A graveyard caper: Invasion of the Centerburg body snatchers

CENTERBURG — We’ve all heard about the disturbing practice of body snatching in the past.

In a time when no legal method provided medical colleges with real human bodies for the purpose of teaching anatomy to doctors, the schools would often resort to paying “resurrectionists,” which is to say, grave robbers, to supply them with corpses.

The practice is infamous from the Burke and Hare case in England, where a couple of body robbing fiends were caught, tried, and executed for their crimes. But that was long ago, in a very different place, right?

Here’s a gruesome little story discovered in the March 24, 1892 issue of the Mount Vernon Democratic Banner:

A special from Centerburg, Sunday, says: This afternoon as two young men were walking through the cemetery, they discovered a corpse lying near a grave.

Upon investigation it proved to be the body of James Gassaway, who died in Columbus hospital Thursday and was buried yesterday. The body had been taken out and the grave re-filled.

Friends cared for the body and placed [it] in a vault. No clew to the robbers. It is supposed that the ghouls were frightened away after having resurrected the body.

The grim fact was, no cemetery in Ohio was safe from body snatchers in the 1800s, unless it happened to be one that posted armed guards.

For the Knox County area, the immediate threat was likely medical schools in Columbus, for the truth — disturbing though it is — is that the “resurrectionists” wanted to unload their hauls as quickly as possible, because a fresh subject was worth more money than a … let’s just say “not fresh” subject.

Thus, the robbers only wanted to procure bodies from a distance no further away than a nighttime wagon ride. Knox County was probably the outer limit for Columbus body snatchers.

This article shows that the practice did indeed hit rural Knox County from time to time.

Granted, city cemeteries were probably plundered far more frequently, and particularly the potter’s field cemeteries where indigent people were buried.

One has to wonder how many of Knox County’s potters field graves are actually empty because of this practice.

The potter’s field on Johnstown Road in Bangs, where the Knox County Home used to stand, supposedly has layers of bodies from its repeated use for decades, but one wonders if the graves were simply empty when reopened for new burials.

All it would have taken is a quick bribe to the nighttime security at the infirmary, and the resurrectionists would have been in business. From there, it’s a quick jaunt to Ohio 3, then known as the Three C Highway, and thence a straight shot to Columbus.

It would be interesting to cross that potter’s field with ground-penetrating radar and see what is really there.

My guess would be that the latest generations of people to pass at the home are probably there, for they were buried after modern laws were put in place to make sure that the remains of criminals and those who volunteered their bodies to science after death would be steered toward medical schools.

But those buried in the 1800s? I doubt if many of their bones remain.

Fortunately, those modern laws almost completely shut down the practice of robbing bodies from graves.

As for James Gassaway, no such name can be found currently in any Centerburg cemeteries, so it would hardly be surprising if the family elected to bury him elsewhere after that incident, though one wonders if anywhere was safe in those days.