Vampire Graves?
In a tiny town of less than 1600 people called Catawissa, which is just south of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, lies Mt. Zion cemetery, more commonly known as the Hooded Grave Cemetery.
In this small cemetery of no more than a couple dozen graves are the resting places of Asenath Thomas and Sarah Ann Boone, both deceased in 1852 within a few days of one another. The two were sisters-in-law.
What’s particularly interesting about these graves is that they are both covered with heavy iron cages, standing about four feet tall. These cages completely cover the plots where each is buried.
From time to time, social media posts appear with a photo of one of these graves or another like it bearing captions such as, “I’d love to know the story behind this.” Of course the comments are fun to read and include such speculation as “they must be to keep the dead from rising,” or “the deceased was the victim of a vampire bite” or “it’s to keep the animals from digging up the dearly departed.”
There appears to be no official record of the reason for these iron cages in small-town Pennsylvania, but upon further investigation it turns out the the Hooded Grave Cemetery isn’t the only place where you will find graves seemingly protected in this way. By far the place with the most frequent occurrence of “hooded graves” is Scotland. And the reason for them there is well documented.
University of Edinburgh Medical School, established in the year 1726 during the Scottish Enlightenment, is one of the oldest medical schools in the world. To learn anatomy, students were legally able to dissect the bodies of criminals executed via the gallows, but it soon became clear that not nearly enough cadavers could be obtained in this manner, so out of necessity medical students began to obtain their own lab specimens. Eventually it became possible for students to pay their tuition by providing corpses for Anatomy 101. This was common knowledge and privately acceptable to the medical schools, but not so much for the general public. Especially those whose loved ones ended up on the dissection table.
When the frequency of body snatching began to rise, those who lost loved ones came up with the idea of making it difficult or nearly impossible for the graves of their friends or relatives to be disturbed in this manner. The iron cages, more properly known as “mortsafes,” were created as one method of preventing the thievery of bodies of the recently deceased. Mortsafes are still very commonly found on graves from the 18th and 19th centuries in cemeteries and graveyards in the UK, particularly Scotland.
There are few known mortsafes in the United States. The two in Catawissa are said by some to be the only ones in North America. (There used to be a third in Catawissa but its whereabouts are currently unknown.) However, there is at least one more in the U.S. and this one belongs to a well-known citizen of Detroit, Michigan whose name most people will recognize. Henry Ford, the man who revolutionized the automobile industry, has a mortsafe over his burial plot in the cemetery bearing his name. It’s the only mortsafe in Ford Cemetery in Detroit.
We couldn’t find the reason that Ford’s family chose to use a mortsafe on his grave, but it’s doubtful that they believed his body might be stolen for medical research. The practice began falling away by the beginning of the 20th century as states were starting to pass versions of an Anatomy Act, which discouraged body snatching by various means such as making it illegal (it wasn’t prior to the Anatomy Acts and similar laws) and providing alternate means for researchers and schools to obtain needed cadavers.