Scottish Bodysnatchers E-Book

Geoff Holder

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 305

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Graverobbing was a dark but profitable industry in pre-Victorian Scotland – criminals, gravediggers and middle-class medical students alike abstracted newly-buried corpses to send to the anatomy schools. Only after the trials of the infamous murderers Burke and Hare and the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832 did the grisly trade end. From burial grounds in the heart of Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh to quiet country graveyards in the Scottish Borders and Aberdeenshire, this book takes you to every cemetery ever raided, and reveals where you can find extant pieces of anti-resurrectionist graveyard furniture, from mortsafes, coffin cages and underground vaults to watchtowers and morthouses. Richly illustrated, filled with hundreds of stories of 'reanimated' corpses, daring thefts, black-hearted murders and children sold to the slaughter by their own mothers, and with Robert Louis Stevenson's classic short story The Body Snatcher at the end, this macabre guide will delight everyone who loves Scotland's dark past.

Leseprobe

SCOTTISH

BODYSNATCHERS

SCOTTISH

BODYSNATCHERS

A Gazetteer

GEOFF HOLDER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As someone who thinks libraries and museums are treasures beyond measure, I am delighted to thank the following fine institutions: East Lothian Library Services, West Lothian Local History Library, Midlothian Local Studies Library, South Lanarkshire Museums, Dumfries Museums, Scottish Borders Museums, Aberdeenshire Museum Service, and the long-suffering AK Bell Library in Perth. I am deeply grateful to the assistance, knowledge and images supplied by Geoff Bailey, Keeper of Archaeology & Local History at Falkirk Museum; Dalkeith History Society, especially David Smith and Alan Mason; Leslie Thomson; John Arthur of South Leith Parish Church; Cate Ludlow; and Billy Kerr of Irvine (it’s amazing who you run into in graveyards). And a tip of the stovepipe hat to Norman Adams, bodysnatching pandit of this parish. As ever, Ségolène Dupuy was the bee’s knees and the cat’s pyjamas.

This book is one of a series dealing with the strange, mysterious and bizarre. For more information, or to contribute your own story, go to www.geoffholder.co.uk.

This book is dedicated to all those who carry an organ donor card. See www.organdonation.nhs.uk

First published 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Geoff Holder, 2010, 2013

The right of Geoff Holder to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUBISBN 978 0 7509 5276 7

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Introduction

SECTION ONE: EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS

Edinburgh

East Lothian

Midlothian

West Lothian

SECTION TWO: GLASGOW AND THE WEST

Glasgow

Renfrewshire

Dunbartonshire

South Lanarkshire

North Lanarkshire

Ayrshire

SECTION THREE: SOUTHERN SCOTLAND

The Borders

Dumfries & Galloway

SECTION FOUR: THE FORTH VALLEY

Falkirk

Stirling

Clackmannanshire

SECTION FIVE: EAST CENTRAL SCOTLAND

Fife

Perth & Kinross

Dundee

Angus

SECTION SIX: THE NORTH-EAST

Aberdeen

Aberdeenshire

Moray

SECTION SEVEN: THE NORTH AND WEST HIGHLANDS

Argyll & Bute

Highland Region

ROBERT LOUIS STEPHENSON’S THE BODY-SNATCHER

Select Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Imagine you are in a lonely Scottish churchyard on a dark moonless night. By the light of a shaded lantern you and your companions dig into a fresh grave, carefully depositing the earth on a spread-out sheet. By the time you are waist-deep in the hole, it is the hardest physical labour you have ever undertaken; you are soaked with sweat. Six feet down, your spade bangs against wood. A crowbar-like tool is used to break open the upper coffin. If the funeral has been recent and the winter cold, there will be little smell, but if conditions are the opposite you are hit full in the face with the reek of putrefaction. Your companions lower a rope which is placed around the neck, and in a series of jerks the corpse is hauled up to the surface. The death-shroud is stripped off and left in the coffin – after all, a corpse does not belong to anyone but you do not want to be accused of theft of property – and the earth tipped back into the hole. The body is placed into a sack, and your team climb over the graveyard wall to a waiting one-horse carriage. If you are lucky, you arrive at your destination in the city without being shot at by watchmen, pursued by an angry mob, or stopped and arrested at a toll-bar or barricade.

Why would anyone desecrate the dead, subject themselves to such harrowing experiences, and take such risks with their life and liberty? The answer was a mix of necessity and greed.

As the conflict with Napoleonic France expanded into the first true World War, the demand for surgeons within the Army and Navy rocketed. Hundreds of young men flocked to what was universally agreed to be the finest medical training-ground in the English-speaking world – Scotland. And each student needed to dissect at least one corpse in order to be an effective doctor when faced with injured people in real life. Unfortunately, the law in Britain was hopelessly out of date. The only bodies that could be legitimately obtained were of executed murderers. You could be hanged for dozens of offences, but only murder attracted the additional penalty of post-mortem dissection. Even in an especially violent year, the number of murderers making it to the anatomy classes was just a handful. Meanwhile, hundreds of students could not qualify as doctors unless they had dissected a body.

The answer was obvious, if unpalatable – break the law and go against common decency, and steal freshly-buried bodies. Bodysnatching commenced in Edinburgh, home of the best and largest medical school, but then spread to the other two Scottish centres for anatomical education, Glasgow and Aberdeen. At a conservative estimate, perhaps 800 cadavers a year were required (Edinburgh alone had 500 medical students). And so came the rise of the bodysnatchers, the resurrectionists, the sack-‘em-up men, the susie-lifters, the graveyard ghouls.

WHO WERE THE SNATCHERS?

1. The Medical Students

At the start, the snatchers were the primary consumers – medical students (and sometimes even their professors). The motive was obvious – each student needed at least one body to complete their studies – although sometimes the execution was poor, with amateurish mistakes. Some students only ‘lifted’ a body once, but poorer ones found they could pay for their tuition fees by selling a stock of cadavers to their colleagues. Sometimes, established country doctors, approached by fellow alumni, acted as informants for the big-city boys.

2. The Gravediggers

Sextons were poorly paid, so were easily bribed. Sometimes they merely informed the resurrectionists about a fresh burial, while on other occasions they participated in the lifting. Others deliberately dug very shallow graves, or even spirited the body out of the coffin before the burial. When a grave was found violated, suspicion frequently fell on the gravedigger, often justifiably.

3. The Professionals

After around 1819, competition between surgeons in Edinburgh raised prices for corpses, so the profits inevitably attracted experienced criminals, sometimes referred to as ‘the scum of the earth’. Edinburgh had at least three professional bodysnatching gangs, while Glasgow, where prices were lower, had perhaps one. Aberdeen, cheaper and smaller, had no major gang, more a number of part-time professionals who lifted on the side.

Having cash-conscious criminals on the books made for some colourful episodes. Two sold a body to Dr Lizars, then stole it back from his dissecting room and flogged it to Dr Knox, making a tidy £25 in total. In 1828 a woman showed a letter to a medical man that stated she would shortly be receiving ‘a very valuable box from the country’. £2 10s was paid in advance for the presumed contents – which proved to be stones packed in straw (the swindlers received 60 days’ detention in the Bridewell). And Robert Liston, a spectacularly adventurous Edinburgh surgeon who regarded bodysnatching as an extension of his sporting prowess, even hired Ben Crouch, the ex-leader of a London bodysnatching gang, as a tutor!

BURKE AND HARE, AT YOUR SERVICE

It is due to Burke and Hare that everyone has heard of bodysnatching. It is ironic, then, that they were not bodysnatchers. That is, they never dug up a body from a grave – they were not resurrection-men. They were, in fact, serial killers – and the most prolific serial-killing duo in British history. Between November 1827 and October 1828 they murdered sixteen people in cold blood and sold the corpses to the Edinburgh anatomists.

Their first sale was not a murder and is not included in the total of sixteen. An elderly tenant died of illness in William Hare’s cheap lodging-house, leaving an unpaid debt for rent. Hare and his friend William Burke opened the coffin and took the corpse to Surgeons’ Square where, after some bumbling resulting from their inexperience, they received the fabulous sum of £7 10s. Had lightbulbs been invented by this time, they would have gone off above their heads. Cadavers clearly equalled cash, and lots of it. Hare’s lodging-house business in West Port meant people were always coming and going, so why not cut out the risky and laborious graverobbing shenanigans and go straight to the source? People, they reasoned, were basically walking skin-bags of valuable organs and bones, a natural resource just begging to be harvested by the enterprising entrepreneur. And, of course, many of the itinerant poor attracted to the bottom-of-the-market lodgings would not be missed – a proposition proven by events, for even today the names of six of their victims remain unknown while a further two are recorded only by their first names. The average price paid per corpse was £10, which largely went on drink. The preferred murder method was suffocation, which guaranteed an unmarked corpse. Following the trial the word ‘burking’, meaning to kill by suffocation or strangulation, entered the English language.

A typical sensational take on the Burke and Hare murders, taken from the Victorian true-crime magazine Famous Crimes.

Famous Crimes had no doubt that Mrs Burke and Mrs Hare were complicit in the murders.

William Burke was thirty-six years old in 1828, William Hare twenty-one. Although each murdered one person on their own, they were effectively a classic example of a toxic couple, where each participant needed the other in order to kill effectively. They were aided and abetted in their crimes by thirty-one-year-old Margaret Logue, the mother of Hare’s infant child, and thirty-three-year-old Helen McDougal, Burke’s wife or partner of ten years, and the only one of the quartet not from Ireland. In the mid-1820s perhaps five per cent of the population of Edinburgh was Irish. The men had separately pursued low-paid labouring and semi-skilled occupations, until Burke and Helen landed up at the lodging-house in Tanner’s Close owned by Margaret and run by Hare. Margaret always made sure she got a £1 ‘landlady’s fee’ for every murder the men committed on her premises. (Tanner’s Close and the surrounding slums were demolished in 1902, its footprint now obscured by Argyll House.)

As the killings proceeded the pair became reckless, even foolhardy, and they were eventually caught after some elementary mistakes from the Big Book of What Not To Do If You Are A Serial Killer. The trial lasted all day and all night on Christmas Eve. Due to the lack of compelling evidence, a deal was struck. The prosecution’s star witness was William Hare, granted immunity from prosecution if he testified against his former partners-in-crime. Helen McDougal was prosecuted but not convicted. Burke was found guilty and hanged before a vast crowd on 28 January 1829. Hare, his wife and Helen McDougal were released, and their post-trial adventures percolate through this book. The primary recipient of the cadavers, the distinguished teacher of anatomy Robert Knox, escaped official censure but was found guilty in the court of public opinion; his career was blighted thereafter.

The trial was a sensation. Although they were not resurrectionists, William and William’s spree of murder-for-money exposed the seedy underbelly of Georgian Edinburgh, where respectable physicians paid hard cash for fresh corpses, no questions asked. The reputation of the medical profession plummeted. When a cholera epidemic took hold in 1831, many doctors found themselves accused of spreading the disease in order to obtain fresh specimens. Across Scotland, those graveyards that were not already protected sprouted, almost overnight, watch-houses, watching associations and morthouses. Although bodysnatching had long been reported in newspapers and broadsides, the trial of Burke and Hare shone a new, blood-red and bright light on the crime. It is the defining moment, the cultural fulcrum, when bodysnatching tipped from being just something-bad-that-happened to an epoch-defining event.

‘Burking’ speedily entered popular culture and folklore. Fake tales of narrow escapes flooded the press. Burkers were said to attack people in alleyways and on lonely moors, suffocating them with poisonous sticking plasters. Friends played burking pranks on nervous companions. Tinkers or travelling people, especially in the North-East, told fearful stories of being stalked by murderous medical students. These tales were still being repeated as recent factual events over a century after the last of the bodysnatchers had disappeared. All of these kinds of folktale can be found throughout this book. Another common urban legend told of a man who substituted himself for a stolen corpse, and then ‘came alive’ and spoke to the terrified bodysnatchers ‘from beyond the grave’.

KILLING FOR CASH BEFORE BURKE AND HARE

Eighty years before the West Port murders, two women became the first ‘killers for cash’ in supplying anatomical subjects. Nurses Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie had promised a doctor the body of a sick child they had been caring for. However, either the child got better or they were unable to abstract the body from the coffin, for a substitute was required. On 3 December 1751 they fixed on nine-year-old John Dallas, son of an alcoholic mother. While Torrence distracted the woman with a dram or five, Waldie kidnapped John and smothered him with her bedclothes. The doctor only offered 2s for the body, raising the price after haggling by another 10d, with 6d to pay the porter who had carried the box. Once sober, the boy’s mother raised the alarm. The body, now a hot potato and evidence of murder, was found dumped in a city street four days later, ‘with evident marks of its having been in the surgeons’ hands.’ The actual act of murder could not be proved, as there were no witnesses, so the pair were convicted of two separate crimes: kidnapping the boy, and ‘selling and delivering his body, then dead, to some surgeons and students of physic’. The implied murder brought the death penalty. Torrence tried to avoid the noose by claiming to be pregnant, but this was easily disproved. Both were hanged in the Grassmarket in February 1752.

In 1826 a destitute Irishwoman offered to sell a surgeon both her healthy two-month-old son (price £7) and her thirteen-year-old boy, ‘whom he could kill or boil or do what he liked with.’ After her arrest she said she had previously marketed the baby to another anatomist, but had only been offered a derisory £5.

DEFENDING THE DEAD

Grave-protection methods varied over time and between parishes, depending on the amount of money available, new developments in technology, and fashion. Typical defences included: high graveyard walls and locked gates; exceptionally deep graves; and spade-frustrating layers of heather or turf mixed in with the soil. Other, more elaborate, methods included:

Mortsafes – heavy coffin-enclosing frameworks of iron bands. Variations included large iron coffins placed over the wooden one. In both cases the expensive grave-cover was usually removed after a few weeks and re-used for the next grave.

Caged lairs – basically the mortsafe idea applied to architecture, with roofs of cast-iron bars sunk into solid stone walls around ‘lairs’ or burial plots. In some cases an entire cage, like an animal cage, was constructed.

A caged lair from Greyfriars Cemetery, Edinburgh. (Geoff Holder)

An iron coffin mortsafe and watch-house at Banchory-Devenick churchyard, Aberdeenshire. (Geoff Holder)

Mortstones – heavy stone blocks laid over a coffin to prevent access.

Morthouses – strongholds where coffins were stored for several weeks, until their contents were of no interest to anatomists. The coffins were then buried as normal.

Watch-houses and watchtowers – structures built to shelter watchmen, armed guards who ‘watched’ graveyards overnight. Nervous watchers were not always reliable with a gun, as their victims included goats, horses, rams, windows, tombstones – and sometimes each other.

This book contains all the mortsafes, iron coffins, mortstones, morthouses, caged lairs and watch-houses it has been possible to locate.

Bodysnatching was subject to the same logistical problems as, say, drug-smuggling. Carriers of illegitimate goods could be stopped at ‘pinchpoints’ – bridges, toll-bars, city gates and ferry ports. If discovered, they risked assault and worse from enraged mobs.

AN INTERNATIONAL CRIME NETWORK

Bodysnatching was big business. It was a de facto industry, with regular suppliers, communications and distribution systems, a reliance on market intelligence, and a network of informants, agents, transportation captains and other freelance contractors. From Edinburgh, tendrils spread through the Lothians, Fife, Stirling, Perth and the Borders. Glasgow’s agents concentrated on the west coast. Aberdeen’s influence extended as far as Inverness and the Highlands.

But even with these multiple suppliers, not enough cadavers were coming through from Scottish sources. So the industry internationalised. Bodies – often tied into compact bundles and transported in boxes marked soft goods, crystal or stationery – came by coach from London or Newcastle. False name and address labels were used, with agents redirecting the items at the depot. But the biggest source was Ireland, a desperately poor country where lifted bodies were sold in bulk at discount prices. Wilson Rae, a Dublin-based Scottish doctor known as ‘The Captain’, had a regular trade sending over his just-expired terminal patients, visiting Edinburgh himself once or twice a year to collect the cash from Dr Knox.

The danger, however, was that the sea voyage could be delayed by weather or customs, causing the perishable ‘goods’ to spoil. For this reason the preferred route was usually Dublin to Liverpool, with the valued products (marked as cured pork, dry-salted beef, stuffed animals, blacking or apples) then transshipped to Scotland by stagecoach or smack. Sometimes plans went awry, as when Liverpool dockers noticed the stench from three casks marked ‘Bitter salts’. Eleven bodies were found pickled in brine and packed in salt, and investigations turned up a further twenty-two in a cellar run by a gang operating out of the city. Coroners at the stagecoach-changing posts of Lancaster and Carlisle became wearily experienced at writing death certificates that simply stated, ‘Found in a box in a putrefied condition.’ And in February 1829 a mix-up saw Dr Knox’s cadaver-handling assistant take delivery of a ham, a cheese, eggs and a roll of Hodden-grey cloth.

BODYSNATCHING AND THE LAW

Graverobbing may have outraged moral and cultural standards, but in legal terms it was a mess. Most laws of the time protected property, and technically a body was not property, so neither the corpse nor the relatives had any rights. So if a body was stolen, what crime had been committed? Most experienced bodysnatchers made sure to leave the shroud and any death-clothes behind, as to take them was evident theft. After about 1805 many judges settled on ‘violating a sepulchre’, the breaking open of the coffin being deemed similar to illegal entry of premises, but the sentence a convicted resurrectionist faced often depended on their own social status and the attitude and legal knowledge of the judge. Generally, but not universally, medical students were treated more leniently than lower-class criminals. By 1820, fines and sentences of imprisonment were becoming heavier.

THE DEATH OF THE RESURRECTIONISTS

Reform of the law was already in the air before Burke and Hare erupted into mass public consciousness. Eventually, dogged by compromise and impelled by a later bodysnatching scandal in London, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act of 1832. People who died in the workhouse and whose bodies were unclaimed by friends or family would now as a matter of course end up on the dissecting table. Anatomy schools were to be regulated and inspected. All cadavers coming in were to be recorded by name, and after use buried in coffins at the school’s expense. It wasn’t perfect, and the poor took the brunt, but it was an improvement, and bodysnatching ceased to be either a necessity or a source of profit.

In the years following 1832, several now-prominent physicians – such as Robert Liston and Sir Robert Christison – came forward with candid memoirs about their bodysnatching days.

MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND

Money was at the heart of the bodysnatching enterprise. In a particularly brutal example of capitalism taken to its ultimate conclusion, people were literally worth more dead than alive. Corpses were offered for sale, evaluated for worth, haggled over, and then exchanged for cash. It was a market-led activity where the hard-to-obtain high-value ‘product’ was, despite difficult trading conditions, continuously supplied by independent contractors due to increased consumer demand. Prices varied as the market ebbed and flowed, with lower sums offered in summer when there were few medical students around and the bodies could not be preserved in the higher temperatures. Prices were lowest in Aberdeen and highest in Edinburgh, where a corpse in good condition in winter fetched on average £10. To put that in perspective, a stagecoach driver made £1 a week, and when Burke and Hare were working as labourers on the Forth and Clyde Canal, they earned 2s a day, a sum similar to that earned by agricultural workers. So a decent corpse paid the equivalent of three months’ hard labour. No wonder there were people willing to do the dirty work.

The 1820s of course used the pre-decimal money system of £ s d, where twelve pennies (12d) made one shilling (1s) and 20s made £1. Other coins used included a guinea (£1 1s) and a sovereign (£1 2s).

With the exception of graveyards within walking (and corpse-carrying) distance, there were always transport expenses. In Edinburgh a porter would carry a box for 6d. Further afield, a vehicle was required. There are several cases where a carriage used for bodysnatching was destroyed by a mob. This would have represented a loss of perhaps £40-50 to the owner, less if it was a small cart, more if it was a fancier model. Horses might cost around £10 more or less, depending on the quality. Most horse-driven carriages were hired, not owned (unless the owner was pretty well-to-do). The daily rate varied, but think of it in terms of prices for hiring a car today.

WHY A GAZETTEER?

The bodysnatchers were predominantly active from the 1730s to 1832. If you come across a mortsafe or watch-house in a graveyard, you are touching a piece of a unique – and deeply strange – period in British history. But over the past few decades much of this physical heritage has vanished. Vandalism, decay and redevelopment have all taken their toll. So please use this book to explore, enjoy and marvel, before some of the physical remains go the way of all flesh.

THE GAZETTEER

The Gazetteer lists every site in Scotland where physical remains of the anti-bodysnatching days have been identified, as well as any associated stories. Each entry has the same basic structure:

THE NAME OF THE SITE (in alphabetical order within a chapter)

A summary, helping you decide if it’s a site worth visiting.

Address: Including the postcode, and directions where necessary.

NGR: The National Grid Reference number, as used on Ordnance Survey maps.

Lat, Long: The Latitude (N) and Longitude (W). Between the postcode, NGR, and these grid co-ordinates, you should be able to locate a site by map, GPS, or online.

Access: Details of parking and entry, including disabled access if any. Many older graveyards, by their nature, are not wheelchair-friendly.

Things to see: The physical remains (watch-houses, mortsafes, etc.), listed and described.

Comments: Other items of interest, such as gravestones carved with eighteenth-century symbols of mortality and immortality, Pictish monuments, and other nearby historic sites.

Stories: Anecdotes, tales and documented events relating to the site. All are taken from written sources, but some stories may have become exaggerated over time.

Over 260 sites are described here. Many more used to have watch-houses or mortsafes, but in the absence of any physical remains, or a good story, they have been omitted for reasons of space.

Section One

EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS

‘How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?’

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

EDINBURGH

Edinburgh provided the finest training for surgeons in the English-speaking world, attracting students from all over the British Isles and the Colonies. The various anatomy lecturers (Alexander Monro at the university, and Robert Knox, Robert Liston, the Aitken brothers, John Lizars and others within the competing private schools) were engaged in a professional war with each other, fighting tooth and nail over reputation, status, students, fees – and the availability of cadavers. It was bodysnatching central.

The Cheilead, or University Coterie, a shortlived student magazine of 1826-27, had this to say when a £10 reward was offered for the identity of those who had stolen a fisherman’s body in Newhaven: ‘These men perform miracles, for they “raise the dead”, they are slave dealers, for they sell men; they are amusing, for they furnish subjects for conversation; scientific, for they assist science. They are a species sui generis; Lycanthropes, for they live on the dead; discoverers, for they bring things hidden to light; quarrelsome, for they pick holes. Of what consequence is it to the fisherman whether the shark, the worm, or the scalpel decomposed his body?’ Charming.

Sometimes the corpses were taken straight out of coffins, replaced by an equal weight of waste material. In 1829 a baker starting his shift spotted a large bundle being lowered from an attic tenement while three men in the street below were actively ignoring it. After a hue and cry the package was opened, revealing a recently-deceased drummer called Nosy. Other times cadavers were stashed in quiet locations, for recovery later. In 1827 two men arrived by gig at an address in Queen Street suspiciously early. A search uncovered a young man’s body hidden in the cellar.

Sometimes, of course, the street vigilantes got things wrong. One night in 1823 a coach was seen carrying a coffin from a doctor’s house in the New Town. In Nicholson Street the mob released the horses, dragged the coach over The Mound, and burned it. It turned out the coach was heading for the physician’s country house, where he had recently passed away. Three youths from the mob were arrested.

BUCCLEUCH CHURCHYARD

Anecdote only.

Address: 33 Chapel Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AT.

NGR: NT26051 72950.

Lat, Long: 55.943881, -3.185549.

Access: The few gravestones around the closed church are generally accessible.

Stories: In 1818 Miss Wilson, a young beauty of Bruntsfield Links, chose Henry Ferguson as her beau in preference to George Duncan. The two suitors lodged together in Potterrow next to Buccleuch. When Ferguson died of disease, the passion-inflamed Duncan hired a professional bodysnatcher named ‘the Screw’ to steal the body and sell it to the anatomists. For the rest of his student days he would gloatingly spy on the young woman as she wept over a grave that was, unknown to her, empty.

A typical caged lair, in Canongate kirkyard. (Geoff Holder)

CANONGATE

A splendid site with numerous caged lairs and a shot-pocked stone.

Address: Canongate Kirk, 153 Canongate, Edinburgh, EH8 8DP.

NGR: NT26443 73883.

Lat, Long: 55.952314, -3.179526.

Access: The graveyard is open during daylight hours. Level access off Canongate but the site slopes severely after that, with some steps on the tarmac paths.

Things to see: 1. By and large the anti-bodysnatching fashion for Edinburgh people with money was for a stone-built vault with a gated entrance or stout door, and a metal ‘cage’ on the roof. Often these vaults were built in rows, taking advantage of a common rear wall. Canongate is a typical example: there are around twenty-two of such vaults, three of which still have their ironwork roof. 2. A tombstone just left of the western path bears the carving of a coach and four horses crossing a stream by an old-fashioned bridge, and the inscription ‘For the Society of Coach Drivers in Canongate’. The stone is peppered with small holes, said to have been from small-shot and swan-shot fired by a watchman.

Comments: An excellent historic church in the Old Town, with many stones of interest, and the grave of economist Adam Smith, one of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Stories: In 1811 a man called Wight from the Canongate area stole into the house where a neighbour’s body lay awaiting burial, removed the corpse, and filled the coffin with sand.

COLINTON

An iron coffin and a watch-house.

Address: Colinton Church, Spylaw Street, Colinton, Edinburgh, EH13 0JP.

NGR: NT21569 69125.

Lat, Long: 55.908803, -3.256171.

Access: Level tarmac paths.

Things to see: 1. The splendid iron coffin cover is impossible to miss beside the path. This is the only survivor of six once owned by the parish. 2. The offertory house adjacent to the entrance was also used as a watch-house.

Comments: Parish minister Lewis Balfour was Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather, and the young RLS played in the graveyard.

CRAMOND

A watch-house and morthouse in a lovely setting.

Address: Cramond Kirk, Cramond Glebe Road, Cramond, Edinburgh, EH4 6NT

NGR: NT18945 76845.

Lat, Long: 55.977714, -3.300459.

Access: Small parking area opposite. Otherwise, follow car park signs to rear of graveyard. Wheelchair ramp, good paths.

Things to see: 1. The attractive watch-house just left of the gate was originally a Session House (and is still used for that purpose today). Two or more men were stationed here, armed with an impromptu range of clubbing weapons. 2. What was very likely a morthouse stands beside the entrance to Kirk Cramond, the path north of the church. It now houses electrical equipment. 3. The three stone-built family lairs probably had iron cages for roofs, but these have vanished.

Comments: An immaculately-kept graveyard, with a church on a site that has been Christian since the sixth century. The outline of the predecessor Roman fort is laid out, and there are many excellent gravestones from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

CURRIE

A mortstone.

Address: Currie Parish Church, 17 Kirkgate, Currie, EH14 6AN.

NGR: NT18301 67655.

Lat, Long: 55.89287, -3.301459.

Access: Many steps.

Things to see: A bemossed mortstone lies in the grass.

Comments: A very fine kirk.

DRUMMOND STREET/SURGEONS’ SQUARE

The vastly-changed site of what was once bodysnatching central.

Address: University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9TT.

NGR: NT261733.

Lat, Long: 55.947539, -3.184540.

Access: City street and university urban campus.

Things to see: No trace of the Royal Infirmary remains, but the ornamental gates form the entrance to the Geography building. Surgeons’ Square is further east, behind the Department of Archaeology. Dr Knox’ s house and most of the other anatomists’ buildings have gone, but Chisholm House (now the Institute of Governance and the Science Studies Unit) remains as a typical example of the surgeons’ mansions that once lined the Square.

Stories: The Infirmary had its own small cemetery for the burial of those who died alone in hospital. As can be imagined, this was highly convenient for the medical students, but convenience created friction. A full-scale fight broke out between rival groups over the body of crippled ballad singer Sandie McNab, with the noise attracting the watch; in the confusion one student used ropes and pulleys to haul the boxed body up to an anatomist’s upper-storey window. On another occasion two adventurer-anatomists, Mowbray Thomson and Robert Liston, confronted each other over a grave. Although outnumbered (and Liston also had the violent ex-boxer Ben Crouch with him), Thomson stood his ground, flourishing a dagger and then a pistol. Things could have turned nasty but Thomson’s reinforcements arrived, so Liston’s gang opted for a tactical retreat. On another occasion, at an unnamed graveyard Liston’s party was disturbed by the watch; under gunfire he escaped, running with an adult corpse under each arm.

In 1826 a porter trundling a large box into the square was set upon by a mob intent on killing him. When rescued by the police he explained his cargo was a llama which had died in Wombell’s Menagerie, and was destined for the anatomy museum.

In 1983, workmen restoring the old town wall (still visible) found fifty-five human bones where the north-east of Surgeons’ Square once stood. The assemblage represented at least five individuals, one a child of around six to eight years. Almost certainly this was an anatomist’s midden.

If a broadside published at the time can be believed, John Macintire was buried alive on 15 April 1824, and brought back to screaming life in an anatomy room: ‘The Demonstrator took his knife, and pierced my bosom. I felt a dreadful crackling, as it were, throughout my whole frame; a convulsive shudder instantly followed, and a shriek of horror rose from all present.’ According to Macintire’s testimony, he had been fully conscious from the moment he was pronounced dead, through to his burial and resurrection.

Surgeons’ Square in 1829. Dr Knox’s Rooms are in the centre, flanked by Surgeons’ Hall (left) and Royal Medical Society (right). (Author’s Collection)

DUDDINGSTON

An excellent watchtower and several caged lairs.

Address: Duddingston Kirk, Old Church Lane, Duddingston, EH15 3PX.

NGR: NT28349 72619.

Lat, Long: 55.941256, -3.148677.

Access: Car park beside the loch. The gate is sometimes locked. Gravel and cobbled paths.

Things to see: 1. The superb two-storey hexagonal watchtower of 1824 dominates the entrance, with its battlemented parapet and arched windows. The ground floor is used as a vestry and Session House. 2. A line of stonebuilt lairs includes two still with caged roofs.

Comments: The church is an utter delight, with Norman architecture, jougs, a loupin’-on stone (for mounting a horse in a genteel manner) and other treasures.

Stories: Dr Martin Eccles and professional resurrectionist John Samuel disinterred the corpse of a Miss Stewart. They had nearly finished shovelling the earth back into the grave, when the corpse gave a great sneeze. Faced with a revived young woman, the pair promptly decamped, and invented a story that the ‘resurrection’ was caused by the sexton attempting to steal her jewellery.

EAST PRESTON STREET

Another high quality watchtower.

Address: East Preston Street Graveyard, Edinburgh, EH8 9QF.

NGR: NT26635 72395.

Lat, Long: 55.938977, -3.176047.

Access: Street parking. A grassy, level site.

Things to see: The impressive two-storey castellated watchtower overlooks the whole site. Dated 1820 and in good condition, it has an external staircase and a ground-floor door.

Comments: A wee gem in the city.

GILMERTON

Anecdote only.

Three inexperienced medical students lifted a woman from a graveyard somewhere near here, but forgot to bring a sack for the body. One man therefore hoisted it on his back, secured by the shroud. As he staggered along, the corpse’s feet bounced off the ground, giving the illusion of movement. Crying ‘She’s alive!’ the tyro dumped his burden and scarpered along with his equally-spooked colleagues. The following morning the widower found his wife’s body by the roadside, and, until the situation was explained to him, thought to his horror that she had been buried alive.

GREYFRIARS

A massive and justly-celebrated site. Essential.

Address: Greyfriars Kirk, Forrest Road/Candlemaker Row, Edinburgh, EH1 2QQ.

NGR: NT25634 73264.

Lat, Long: 55.946629, -3.192312.

Access: Entrance up a slightly inclined cobbled lane called Greyfriars. Paved, tarmac and gravel paths on a site that slopes in all directions, with some steps in the further regions. Wheelchair users with assistance should be able to see most of the sights. A visitor centre in the church itself is open from Easter to October, 10.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. Monday to Friday, and 10.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. on Saturday.

Things to see: