No explosion craters here: The highly elusive coffin-torpedo of Gann

BRINKHAVEN — I turned off Ohio 62, following the old road to Brinkhaven with the glare of the rising sun in my eyes.

At the curve, I looked over at the old bridge across the Mohican River to the village in eastern Knox County once known as Gann.

The bridge, no longer open to vehicles, is so decrepit that bushes and trees are growing out of its roadbed. I angled up the steep and narrow road that led away from the river and up the hillside onto Turkey Ridge, parallel to the waterway.

Near the top of the hill, I began to spot the tombstones of the Brinkhaven Cemetery, and pulled into the drive that would be muddy with the hillside’s yellow clay if it weren’t so perniciously cold.

What a spring, I muttered to myself, 27 degrees Fahrenheit. I parked, making sure I was on firm ground and wouldn’t turn around to see my car slumping down the bluff and into the river far below.

Despite the frosty cold that had coated grass, trees, and gravestones with a velvety glint of ice, the sun was bright.

I walked across the cemetery — a fairly large one for a small town, but then again, its graves go back into the early 1800s—from the old high end, to the newer graves, where the ground was still saturated from recent rains. I took a good, long look around.

No explosion craters here.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column that details incidents in an alleged grave robbing escapade in Centerburg in 1892. That prompted Knox Pages reader Jackie Carsey Johnson to reference a WOSU news article by Gabe Rosenberg from 2017 in her comment on Facebook.

The WOSU piece cites a report from the Jan. 20, 1881, Stark County Democrat which says that a grave robber was killed near Gann in Knox County by an explosion. If so, this is quite the story.

As I noted in the previous column, body snatching was unfortunately what the growing medical colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries resorted to, in order to find bodies for use in training young medical personnel.

The schools would pay “resurrectionists” under the table to provide them with bodies. No questions were asked about where the bodies came from.

Most were stolen from potters’ fields — which is the euphemistic term for the burial grounds for people too poor to have a proper gravesite — though, as the need rose higher, the body snatchers began to roam all over the countryside.

It became a common practice to raid freshly dug graves, and if the cemetery had a guard, the resurrectionists typically made enough money to pay off the guard.

The Ohio state government was slow to respond to this crisis, if you can imagine that. It wasn’t until very late in the century that the state devised a system for supplying medical schools with bodies, mostly from prisons and the unclaimed bodies of the poor.

That system is still in place today. Before these laws were passed, however, some inventors took it upon themselves to come up with another solution: armed coffins.

As detailed in Rosenberg’s article, two Ohio inventors filed patents for coffins which would bring harm to anyone attempting to tamper with them.

Phillip K. Clover of Columbus filed a patent in 1879 for a coffin that would fire a barrage of
bullets upward if a trip wire were hit.

What allegedly happened near Gann (better known today as Brinkhaven) was, however, not a hail of bullets, but an explosion.

That sounds more like the patent filed in 1881 — the same year as the incident — by Thomas N. Howell in Circleville. Howell, a retired judge, created a device that included a landmine which would go off if the coffin were tampered with.

What this might actually do to the dearly departed underneath the landmine was not discussed.

One would hope the coffin itself was somehow armored against the explosion. Of course, the expense of the explosive, plus an armored coffin, would put such a device into a very expensive category.

There is, in fact, no evidence that either product was ever produced. And even if some prototypes were made, who in Gann would have had the big bucks to have one installed?

Giving the story the benefit of the doubt, we can consult the sources. The Stark County Democrat story appears to be wired from Mount Vernon:

A torpedo blows them up

Mt. Vernon, Jan. 19 – A report reaches here, that on Monday night, three body-snatchers, while attempting to rob a grave near Gann, this county, met with a fatal accident.

The story goes, that while excavating the grave, the picks came in contact with a torpedo, which exploded, killing one of the ghouls, named Dipper, and mangling the leg of another, whose name could not be learned.

The third party was occupying a sleigh as a lookout, and after the accident succeeded in getting his disabled companion in the sleigh and driving off.

Interesting and very dramatic. However, a search in the Mt. Vernon Democratic Banner finds a rather different take on the alleged incident:

Killed While Grave Robbing

A gentleman who came down on the Orrville accommodation train Monday morning, gave circulation to a rumor he learned while taking breakfast at Gann, this county.

The story goes that two human ghouls had been at work Friday night in a Holmes County cemetery; that after excavating several feet, their picks came in contact with a torpedo, which exploded, killing one of the “resurrectors” and mangling the other one’s leg.

As no names are given and the story in other particulars lacks confirmation, it is more than likely, the party was imposed upon by some cruel wags.

So, this at least gives us a source for the story, which indeed connects it to Gann.

But, lacking further confirmation, Banner editor Lecky Harper was skeptical that it was anything other than a tall tale cooked up by someone in Gann wanting to tease gullible travelers.

To be on the safe side, though, he includes a warning elsewhere in the paper that residents should be aware of the potential for grave robbing in the area.

Editor Harry Armstrong of the Mount Vernon Republican News wasn’t having it either. Not even giving the story a headline, he buried it in a column of local news:

“A conductor on the C., Mt. V. & C. R.R. brought the following word to this city last evening, that parties were trying to rob a grave near Gann, O., Monday night.

“A torpedo had been placed over the coffin, and when they reached it, an explosion followed, killing one man and breaking their horse’s leg. We give it for what it’s worth.”

Neither paper offers a follow-up in subsequent editions. The only other newspapers that carry the story clearly offer the same wire report run by the Stark County paper.

If that report didn’t come from the actual Knox County newspapers, then I suspect it is nothing more than a hoax.

If a man had really been killed, there would have been law enforcement follow-ups and more subsequent coverage.

One interesting detail is the grave robber who was supposedly killed was named Dipper. For the purposes of a hoax, one might expect a more generic name to be used, such as “Smith” or “Jones.”

Dipper is a real surname, occasionally seen among German immigrant families. But it is by no means common. I could not find a Dipper living anywhere in the central Ohio region who died in 1881.

Thinking a little more deviously, was that surname a tasteless joke by the hoaxer? After all, you use a “dipper” to scoop out a delicious bit of ice cream. This ghoul was simply trying to scoop up a different sort of treat.

Could this be a hoax fostered by a newspaper editor hoping to put something out there in the media that would discourage grave robbers? Perhaps the thought of exploding graves may have worked as a deterrent.

I have to say, though, that anyone desperate enough to be snatching bodies in the first place isn’t likely to be deterred by the low odds of encountering a coffin torpedo.

And the closer you look at the story, the less sense it makes. If one was killed, and the others fled, how would anyone know the dead man’s name?

People didn’t carry identification cards in those days. And if the survivors fled before they could be caught, how would anyone know how many there were?

This begins to explain some of the wavering details of the story.

Additionally, if an explosion took place in Brinkhaven Cemetery, just across the Mohican River from the village, I would think dozens of people — at the very least — would have instantly turned out and chased the rascals.

Plus an old farmhouse sits at the bottom of the hill below the cemetery. They would certainly have heard any shenanigans, and could have blocked an offender’s escape. And what’s more is that the local newspapers described early 1881 as having been a harsh winter thus far.

The only chance of grave robbers getting through frozen ground would be if there was an extremely recent grave in the cemetery. The transcriptions of the graves in Brinkhaven Cemetery available at Rootsweb.com shows no burials at all in early 1881.

There are two family cemeteries listed on FindAGrave.com as being nearby. The Miller Family Cemetery is said to be near Brinkhaven, though no location specifics are given. The Brown Cemetery is east of the village, far back in the woods.

If these supposed body snatchers were raiding small, remote country cemeteries, the perpetrators would have had to maneuver their way out of numerous small, intricate country lanes before they got to a larger road.

They would have been caught by the families and probably shot on sight.

Anyway, the Brown Cemetery is transcribed, and it also features no burials in early 1881.

In sum, the story doesn’t wash. One could imagine the hoaxer came up with the location by looking at a map of Ohio for some very obscure place that didn’t have a newspaper of its own.

Even better if it had alternate names, like Gann/Brinkhaven. But, then again, the two actual Knox County newspaper editors both cited sources. Armstrong got the story from a railroad conductor, while Harper heard it from a “gentleman,” perhaps a traveling businessman who stopped in Gann.

Perhaps the story was nothing more than a joke cooked up by someone at the general store in Brinkhaven to liven up a dull week.

If anyone has proof otherwise about this story, let me know. I almost wish it were true, just for the sheer drama of it.

But it doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny, nor is there the slightest trace of physical evidence anywhere that I’ve found so far. Meanwhile, thanks to Jackie for pointing it out to me, so that I could track it down once and for all.

File this one under the heading, “Stories That Ain’t!”