Creepy but true: When grave robbers prowled Indy
Grave robbing, body snatching, call it what you will: It happened, and it had to happen — not to satisfy the urges of sickos (not entirely, anyway) but because medical students in order to study human bodies needed human bodies.
That said, stealing bodies from graves was a grisly business involving shovels and grappling hooks. It was always highly illegal, of course, and done under cover of night by people with not just strong backs but strong stomachs, too.
In Indianapolis, the practice came to a head in 1902 following a serious blitz: 315 bodies in three months, by one newspaper account. Some two dozen people were arrested.
Some went to prison, including a disfigured Confederate veteran and Fishers resident named Wade Hampton West, who would die two years later of stomach cancer; an Indianapolis man named Rufus Cantrell who would survive the ignominy of being a convicted body snatcher and after his incarceration go into politics; and a physician named Joseph Alexander, one of the city’s top medical educators.
David Heighway, a Hamilton County historian, is an expert on all this and will tell the story at 7 p.m. Friday at the Indiana Medical History Museum, 3045 W. Vermont St. His talk is sponsored by the Hoosier Chapter of the Victorian Society of America.
The museum is housed in a 120-year-old building that once housed a pathology lab. The building looks as it looked during the body-snatching craze and in fact, like many medical schools of its day, was the occasional repository for snatched bodies. “An interesting little echo there,” Heighway said.
Heighway’s presentation will be in the building’s lecture hall, the very room where Dr. Alexander taught students of the Medical College of Indiana about anatomy using stolen dead bodies as teaching aids.
Heighway’s talk has a happy ending. The body-snatching scandal led to the creation of the Indiana State Anatomical Board, which ushered in a legal method for medical schools to obtain cadavers.
That may have ended the massive digging, but in later years came a different type of body snatching: celebrity body snatching.
Some examples, according to historians and news accounts:
• Shortly after the 1934 Indianapolis burial of John Dillinger, the bank robber’s family paid for several tons of concrete to be poured over the grave to discourage snatching. The concrete is still visible. Dillinger’s body had value, the family learned, after a vaudeville company offered $5,000 for a three-day lease of the body “for exhibition purposes.” Dillinger’s survivors, though hard up financially, said no.
• In 1977 in Memphis, Tenn., some people made a run on rocker Elvis Presley’s grave. They failed.
• The next year in Switzerland, grave robbers successfully raided the final resting place of movie actor Charlie Chaplin. They held the remains for ransom, but Chaplin’s widow refused to pay. “Charlie would have thought it ridiculous,” Oona Chaplin told the BBC. Eleven weeks after the snatching, police arrested the two men involved and located the “Little Tramp,” who was reburied, this time under several tons of concrete.
• Possibly the strangest story involving body snatching involved one of Indiana’s most famous sons, future president of the United States Benjamin Harrison, who in 1878 found himself tracking the missing body of a recently deceased friend to a Cincinnati medical school. What he found instead, to his amazement and horror, was the body of his own father.
Harrison was, naturally, hopping mad, and he wrote a missive to the citizens of Cincinnati, which was published in The New York Times.
Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.
'Late Victorian Grave Robbing in Central Indiana'
When: 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9.
Where: Indiana Medical History Museum, 3045 W. Vermont St.
How much: $10 (Hoosier Chapter, Victorian Society of America members receive half off).
RSVP: HoosierVSA@gmail.com.