FORGOTTEN MANCHESTER: The gruesome history of Manchester’s body snatchers

Manchester has an undeniably grizzly past, what with the industrial revolution and all that. But have you ever heard the gruesome tale of the city’s many body snatchers?

Yep, Manchester had its very own Burke and Hare, only up here he was known as the notorious John Massey. It all began in the 1820’s, when the price of corpse’s across the city had reached an all-time high; with two anatomy schools being based right here in Manchester, a corpse sold on the black market could fetch as much as £10, the equivalent to around £1,000 today. 

Clearly aware of the profit potentials of this, John Massey gathered his accomplices and, one evening in May 1829, they left their lodgings on Deansgate and walked to the Quaker Burial Ground in Jackson’s Row. 

In the dead of the night, the men all worked hastily together to dig up one of the freshly buried bodies – the body was later identified to be that of a lady named Mary Howcroft. The men managed to lug the heavy corpse all the way back down Deansgate without detection and back to Massey’s house, where they shoved it into a trunk and sent it off to the Star Coach offices, destined for London. 

Thomas Rowlandson

However, a worker at the Star Coach office decided on a whim to open up the trunk and made the grim discovery of Howcroft’s body. Massey was later apprehended, arrested and sentenced to three months in prison for his crime. 

But, quite unbelievably, this wasn’t this first instance of body snatching in Manchester; just a couple of years earlier in 1824, two men by the names of William Johnson and William Harrison were on a similar mission and managed to snatch several corpses from their graves throughout just two months. 

According to Michala Hulme, a member of the Manchester Centre for Public History and Heritage at Manchester Metropolitan University, Johnson and Harrison would actually rebury the coffin after removing the corpse in an attempt to cover up their heinous crime. 

And this tactic worked… Until they were ratted out to the police by a prying neighbour, who just so happened to witness them packing up cases throughout the night and believed them to be thieves. 

@theblowup / Unsplash

The neighbour called the police and Constable Lavender brought down his beagles to search the office, eventually going on to make the grim discovery of several bodies that had been stuffed into cases, all ready for shipment to London.

After being unable to identify the corpses (as you can imagine, equipment and technology were severely lacking in those days), the constable took an advertisement out in the local newspaper stating that the bodies would be on public display the following day, and viewing would require a ticket – yes, in the 1800s it was common practice to showcase unidentified corpses in an attempt to locate their families and next-of-kin. Just imagine it.

Anyway, after a fairly lengthy process, all the bodies were claimed and re-interred. Johnson and Harrison were later found guilty of stealing bodies and sentenced to fifteen months at Lancaster Castle – the same place the Pendle Witches were executed for alleged witchcraft.

Who else won’t be sleeping tonight?