Burke And Hare: 8 Facts About The Bodysnatchers Who Weren't

For the reasons outlined in the point above, there was a real epidemic in Edinburgh around this time of newly buried graves being dug up by grave robbers. While this had happened at times previous, the main motivation for doing so was in case people had been buried wearing expensive jewellery that the robbers may be able to sell on.

However, once it became more publicly known that digging up a body just for its own sake was difficult to punish in any real way and the amounts of money being offered for the corpses was so high, a sad sort of battle began to take place after Edinburgh burials.

Before this became a problem, any poor family that buried someone had little to fear from the grave-robbers: there was unlikely to be anything worth stealing from the corpse. Now though, they had to contend with the fact that people might be trying to exhume the body in its own right and selling their loved ones for medical research.

This led to family members often standing watch over gravesides and cemeteries, at least for the first twenty-four hours or so. The reason this was the most crucial time was that the amount of money paid out for cadavers was directly related to how "fresh" the remains were.

Watchtowers were even constructed in some graveyards and stand to this day. A true testament to how commonplace this practice must have become.