by Justin Nobel

Body snatching was once so pervasive in America that wealthy families hired shotgun-wielding watchmen to protect the graves of their kin. Sentiments against the body-snatchers exploded in New York City during the Doctor’s Mob Riot of 1788. (Photo by Justin Nobel)

“The activity engaged in by this funeral director was utterly repulsive,” reads a recent newspaper article.

The man referred to is Stephen Finley, a funeral home director who clipped skin, bones, tendons, ligaments and heart valves from his clients and sold them for use in transplant surgeries. The case shocked the nation but the crime goes back centuries.

Leonardo Da Vinci, the sixteenth century artist and inventor who painted The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, also sketched sinews, sex organs, skeletons and one of the first reproductions of a fetus in utero, all of which he obtained from corpses. Da Vinci received his bodies from the hospital Santa Maria Nuova, in Florence. Michelangelo drew cadavers from the nearby church of Santo Spirito. Surgeons, who required corpses for medical study, had a much more difficult time obtaining them.

In England, the demand for cadavers was alleviated somewhat by the Murder Act of 1752, which gave surgeons access to the hung bodies of murderers. Anatomy schools flourished and the corpses of murderers did not suffice. Surgeons paid shadowy villains known as Sack’ em up men, or Ressurectionists to unearth bodies from cemeteries and churchyards. Thieves dug with a wooden spade, quieter than metal, cracked the coffin open and dragged the body out with a rope. Because bodies had no value stealing them was not considered a crime. Body snatching occurred primarily in winter, when corpses lasted longer. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Helen Sclair, 78, has coffins in her dining room and a copper-lined burial vault in her living room. She lives in a cottage on the grounds of Bohemian National Cemetery, in Chicago, and is writing a book about the ethnography of Chicagoland cemeteries. Buried in Bohemian are Muslims, Assyrians, Romanians and Bohemians. (Photo Courtesy of Matt Hucke, http://graveyards.com/)

In Helen Sclair’s dining room are coffins: one from the 1940s fit for a baby, a wicker model from the 1920s and a Civil War-era pine casket. A copper-lined burial vault adorns her living room, and on her walls are the death mask from a notorious Depression-era Chicago bank robber and paraphernalia from Day of the Dead and Qingming, Mexican and Chinese festivals that involve decorating ancestral graves.

“People seem to be somewhat afraid of death,” said Sclair, a 78 year-old widow who adores it, and is known locally as the cemetery lady, “But if you look closely you’d be amazed at what you’ll find in cemeteries. You step back in time and you cross oceans.”

Sclair sang opera as a young woman and taught kids with learning disabilities in inner city Chicago. The death of her husband, some 30 years ago, led to a fascination with Chicago’s cemetery history. “It was just total idle curiosity,” she said, “something to fill the time on weekends.”

When Sclair took a bad fall ten years ago, her daughter suggested moving to a one floor home or an elevator building. Sclair scoffed at the idea, and instead, called the Bohemian National Cemetery, on the north side of Chicago, and asked for a home. After a nod from the board of directors, Sclair moved into one of three simple cottages on the property. “It’s been wonderful,” she said, “I live with death on a daily basis.”

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