 Anthro-Perdermic Bibliopagy was a practice used in the 18th and 19th century. This was the practice of using human skin to bind books. As morbid as this practice sounds to us today, this was an accepted practice back then. You see, a lot of people back in those times would actually consent to allowing their skin to be used to bind books once they had passed away. Although a more accepted person to use, was that of executed criminals. And one of the most famous occurrences of this practice was that of the skin used from the executed criminal William Burke. William Burke was hanged in Edinburgh, Scotland on the 28th of January in 1829. He had been found guilty of 16 murders. However, he did not act alone, although he was the only person to pay the price. But before we go any further, you know what to do. Please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. Again, thank you to all our patrons, including our producer Tiffany Monroe. If you would like to get in contact with Tiffany for her Reiki services, her email address is listed in the description box below. And if you too would like to help support the channel, we also have a link to our Patreon page as well down below. All right, let's get started back to our exploration of Scotland. Welcome to SOTaric Atlanta. My name is Bryce and today we're going to be talking about the murderous pair of Burke and Hare. I have said many times on this channel that I come from a family of medical doctors. My mother's family, the Bryce's, where I get my name, that's my mother's maiden name, have been doctors for multiple generations. My grandfather was a surgeon and because he was a surgeon in South Carolina, he was head hunted to come to Georgia to head up surgery in a clinic here in Georgia, hence why we ended up in Georgia. We even have medical ledgers and medical equipment that has been passed down through the generations. One of my favorite antique items at my mother's house is a ledger that was kept by one of my great grandfathers during the American Civil War where he was a doctor. My mother still has this ledger and you can see everything written down at it at all the procedures that he did during this time in the mid-1800s. Well of course to be a surgeon, you have to do a lot of work on cadavers or nowadays bodies that have been donated to science for kids, adults, and medical school to learn how to properly open a body and then close a body back up again. I would guess that most people who have had surgery would hope that their surgeon had the proper training before using these techniques on a living breathing person. Well in the early 1800s, Edinburgh, Scotland was one of the leading cities in Europe when it came to anatomical study. However, as the practice of medicine grew and the amount of students became interested in the study and the practice of surgery, these doctors, these professors of surgery, of medicine started to run out of bodies. Of course nowadays things are obviously a little different because people have the right to donate their body to science to be used for this purpose. However in the early 1800s the Scottish law had certain boundaries on what bodies could be used for this purpose. The only bodies that could be used was that of prisoners or of orphans or of suicide victims or the bodies of children who had been abandoned. Now because the legal restriction on the bodies that could be used was so tight, the demand for bodies grew. Now we know with supply and demand when you need something you don't have it, the price you're willing to pay to get it goes up. And so during this time the practice of grave robbing became big and in fact the grave robbers or body snatchers started to be called resurrection men which I think is kind of humorous because they would go into these cemeteries and pull up corpse dead bodies to then sell to these medical institutions. This of course became tricky legally because you see at this point it was illegal to disturb a grave or to steal items from a dead corpse. However the act of stealing the corpse wasn't a crime because it was believed by the law that the corpse didn't belong to anyone. It belongs to itself and since the person wasn't alive to speak up then there was a loophole here. Around this time the going rate for bodies consisted of around eight pounds during the summertime and around 10 pounds during the winter. Again this had to do a lot with the season and how long the body would stay fresh. In the summertime the body is going to you know disintegrate faster so therefore they got a lesser fee and in the winter the body could be preserved longer and so the fee was higher. Now because this business of resurrection men became quite an enterprise in Edinburgh during this time as again Edinburgh was the leading city for surgery for the study of surgery the residents of Edinburgh started to protest this practice around 1820. Of course it was horrifying for these residents to know that once they lost a loved one and buried a loved one the chances of their loved one being resurrected and sent to a medical school to be used as a cadaver was terrifying and so we almost see like this counter business happening where people are hiring guards to guard their loved ones graves at night. We're seeing people put slabs of rock in like kind of like concrete on top of graves as well so people can't dig up the bodies. We also see what became almost like a cage that people put over bodies as well to prevent these resurrection men from digging up their loved one. Well this whole fiasco regarding the murders of Burke and Hare revolved around this situation again the lack of cadavers except for Burke and Hare they didn't resurrect the dead they killed the living they weren't going to the graveyards they were luring people into their own houses. Both William Burke and William Hare were Irish men by birth. William Burke was born in 1792 again in Ireland he was one of two children and he came from a pretty well established middle class family. He ended up joining the British army as a teenager and while living in Ireland he got married and had two children. At some point William Burke had an argument with his father-in-law and ended up abandoning his wife and children moving to Scotland. Now nowadays that's pretty common for families to break apart but during this time period that was not super common so in my opinion this is probably the first sign that we have that there is something a little bit off with William Burke. Well when he moved to Scotland he took work on the Union Canal and this is how he met William Hare which we'll get to in a moment. He ended up meeting his second wife a woman named Helen McDougal. Now it is believed by many that Helen McDougal was a participant in the murders with Burke and Hare however because she was a woman I believe that that probably allowed her to get off the hook. Back in those time periods people had a little bit more of a problem persecuting women than they do today. Although this story does in my opinion resemble the story of Lebanese Fisher that I told a long time ago that took place in Charleston, South Carolina which I will put a link to that video down in the description box below because she was a female murderer who was convicted and executed here in the United States. But anyway back to Burke and Hare. Well William Burke and his new wife Helen McDougal left the Union Canal and moved to Edinburgh in 1827 where he worked as a cobbler. They also took in lodgers and this seems to be a common practice back in those days to take in lodgers. I don't I mean I imagine there were like ins and in keepers and stuff but I don't think in the 1800s there was like you know the Hyatt Hotel around the corner and for traveling workmen and salesmen they needed a reasonable room to rent for the night so it seems like this was something a lot of middle class people did just around the world in this time period. Now William Hare, William Burke's accomplice in all this, his big-time partner in all this, he's a little bit more mysterious. People think he was a little bit younger. They set his birth date anywhere between 1792 and 1804. Again William Burke was born in 1792 so I'm guessing that it was closer to the 1800s that William Hare was born. Now once again William Hare was also an Irishman. He was from London Dairy which is in Northern Ireland. Side note, if you all have not seen the show Dairy Girls which takes place in this town in the 90s you are missing out. That is a fantastic show but unlike William Burke it seems that William Hare moved to Scotland just to start a new life. He wasn't leaving anything behind. It didn't appear that he had a family that he had abandoned like William Burke. He came to Scotland to work on the Union Canal. That's where again he met William Burke and he was there for about seven years. He did have a wife of sorts who was a widow that he eventually kind of moved in with like shacked up with which back then would have been super scandalous. But nowadays that's pretty pretty normal. I mean my boyfriend and I lived together and we're not married. Now I couldn't find clear information on whether William Hare and his pseudo wife ever did get married or not or if they just referred to her as his wife just for the sake of understanding who she is in this whole fiasco. But nonetheless after seven years of working on the Union Canal William Hare and his lady friend moved to Edinburgh where his buddy William Burke and his second wife Helen McDougal were already living. Now William Hare and his lady friend started to also take in lodgers just like William Burke. William Hare also had a job working as a coal man's assistant and it is believed that it is possible that William Hare might have had some mental issues. He was extremely violent according to a lot of people and not super literate. Now when people say not super literate I usually don't really take that to mean much during this time because education wasn't granted to everybody. It didn't mean they were dumb. It just means they didn't have an opportunity to learn how to read and write but the way that it was spoken about with him it seemed like there was possibly something wrong and if he had been born today he would have been given some medical attention but that's just speculation on my part. Now everything really got started on November 29th in 1827 when a lodger who was lodging at William Hare and his lady friend's house passed away unexpectedly in the night. Apparently he had had a bit of a fever and when he died he died owing William Hare back rent for his room. Well William Hare didn't know what to do. Here you have this dead lodger in your house and he owes you money anyway so he did what any I guess panicked person would do and he called his buddy William Burke to come over to figure out how they were going to handle this situation. They knew that he was upset about the back payment. Here's this guy is dead. There's no way to get money from him now because he's freaking dead and William Hare is also worried that rumors were going to go around the town that if you go to William Hare's house and rent a room you're going to get sick and die. Well William Burke and William Hare went and got a coffin for this lodger and what they ended up doing was filling the coffin up with tree stuff just anything to weigh it down. They locked the coffin up and they sent it on its way to be buried and then they decided to take the body to the local medical school to sell it as a cadaver. This would give William Hare the money that he was owed and give William Burke some extra money as well. Problem solved right? When they got to the medical school they ended up selling the body to a doctor named Dr. Robert Knox. Dr. Robert Knox was a pretty big deal in the medical industry. He became a doctor in 1814 and he ended up serving as a doctor for the British army and in 1825 Dr. Robert Knox joined the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh where he did dissections on cadavers twice a day to about 400 pupils. This dude was in desperate need of bodies. When Burke and Hare sold Robert Knox their first cadaver Robert Knox asked them no questions and gave them seven pounds for the fresh body. Seeing how quick and easy it was for them to score this money this opened the floodgates to Burke and Hare now taking the lives of innocent people in order to make extra cash. Again the first person died of natural causes but the 16 people to follow did not die of natural causes. Some of them were lodgers in their houses. Some of them were cleaning ladies. Some of them were people that just were walking by and got lured into their house with the promise of whiskey. Again it is believed by many people that their wife and their lady friend had something to do with this too because it was happening so frequently. All these murders took place in the space of 10 months so that was one to two murders per month and of course they were always selling their cadavers to Dr Robert Knox who of course was grateful to receive the bodies for his classes. Again he never questioned where these men were getting these fresh human beings. Although people do suspect that Robert Knox probably had some idea that these men were murdering people because of the case of James Wilson. Now at that times James was called Daft James by the town folk. He was a little bit slow and he walked with a limp. Everybody in the town knew who he was and unfortunately James Wilson or Daft James became one of Burke and Hare's victims. He was pretty easy to lure into their houses on the promise of whiskey. Now when James Wilson was brought to Dr Robert Knox as a cadaver Robert Knox recognized him and he was afraid that his students would also recognize who this guy was as well and would potentially freak out and panic. Now Robert Knox I guess in his mind he thought ignorance is bliss. I don't really know how these guys are getting these bodies but I can suspect they might be murdering them but I'm not gonna say anything because I don't want to get rid of a good thing. I'm receiving bodies. I can do my job and these men are getting paid out as well. So once Dr Robert Knox got James Wilson's body he proceeded to cut his head off and his hands and feet off so his students would not recognize him. Now Burke and Hare's undoing came on the 31st of October in 1828 Halloween with their final victim. Their final victim was a woman by the name of Margaret Daughtry and it was other lodgers at Burke's house that identified the body. They knew something strange was going on and they suspected that the body had been under the bed and had been murdered and they actually went to Dr Robert Knox's classroom to identify the body as Margaret. Well the police immediately interviewed Dr Robert Knox. After all it was his classroom that held the body. Dr Robert Knox at this point claimed that he assumed that Burke and Hare were hanging outside of all these different lodgers houses just waiting for people to die. That's a lot of people dying just randomly at different lodgers houses and willingly giving these bodies up to William and Burke to sell to the medical school. So I don't believe that for one second but back in the 1800s of course this was a respectable doctor and his word was as good as gold. We also did not have forensic evidence like we do today and of course later on William Burke himself would go ahead and clear Dr Robert Knox of any wrongdoing in a signed statement. At this point William Burke and William Hare and their ladies were the prime suspects of these murders but again as I said with Dr Robert Knox we didn't have the forensic equipment that we have today. A lot of what we had was evidence was testimony from witnesses and obvious evidence left over at the house like blood or whatever. Now because most of these victims were suffocated there was obviously no blood in the house at all and so they relied on the chance that these two men would potentially turn on each other. Well they brought William Hare in and they convinced William Hare to turn King's evidence. That sounds really weird to say to turn King's evidence because here in the United States we say to turn states evidence but I guess yeah because England and Scotland is a monarchy then it's going to be to turn the King's evidence or turn the Queen's evidence. They told William Hare that if he were to turn King's evidence he and his wife or his widowed lady friend would walk away no scratches total immunity and so he agreed and he told them everything. Penning everything on William Burke and his wife Helen McDougal. Well both Helen McDougal and William Burke were arrested for the crimes. Now the trial started at 10 a.m. on December 24th of 1828. We wouldn't do that today I think we you know Christmas is a government holiday so there would be no trials on these days but as it was back in that time they started their trial on Christmas Eve. This story was so sensational that by 9 a.m. one hour before the trial was set to begin the courthouse was full of spectators. Not only that but about 300 people were waiting outside of the courtroom to get the details the juicy gory details of these murderers. Now because of the sensation of the case the trial ran all night and into the next day they did not allow for breaks or to stop they just kept going and at the end of it William Burke was found guilty and he was sentenced to hang. His wife on the other hand was pronounced innocent. Now both of the women William Burke's wife and William Hare's lady friend or wife we're not totally sure both left Edinburgh and they had some problem with the public of course this was the age of newspapers and of course this was a very sensational trial so everybody knew who they were. Now they had to go outside of the city to start new lives where we lose track of what happened to them. But again on the 28th of January 1829 William Burke was hanged in front of 25,000 people. His body then was sent to the medical school to be dissected as a cadaver. His skeleton is still available for people to see. The skeleton of William Burke is located at the Anatomical Museum of Edinburgh Medical School so if you're in Edinburgh go see old William Burke skeleton and of course as I mentioned in the beginning his skin was used to create a wallet. I believe that is also on display to this day nobody nobody's walking around using William Burke's wallet with their cash nowadays because we don't do that shit anymore at least normal people do not. Now the interesting thing William Hare was held in prison until the 5th of February before he was released. They wanted to make sure that when he was released he would be safe and he wouldn't be like pommeled to death by the people of Edinburgh although he did have some difficulty and it is believed he made his way down into England to start a new life but again we lose track of William Hare as well. So what do you guys think? Have you been to see William Burke's skeleton? Have you seen the wallet of William Burke's skin? What do you think of the murders? Was this the act of two psychopaths or were they like totally just desperate for money? What's going on here? They did say that William Burke had to drink a lot and take a lot of opium to handle murdering these people so that tells me there was probably some sort of empathy and compassion and awareness within him and maybe the drinking and the drugs made him even more psychotic. I don't know. You let me know your opinions and thoughts down in the comment section below. And once again I will be putting the link to Levenia Fisher's story too for those who have not seen Levenia Fisher's story. It's a lot like in my opinion a lot like William and Hare's story. It was her and her husband though that were charged with murdering lodgers here in the United States in the late 1700s. All right guys thank you again for sitting through another story. If you have any awesome Christmas traditions that you want to share next week on this channel please email me those at esotericatlanta.com and put in the subject line Christmas. Especially if you have any like Christmas treats or goodies that you want to share that I can make and present on this channel please send those to me. Once again we don't eat meat so make sure any recipes are non-meat recipes and tell us a little bit about your tradition and your culture and your country and we will make some fun videos next week to celebrate the holiday season. All right thank you again to Todd Broderick for helping me put this video together and to Josh for our opening song if you would like to purchase the opening song again that can be found in the description box below. All right guys I hope you have a wonderful Friday and a fantastic weekend. I will see you all again on Monday. Bye!