The Resurrection Men

This Halloween, we dig deep — literally — into one of the most disturbing true crime tales in medical history.

Step into 1820s Edinburgh, where cobblestone streets echoed with the footsteps of scholars by day… and the shovels of grave robbers by night. This episode uncovers the chilling story of William Burke and William Hare, two men who didn’t just rob graves — they skipped the digging and began murdering for fresh corpses, selling the dead to fuel the booming anatomy lectures of Dr. Robert Knox.

From the shadowy world of the Resurrection Men to the public execution and dissection that shocked a nation, we explore how science, desperation, and greed collided in a city that called itself enlightened.

Featuring:

The rise of grave robbing in Britain and beyond

Real 19th-century news quotes, nursery rhymes, and courtroom drama

The chilling legacy of Burke & Hare — and how it reshaped medical ethics forever

So light a candle, lock your door, and settle in. Because tonight…
the dead don’t stay buried.

Transcript

They say Halloween is the time when the veil between worlds thins.

When spirits walk, witches stir… and the dead — refuse to stay in their graves.

But sometimes, it’s not ghosts pulling themselves from the earth.

Sometimes, it’s men. With shovels. And purpose.

The history of grave robbing is longer than you think — and far more organized than you might imagine. Forget the sneaky ghouls of horror fiction. The real Resurrection Men weren’t working for Satan…

They were working for science.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, a corpse could be worth more than a month’s wages. As medical schools blossomed across Europe, professors needed cadavers — fresh ones — to train the next generation of surgeons. The problem? The law couldn’t keep up. Executions were down. Donations were rare. And students still needed bodies to cut into.

So the market adapted.

Enter the Resurrection Men — a network of grave robbers who operated with military precision and cold pragmatism. They’d follow funerals, wait for darkness, dig from the head of the grave, and extract the body without disturbing the rest of the soil. All in under an hour. No jewelry. No personal effects. Just flesh.

Just product.

This wasn’t just an Edinburgh problem. Oh no.

In London, you had Ben Crouch — leader of the Borough Gang — who ran one of the city’s most notorious body-snatching rings in the early 1800s. Crouch wore fine clothes and traveled in a coach, pretending to be a gentleman. At night, he orchestrated the theft of hundreds of corpses — some from fresh graves, others straight from coffins still above ground.

In New York, the New York Doctors' Riot of 1788 broke out when citizens discovered medical students dissecting stolen bodies. A mob stormed Columbia College. Doctors fled for their lives. One student was found with the severed arm of a recently buried woman — and calmly claimed he was just "practicing his technique."

Even America’s first black medical doctor, James McCune Smith, trained in Glasgow and worked alongside resurrection men in Scotland — because it was the only way students could learn.

Grave robbing wasn’t a horror story. It was a business model.

But here’s where it gets darker.

Because some men didn’t just dig up the dead.

They started making their own.

That’s where our story tonight begins.

Two men.

Sixteen victims.

No graves.

No digging.

Just suffocation… and silver.

Burke and Hare weren’t the first resurrectionists — but they were the first to cut out the middleman and murder to order.

They haunted the alleyways of Edinburgh like wolves — choosing their prey not for vengeance or hate, but for profit.

And behind the door that accepted those bodies,

Stood a man with a scalpel…

And a blind eye.

Halloween is full of legends.

But tonight’s story isn’t one of them.

It’s real.

It happened.

And parts of it — are still hanging in a glass case in Edinburgh.

Welcome to Season Five of the Curator135 Podcast, my name is Nathan Olli and this is Episode 95 - The Resurrection Men

In the early 19th century, Edinburgh stood at the edge of a scalpel.

This wasn’t the cobbled, festival-lit capital you might imagine today. In the 1820s, Edinburgh was a city of contradictions — a cradle of Enlightenment science built upon shadowy, bloodstained foundations.

Above ground: cobblestone streets teemed with thinkers, medical students, and young surgeons-in-training. Below? A hidden economy festered — one fueled by grave robbers, secret cash transactions, and bodies unearthed under cover of night.

This was the golden age of anatomy. And Edinburgh was its epicenter — rivaled only by London and Paris. Thousands of students came from across Europe and North America to study dissection and surgery. In tightly packed anatomy halls, professors sliced into cadavers to unlock the secrets of life — and death.

But science had a problem.

It needed bodies. Fresh ones.

And the law didn’t supply nearly enough.

Under British law, the only legally available cadavers for medical dissection were the corpses of executed criminals. But executions were in decline — not because crime had vanished, but because public sentiment was shifting. People were beginning to see public hangings as barbaric. As society moved toward “civilization,” the gallows fell quiet.

Yet the need for cadavers surged. Anatomy students demanded hands-on experience. Professors wanted new discoveries. Medical lectures ran daily, each requiring multiple bodies.

So what happens when demand exceeds supply?

You turn to the shadows.

Enter the Resurrection Men.

These were no fictional ghouls or religious metaphors — they were real. Hardened. Opportunistic. They operated at night with shovels, sacks, and horse-drawn carts. Their mission? To unearth the newly buried and deliver them — “fresh and undamaged” — to the dissecting rooms of Edinburgh’s medical elite.

They were known by many names: body snatchers, grave robbers… but most famously, Resurrection Men.

Most worked in small crews. One would watch the graveyard. One would dig. Another would carry the corpse. They waited until families had gone home from a funeral, then returned after midnight. They worked quickly, often digging from the head of the grave to avoid collapsing the full coffin. They’d break open the lid, lift the body out with iron hooks or their bare arms, then refill the earth to make it seem untouched.

It was dirty, dangerous work — but the payout was exceptional.

Each cadaver fetched between 7 and 10 pounds — equivalent to several months’ wages for a laborer.

And here’s the sinister detail: under the law, a dead body wasn’t considered property. Stealing a corpse wasn’t “theft” in the traditional sense. If they didn’t steal jewelry or clothes, only the body, they risked little more than a slap on the wrist.

Still, the public was terrified.

Panic spread across Edinburgh like a sickness.

Families began guarding graves overnight — sometimes with guns. Iron cages called mortsafes were invented and clamped over coffins. Wealthy families built stone tombs or hired round-the-clock guards. Some churches posted warnings: “Grave robbers operate here — watch your dead!”

And yet, even with the threat of arrest or violence, the trade continued.

Why? Because the anatomists paid — and asked no questions.

In the lecture halls of Surgeon’s Square, medical professors were under pressure to provide cadavers for their paying students. There were no refrigeration units, no preservatives. A body lost its usefulness in just days.

So the Resurrection Men became essential to the education system.

Anatomists — even the most respected — left coins on tables and picked up fresh corpses from anonymous hands. Some even kept regular “contacts” in the resurrection trade. The fresher the body, the higher the price.

In one recorded case, a professor was so pleased with the state of a body that he reportedly said:

“This one’s so warm, I feared he might still speak.”

Still, the system kept turning. Because what other choice did they have?

And so, this dark economy flourished in the alleys and vaults beneath Edinburgh.

Until two men decided to skip the grave robbing altogether.

Before the murders. Before the headlines. Before the city turned against itself — there was Dr. Robert Knox.

In 1820s Edinburgh, he was the name on everyone’s lips. Surgeon. Showman. Scientist.

Knox was a man of contradictions: brilliant, ambitious, deeply respected — and yet, willfully blind to the blood-streaked trail that led to his lecture hall. He wore a black patch over one eye, a lifelong reminder of the smallpox that nearly killed him as a child. His surviving eye sparkled with intellect — and obsession.

He had served as a military surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars. At the Battle of Waterloo, he tended to the shattered limbs and split bodies of the fallen, gaining a first-hand education in trauma few could match.

When he returned to Edinburgh, he brought with him not just scars, but an unrelenting hunger for knowledge. His passion? Anatomy — the raw, physical study of the human body. He believed it was the cornerstone of all medical understanding.

And he knew that to teach it properly, he needed bodies.

Knox began lecturing at the Extramural School of Anatomy, independent from the University, where students flooded his classrooms. His lectures were legendary — fast-paced, animated, sometimes even funny. He used wax models, dramatic flair, and scalpel precision to keep crowds riveted.

He held five classes a week. Each one needed at least one cadaver. Often more.

That meant over 250 corpses a year — just for his teaching schedule.

Where would those bodies come from?

That was not a question Knox wanted to ask out loud. He never dug a grave. Never moved a corpse himself. But his purse paid for every one.

He relied on resurrection men to feed the furnace of education. 

And by 1827, the furnace was burning hot.

That’s when two Irish immigrants — William Burke and William Hare — walked into Knox’s dissecting room carrying a body.

They didn’t look like grave robbers. But they had something better.

They had a corpse that was clean. Still warm. No sign of rot. No grave dirt. No broken teeth or damaged limbs.

Knox didn’t ask where it came from.

He paid £7 and 10 shillings.

And that payment changed everything.

Here’s how it started:

In late 1827, a tenant at Hare’s boarding house died of illness. He owed back rent. Hare complained to Burke that the man had died “still in debt.”

That’s when they got the idea.

Why not turn the body into a profit?

They put the corpse into a tea chest, hauled it across town to Surgeon’s Square, and offered it to Knox. The transaction was swift. Quiet. Rewarding.

When Knox asked for more, they had a decision to make.

Why wait for someone else to die… when they could make it happen?

Over the next 10 months, Burke and Hare would murder at least 16 people.

They weren’t grave robbers. They didn’t dig. They didn’t steal from coffins.

They killed to order.

Their method was simple and silent: Burke would sit atop the victim — typically while they were drunk or passed out — and smother them. He would cover the mouth and nose with one hand, and press his weight down onto the chest with the other. No marks. No blood. No external damage.

Later, this became known as “Burking.”

Their victims were the unnoticed: sex workers, beggars, the elderly, disabled lodgers, even street performers. They chose people who would not be missed — at least not by anyone the law would listen to.

Let’s pause here and imagine, for a moment, the night before one of these murders.

Scene: A candlelit room in Hare’s boarding house. Rain tapping against the glass.

Burke: “She’s asleep. Out cold. We wait, she’ll die on her own.”

Hare: (draining a mug) “Wait and lose the money. Or do it now.”

Burke: (pauses) “She trusts us.”

Hare: “Then she won’t see it coming.”

They share a look. The silence says the rest.

This wasn’t just murder — it was a routine. A business model.

They would get the victim drunk, calm them, lull them into a false sense of safety… then strike. Within hours, the body would be packed, carried through the streets, and delivered to Dr. Knox.

Did Knox Know?

Here’s the question that haunts this case: Did Robert Knox know these bodies were murdered?

He always denied it.

He claimed he believed they came from traditional resurrection men — the grave robbers who’d supplied him for years.

But his students were not convinced.

They noticed oddities: corpses that were too fresh. No smell of decay. No signs of burial. Some had blood under their fingernails. Others were still limp with warmth.

When suspicions grew, Knox reportedly began removing the heads or disfiguring the faces before using the bodies in class — a move some saw as practical… and others saw as deliberate obfuscation.

Still, no formal accusation was made.

The bodies kept coming.

The money kept flowing.

The lectures continued.

For ten months, William Burke and William Hare lived in the shadows. Their murders left no marks. Their victims left no names. They moved through Edinburgh like smoke — vanishing the city’s most vulnerable into the dissecting halls of science.

But in late October of 1828, they made a mistake.

Her name was Margaret “Mary” Docherty.

She was older. Irish. Poor. Alone.

Burke spotted her in a tavern, struck up a conversation, and invited her to his lodging house under the pretense of shared heritage and free whiskey.

As usual, the plan was to kill her that night.

But this time, there were witnesses.

Suspicion in the House

Two other tenants at the lodging house — James and Ann Gray — were suddenly told they’d need to sleep elsewhere for the night.

It wasn’t the first strange request they’d received, but it felt off.

The next day, they returned to find the house oddly silent. Mary Docherty was nowhere to be seen. And there was a foul smell coming from a straw pile in the corner.

Suspicious, the Grays searched the room when Burke and Hare were out.

Beneath the straw, they found Mary’s body — still warm.

Panicked and horrified, they went straight to the police.

But they were too late.

By the time authorities arrived, Mary’s body had already been delivered to Dr. Knox.

Laid out on a table. Tagged for dissection.

The House of Horrors

Police raided Burke’s lodging house, and then Knox’s dissecting rooms.

They found Mary’s body, still recognizable.

They found knives, bloody clothing, missing persons lists, and testimonies from former tenants who had been forced to move out under strange circumstances.

Burke and Hare were arrested, along with their respective partners: Helen McDougal and Margaret Laird.

But despite the horror, the prosecution faced a major obstacle.

There were no bodies from the previous 15 victims.

No physical evidence. No murder weapons. No eyewitnesses to the actual killings — just suspicions, rumors, and the gruesome confession of a hidden body.

So the Lord Advocate made a decision that would haunt the city.

The Devil’s Bargain

To ensure a conviction, prosecutors offered Hare a deal.

If he confessed everything — and testified against Burke — he would be granted full immunity.

The public was outraged. But the court accepted it.

Hare turned on his partner.

Burke would stand trial alone.

Christmas Eve, 1828: The Trial Begins

The trial of William Burke opened at 10:00 PM on December 24th, in the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh.

It would continue through the night.

The courtroom was packed — journalists, clergy, families of the missing. Police surrounded the building to hold back the angry crowds. Spectators stood shoulder to shoulder for hours, barely breathing.

When Hare took the stand, the room fell into a hush.

He described, in chilling detail, how they had smothered Mary Docherty:

“She was held down… her mouth covered by a hand, her chest pressed… she fought little, being drunk. She passed quickly.”

When asked how many others, he replied:

“I cannot remember the number. There were many.”

He admitted to splitting the profits with Burke — and to watching at least three murders without lifting a hand to stop them.

Burke’s defense attacked Hare’s credibility, suggesting he was the more manipulative of the two. But it wasn’t enough.

Christmas Morning: The Verdict

At 8:30 AM on December 25th, the jury returned with their verdict:

William Burke was guilty of murder.

The courtroom erupted.

Outside, the crowd surged. Angry chants echoed across the city.

Then came the judge’s sentence:

“You shall be taken to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the common place of execution… there to be hanged by the neck until you be dead… and your body thereafter to be publicly dissected and anatomized.”

It was a poetic twist.

The man who killed for anatomy would himself become anatomy.

The Execution of William Burke

On January 28th, 1829, a crowd of over 25,000 gathered in Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket.

Vendors hawked pamphlets and caricatures. Children wore “Burke masks.” Artists sold hand-drawn posters of the murders.

Some reports claimed it was the largest public gathering in Scottish history up to that time.

Burke mounted the scaffold just after dawn. He reportedly prayed aloud, confessed to the crimes, and asked forgiveness from God.

At 8:15 AM, the trapdoor fell.

He was dead within moments.

The Dissection — A Public Event

Two days later, Burke’s corpse was taken to the Edinburgh Medical College, where it was dissected publicly by Professor Alexander Monro III.

Over 100 spectators — including students, professors, and members of the public — were in attendance.

The dissection was slow, deliberate, and theatrical.

His body was laid bare on a cold table. His ribcage peeled open. His brain removed and displayed.

Students dipped their quills into his blood and wrote notes like:

“This is written with the blood of William Burke, who was hanged and dissected at Edinburgh.”

His skin was rumored to have been turned into wallets, book covers, and calling card holders. One such item — a small notebook bound in Burke’s tanned flesh — still exists in the Surgeon’s Hall Museum.

Burke’s skeleton was preserved and still hangs today at the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum.

His death, like his crimes, became a piece of medical lore.

What Became of the Others?

William Hare, now a free man, disappeared. Some claimed he was attacked by a mob and thrown into a lime pit. Others believed he fled to England under a false name. His ultimate fate remains unknown.

Helen McDougal, Burke’s mistress, was released due to lack of evidence. She was mobbed in the street and chased out of town. No record of her survives beyond that year.

Margaret Laird, Hare’s wife, vanished into obscurity.

And Dr. Robert Knox?

He was never charged.

But the court of public opinion was damning.

Knox in the Public Crosshairs

Knox’s lecture halls emptied. Protesters burned effigies outside his home. Parents pulled their children from his anatomy classes.

One newspaper wrote:

“If Burke is the butcher, and Hare the thief — then surely, Knox is the man who bought the beef.”

Though he claimed ignorance of the murders, many found his silence unforgivable.

In 1831, Knox resigned from his post in disgrace and moved to London. He continued writing and teaching, but his reputation never recovered.

He died in 1862, largely forgotten by the city he once ruled.

The public dissection of William Burke may have ended his physical life — but it marked the beginning of something else:

A permanent stain on British medicine.

And a reckoning with the ethics of science.

The Aftermath

After the execution, Edinburgh was never the same.

The city had stared into its own reflection — a place where science fed on the poor, and murder could masquerade as progress. The people demanded change. The press exploded with criticism. Churches condemned the medical colleges. Parliament debated for months.

One London paper declared:

“The dissecting tables of Scotland have been stained not merely with blood, but with shame.”

The public now knew what they had only suspected: that the anatomy trade had made monsters of men. That the price of medical advancement had been paid in stolen lives.

There was no turning back.

The Anatomy Act of 1832

In response to the Burke & Hare scandal, the British government passed the Anatomy Act — legislation that transformed how the medical world acquired cadavers.

Under this new law:

Doctors and medical schools could now legally dissect unclaimed bodies from workhouses, hospitals, and prisons.

Families had the right to object — but if no one stepped forward, the body could be taken.

A formal licensing system was created to regulate who could teach anatomy and who could receive bodies.

It ended the age of the Resurrection Men.

And ironically, it legalized the very thing Burke and Hare had done — acquiring the bodies of the destitute — but now under state control.

Critics pointed out that it still disproportionately affected the poor. The wealthy were buried in safety; the poor might still end up on a dissection table — just legally now.

But the public fear of being snatched from the grave finally faded.

Science moved forward.

Quietly.

Legally.

Knox’s Quiet Exile

Dr. Robert Knox, though never charged, was finished in Edinburgh.

He resigned. He moved to London. He continued to write and teach but never regained his former glory. Some students still admired him. Others never forgave him.

He died in 1862, of cancer. His obituary barely mentioned Burke and Hare — but the public hadn’t forgotten.

In the public’s imagination, he was the third man. Not the killer. But the one who looked away.

Burke & Hare in Popular Culture

Their story didn’t vanish — it evolved.

For nearly 200 years, Burke and Hare have appeared in:

Plays: Even before the trial ended, unauthorized stage plays were dramatizing the murders across Scotland and England.

Novels: Sir Walter Scott referenced them. So did Robert Louis Stevenson in The Body Snatcher.

Films: From 1948’s The Greed of William Hart to the 2010 black comedy Burke and Hare starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis.

Halloween legends: In Scotland, some children still chant:

“Up the close and doon the stair,

But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare.

Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,

Knox the man who buys the beef.”

Their names became synonyms for betrayal, for death disguised as civility, for murder with a medical face.

And their legacy? It’s in every scalpel used in a classroom. Every law regulating dissection. Every bioethics course that asks: “What is the cost of discovery?”

Ghosts in the Gallery

Today, if you walk into Surgeon’s Hall Museums in Edinburgh, you can still find:

Burke’s death mask

His skeleton, labeled and on display

A small, cracked notebook bound in his skin

Wax replicas of the victims

A painting of Dr. Knox, surrounded by jars of preserved tissue

It’s all there. Quiet now. But not forgotten.

Every October, the tours grow more crowded. The windows fog with breath. People press their hands to the glass and stare at Burke’s bones, trying to understand what made a man sell another’s life for £10.

Final Thoughts

Burke and Hare didn’t just murder sixteen people.

They forced a nation to confront the dark places where science, money, and morality meet.

They left behind more than bodies.

They left behind a question that still lingers:

“What are we willing to ignore in the name of progress?”

💀 You’ve just listened to a story of history, horror, and human ambition.

So next time you pass a graveyard, a medical school, or a Halloween mask that looks a little too lifelike…

Just remember:

Some ghosts are made of flesh and bone.

And some are still hanging in the Anatomy Museum — watching.

What do you think? Let me know. I’ll have photos and news articles up on the website soon. Curator 135 dot com. 

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