People Booby Trapped Graves to Protect Them from Body Snatchers | Joe Rogan and Lindsey Fitzhar

It's just like when you look at medical history in the past, you don't own your body. And so a lot of these surgeons get hold of these bodies to dissect, and they're digging them up from graveyards. There were body snatchers, they called themselves resurrection men. And they would go into these cemeteries and they would dig up these bodies. And they would oftentimes strip the body naked because it was illegal to steal possessions from the corpse, but not the body itself. Because there was no concept of the body being sort of property. So they would throw the clothes back into the grave. And they were really clever in the ways they did it. They usually sent a woman in the daytime to masquerade as a mourner, and she would kind of go through the graveyard and she would see where the fresh graves were because of course you'd want the body to be as fresh as possible. And then at nighttime they would go in there and they would dig up these bodies. And they could take as many as 12 bodies in a night. It was like hard labor. And it was very lucrative. Because the only legal bodies to dissect in Britain in the early 19th century were bodies of executed criminals, of people who had murdered other people. So specifically murderers. So if you went to the, like to say goodbye to your nana and drop some flowers on a grave and there's just a big hole in the ground. Well they would cover it up, but you do get these stories of people finding out that a body, so for instance I think it was in 1785 this person goes to this graveyard and discovers that a body is missing, that a body has been snatched. And everybody in the village goes to this graveyard and digs up their relatives and drags these coffins back to their home until they could make the cemetery safer. Oh my god. Which is insane because people really feared this. And so yesterday on Twitter I put up a picture of something called the cemetery gun. So they had these devices that they would put at the foot of the grave and it had like a trip wire and so you could set up the gun to shoot anybody who would. Oh my god. There's actually a really awful story of a grieving father who, this was set up at the grave and he accidentally trips it and he gets shot. So it wasn't exactly a safe way to protect the bodies, but they also had watchmen. Look at that. There it is. That's from your Instagram or your Twitter feed. That's Twitter, yeah. Everybody went nuts on that yesterday. Oh my god. Cemetery gun. 19th century used to protect against body stanchors. That is so crazy. It's a musket. Yeah. It was hardcore. Quite wealthy as well to set something like that up at the foot of your relative's grave. They also used coffin collars. So that was sort of like an iron, well it was a collar and they would nail it to the bottom of the coffin. So that way, so what a body snatcher would typically do is just open the foot of the grave. You wouldn't dig up the whole grave. He'd smash open the lid and he'd have instruments to kind of drag the body out. Well, if the corpse is nailed to the bottom of the coffin, you're going to have a lot of trouble dragging that body out. So people, they did all kinds of things. They put these cages over the graves to protect them. So people, the internet, God bless it, will say to protect against vampire, or to keep vampires from coming out. It had nothing to do with that or zombies. It was to prevent body snatchers from getting ahold of those corpses. But those bodies. Look at this. Yeah, there they are. Mort safes they were called. Oh my god. And you'll see them a lot in Britain. And they were, people were very paranoid about this. I mean, you can find a lot of examples of this. And bodies were stolen a lot. And thank God they wore on some level, right? Because think about how much we learned from these bodies. Bodies were needed to be dissected to teach medical students. And one of the scenes in the book, I talk about the Dead House. They called it the Dead House. And everybody had a different experience in the Dead House. There's probably people listening who've been in a dissection room and you have a really vivid memory of that. It's probably bright and white and clinical. Well these places, the bodies would have been bloated and partly decomposed. Dissecting bodies was dangerous because you could cut yourself and you can infect yourself with bacteria. They weren't wearing gloves. And so you get examples of people cutting themselves and dying within 48 hours. So going into medicine was dangerous. And there's a story in this book about a guy who goes into the Dead House for the first time and he freaks out and he sees all these mice and rats and things like that eating the bodies. And so he jumps out the window and he runs off. But later he becomes accustomed to it as we all become accustomed to horrible things at some point. And he actually starts taking pieces of the corpse and throwing it to the poor little starving creatures that are in the Dead House. Jesus. Yeah, so it's kind of like that horror that we all experience possibly when we're confronted with death to accepting it as you have to as a medical student if you want to go on. So the Dead House is particularly, it would have smelled, dissection would have been a winter sport because the bodies wouldn't decompose as quickly. Your course wouldn't want to be dissecting in the heat of the summer. Right. So did they literally have seasons for dissecting? Yeah, they would tend to teach students in the winter. And did they wear winter jackets and do it in a cold? Yeah, well they would have probably because, well they had a fireplace at the end of the room as well, make it really stuffy and smelly. And you couldn't really predict what a person had died from as well. So remember people are dying from things like smallpox, which is awful. And this is before mass vaccinations, this is certainly before antibiotics. And so a lot of doctors or medical students die as a result of going into the profession.