Post by Graveyardbride on Aug 30, 2017 5:42:08 GMT -5
Grave Robbing 101 Tour
CHICAGO – Know any place that still pays cash for dead bodies – human bodies, that is? If so, Adam Selzer can set you on the way to fortune and, well, infamy. Selzer leads the Grave Robbing 101 walking tours through Lincoln Park, which was the city cemetery in the decades before the Great Chicago Fire. A tour is set for tonight, Wednesday, August 30, and another is scheduled for Wednesday, September 20. “It’s a fun thing for me to dig up information about,” Selzer says.
After the fire in 1871, the bodies were removed – most of them, anyway – and the area was converted into the park we all know and love, to serve new residents as the exodus moved north from the fire zone. But before that, Selzer explains, the park was a haven for grave robbers. The mid-1800s was “right when medical schools realized you can’t really train a doctor without getting dead bodies to practice on, but before anybody actually started donating their bodies to science.” Chicago medical schools of the era, Selzer adds, had an “open-door policy” on cadavers. You showed up with a fresh corpse, you could turn it in for cash or prizes – no questions asked.” The pay was more than a miner might make in a month – to compare vocations based on digging up things.
The $20 walking tour steps off from the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark Street, at 7 p.m. and stops at one of the places bodies are still buried in Lincoln Park: the Couch family tomb (above), just south of the LaSalle Street spur running to Lake Shore Drive. “There are a lot of conflicting opinions on how many people are in there – or were ever in there,” Selzer tells his audience. “It hasn’t really been opened in a good 100 years.” But if family patriarch Ira Couch is still in there, it’s possible he could be very well preserved, as he died in 1857, when the Fisk metallic burial case, invented nine years earlier, was in vogue. “They were supposed to preserve your body pretty well forever.” Selzer explains. The tomb, however, is equally impervious. According to Selzer, he’s only succeeded in taking photos of the inside using what he calls a “Tomb Snooper 500” (an iPhone taped to a wire hanger).
“Grave robbers would generally regard that kind of tomb as a pretty poor score,” Selzer continues. “It’s too hard to get into, without being able to cover your tracks. Generally, it was a lot easier for a grave robber to go out to the potter’s field where the baseball fields are now.” The indigent were buried without much ceremony in those days and the pickings would have been readily available, what Selzer calls “a regular smorgasbord for grave robbers.”
Selzer next leads his group on 2-mile tour of Lincoln Park, dispersing details along the way. The tour runs rain or shine, and those taking part are advised to wear good walking shoes and bring cameras. Selzer calls the tour “family-friendly,” but warns that “parents have to keep an eye on their kids.”
Selzer runs a series of tours through his Mysterious Chicago website. He’s also conducted tours of Graceland Cemetery, but says, “I wanted to branch out into stuff that was a little less paranormal.” The Atlas Obscura website and its Illinois outlet encouraged the Grave Robbing 101 tour, and the groups act as hosts. “They attract a very diverse sort of curious people,” he advises.
Selzer has written several books, including H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil and The Ghosts of Chicago, as Just Kill Me, well as a novel about a ghost-tour guide who makes haunted places even more haunted by killing people at the various sites. So yes, do keep an eye on your children – and yourself – when you take Grave Robbing 101.
For information: www.eventbrite.com/e/grave-robbing-101-september-tickets-36845662368?aff=erelpanelorg
Source: Ted Cox, DNAInfo, August 25, 2017.
