Those Ghastly Grave Robbers

My fanbase knows that the police Incident Room is relocated in every Barrington Bay story. It has hopped from an abandoned fish warehouse to a shuttered bank, then to a vacant chandler shop, and now—in The Nighthawk’s Nemesis—to a disused funeral parlor.

Apropos for an All Hallows' Eve blog, don’t you think?

This newest setting for the Incident Room launched my research into funeral homes and burials which invariably led to grave robbing. Ugh! Memories of the 1945 horror film The Body Snatcher still make me shudder. The film was based upon the Burke and Hare murders undertaken in Scotland as a way of obtaining fresh corpses (and put to ink by Scotland’s author Robert Louis Stevenson). The film showcases some of classic horror’s greatest talents: Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

Turns out that ghastly grave robbers were predominately hired by medical colleges to obtain cadavers for anatomy lessons. Students needed to practice somewhere, and the dead never complained. Their families certainly did, though! The grave robbing practice eventually led to riots by families and friends of the dearly departed. Thanks to their vocal and often violent protests, the practice was eventually banned.

Working in an abandoned funeral parlor where the unburied once festered, is it any wonder that our highly imaginative Sergeant Paul Albright has a bad case of the heebie-jeebies?