Dark Edinburgh: Burke, Hare and the Body Snatchers

You are on the esplanade in front of Edinburgh Castle, on the rock of an extinct volcano. Look down: the old town runs down a single street to the palace, a mile away. Before we get to the corpses, look at the wall beside the esplanade. Find a small bronze fountain with two women's heads and a serpent. It is the Witches' Well. It remembers hundreds of women executed here on charges of witchcraft, between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Scotland hunted witches with particular ferocity. King James VI even wrote a treatise on demonology. Many were tortured with sleep depriv…

You are on the Lawnmarket, at the corner of a tavern named after Deacon Brodie. Look at the sign: an elegant gentleman on one side, a masked burglar on the other. William Brodie was a cabinetmaker and deacon of his guild, a respected eighteenth-century citizen. He made furniture and locks for the finest houses. By night, he used the copies of keys he made to break into those same houses and rob them. He gambled, drank and kept two mistresses. He was caught in 1788. He was hanged before a crowd. Legend says the gallows used a mechanism he himself had improved. It is probably untrue. A centu…

You are facing the City Chambers, Edinburgh's town hall. Beneath this building lies an entire seventeenth-century alley: Mary King's Close. The old town was hemmed in by walls and marshes. Unable to spread outward, it grew upward. There were buildings ten, twelve, fourteen storeys high. The rich lived on the middle floors. The poor, above and below. At night, the contents of chamber pots were tipped from the windows into the street. In 1645 the plague arrived. Narrow streets like this became traps. Infected families were shut up in their homes. A century later, in 1753, the city decided to…

You have entered Greyfriars Kirkyard. Walk among the moss-covered headstones, the carved skulls, the hourglasses. Look for graves covered by iron cages. They are called mortsafes. They were not to stop the dead getting out. They were to stop anyone taking them. In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh had one of the best medical schools in Europe. Hundreds of students needed corpses to learn anatomy. The law only allowed the bodies of executed criminals to be used. There were not enough. So a night trade was born: the resurrection men. They dug into fresh graves at night, broke the coffi…

You are in the Grassmarket, the long square at the foot of the castle. Today it is full of pubs and terraces. For centuries it was the site of public executions. Look on the ground, at the east end, for a stone circle with a cross. It marks where the gallows stood. In 1724 a young woman named Maggie Dickson was hanged here, accused of concealing her pregnancy and abandoning her dead baby. She was left hanging for the required time. She was declared dead. She was put in a coffin and loaded onto a cart bound for her village. On the way, the men taking her heard knocking inside the coffin. Ma…

You are on West Port, west of the Grassmarket. Around here, in an alley that no longer exists, stood the lodging house of William Hare and his wife, Margaret. William Burke and William Hare were poor Irish immigrants. They had come to Scotland to work on building canals. In November 1827, an old lodger in the house died of illness owing rent. Instead of burying him, Hare and Burke filled the coffin with bark and sold the body to an anatomist. They were paid more than seven pounds. That was more than a laborer earned in months. Then they stopped waiting for people to die. During 1828 they m…

You are in Surgeons' Square. Look at the old stone buildings. At number 10, Dr Robert Knox ran his private anatomy school. Knox was brilliant, charismatic and vain. His lectures were the most popular in the city. He had hundreds of students per course. To keep that up he needed corpses. Many. And fresh. He did not ask many questions about where they came from. Burke and Hare sold him all their bodies. They brought them in trunks or tea chests, sometimes in broad daylight. Some students recognized the victims. One of the dead was a disabled young man known to the whole neighborhood, Daft Ja…

You are facing the Old College of the University of Edinburgh. Look at the dome with the golden figure of a youth holding a torch: knowledge. After the arrest, Hare agreed to testify against Burke in exchange for immunity. His evidence was enough. Burke was sentenced to death. Hare walked free. On 28 January 1829, Burke was hanged on the Lawnmarket before a huge crowd. But the sentence included something more: his body was to be publicly dissected. The next day, in this university's anatomy theater, Professor Alexander Monro opened Burke's body before the students. Outside, hundreds demande…

You are facing Surgeons' Hall, the Greek-columned building of the Royal College of Surgeons. Its medical museums are inside. If you go in, look for the room devoted to Burke and Hare. There is a death mask of Burke, taken after the execution. Look at the face: an ordinary man. And there is a small brown leather pocketbook. According to its inscription, it is made from the skin of William Burke. It is hard to look at. But it is real. In those days, objects like this were made as souvenirs of famous criminals. The museum also tells how the story ended. The Burke and Hare scandal, and similar…

You are facing the Canongate Kirk, a church with a curved facade and a stag on top. Go into the graveyard beside it. Find the grave of Adam Smith, father of modern economics. He died on this street in 1790. He wrote The Wealth of Nations. In the eighteenth century, Edinburgh was one of the capitals of the Enlightenment. It was called the Athens of the North. Philosophers, economists, geologists, physicians. David Hume, Adam Smith, James Hutton. Men who wanted to understand the world through reason, free of superstition. That same passion for knowledge filled the medical classrooms. And the…

You have reached the end of the Royal Mile, facing the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the British crown's official residence in Scotland. Behind it, the ruins of an abbey and the hill of Arthur's Seat. This palace saw one of the most famous crimes in Scottish history, long before Burke and Hare. On 9 March 1566, Mary Queen of Scots was dining in a small tower room with her secretary, an Italian musician named David Rizzio. Her husband, Lord Darnley, jealous and manipulated by nobles hostile to Rizzio, came in with an armed group by a private staircase. They dragged Rizzio out of the room as he c…

You are at the foot of Arthur's Seat, the old volcanic hill that dominates Edinburgh. Look at the reddish cliffs of Salisbury Crags. If you climb, the whole city lies at your feet. In June 1836, some boys hunting rabbits on these slopes found a small cave sealed with slabs of stone. Inside were seventeen miniature coffins, about ten centimeters long. Each held a small carved wooden figure, dressed in cloth clothes. Some coffins looked older than others, as if they had been left at different times. No one knew who had placed them there or why. There are many theories. Witchcraft, a ritual f…