December 5, 2024 • 47 mins
In the summer of 1989, a construction crew working in the basement of a building at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta stumbled across thousands of human bones. The acquisition and disposal of the remains has been kept secret.
It happens again in 1994, a crew discovered an old well containing human remains while constructing a new medical sciences building on the campus of the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) at Virginia Commonwealth University. The well is called the Limb Pit.
It happened one more time at Harvard in 1999. During renovations at Harvard’s Holden Chapel in 1999, a worker operating a mini bulldozer stumbled across human remains when his machine broke through a wall into an old well.
Joseph Scott Morgan explains how it's possible to find human bones that have been hacked, cut with a saw, chisel, or knife, and then hidden so the law can't find them.....and it isn't a crime.
Transcript Highlight
00:00.01 Introduction
04:35.58 Resurrection - Grave Robbing 09:40.88 Studying medicine, finding bones
14:08.17 Doctors who have never dissected a body
19:18.35 Bones used by medical schools
23:17.45 Medical college paying grave robbers
28:16.99 Getting rid of bones without getting caught 32:11.18 Doctors had no opportunity to study the human body
38:59.35 The Limb Pit - Chris Baker MCV
40:17.79 Harvard had name for club that dug up bodies
44:00.58 Mass burial of bones, no names
47:27.15 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body dies with Joseph Scott More. Since I was a
small child, I have attended church. Now, I've been a
member of many different denominations, as I'm sure some of
you have out there. It's been. To say that it's
a journey is probably an understatement. However, in my experience,
(00:25):
there was something that was consistent all the way through,
and that is that I was always taught that on
the third Day Christ arose from the grave, and the
term that is always applied to that event is the resurrection.
(00:48):
I think that we could all agree that that's a
seminal event in human history. However, today I want to
apply that term to another individual term that he actually
went by. And as a matter of fact, many of
the people from around the world that were in the
(01:12):
same field as a gentleman were referred to as these
by these titles. The term is resurrectionists. Isn't that an
odd term? Does that mean that this individual himself was resurrected?
Oh no, that's not what it meant. For this individual
(01:33):
actually went out and opened graves, and he didn't actually
resurrect the dead, but he did in fact remove them
from their eternal resting spots. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Body Backs. I'm back together with my buddy
(02:01):
Dave mac and I'm telling you I got to tell
you my friends. Listen. If it wasn't for Dave, I
would not be doing this episode because he has been
really jazzed about this about this topic, because it is
(02:22):
kind of like Dave day day. You don't really know Dave.
Dave's bit quirky, you know, which is cool. You know.
That's that's why I.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Digg Kirky's a nice way of saying somebody's really weird.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
No, no, no, it's it's fantastic. Actually, you are a
typical Dave. That's why we love you man. There's never
a boring moment with you. And this, these cases that
we're going to talk about today are kind of right
in my wheelhouse. I didn't I didn't know that there
would necessarily be an interest in this, per se h.
(02:56):
But if I'm to use you as my barometer, I'd
say that there probably is an interest in this. And
and uh, I'll go ahead and say it. We're we're
going to talk a little bit about grave robbing and
the first you know who I first thought.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Of Frankenstein I did, I did.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
I thought about Marty Feldlin Frankenstein and I found out
a bit of trope trivia the other day. And I
don't know if you've heard this. I'm gonna throw I'm
gonna throw out a little a little Young Frankenstein, Young
Frankenstein trivia to you. Uh, thank you?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Doctor?
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Did you know that? And I know that you're going
to know this. I just know it that Aerosmith got
the title for their famous song, the original version, Walked
this Way, because they all went to Young Frankenstein and
(03:56):
saw the movie and that scene where where I Gore
played by Marty Feltman, hands the cane back to Gene Wildern's,
you know, after he tells him walk this way and
he has to kind of hunch over and stumble down
the staircase. But you know, I gore that character in
the movie. There's interaction between him and Frankenstein, Doctor Frankenstein, Frankenstein.
(04:25):
There's a grave robbing episode, and of course that's where
they get the parts for the creature. The creature was
not Frankenstein. It was Frankenstein's monster originally when the book
was written by Shelley and so you know, but.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
You're saying did you give me Abby somebody?
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, and so parts is parts man, as they used
to say. Of course we're talking about robbing graves of
the how do we say this, the newly buried or
the fresh dead.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
But it's not for the sake of building Frankenstein's monster.
It's actually for educational purposes, kind of like Granny's medicinal whiskey.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah, they're finding they're actually finding poor people, you know,
those who are indigent and those who have been you know,
put to death, although oftentimes I don't know what happens,
but looking in history that you know, they would were
going to kill these guys and you can have them
for science, but they never seem to make it. It's
(05:31):
like something would happen to the dead on the way.
I mean, there's weird stuff that used to happen Joe.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Oh, yeah, there really are instances. And of course down
here in the South, I think you know, the where
the lineage of this, you know, kind of arises from
is an event that took place back in nineteen eighty
nine at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia,
(05:58):
which by the way, is one of the older medical
colleges in the US, and to give you a little insight,
it's actually the first location that a hysterectomy was performed,
which is kind of fascinating, I think because there are
many members in our audience that have had to undergo
(06:20):
that procedure. There's been history that has been made there
over the years. I don't know that what happened in
nineteen eighty nine was necessarily something they wanted to be
known for, but yet it happened. Workers were working on
one of the oldest buildings on campus at the Medical
(06:41):
College of Georgia in Augusta, and they happened to stumble
upon a large collection of human remains. Of course, skeletal
remains is what I'm referring to, and they could see
even with the unaided eye. It didn't take a forensic
anthropologist to determine this that these remains had been in
(07:07):
many cases dismembered or they showed signs of having been dismembered.
So when you have a skeletal recovery, particularly if you're
talking about a clandestine grave, one of the things that
you expect to find is not like, let me see,
how can I say this? It's not necessarily like a
(07:27):
grave that you would come across where that would look
like a Halloween skeleton where everything is intact. You know,
the elements of skeleton will have come apart and depended
upon the ground in which it's settling into. There's a
process that's referred to its turbation, and you don't really
(07:48):
see it, but the earth actually moves beneath the surface,
and it's always changing, but the top end kind of
stays static, and that's the appearance you get, so and
it can be measured probably in millimeters, and it happens
over a long period of time. And those slight adjustments
(08:09):
beneath the surface can of impact burials that can impact
bodies that are down there, and so things shift around.
But skeletons don't necessarily are intact, you know, like you
have something from Halloween that's hanging out in your yard,
it's not going to look like that. But what they
were seeing were first off comingled remains, which meant that
(08:33):
these remains were from a variety of different bodies. The
bodies were in many instances male and female, and they
had a great deal of post wartem trauma to the bone,
and one of the ways people always ask, you know,
(08:54):
how can you tell that a skeletal remain has been
traumatized in death when you have no tissue to see
hemorrhage and that sort of thing. There's a reactive event
that takes place within the bone that you can actually see,
you know, even if it's approximates death on the living
side as opposed to the you know, those events that
(09:18):
occur after death. But anyway, that's the story for another day.
But when those workers saw this in nineteen eighty nine,
you can imagine it was a head scratcher. And going
back to the dismemberment, Dave, that adds another layer of
horror to this, right.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
See, you're seeing bones. This is like going through a
really bad Halloween haunted house, you got it. Yeah, I
would think they're fake. I would think Joe, you know what,
Joe and those guys in friends that are messing with us,
that's what they're doing. These are all That's what I'd
be selling people, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, But there's something clinically. I think it's because of
the location day when, because even these workers have an
awareness that there's people walking all over this campus and
I've been to this campus. They're walking all over the
place in white lab coats and scrubs, and you know
what they're studying here, They're studying medicine. And when you
(10:12):
get into this area, you know, I'm really wondering. I'd
love to be able to interview like some of the
workers that were there discovered this, you know, the first
person to lay eyes on this, because you know, for me,
having interviewed many people that find bodies, which are some
of the most fascinating stories. You know, how they come
(10:32):
across bodies, it's always that one person that says, I
really didn't believe what I was seeing. When I first
saw it, I thought that, you know, like you said,
I thought that it was a fake. I thought that
it was something that was just there to scare people.
But then I approached and I noticed. You know, they'll
say things like then the smell hit me, or I
(10:56):
saw what I could have sworn was blood. Are in
the case of a bone, they their default position with
most people that I've encountered that find skeletal remains, Dave,
you know what they always say, I thought I thought
it was a deer. I thought it was a dog.
You know, because I think in the human brain, most
(11:17):
of us don't want to come to grips with well,
you know what, man, Every now and then you're going
to come across a human remain that's exposed out there,
and and so this is you know, it's quite a
fascinating dynamic here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
I'm just, as you say, fascinated by the people who
discovered it and what kind of damage it did to
their psyche. You know, that's not we could actually probably get.
We need to get Bethany Marshall and a couple of
the other psychs from Nancy Gracie Show and just line
a couple of these cats up and say what happened
that day and what have you seen since then? Like
did you watch, you know, any of the old Halloween
(11:54):
movies and had skeletons? Do you freak out at that now?
Because I still haven't quite got past that's the idea
that we as a people didn't have a way to
actually study the human body firsthand without breaking the law
to do it. That's something that just amazes me, Joe,
(12:15):
And that's what we're doing the show about, because when
Joe sends me this article, okay about this huge find.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
From Atless Obscura is my favorite sources. By the way,
if you've never read Atlas obscura's pretty fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Yeah, it's the like it's the OSQ of of Medicine
Obscure Sports Quarterly. But on ESPN a the ohow they
had bones throwing contest. You know, that's the kind of
stuff I expect to see when you have a bunch
of bones that just show up in a building. But
after you get past all the ideas of why and okay,
(12:51):
it's a medical building, but still don't the dead deserve
to be buried, don't they don't they deserve to be
better than this? These are real bones? Is this only
how we and if they have been used in some
kind of a medical learning experience, shouldn't they be given
a nicer send off than just thrown into the bottom
of a well or a building or you know, just
(13:12):
tossed away like trash.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Yeah, you would think so that that would be the case.
But you have to understand, here's that word again. This
is a clandestine event because it was against the law,
and it had been against the law for forever as
far as people could remember. And this is something that
kind of it was the law in Europe not to
(13:34):
do this. And so when the US was settled, like
a lot of things, it transferred over and in Georgia
in particular, you know, they the school in Augusta opened
like in the mid eighteen twenties. All right, we're really
pre pre Civil War. We're talking Andrew Jackson era time.
(13:58):
That's when this thing was established. And Dave, it was
that law prohibiting people from using human cadavers for dissection
did not come off the books until the mid eighteen eighties.
And so you've got doctors that are being trained at
this location and dude, they've never done a dissection. They've
(14:21):
never done a dissection on a human remain, and so
it's it's startling. You know, how how is it that,
you know, you think about somebody that's called a surgeon
can actually try to facilitate the healing of somebody without
(14:44):
actually knowing what the anatomy is. Now you you have
detailed drawings that have occurred over the year, even years,
even Da Vinci had rendered, you know, beautiful anatomical drawings
of human human remains. But it's just the fact that
you're going to go into this environment, open the environment,
opened the body up on a living patient. And you
(15:08):
don't know what you're going to be looking for. Interestingly enough,
just down the road from Augusta Crawford Long back in
the eighteen forties. He's the first guy that ever used anesthesia.
He's the guy that first to play. And literally this
is in like a little tiny town in Georgia. They've
got the Crawford Long Museum there. I urge anybody that
(15:31):
they have an opportunity to go and check this place out.
And he used ether on a guy to remove a tumor. Now,
ether's very unstable, it's not something we would use today.
But before that, you know, people had to endure surgery
without any kind of anesthesia whatsoever. So we're in a
real there's a real learning curve here. But what physicians
(15:52):
are medical students knew back then was that they needed
they needed someone that could facilitate getting bodies for them,
and they might have to do it by oil lamp,
a whale oil lamp or a candle to do these
dissections in the middle of the night, and so that
(16:14):
they could understand anatomy and listen, I'll tell you this,
everybody knew what was going on because the medical students
had all been through the program, the faculty were there.
It's like the old Monty pythonline, wink, wink, nod, nod,
(16:36):
A nod is just as good as a wink. Dave.
I'm going to tell you something right now that I
(16:57):
don't know that I've ever told anyone else. I was
actually involved when I was at the Medical Examiner's office
in Atlanta of having to go back and retrieve human
remains from a former employee. This guy had been dismissed
(17:20):
from the office and we were missing two human skulls,
and myself and another investigator showed up at his house
and said, look, we don't want to involve anybody else
in this, but we believe that you're in possession of
(17:40):
two skulls that we had that were unknown individuals that
we had in boxes that were back in an area
where we keep box skeletal remains. And sure enough, he
produced them. Of course, it was under thread of arrest
and being tried and all those sorts of things, but
he gave them back to us. This was in days,
(18:01):
within days of him being fired for other issues. And
it's not like that sort of thing doesn't happen. As
a matter of fact, Dave, if you remember I think
it was. Yeah, it was in maybe late twenty two
or early twenty three. Remember we covered a case out
of Colorado here on Body Bags about a funeral home
(18:27):
proprietor in Colorado who had been dissecting Hess was the
last name. She had been dissecting human remains and selling
body parts to whoever would buy them. And it was
a chilling story, you know, because you've got family members
(18:48):
there that I think are expecting if I remember qrrectly,
they were expecting cremains, but yet she was taking off
body parts and selling those body parts to individuals who
out there. Yeah, she would sell them internationally as well.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
And we had a couple of different stories about that
same time. If you remember a couple of years ago,
where we had different members of the funeral director's community
that were not doing away with They were not doing
cremations or they weren't burying. There were bodies just piling
up in all sorts of areas. And that's a horrible
(19:22):
thing that takes place even now, But at least then
the bones were talking about in this particular story today,
they actually there was a reason for them being there.
There was a purpose, and there was an entire industry
built around these medical colleges that it's a shame, it's
a stain. But I don't know who should take responsibility
(19:43):
for it because with I Joe, I'm thinking as soon
as you had the first medical school, you had the
first cadaver we could look at, you had the first
set of bones, you know, you would have somebody who
was into the medical fraternity would say, when I die,
you guys can take a look at what's inside. Cut
me open.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah. Absolutely, And the people.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
That sounded really graphic and bad, but I don't mean.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
It that way. No, no, no, this is this is
body backs. Yeah, I mean that's what we talk about.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
It just seems like they would do that though, right.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Yeah, yeah, you would think so. And there are people
that donate their bodies to you. You might not know this.
There are people that actually donate their bodies to the
body farm at UT. Now you want to talk about
something that's I guess it's needed, but it's really gruesome
because you know these bodies will be taken up there
and use for decay studies. Now you're laying out in
(20:32):
the or not you, but you know, the people that
donate their bodies are laid out in an open area
and exposed to the elements. This does I've actually had
people contact me to wanting I was like, I don't
work for ut you know, you need to reach out
to them, and it's like they're curious about it. You know,
could this be done? But all the way back in
(20:55):
prior to the Civil War, there was a gentleman by
the name of Gradison Harris and he was a slave.
And here's an interesting little factoid. He was a Gulla person.
And I know that you've got family members that live
off of off of Ocracoke. Well, he's a Gulla person,
(21:21):
which is kind of in the coastal area of South Carolina.
They speak a very yeah, they speak a very distinctive
language there.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
The dialect that you don't find anywhere else.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
It is, it's very unique. It's kind of like my
ancestors in South Louisiana. I got a whole portion of
my family that speaks Cajun fringe and so. But he
came from that environment. And here's what's really interesting when
he and I hate saying this about anybody, but when
he was purchased, he was not purchased by a single
individual day. He was actually purchased by the medical college.
(22:00):
He was owned, and this is the way it's written.
He was owned by the faculty, and he developed quite
the reputation. He became what was known as a resurrectionist.
Now resurrectionist, it's not like this is an isolated event
relative to Georgia. Okay, they were everywhere, but he made
(22:25):
quite the name for himself, and he would appear in
group photos at graduation for the students. They knew that
he was the person that could go out and acquire remains.
He primarily focused on slave burials because no one was
watching slave graves and there was a huge mortality issue
there where people would die very young, and you know
(22:49):
cadavers now many times are people that are much older. Well,
back then, people didn't live to what we now consider
a ripe old age. Back then, you'd have people that
would pass way their mid forties and you'd have children
that would pads a good life.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, he didn't midas the old man mid.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Forties, yeah, mid forties man. And so he would go
out at the behest of the medical college. And let
me just give you an idea. Did you know that
it was illegal to teach a slave or enslaved person
to read and write, but there was an exception made
(23:29):
for Gratison because he would have to read the obituaries
and just lock into that just for a second. So
he would read the obituaries in the paper so that
he could he could stay up to date on newly
buried remains, and that at night he would go out.
(23:50):
I'm sure that he had assistance that would help him
dig these freshly buried people up, pop the graves open,
and the slave population back during that time is not
going to say anything about it, and they're not going
to complain because they know what's going to happen to
them if they do. He would remove these bodies and
then take them back to the medical school where they
(24:14):
would under the cover of darkness be dissected in the
middle of the night when no one else was around,
and these students are there over this cadaver, attempting to learn,
and Gratison is probably assisting them with these dissections. Gratison
is probably having to clean up after them and then
dispose of the bodies. And so there was just an
(24:37):
area collective area where it's unclear how they wound up. There.
Would he because this was in the basement of the building.
Were they doing the dissections in the basement, you know,
and then they would just kind of take the cadavers
and put them in a big pile, and you know,
over a period of time it would render down. The
(24:57):
one thing that strikes me here is how would you
get past the smell? You know? And I know they
have lime back then and that sort of thing, but lime,
the presence of lime is not necessarily going to retard
or knock down that smell of decomposition to the point
where you're not going to appreciate it at all. You're
walking by a building and you know, people catch a
(25:18):
whiff there and they're wondering, you know, what in the
world is going on? And you know, but everybody that
was in the know, wink wink, not not knew that
these dissections were going or taking place down there. And
so yeah, he became known as a resurrectionist and was
eventually became a freedman after the Civil War, but continue
(25:40):
to work at the university for decades afterwards.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
And actually about his job is a grave robber. You're
not going to be able to do that outside of
working for the school, you know, your occupation unless you
become a grave bigger, you know.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Yeah, yeah, you're you're right, unless you're a grave digger,
you know, but you're a resurrectionist. Interestingly enough, during reconstruction,
of course, reconstruction failed, he had moved to across the
Augusta River actually into South Carolina and became a judge
in South Carolina. And when reconstruction failed, they had race
(26:23):
riots and I think it was Hamburg, I can't remember
the actual name of the town in South Carolina, and
it got so bad he left and came back to
the university, and the students actually kind of reminded him
that he needed to keep his place, his proper place,
(26:43):
because they saw him trying to ascend into the professional class,
and so they referred to him as judge for years
and years after that, you know, just as a reminder,
this is who you are. You're a resurrectionist and you're
working for us. So it's kind of an interesting story.
But Dave, I think, if I remember correctly, this is
(27:04):
not the only location that this was occurring.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
No, but let me before we move on. Yeah, yeah,
you've got a resurrectionist to actually, Okay, if you look
at it from the standpoint of continuing education and learning
and helping the living through you examining the dead. I
get all that, but you would think they would have
a better plan. Okay, once we got the body, you know,
(27:30):
and we've done what we're gonna do, you would think
somebody there at the college level would have a suggestion
as to what to do with these bones that you
now cannot legally have you should have never had to
start with. So not one of these educated people had
any common sense. So the best plan they could come
(27:51):
up with was, when we're done, we're going to throw
them on the floor in the basement and we'll cover
them with some lime and dirt and just leave them there.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Yeah, isn't that something that Yeah? And listen, I lay
the you know who, I laid the fault fault to
at this and this is nationwide. I lay the fault
at the propriety of society and the church because they
viewed using bodies like this as desecration of the dead,
and that seems to run contrary to spiritual beliefs actually,
(28:23):
because if we believe that human body is a vessel,
and after you've passed on to the other side, then
what kind of utility does the body have? For you
at that point in time. And what better utility might
exist than to learn from the dead and to learn
from their the anatomical specimens that they could render. How
many I wonder, Here's here's an interesting question. I wonder
(28:46):
how many people died. How many people died as a
direct result of some doctor who had never had any
kind of anatomical training, and they went in and clipped
a vessel that if they had and the person bled
out there was no way to stop the bleeding during
some kind of surgery. How many of these people died
(29:09):
as a result of not having any kind of direct
anatomical training, gross anatomical training. I think that that's a
worthy question. Yeah, and there's no way to take the
measure of it.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Now that you get the guy. Look, don't you have
a kid that cuts steaks just perfect down at the
get him and we're going to make him the town
surgeon because the old one died. He at least knows
something about cutting beef. Maybe he can help it, you know, right, Well,
what you're going to do.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, well, you know that that's like the origin of
the barber pole, right, barber's cut hair and they did surgery,
you know, when you see the red, blue and white
spinning bark, that was an indication of a surgeon. And
so they, you know, all things to all people. I guess,
I don't know, but it's an interesting I think that
it's very interesting, you know, kind of following this threat
(29:57):
through history, how how this evolved as a practice. What's
amazing is that they still held onto this law in
the wake of the Civil War, Dave. I've seen pictures
and I don't know if you've ever seen them of it.
There's one in particular, Matthew Brady, that Matthew Brady took
at a battlefield I think adjacent to a hospital, and
it was stacks of limbs and these these limbs had
(30:21):
been amputated, you know, as a result of you know,
battle injuries that you know, there was no way to
salvage the leg. And it seems as though that people
would have been screaming out at this point in time,
well literally, but screaming out that we need proper training
(30:43):
for our physicians. Now. Listen. A lot of these guys,
I'm sure, became fantastic surgeons that had to work in
those field hospitals just with you know, a pair of scissors,
a scalpel, and of course the infamous saw that you
can see in any of these old medical kits. It's
one of the most gruesome you'll ever see. And they
were doing this on many cases with people that had
(31:05):
no nasty They didn't have ether on board, particularly in
the South, they didn't have anything to apply anesthesia with. So,
you know, in the wake of arguably the most terrific
human tragedy in our country's history, there still they still
have this prohibitive law that's on the books that didn't
come off the books until like the eighteen eighties in
(31:26):
Georgia at least. Now you know up in you know,
like up in Massachusetts, of laws were a bit more
liberal up there. So prior to this they had they
had they had made allowances for this. You know, you
go to places like Harvard for instance, probably Yale, those
areas up there, and Penn which interestingly enough is Crawford
(31:51):
Long actually spent time at Penn University of Pennsylvania. They
had access to bodies up in those areas and they
could do these dissections. So I don't know, it's a
curious thing, you know when I think about it, and
you know, I take many times I take for granted
the time I spent in the morgue, you know, dissecting
(32:12):
all of his bodies for so many years, and looking
back through time, I think how many of those physicians,
young physicians or want to be physicians back then, would
have died just to have an opportunity that I had,
you know, opening you know, close to seven thousand bodies
(32:34):
over the course of my career. They would have loved
to have had access to that. You see all manner
of things in the morgue, things that most people, particularly
(33:02):
years ago, it's not quite as morbid as it used
to be. Probably. I worked with a guy for a
number of years that was also an autopsy assistant. He
had been there for years and years, and he had
a collection that he kept on a shelf in a
(33:26):
glass mason jar. As a matter of fact, he had
several of these jars, and when you looked at him,
when you looked at him, they looked like large marbles.
Some were small marbles, but they're all black or green
in color. And then for those that didn't know what
(33:48):
they were, they would approach it would catch the eye
as they'd walk up to the shelf, and they would
look and they discovered after, of course, with a grin,
he explained to them those are gallstones. And every autopsy
that he performed where he found a gallstone in dwelling
(34:09):
the gallbladder, he would retrieve it, wash it, and keep it.
It always fascinated me, this idea of retaining things I've
been in. I think probably the thing that used to
unnerve me the most. It was an anatomy lab that
I visited as an undergraduate, and I'd go in there
(34:31):
regularly and there were babies and glass jars that went
back decades and decades and decades, and there was something
about that that just sent a chill up my spine.
But we have to understand that specimens many times reveal
things that might not otherwise be revealed. They therein rest
(34:56):
scientific truth, and sometimes the truth can be actually quite horrific. David,
You know, somebody gets a body, and it doesn't matter
if you had the backing of the school or not,
or if you're some person that kills somebody nowadays and decides, well, yeah,
let me say, let me get out the jigsaw, right.
You know, what are you going to do with the body? Now?
(35:19):
What are you going to do? Where? Where? Is it
that you're going to take a body and dump it
somewhere where no one is going to find it. But
I got to tell you, to uh Chris's credit, they
didn't find it for a while. I mean, you know
they it was years later, you know, after all this
had passed and they've got the limb pit, which they've
(35:41):
also I saw it also described I think as a well,
I'm not really sure, and yeah, the well of souls,
I don't know. I'm thinking lost raders, lost arc But
you know, you think about that, you think, what are
you going to what are you going to do with
the body? This bloody mess that has been torn too
and literally they are torn a bit. You you ought
to see a medical cadaver after the kids are done
(36:04):
with it after a year, and it is after a year. Yeah, yeah,
they might have it. It depended upon the curriculum. They
might have it beginning in the fall and it will
go all the way through spring term, or it could
just be a single term and you're going to have
multiple kids on one body. It's not like every kid
gets a body.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
In medical you see the worst kid in the classes
in the very back and he's getting that foot he's
the last guy in the class with the foot and
he gets it and it's like hundred and sixty eight
bones in the foot. I got four. Excuse me, which
one is the pinky doe?
Speaker 1 (36:35):
No, no, no, they're they're they're doing the dissection and
concert with one another. And that's that's one of the
things that you learn in medical school. You're kind of helping,
you know, helping one another along through in you know,
gross anatomy is one of those gateway classes too that
you take. It's the first class to take in medical school,
and so it's but it is fascinating, you know, those
(36:57):
bodies that are anatomical specimens like that, they are properly
disposed of. They generally go back to their point of
origin and then they are either returned to the families,
or they have a burial area that is already preconceived
at that point time, or the bodies are cremated. But
(37:19):
not in this case in Virginia, Dave.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
I was looking at when they found the limp. It yeah,
and it cleared it out. Below it was another capped Well,
they didn't uncap that one. They just let us sit.
So you and I want to go up and have
some fun and scare some kids and.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
May nowhere to go jas. I'll pass, I'll pass. I
have no interest in going there whatsoever. Richmond, I'm sure
as a fine city, but particularly on that little tour
let a little jaunt, I have no interest in doing it.
But you know, it's interesting. I think that a lot
of this physicians, and we have to understand this in
(38:02):
an academic setting. Academics are many times are intellectual vagabonds.
They travel all over the place, and it's no different
in the medical community. You think about doctors, physicians that
are out there practicing day to day, but you know,
there has to be somebody that educates the physicians, and
generally they are physicians. And you'll have other people with
(38:26):
PhDs that are there, you know, teaching pharmacology. You have
PhD anatomist that are there as well. But for the
most part, you've got doctors that are crisscrossing the country
taking different academic positions. They just don't want to practice
medicine and traditional sense, they want to teach others. And
so with that said, this knowledge of these resurrectionists would
(38:50):
travel everywhere. So everywhere that you had a medical school,
there was probably some form of resurrectionists that was there,
and there were always be these stories that would come
along with it. You know, the new faculty member would
be there, Oh where'd you come from? Well, this guy's
at Harvard now and he had been he had been
(39:10):
trained at Medical College of Georgia. And he says, yeah,
I was trained the Medical College of Georgia. And people
are leaning in and saying, wait, didn't you guys have
this like really wild, you know, really wild resurrection is
down there? Oh? Yeah, man, we had all the bodies
we could take at one time. We did the dissections.
Boy did I ever learn anatomy? Well, how do we
(39:33):
get our hands on this? And what do we have
to do? Well that knowledge travels, doesn't it, Dave? And
you know. The peace to this is this kind of
unique situation at Harvard, which is arguably, if not the oldest,
one of the oldest institutions in the United States. And
they have forever and ever a men had a medical
school at that location, and they had a similar finding
(39:58):
up there, didn't they They were they covered a little same thing.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
It didn't even shock By the time I got to Harvard.
It just was like, you know, you're numb to it, yeah,
because this one. But this here's the weird part about Harvard.
They have like a it'd be even time to go
into all of what Harvard has, but they have like
a special name, you know that they give their little
club back in the day. Because where the other guys use,
you know, a former slaver, a janitor, Harvard actually has
(40:26):
a little team and they have certain rules that apply
to them when they're going into you know, they actually
the actually have the rules for when they go in
to steal a body, you know, and they're going to
do grave robbing, and they make fun and great the
others who don't do it as good as them, and
they mock them. And it became a whole thing at
Harvard among these students to form a club to become
(40:49):
really good grave robbers. And I'm not knocking Harvard by
any stretch of the imagination. It's just it's so funny
they could take something there that in every other school
they kind of winking an odd as you said earlier,
and try to avoid and they're they're like broadcast. They
probably have a newsletter going out every other month, you know,
(41:10):
and there were recent meetings, but they found a place
it was at the Harvard's Holding Chapel. This one pops
up in nineteen ninety nine and a worker is operating
a mini dozer. All I can tell you can you
imagine this guy. Yeah, he's recently recovered alcoholic, he's sixty
days sober. He's moving the little mini dozer and hit something.
(41:33):
It's like, what is that? And he moves up a
little closer, and all of a sudden, the bones are coming.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
I know, holy smokes. Yeah, yeah, show me the way
to go home at that point, you know, because I
got to tell you I'm heading down to the local pub.
But even for me, because you know, you think about
and these are average people, right, you know, with average lives.
They're moving dirt and then all of a sudden, this
guy recovers these remains that are Look, when a forensic
(42:01):
anthropologist gets their hands on this, just like they did
at Georgia Medical College, they know that these are not
recent burials because there is a certain patina which is
kind of that coloration and time markers that have been
left behind on the bone just by virtue of the
(42:21):
fact of their exposure and not being treated. You know,
they're not these remains are not what are referred to
as casketed remains. They're not protected. Not that casketed remains
are completely protected, but the difference between being in a
box that's inside of a vault, that's in the ground
and has a lid on it is there's a world
(42:42):
of difference between that and finding remains that are essentially
just kind of buried beneath the surface, are hidden or
obscured in this manner. The fact that he found anything
is quite amazing, because you know, you can go to
the sites of major battlefields where you know, a couple
of hundred years ago, you're not in the dead were left.
(43:04):
You're not gonna necessarily find any kind of skeletor it makes.
You might find a metal button or a buckle or
something like that. You're generally not gonna find bone charts
that are left behind unless you really really look. This
guy is driving a skid steer and he comes across
I guess it's like a skid steer, and he comes
across these remains, Dave.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
And the thing is is that I was noticing, you know,
when we were looking at the other stories, and which
kind of gives you an idea because these we're talking
about it from eight nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety
nine when these three different things took place. Georgia in
eighty nine, you had Virginia in ninety four, five years later,
and then here we go ninety nine at Harvard. At
Harvard the third place to find cash of bones, and
(43:49):
instead of getting them out, studying them and doing you know,
anything like that, they basically looked at it and went, yeah,
we knew they were there somewhere. Go ahead, and let's
just let's move this. Go ahead and put the dirt
back over there, and let's dig someplace else. Meanwhile, right
at the other clay, in nineteen ninety eight, the bones
(44:09):
from the Medical College of Georgia were reinterred in a
mass grave.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
Yeah, they did what I thought we should do. Look,
I can joke around about stuff, but at the end,
there's got to be something here. And that showed me
a little respect.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah it did. And you know, interestingly enough that that
grave in which they buried those people, they have no
idea who they are, and they you know, they put
you know, we we started off talking about the resurrection,
and it's fitting that, you know, we kind of draw
the curtain here that there's you know, a forward term
(44:50):
that they put there known but to god, you know
that that gives you an idea, you know, of the
number of remains that they found which were significant and
they were all commingled. And after the forensic anthropologists who
I actually met at one point in time, that was
a state anthropologist at the time that was called in
(45:12):
on this case after her examinations were done, and she
became quite famous as a result of this case because
she wrote several academic papers based upon It's one of
those things as a practitioner, as a forensic anthropologist. I
don't want to be too flippid about this, but it's
(45:33):
one of those things that as a professional, it's a
once in a lifetime event. You're not going to find
like a cachet of bones somewhere. It's generally going to
be like a single bone. They're going in there and
they're finding huge collection of elements of skeletons, and this
is like, you could do research on this for years
and years and years to come from all kinds of
(45:54):
different perspectives. But back to what came of Grandison. When
Grandison died and he did in fact pass away way
back in nineteen eleven. And remember he had entered Georgia
(46:18):
Medical College as a slave that was actually owned by
the institution and the faculty. He became a freedman and
continued to work for them for years and years to come. Well,
you know, he he had robbed so many graves, but
they were all essentially in what was the Cedar Grove Cemetery.
(46:42):
And these were African American individuals primarily that had been
buried there. They were all poor. There were a few
poor whites that were there as well. In an interesting
turn of events, Gratison, when he passed, was buried in
Cedar Grove Cemetery as well. And just a few years
(47:03):
later a great flood took place. The Augusta River breached
the banks and Cedar Grove Cemetery was no more. And
to this day they have no idea whatever happened to
(47:24):
Gratison's remains. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body
backs
Body dies with Joseph Scott More. Since I was a
small child, I have attended church. Now, I've been a
member of many different denominations, as I'm sure some of
you have out there. It's been. To say that it's
a journey is probably an understatement. However, in my experience,
(00:25):
there was something that was consistent all the way through,
and that is that I was always taught that on
the third Day Christ arose from the grave, and the
term that is always applied to that event is the resurrection.
(00:48):
I think that we could all agree that that's a
seminal event in human history. However, today I want to
apply that term to another individual term that he actually
went by. And as a matter of fact, many of
the people from around the world that were in the
(01:12):
same field as a gentleman were referred to as these
by these titles. The term is resurrectionists. Isn't that an
odd term? Does that mean that this individual himself was resurrected?
Oh no, that's not what it meant. For this individual
(01:33):
actually went out and opened graves, and he didn't actually
resurrect the dead, but he did in fact remove them
from their eternal resting spots. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Body Backs. I'm back together with my buddy
(02:01):
Dave mac and I'm telling you I got to tell
you my friends. Listen. If it wasn't for Dave, I
would not be doing this episode because he has been
really jazzed about this about this topic, because it is
(02:22):
kind of like Dave day day. You don't really know Dave.
Dave's bit quirky, you know, which is cool. You know.
That's that's why I.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Digg Kirky's a nice way of saying somebody's really weird.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
No, no, no, it's it's fantastic. Actually, you are a
typical Dave. That's why we love you man. There's never
a boring moment with you. And this, these cases that
we're going to talk about today are kind of right
in my wheelhouse. I didn't I didn't know that there
would necessarily be an interest in this, per se h.
(02:56):
But if I'm to use you as my barometer, I'd
say that there probably is an interest in this. And
and uh, I'll go ahead and say it. We're we're
going to talk a little bit about grave robbing and
the first you know who I first thought.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Of Frankenstein I did, I did.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
I thought about Marty Feldlin Frankenstein and I found out
a bit of trope trivia the other day. And I
don't know if you've heard this. I'm gonna throw I'm
gonna throw out a little a little Young Frankenstein, Young
Frankenstein trivia to you. Uh, thank you?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Doctor?
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Did you know that? And I know that you're going
to know this. I just know it that Aerosmith got
the title for their famous song, the original version, Walked
this Way, because they all went to Young Frankenstein and
(03:56):
saw the movie and that scene where where I Gore
played by Marty Feltman, hands the cane back to Gene Wildern's,
you know, after he tells him walk this way and
he has to kind of hunch over and stumble down
the staircase. But you know, I gore that character in
the movie. There's interaction between him and Frankenstein, Doctor Frankenstein, Frankenstein.
(04:25):
There's a grave robbing episode, and of course that's where
they get the parts for the creature. The creature was
not Frankenstein. It was Frankenstein's monster originally when the book
was written by Shelley and so you know, but.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
You're saying did you give me Abby somebody?
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, and so parts is parts man, as they used
to say. Of course we're talking about robbing graves of
the how do we say this, the newly buried or
the fresh dead.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
But it's not for the sake of building Frankenstein's monster.
It's actually for educational purposes, kind of like Granny's medicinal whiskey.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah, they're finding they're actually finding poor people, you know,
those who are indigent and those who have been you know,
put to death, although oftentimes I don't know what happens,
but looking in history that you know, they would were
going to kill these guys and you can have them
for science, but they never seem to make it. It's
(05:31):
like something would happen to the dead on the way.
I mean, there's weird stuff that used to happen Joe.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Oh, yeah, there really are instances. And of course down
here in the South, I think you know, the where
the lineage of this, you know, kind of arises from
is an event that took place back in nineteen eighty
nine at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia,
(05:58):
which by the way, is one of the older medical
colleges in the US, and to give you a little insight,
it's actually the first location that a hysterectomy was performed,
which is kind of fascinating, I think because there are
many members in our audience that have had to undergo
(06:20):
that procedure. There's been history that has been made there
over the years. I don't know that what happened in
nineteen eighty nine was necessarily something they wanted to be
known for, but yet it happened. Workers were working on
one of the oldest buildings on campus at the Medical
(06:41):
College of Georgia in Augusta, and they happened to stumble
upon a large collection of human remains. Of course, skeletal
remains is what I'm referring to, and they could see
even with the unaided eye. It didn't take a forensic
anthropologist to determine this that these remains had been in
(07:07):
many cases dismembered or they showed signs of having been dismembered.
So when you have a skeletal recovery, particularly if you're
talking about a clandestine grave, one of the things that
you expect to find is not like, let me see,
how can I say this? It's not necessarily like a
(07:27):
grave that you would come across where that would look
like a Halloween skeleton where everything is intact. You know,
the elements of skeleton will have come apart and depended
upon the ground in which it's settling into. There's a
process that's referred to its turbation, and you don't really
(07:48):
see it, but the earth actually moves beneath the surface,
and it's always changing, but the top end kind of
stays static, and that's the appearance you get, so and
it can be measured probably in millimeters, and it happens
over a long period of time. And those slight adjustments
(08:09):
beneath the surface can of impact burials that can impact
bodies that are down there, and so things shift around.
But skeletons don't necessarily are intact, you know, like you
have something from Halloween that's hanging out in your yard,
it's not going to look like that. But what they
were seeing were first off comingled remains, which meant that
(08:33):
these remains were from a variety of different bodies. The
bodies were in many instances male and female, and they
had a great deal of post wartem trauma to the bone,
and one of the ways people always ask, you know,
(08:54):
how can you tell that a skeletal remain has been
traumatized in death when you have no tissue to see
hemorrhage and that sort of thing. There's a reactive event
that takes place within the bone that you can actually see,
you know, even if it's approximates death on the living
side as opposed to the you know, those events that
(09:18):
occur after death. But anyway, that's the story for another day.
But when those workers saw this in nineteen eighty nine,
you can imagine it was a head scratcher. And going
back to the dismemberment, Dave, that adds another layer of
horror to this, right.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
See, you're seeing bones. This is like going through a
really bad Halloween haunted house, you got it. Yeah, I
would think they're fake. I would think Joe, you know what,
Joe and those guys in friends that are messing with us,
that's what they're doing. These are all That's what I'd
be selling people, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, But there's something clinically. I think it's because of
the location day when, because even these workers have an
awareness that there's people walking all over this campus and
I've been to this campus. They're walking all over the
place in white lab coats and scrubs, and you know
what they're studying here, They're studying medicine. And when you
(10:12):
get into this area, you know, I'm really wondering. I'd
love to be able to interview like some of the
workers that were there discovered this, you know, the first
person to lay eyes on this, because you know, for me,
having interviewed many people that find bodies, which are some
of the most fascinating stories. You know, how they come
(10:32):
across bodies, it's always that one person that says, I
really didn't believe what I was seeing. When I first
saw it, I thought that, you know, like you said,
I thought that it was a fake. I thought that
it was something that was just there to scare people.
But then I approached and I noticed. You know, they'll
say things like then the smell hit me, or I
(10:56):
saw what I could have sworn was blood. Are in
the case of a bone, they their default position with
most people that I've encountered that find skeletal remains, Dave,
you know what they always say, I thought I thought
it was a deer. I thought it was a dog.
You know, because I think in the human brain, most
(11:17):
of us don't want to come to grips with well,
you know what, man, Every now and then you're going
to come across a human remain that's exposed out there,
and and so this is you know, it's quite a
fascinating dynamic here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
I'm just, as you say, fascinated by the people who
discovered it and what kind of damage it did to
their psyche. You know, that's not we could actually probably get.
We need to get Bethany Marshall and a couple of
the other psychs from Nancy Gracie Show and just line
a couple of these cats up and say what happened
that day and what have you seen since then? Like
did you watch, you know, any of the old Halloween
(11:54):
movies and had skeletons? Do you freak out at that now?
Because I still haven't quite got past that's the idea
that we as a people didn't have a way to
actually study the human body firsthand without breaking the law
to do it. That's something that just amazes me, Joe,
(12:15):
And that's what we're doing the show about, because when
Joe sends me this article, okay about this huge find.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
From Atless Obscura is my favorite sources. By the way,
if you've never read Atlas obscura's pretty fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Yeah, it's the like it's the OSQ of of Medicine
Obscure Sports Quarterly. But on ESPN a the ohow they
had bones throwing contest. You know, that's the kind of
stuff I expect to see when you have a bunch
of bones that just show up in a building. But
after you get past all the ideas of why and okay,
(12:51):
it's a medical building, but still don't the dead deserve
to be buried, don't they don't they deserve to be
better than this? These are real bones? Is this only
how we and if they have been used in some
kind of a medical learning experience, shouldn't they be given
a nicer send off than just thrown into the bottom
of a well or a building or you know, just
(13:12):
tossed away like trash.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Yeah, you would think so that that would be the case.
But you have to understand, here's that word again. This
is a clandestine event because it was against the law,
and it had been against the law for forever as
far as people could remember. And this is something that
kind of it was the law in Europe not to
(13:34):
do this. And so when the US was settled, like
a lot of things, it transferred over and in Georgia
in particular, you know, they the school in Augusta opened
like in the mid eighteen twenties. All right, we're really
pre pre Civil War. We're talking Andrew Jackson era time.
(13:58):
That's when this thing was established. And Dave, it was
that law prohibiting people from using human cadavers for dissection
did not come off the books until the mid eighteen eighties.
And so you've got doctors that are being trained at
this location and dude, they've never done a dissection. They've
(14:21):
never done a dissection on a human remain, and so
it's it's startling. You know, how how is it that,
you know, you think about somebody that's called a surgeon
can actually try to facilitate the healing of somebody without
(14:44):
actually knowing what the anatomy is. Now you you have
detailed drawings that have occurred over the year, even years,
even Da Vinci had rendered, you know, beautiful anatomical drawings
of human human remains. But it's just the fact that
you're going to go into this environment, open the environment,
opened the body up on a living patient. And you
(15:08):
don't know what you're going to be looking for. Interestingly enough,
just down the road from Augusta Crawford Long back in
the eighteen forties. He's the first guy that ever used anesthesia.
He's the guy that first to play. And literally this
is in like a little tiny town in Georgia. They've
got the Crawford Long Museum there. I urge anybody that
(15:31):
they have an opportunity to go and check this place out.
And he used ether on a guy to remove a tumor. Now,
ether's very unstable, it's not something we would use today.
But before that, you know, people had to endure surgery
without any kind of anesthesia whatsoever. So we're in a
real there's a real learning curve here. But what physicians
(15:52):
are medical students knew back then was that they needed
they needed someone that could facilitate getting bodies for them,
and they might have to do it by oil lamp,
a whale oil lamp or a candle to do these
dissections in the middle of the night, and so that
(16:14):
they could understand anatomy and listen, I'll tell you this,
everybody knew what was going on because the medical students
had all been through the program, the faculty were there.
It's like the old Monty pythonline, wink, wink, nod, nod,
(16:36):
A nod is just as good as a wink. Dave.
I'm going to tell you something right now that I
(16:57):
don't know that I've ever told anyone else. I was
actually involved when I was at the Medical Examiner's office
in Atlanta of having to go back and retrieve human
remains from a former employee. This guy had been dismissed
(17:20):
from the office and we were missing two human skulls,
and myself and another investigator showed up at his house
and said, look, we don't want to involve anybody else
in this, but we believe that you're in possession of
(17:40):
two skulls that we had that were unknown individuals that
we had in boxes that were back in an area
where we keep box skeletal remains. And sure enough, he
produced them. Of course, it was under thread of arrest
and being tried and all those sorts of things, but
he gave them back to us. This was in days,
(18:01):
within days of him being fired for other issues. And
it's not like that sort of thing doesn't happen. As
a matter of fact, Dave, if you remember I think
it was. Yeah, it was in maybe late twenty two
or early twenty three. Remember we covered a case out
of Colorado here on Body Bags about a funeral home
(18:27):
proprietor in Colorado who had been dissecting Hess was the
last name. She had been dissecting human remains and selling
body parts to whoever would buy them. And it was
a chilling story, you know, because you've got family members
(18:48):
there that I think are expecting if I remember qrrectly,
they were expecting cremains, but yet she was taking off
body parts and selling those body parts to individuals who
out there. Yeah, she would sell them internationally as well.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
And we had a couple of different stories about that
same time. If you remember a couple of years ago,
where we had different members of the funeral director's community
that were not doing away with They were not doing
cremations or they weren't burying. There were bodies just piling
up in all sorts of areas. And that's a horrible
(19:22):
thing that takes place even now, But at least then
the bones were talking about in this particular story today,
they actually there was a reason for them being there.
There was a purpose, and there was an entire industry
built around these medical colleges that it's a shame, it's
a stain. But I don't know who should take responsibility
(19:43):
for it because with I Joe, I'm thinking as soon
as you had the first medical school, you had the
first cadaver we could look at, you had the first
set of bones, you know, you would have somebody who
was into the medical fraternity would say, when I die,
you guys can take a look at what's inside. Cut
me open.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah. Absolutely, And the people.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
That sounded really graphic and bad, but I don't mean.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
It that way. No, no, no, this is this is
body backs. Yeah, I mean that's what we talk about.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
It just seems like they would do that though, right.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Yeah, yeah, you would think so. And there are people
that donate their bodies to you. You might not know this.
There are people that actually donate their bodies to the
body farm at UT. Now you want to talk about
something that's I guess it's needed, but it's really gruesome
because you know these bodies will be taken up there
and use for decay studies. Now you're laying out in
(20:32):
the or not you, but you know, the people that
donate their bodies are laid out in an open area
and exposed to the elements. This does I've actually had
people contact me to wanting I was like, I don't
work for ut you know, you need to reach out
to them, and it's like they're curious about it. You know,
could this be done? But all the way back in
(20:55):
prior to the Civil War, there was a gentleman by
the name of Gradison Harris and he was a slave.
And here's an interesting little factoid. He was a Gulla person.
And I know that you've got family members that live
off of off of Ocracoke. Well, he's a Gulla person,
(21:21):
which is kind of in the coastal area of South Carolina.
They speak a very yeah, they speak a very distinctive
language there.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
The dialect that you don't find anywhere else.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
It is, it's very unique. It's kind of like my
ancestors in South Louisiana. I got a whole portion of
my family that speaks Cajun fringe and so. But he
came from that environment. And here's what's really interesting when
he and I hate saying this about anybody, but when
he was purchased, he was not purchased by a single
individual day. He was actually purchased by the medical college.
(22:00):
He was owned, and this is the way it's written.
He was owned by the faculty, and he developed quite
the reputation. He became what was known as a resurrectionist.
Now resurrectionist, it's not like this is an isolated event
relative to Georgia. Okay, they were everywhere, but he made
(22:25):
quite the name for himself, and he would appear in
group photos at graduation for the students. They knew that
he was the person that could go out and acquire remains.
He primarily focused on slave burials because no one was
watching slave graves and there was a huge mortality issue
there where people would die very young, and you know
(22:49):
cadavers now many times are people that are much older. Well,
back then, people didn't live to what we now consider
a ripe old age. Back then, you'd have people that
would pass way their mid forties and you'd have children
that would pads a good life.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, he didn't midas the old man mid.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Forties, yeah, mid forties man. And so he would go
out at the behest of the medical college. And let
me just give you an idea. Did you know that
it was illegal to teach a slave or enslaved person
to read and write, but there was an exception made
(23:29):
for Gratison because he would have to read the obituaries
and just lock into that just for a second. So
he would read the obituaries in the paper so that
he could he could stay up to date on newly
buried remains, and that at night he would go out.
(23:50):
I'm sure that he had assistance that would help him
dig these freshly buried people up, pop the graves open,
and the slave population back during that time is not
going to say anything about it, and they're not going
to complain because they know what's going to happen to
them if they do. He would remove these bodies and
then take them back to the medical school where they
(24:14):
would under the cover of darkness be dissected in the
middle of the night when no one else was around,
and these students are there over this cadaver, attempting to learn,
and Gratison is probably assisting them with these dissections. Gratison
is probably having to clean up after them and then
dispose of the bodies. And so there was just an
(24:37):
area collective area where it's unclear how they wound up. There.
Would he because this was in the basement of the building.
Were they doing the dissections in the basement, you know,
and then they would just kind of take the cadavers
and put them in a big pile, and you know,
over a period of time it would render down. The
(24:57):
one thing that strikes me here is how would you
get past the smell? You know? And I know they
have lime back then and that sort of thing, but lime,
the presence of lime is not necessarily going to retard
or knock down that smell of decomposition to the point
where you're not going to appreciate it at all. You're
walking by a building and you know, people catch a
(25:18):
whiff there and they're wondering, you know, what in the
world is going on? And you know, but everybody that
was in the know, wink wink, not not knew that
these dissections were going or taking place down there. And
so yeah, he became known as a resurrectionist and was
eventually became a freedman after the Civil War, but continue
(25:40):
to work at the university for decades afterwards.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
And actually about his job is a grave robber. You're
not going to be able to do that outside of
working for the school, you know, your occupation unless you
become a grave bigger, you know.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Yeah, yeah, you're you're right, unless you're a grave digger,
you know, but you're a resurrectionist. Interestingly enough, during reconstruction,
of course, reconstruction failed, he had moved to across the
Augusta River actually into South Carolina and became a judge
in South Carolina. And when reconstruction failed, they had race
(26:23):
riots and I think it was Hamburg, I can't remember
the actual name of the town in South Carolina, and
it got so bad he left and came back to
the university, and the students actually kind of reminded him
that he needed to keep his place, his proper place,
(26:43):
because they saw him trying to ascend into the professional class,
and so they referred to him as judge for years
and years after that, you know, just as a reminder,
this is who you are. You're a resurrectionist and you're
working for us. So it's kind of an interesting story.
But Dave, I think, if I remember correctly, this is
(27:04):
not the only location that this was occurring.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
No, but let me before we move on. Yeah, yeah,
you've got a resurrectionist to actually, Okay, if you look
at it from the standpoint of continuing education and learning
and helping the living through you examining the dead. I
get all that, but you would think they would have
a better plan. Okay, once we got the body, you know,
(27:30):
and we've done what we're gonna do, you would think
somebody there at the college level would have a suggestion
as to what to do with these bones that you
now cannot legally have you should have never had to
start with. So not one of these educated people had
any common sense. So the best plan they could come
(27:51):
up with was, when we're done, we're going to throw
them on the floor in the basement and we'll cover
them with some lime and dirt and just leave them there.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Yeah, isn't that something that Yeah? And listen, I lay
the you know who, I laid the fault fault to
at this and this is nationwide. I lay the fault
at the propriety of society and the church because they
viewed using bodies like this as desecration of the dead,
and that seems to run contrary to spiritual beliefs actually,
(28:23):
because if we believe that human body is a vessel,
and after you've passed on to the other side, then
what kind of utility does the body have? For you
at that point in time. And what better utility might
exist than to learn from the dead and to learn
from their the anatomical specimens that they could render. How
many I wonder, Here's here's an interesting question. I wonder
(28:46):
how many people died. How many people died as a
direct result of some doctor who had never had any
kind of anatomical training, and they went in and clipped
a vessel that if they had and the person bled
out there was no way to stop the bleeding during
some kind of surgery. How many of these people died
(29:09):
as a result of not having any kind of direct
anatomical training, gross anatomical training. I think that that's a
worthy question. Yeah, and there's no way to take the
measure of it.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Now that you get the guy. Look, don't you have
a kid that cuts steaks just perfect down at the
get him and we're going to make him the town
surgeon because the old one died. He at least knows
something about cutting beef. Maybe he can help it, you know, right, Well,
what you're going to do.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, well, you know that that's like the origin of
the barber pole, right, barber's cut hair and they did surgery,
you know, when you see the red, blue and white
spinning bark, that was an indication of a surgeon. And
so they, you know, all things to all people. I guess,
I don't know, but it's an interesting I think that
it's very interesting, you know, kind of following this threat
(29:57):
through history, how how this evolved as a practice. What's
amazing is that they still held onto this law in
the wake of the Civil War, Dave. I've seen pictures
and I don't know if you've ever seen them of it.
There's one in particular, Matthew Brady, that Matthew Brady took
at a battlefield I think adjacent to a hospital, and
it was stacks of limbs and these these limbs had
(30:21):
been amputated, you know, as a result of you know,
battle injuries that you know, there was no way to
salvage the leg. And it seems as though that people
would have been screaming out at this point in time,
well literally, but screaming out that we need proper training
(30:43):
for our physicians. Now. Listen. A lot of these guys,
I'm sure, became fantastic surgeons that had to work in
those field hospitals just with you know, a pair of scissors,
a scalpel, and of course the infamous saw that you
can see in any of these old medical kits. It's
one of the most gruesome you'll ever see. And they
were doing this on many cases with people that had
(31:05):
no nasty They didn't have ether on board, particularly in
the South, they didn't have anything to apply anesthesia with. So,
you know, in the wake of arguably the most terrific
human tragedy in our country's history, there still they still
have this prohibitive law that's on the books that didn't
come off the books until like the eighteen eighties in
(31:26):
Georgia at least. Now you know up in you know,
like up in Massachusetts, of laws were a bit more
liberal up there. So prior to this they had they
had they had made allowances for this. You know, you
go to places like Harvard for instance, probably Yale, those
areas up there, and Penn which interestingly enough is Crawford
(31:51):
Long actually spent time at Penn University of Pennsylvania. They
had access to bodies up in those areas and they
could do these dissections. So I don't know, it's a
curious thing, you know when I think about it, and
you know, I take many times I take for granted
the time I spent in the morgue, you know, dissecting
(32:12):
all of his bodies for so many years, and looking
back through time, I think how many of those physicians,
young physicians or want to be physicians back then, would
have died just to have an opportunity that I had,
you know, opening you know, close to seven thousand bodies
(32:34):
over the course of my career. They would have loved
to have had access to that. You see all manner
of things in the morgue, things that most people, particularly
(33:02):
years ago, it's not quite as morbid as it used
to be. Probably. I worked with a guy for a
number of years that was also an autopsy assistant. He
had been there for years and years, and he had
a collection that he kept on a shelf in a
(33:26):
glass mason jar. As a matter of fact, he had
several of these jars, and when you looked at him,
when you looked at him, they looked like large marbles.
Some were small marbles, but they're all black or green
in color. And then for those that didn't know what
(33:48):
they were, they would approach it would catch the eye
as they'd walk up to the shelf, and they would
look and they discovered after, of course, with a grin,
he explained to them those are gallstones. And every autopsy
that he performed where he found a gallstone in dwelling
(34:09):
the gallbladder, he would retrieve it, wash it, and keep it.
It always fascinated me, this idea of retaining things I've
been in. I think probably the thing that used to
unnerve me the most. It was an anatomy lab that
I visited as an undergraduate, and I'd go in there
(34:31):
regularly and there were babies and glass jars that went
back decades and decades and decades, and there was something
about that that just sent a chill up my spine.
But we have to understand that specimens many times reveal
things that might not otherwise be revealed. They therein rest
(34:56):
scientific truth, and sometimes the truth can be actually quite horrific. David,
You know, somebody gets a body, and it doesn't matter
if you had the backing of the school or not,
or if you're some person that kills somebody nowadays and decides, well, yeah,
let me say, let me get out the jigsaw, right.
You know, what are you going to do with the body? Now?
(35:19):
What are you going to do? Where? Where? Is it
that you're going to take a body and dump it
somewhere where no one is going to find it. But
I got to tell you, to uh Chris's credit, they
didn't find it for a while. I mean, you know
they it was years later, you know, after all this
had passed and they've got the limb pit, which they've
(35:41):
also I saw it also described I think as a well,
I'm not really sure, and yeah, the well of souls,
I don't know. I'm thinking lost raders, lost arc But
you know, you think about that, you think, what are
you going to what are you going to do with
the body? This bloody mess that has been torn too
and literally they are torn a bit. You you ought
to see a medical cadaver after the kids are done
(36:04):
with it after a year, and it is after a year. Yeah, yeah,
they might have it. It depended upon the curriculum. They
might have it beginning in the fall and it will
go all the way through spring term, or it could
just be a single term and you're going to have
multiple kids on one body. It's not like every kid
gets a body.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
In medical you see the worst kid in the classes
in the very back and he's getting that foot he's
the last guy in the class with the foot and
he gets it and it's like hundred and sixty eight
bones in the foot. I got four. Excuse me, which
one is the pinky doe?
Speaker 1 (36:35):
No, no, no, they're they're they're doing the dissection and
concert with one another. And that's that's one of the
things that you learn in medical school. You're kind of helping,
you know, helping one another along through in you know,
gross anatomy is one of those gateway classes too that
you take. It's the first class to take in medical school,
and so it's but it is fascinating, you know, those
(36:57):
bodies that are anatomical specimens like that, they are properly
disposed of. They generally go back to their point of
origin and then they are either returned to the families,
or they have a burial area that is already preconceived
at that point time, or the bodies are cremated. But
(37:19):
not in this case in Virginia, Dave.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
I was looking at when they found the limp. It yeah,
and it cleared it out. Below it was another capped Well,
they didn't uncap that one. They just let us sit.
So you and I want to go up and have
some fun and scare some kids and.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
May nowhere to go jas. I'll pass, I'll pass. I
have no interest in going there whatsoever. Richmond, I'm sure
as a fine city, but particularly on that little tour
let a little jaunt, I have no interest in doing it.
But you know, it's interesting. I think that a lot
of this physicians, and we have to understand this in
(38:02):
an academic setting. Academics are many times are intellectual vagabonds.
They travel all over the place, and it's no different
in the medical community. You think about doctors, physicians that
are out there practicing day to day, but you know,
there has to be somebody that educates the physicians, and
generally they are physicians. And you'll have other people with
(38:26):
PhDs that are there, you know, teaching pharmacology. You have
PhD anatomist that are there as well. But for the
most part, you've got doctors that are crisscrossing the country
taking different academic positions. They just don't want to practice
medicine and traditional sense, they want to teach others. And
so with that said, this knowledge of these resurrectionists would
(38:50):
travel everywhere. So everywhere that you had a medical school,
there was probably some form of resurrectionists that was there,
and there were always be these stories that would come
along with it. You know, the new faculty member would
be there, Oh where'd you come from? Well, this guy's
at Harvard now and he had been he had been
(39:10):
trained at Medical College of Georgia. And he says, yeah,
I was trained the Medical College of Georgia. And people
are leaning in and saying, wait, didn't you guys have
this like really wild, you know, really wild resurrection is
down there? Oh? Yeah, man, we had all the bodies
we could take at one time. We did the dissections.
Boy did I ever learn anatomy? Well, how do we
(39:33):
get our hands on this? And what do we have
to do? Well that knowledge travels, doesn't it, Dave? And
you know. The peace to this is this kind of
unique situation at Harvard, which is arguably, if not the oldest,
one of the oldest institutions in the United States. And
they have forever and ever a men had a medical
school at that location, and they had a similar finding
(39:58):
up there, didn't they They were they covered a little same thing.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
It didn't even shock By the time I got to Harvard.
It just was like, you know, you're numb to it, yeah,
because this one. But this here's the weird part about Harvard.
They have like a it'd be even time to go
into all of what Harvard has, but they have like
a special name, you know that they give their little
club back in the day. Because where the other guys use,
you know, a former slaver, a janitor, Harvard actually has
(40:26):
a little team and they have certain rules that apply
to them when they're going into you know, they actually
the actually have the rules for when they go in
to steal a body, you know, and they're going to
do grave robbing, and they make fun and great the
others who don't do it as good as them, and
they mock them. And it became a whole thing at
Harvard among these students to form a club to become
(40:49):
really good grave robbers. And I'm not knocking Harvard by
any stretch of the imagination. It's just it's so funny
they could take something there that in every other school
they kind of winking an odd as you said earlier,
and try to avoid and they're they're like broadcast. They
probably have a newsletter going out every other month, you know,
(41:10):
and there were recent meetings, but they found a place
it was at the Harvard's Holding Chapel. This one pops
up in nineteen ninety nine and a worker is operating
a mini dozer. All I can tell you can you
imagine this guy. Yeah, he's recently recovered alcoholic, he's sixty
days sober. He's moving the little mini dozer and hit something.
(41:33):
It's like, what is that? And he moves up a
little closer, and all of a sudden, the bones are coming.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
I know, holy smokes. Yeah, yeah, show me the way
to go home at that point, you know, because I
got to tell you I'm heading down to the local pub.
But even for me, because you know, you think about
and these are average people, right, you know, with average lives.
They're moving dirt and then all of a sudden, this
guy recovers these remains that are Look, when a forensic
(42:01):
anthropologist gets their hands on this, just like they did
at Georgia Medical College, they know that these are not
recent burials because there is a certain patina which is
kind of that coloration and time markers that have been
left behind on the bone just by virtue of the
(42:21):
fact of their exposure and not being treated. You know,
they're not these remains are not what are referred to
as casketed remains. They're not protected. Not that casketed remains
are completely protected, but the difference between being in a
box that's inside of a vault, that's in the ground
and has a lid on it is there's a world
(42:42):
of difference between that and finding remains that are essentially
just kind of buried beneath the surface, are hidden or
obscured in this manner. The fact that he found anything
is quite amazing, because you know, you can go to
the sites of major battlefields where you know, a couple
of hundred years ago, you're not in the dead were left.
(43:04):
You're not gonna necessarily find any kind of skeletor it makes.
You might find a metal button or a buckle or
something like that. You're generally not gonna find bone charts
that are left behind unless you really really look. This
guy is driving a skid steer and he comes across
I guess it's like a skid steer, and he comes
across these remains, Dave.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
And the thing is is that I was noticing, you know,
when we were looking at the other stories, and which
kind of gives you an idea because these we're talking
about it from eight nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety
nine when these three different things took place. Georgia in
eighty nine, you had Virginia in ninety four, five years later,
and then here we go ninety nine at Harvard. At
Harvard the third place to find cash of bones, and
(43:49):
instead of getting them out, studying them and doing you know,
anything like that, they basically looked at it and went, yeah,
we knew they were there somewhere. Go ahead, and let's
just let's move this. Go ahead and put the dirt
back over there, and let's dig someplace else. Meanwhile, right
at the other clay, in nineteen ninety eight, the bones
(44:09):
from the Medical College of Georgia were reinterred in a
mass grave.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
Yeah, they did what I thought we should do. Look,
I can joke around about stuff, but at the end,
there's got to be something here. And that showed me
a little respect.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah it did. And you know, interestingly enough that that
grave in which they buried those people, they have no
idea who they are, and they you know, they put
you know, we we started off talking about the resurrection,
and it's fitting that, you know, we kind of draw
the curtain here that there's you know, a forward term
(44:50):
that they put there known but to god, you know
that that gives you an idea, you know, of the
number of remains that they found which were significant and
they were all commingled. And after the forensic anthropologists who
I actually met at one point in time, that was
a state anthropologist at the time that was called in
(45:12):
on this case after her examinations were done, and she
became quite famous as a result of this case because
she wrote several academic papers based upon It's one of
those things as a practitioner, as a forensic anthropologist. I
don't want to be too flippid about this, but it's
(45:33):
one of those things that as a professional, it's a
once in a lifetime event. You're not going to find
like a cachet of bones somewhere. It's generally going to
be like a single bone. They're going in there and
they're finding huge collection of elements of skeletons, and this
is like, you could do research on this for years
and years and years to come from all kinds of
(45:54):
different perspectives. But back to what came of Grandison. When
Grandison died and he did in fact pass away way
back in nineteen eleven. And remember he had entered Georgia
(46:18):
Medical College as a slave that was actually owned by
the institution and the faculty. He became a freedman and
continued to work for them for years and years to come. Well,
you know, he he had robbed so many graves, but
they were all essentially in what was the Cedar Grove Cemetery.
(46:42):
And these were African American individuals primarily that had been
buried there. They were all poor. There were a few
poor whites that were there as well. In an interesting
turn of events, Gratison, when he passed, was buried in
Cedar Grove Cemetery as well. And just a few years
(47:03):
later a great flood took place. The Augusta River breached
the banks and Cedar Grove Cemetery was no more. And
to this day they have no idea whatever happened to
(47:24):
Gratison's remains. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body
backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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