world a few months later when he stole the body of John Scott Harrison, the son of U.S. President William Henry Harrison.”
(Bucky Cutright. “Central Ohio’s Sordid History of Grave Robbing.” Columbus Underground. September 6, 2019.)
Common Practice In Ohio
Kevin Grace, an archivist at the University of Cincinnati, reports that a medical school had ended up with a stolen body was not out of the ordinary. In fact, Ohio had a long and ghastly history of body snatching that lasted until the very end of the 19th century. Medical schools in Ohio and around the globe were deep into the business of body-snatching – for two reasons: supply and demand.
Grace says that the professionalization of the medical field in the 1700s led both to the formation of medical schools across the country, but also to the focus on anatomy – including at the Medical College of Ohio, formed in 1819 (and which later became the University of Cincinnati's College of Medicine).
“One is that, by the mid-19th century, it was accepted in medical education that you learn by doing, so that means that if you want to learn about the human body you had to do anatomy studies," Grace says. "The second thing was that there were no laws that permitted the use of bodies by medical schools. There was no way to obtain the bodies except by illegal means.”
“The legal profession, including judges, recognized the necessity of human dissection in the preparation of members of a sister profession for efficient practice, and, in the absence of adequate anatomical laws,were not disposed to punish severely the illegal acquisition of material for dissection.”
– Grave Robbing in New England by Dr. Frederick C. Waite (1945)
For most of the 19th century, Ohio had no way for people to dedicate their bodies to science, or even to collect the bodies of prisoners or poor people. Ohio's first anatomy law was passed in 1879, around the time similar laws passed in Indiana and Michigan, but it was far too limiting.
So to do human dissections, medical professors would hire someone for the dirty work.
(Gabe Rosenberg. “Ohio's Ghoulish Gambit Against Grave Robbing: Coffin Torpedoes.” WOSU, NPR News. May 17, 2017.)
And hire body snatchers – so-called “resurrectionists” – they did. Right here in Ohio.
Columbus Underground reported during a span of sixty years in the 1800s, there was hardly a cemetery in the area surrounding Columbus that escaped the shovel of marauding ghouls and an estimated 5,000 dead Ohioans unwittingly donated their bodies to the advancement of science.
Some of the city’s most prominent physicians would take to the night procuring “specimens” for the classroom. As long as their quarry were those deemed by society as lower class, there were less chances of getting caught, and even if they did, the repercussions seemed slight.
Bucky Cutright of the Underground reported …
“This became evident in 1844 when a gun fight broke out between two groups of body snatchers attempting to steal the corpse of a criminal that was hung near the intersection of Second and Mound Streets, just south of the Columbus Cultural Arts Center.
“While the identities of the two groups who came to blows over the toe tagger were never disclosed, Dr. Ichabod Jones, head physician for the Ohio Penitentiary at the time, wound up in possession of one of the condemned man’s feet, which he proudly displayed in a jar on his office desk for years to follow.
“In November of 1864 a well-known doctor by the name of Joab Flowers got into a bit of trouble after it was discovered that he had snuck into Camp Chase Cemetery, dug up seven recently deceased Confederate soldiers and sold them to a medical school in Cleveland. When pressed on the matter, he exclaimed, “The bodies were those of rebels who were fit for nothing but dissection!” In lieu of jail time, Dr. Flowers was elected to serve on Columbus City Council.”
(Bucky Cutright. “Central Ohio’s Sordid History of Grave Robbing.” Columbus Underground. September 6, 2019.)
As a history lesson, Bucky Cutright, a guide with Columbus Ghost Tours, likes to bring people to the Franklinton Cemetery where he tells people about grave robbing in Columbus. Most of the graves here are long-removed, sent up to Green Lawn Cemetery, but Cutright says it still has a perfectly eerie feel.
“Now, grave robbing didn’t exactly happen where you see it in the movies where a ghoul sneaks into the graveyard with a lantern and shovel, completely unearths a coffin, opens it, steals a piece of jewelry then says something sassy to the corpse before hauling away," Cutright says, hunching over a tombstone. "It was an illegal activity, so you had to get in fast, you had to get out fast."
Rather than digging up the whole casket, grave robbers would dig close to the headstone, break through the casket, loop a rope around the head and shoulders - and pull. "Yanked 'em right out of the ground.”
(Gabe Rosenberg. “Ohio's Ghoulish Gambit Against Grave Robbing: Coffin Torpedoes.” WOSU, NPR News. May 17, 2017.)
Thus, The Invention of the Grave Torpedo
With the Harrison Horror, grave robbing became a focus of national news. The incident spread throughout the papers and instilled a lot of fear in bourgeois and wealthy society that this can really happen to anyone.
To prevent grave-robbing from occurring, numerous people tried to develop inventions to deter the robbers. Philip K. Clover an artist and inventor from Columbus, Ohio, developed a device that was to "prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies." Clover named his device the coffin torpedo. Buried underground, the torpedo would fire several lead balls into the thief. Clover received a patent for this device on October 8, 1878.
Clover wrote …
“And with this end in view, my invention consists of a peculiarly-constructed torpedo, adapted to be readily secured to the coffin and the body of the contained corpse in such a manner that any attempt to remove the body after burial will cause the discharge of the cartridge contained in the torpedo and injury or death of the desecrator of the grave.”
Clover’s ‘torpedo’ was attached to the top lid of the inside of the coffin and was wired to the corpse. It functioned as a sort-of shotgun that would be triggered upon opening the lid. The would-be robber would be pummeled with 36-caliber lead balls – either killing or gravely wounding the thief.
(Forrest Hanson.“Introducing the Coffin Torpedo: Bizarre contraption that was used to deter 19th Century grave robbers by exploding when the lid was pried open.” U.K. Daily Mail. July 04, 2017.)
While Clover’s design seems perfect for a lone wolf, a collective could easily send one particularly unlucky member to pry the coffin open first and die by coffin torpedo. The individual’s martyrdom would allow other members of the gang to then take the body.
Then, on December 20, 1881, former Probate Judge Thomas N. Howell of Circleville, Ohio, received a patent for an exploding shell that was buried underground above a coffin. If robbers tried to dig up the coffin, the shell would explode, injuring or killing the thieves.
History Detective Wes Cowan learned that this “grave torpedo” was Dorrum's find – the object featured in “Episode 703, Story 3: Cemetery Alarm.”
Howell’s gadget was a shell buried above the coffin and wired to it. This worked like a landmine and would detonate when thieves ran into the wiring.
The shell, filled with almost one pound of black powder, would ignite at a physical disturbance. The metal contraption would act as both a shield and weapon and direct the force of the blast at the grave robber. The body of the deceased would remain unharmed, while the ‘resurrection man’ would emerge at best with some burns and – at worst – dead.
(Forrest Hanson.“Introducing the Coffin Torpedo: Bizarre contraption that was used to deter 19th Century grave robbers by exploding when the lid was pried open.” U.K. Daily Mail. July 04, 2017.)
Cowan even found an advertisement for the Howell torpedo: “Sleep well sweet angel, let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo, ready to make minced meat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat.”
Lore of coffin torpedoes and graves loaded with them spread in patent catalogs and newsprint. A 1899 issue of the Topeka State Journal claimed the late Mrs. W.C. Whitney’s grave was “sown with powerful torpedoes” and fiercely guarded by watchmen at all hours. The report referenced the case of A.T. Stewart, a gilded-age tycoon whose body was taken from its grave in 1878 and held for ransom.
“There is no secret about the torpedoes,” the Journal claimed. “All the village talks of them.”
(Lucy Tiven. “Victorian ‘Coffin Torpedoes’ Blasted Would-Be Body Snatchers: Grave robbing got more hazardous in the 1880s.” Atlas Obscura. April 3, 2017.)
But, despite all the chatter about graveyard artillery, there is little to suggest coffin torpedoes were widely manufactured or commercially successful.
“For the most part, these devices seem to have been used very little,” says anthropologist Dr. Kate Meyers Emery. “They were definitely oddities designed to make money off of the widespread fear about body snatching. The truth is, most of the time you really just needed someone to watch over your grave for a few days or weeks to make sure that the body had time to decay and wouldn’t be of use.”
Doctoral candidate Megan Springate authored the book Coffin Hardware in Nineteenth-century America. She was similarly unconvinced that coffin torpedoes made it out of patent catalogs. According to Springate, these news clippings probably reference “general explosives” placed around graves rather than inventions specific to the funeral industry.
“Other aspects of the mortuary industry in the U.S. would have also deterred body snatching, including burial in sealed shipping crates as makeshift vaults, the use of hidden locking mechanisms on casket lids, and the use of cast iron coffins,” she says. “All of these have been recovered archaeologically.”
(Megan Springate. Coffin Hardware in Nineteenth-century America. 2014.)
There is one Ohio account of a grave torpedo incident. It seems one night in January 1881, three resurrectionists were thwarted in their attempt to snatch a body from a cemetery in Mount Vernon, Ohio. One of the grave robbers was, for better or worse, sent to his own grave.
‘The story goes, that while excavating the grave, “the picks came in contact with a torpedo, which exploded, killing one of the ghouls, named Dipper, and mangling the leg of another,” reads a report from the Stark County Democrat. The third individual, who fortunately for him served as watchman, was not believed to have been hurt and saved his mangled comrade.
(Forrest Hanson.“Introducing the Coffin Torpedo: Bizarre contraption that was used to deter 19th Century grave robbers by exploding when the lid was pried open.” U.K. Daily Mail. July 04, 2017.)
“Her body stolen by fiendish men,
Her bones anatomnized,
Her soul, we trust, has risen to God,
Where few physicians rise.”
– Epitaph in a cemetery in Hoosick, New York. "Ruth Sprague, aged nine, died 1846. She was stolen from the grave by Roderick R. Clow and dissected at Dr. P. M. Armstrong's office at Hoosick, New York, from which place her mutilated remains were obtained and deposited here.”
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