The Strange Reason Ben Franklin's Basement Was Filled with Skeletons

Dude, you ever hear about what Ben Franklin was? Okay, that's a different story. But what did he do? You never heard that like what he was found in it, they found in his house? No. Like tons of bodies, bro! What? Ben Franklin, they found tons of bodies in his- Ben Franklin was a serial killer? No, he was like doing some weird shit, dude. Bodies, stuff. Like experimenting with bodies? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is this real? Everything I say. Was Ben Franklin's basement filled with skeletons? Repairs on Franklin's old London house turned up 1,200 pieces of bone from at least 15 people. Holy shit. For nearly two decades. By the way, this is from the Smithsonian. This is not some wacky conspiracy- This ain't Samtripley.com. Yeah. For nearly two decades leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin lived in London in a house on 36 Craven Street. In 1776, Franklin left his English home to come back to America. More than 200 years later, 15 bodies were found in the basement buried in a secret windowless room beneath the garden. In 1998, conservationists were doing repairs on 36 Craven, looking to turn Franklin's old haunt into a museum. From a one-meter wide, one-meter deep pit, over 1,200 pieces of bone were retrieved. Remnants of more than a dozen bodies, said Benjamin Franklin's house. Six were children. Forensic investigation showed that the bones dated to Franklin's day. Holy shit. The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin's young friend and protege, William Houston. Oh, just an anatomy school. Yeah, and we're just going to bury them downstairs. Okay, anatomy was still in its infancy, but the day's social and ethical mores frowned upon it. A steady supply of human bodies was hard to come by legally, so Houston, Hunter, and Fields, other pioneers, had to turn to grave robbing, either paying professional resurrection men to procure cadavers or digging them up themselves to get their hands on specimens. Researchers think 36 Craven was an irresistible spot for Houston to establish his own anatomy lab. The tenant was a trusted friend, and the landlady was his mother-in-law, and he was flanked by convenient sources for corpses. Bodies could be smuggled from graveyards and delivered to the wharf at one end of the street or snatched from the gallows at the other end. When he was done with them, Houston simply buried whatever was left of the bodies in the basement rather than sneak them out for disposal elsewhere and risk getting caught and prosecuted for dissection and grave robbing. Franklin was probably aware of the illegal studies going on in his building, says the Benjamin Franklin House, but it's doubtful that he was involved himself. Still, we can't imagine that curious man that he was, he didn't sneak down and check out the proceedings at least once or twice. Of course he did. Could you imagine if you're my friend and we live together and I say, Sam, what are you up to? You're like, bro, we got to find out how people work, and there's only one way to do it. We got to look at bodies. Whoa. How are you going to do that? We're going to find a place where we can fucking legally or secretly look at bodies. Well, I'm going to basement. Okay, so what do we do with the bodies? I'm from Buriam, bro. But back then, when they were studying medicine, isn't that what they did? Like, all those people that like studied anatomy back then, how did they, if it was illegal to study anatomy, if it was illegal to study bodies, how else would they find out how anatomy worked? That seems weird, but who knows? They had weird laws back then, but... It does seem weird, but it makes sense, right? Because if they had never studied anatomy before and then all of a sudden it came along and they're like, well, we got to fuck up your grandpa. Right. You got to carve grandpa up like a turkey to find out what makes people tick, you know? So weird note to add in another article about this. Oh, boy. It's just that... Franklin's history as a mason was one of the historians' initial points of inquiry. Though shrouded in secrecy, masonic rituals have dark, known undercurrents which have at times gone horribly wrong. For example, in a 2004 initiation ceremony, a new member was accidentally shot by a member who meant to fire an empty gun but instead fired a loaded one. Yeah. They fake shot at each other? Yeah. But when historians dug deeper into what was going on in the Franklin home during the years, the bones dated back to, they discovered the real culprit behind the bones is one of William Houston and the other medical student. And they're basically saying the same thing. Crazy, right? Yeah.