The Phantom of Forest Lawn

That had all changed by 1867. Certainly any self-respecting corpse would be wearing a watch or necklace, wedding ring or tiepin, but those baubles were trifles. No one was about to spend a night digging, and risk a year in the Erie County Penitentiary, for a few dollars’ worth of costume jewelry. What made the toil worthwhile would have stood the Pyramids on their heads—because nowadays it was the body itself that brought the big money.

Medicine was fast evolving from a motley collection of old wives’ tales into something more like a profession. Where not too long before, doctors had learned their craft on the job, now medical colleges were springing up, credentials were being issued, and diplomas hung on office walls. And one of the fundamental elements of medical education was anatomy, and anatomy could be studied only so well from etchings in textbooks. A mastery of the structure of the human body required hands-on experience. And that, in turn, required dissection.

Since one couldn’t very well dissect a living human being— although dogs, cats, and pigs were callously subjected to such vivisection—this new educational requirement created a swell of demand for corpses. And while people were dying every day, prevailing religious belief required that the body be preserved intact against the great day of Resurrection, when the dead would be reawakened and—this was the critical part—their mortal remains reunited with their departed spirit and transformed into a glorified being. Thus people guarded the bodies of their dead with the same jealousy that the Pharaohs had defended their treasure. Medical science would have to turn elsewhere to satisfy its ever-increasing appetite for flesh.

Enter the resurrectionist—the professional for-profit body snatcher, who would exhume a newly interred corpse and sell it to one of the medical colleges, or to one of the less professional schools of anatomy run by unscrupulous doctors. A freshly dug body—and freshness was crucial—fetched about twenty-five dollars. Since most working men made about a dollar a day, working six days a week, in a single night of hard digging an intrepid fellow could earn more than a month’s wages. There was risk in it, but the rewards were irresistible to those interested in a quick buck.

The richest place for such prospecting was the potter’s field, into whose soil went the bodies of the indigent, the unidentifiable, and the unclaimed. This burying ground—more properly known as Limestone Hill Cemetery—was located just south of the city, atop the Ridge Road in Lackawanna. Its location made it convenient to wagon traffic, and yet it remained tucked discreetly under the crest of the hill, hidden from curious onlookers. Which was all by design: at Limestone Hill, city officials actively abetted the resurrection trade by issuing instructions to their gravediggers that a pauper’s grave—in keeping with their modest circumstances—should be dug only two feet beneath the surface. This made the job of the resurrectionist much easier: two feet was a walk in the park compared to a recovery from almost six feet under, inside a cement vault, and in a properly sealed casket. 

That was hard duty. At the potter’s field, a desultory dig and a crowbar inserted under the flimsy lid of the standard-issue pine box was more than sufficient effort.

Competition among the resurrectionists was accordingly fierce. Some chose to spend their days perched along Ridge Road, hoping to be the first to swoop down on a fresh body. Others paid a little earnest money to a cooperative contact in the Erie County Coroner’s Office. Either way, the earthly remains of poor folk rarely remained unmolested until the final trump of the Lord sounded. They were lucky if they made it overnight.

None of this meant that the work of the body snatcher was a sinecure. It was gruesome, of course, but one did become inured to that after a while. Disinterring children, infants, and even fetuses could be emotionally distressing, but again, in time that became almost routine. The greatest risk, and a potentially lethal one, came from exposure to the very freshest bodies—always the most desirable—of those who had succumbed to a communicable disease, such as tuberculosis or syphilis. Left alone for a decent period, such a body would not normally transmit disease—but dig one up on the same day it had been interred, and all bets were off.

The resurrectionist’s work abated in winter, when the ground was frozen and, for fear of discovery, it was unwise to risk a lengthy dig through even two feet of icy soil. Those unwanted souls unlucky enough to perish in the bleak season went instead mainly to Kraft’s Dead House, on Huron Street, an enterprising offshoot of Mr. John Kraft’s already lucrative coffin warehouse. The Dead House was no more than an unheated outbuilding, where the low temperatures would freeze the deceased solid and preserve them until the ground softened again in spring. Occasionally a body was spirited away from Kraft’s place, but that was infrequent since toting a stiff through the streets of downtown was a far cry from conducting an isolated excavation in an unlit cemetery.

The medical academies, therefore, needed to stockpile dissectible specimens long before the bitter Buffalo winter set in. The solution to that little problem was the pickling vat. This was no more than an out- sized version of the pickle barrel found in every general store—a large wooden tub filled with a brine of vinegar and salt. The bodies would be dumped into the vat and could be kept fresh for as long as needed. And the pickling process had an additional advantage: it toughened the soft and spongy tissues into something more like the rubbery consistency of a pencil eraser, which was much easier to dissect.

Resurrection was a large and lucrative trade, and most of the better sort turned a blind eye to grave robbing, so long as the graves concerned were those of the indigent, who had—after all—sponged off of decent society long enough. It was high time for them to earn their keep. The dead of Forest Lawn, however, were a different animal. Here a single plot, a simple burial, and a worthy granite marker could cost hundreds of dollars, and that kind of custom was difficult to come by in the cemetery game. So it was inconceivable that a common body snatcher would so much as dare to disinter one of Forest Lawn’s fortunate dead.

And yet—as spring bloomed in Buffalo, that is precisely what was about to happen.