But some grave-robberies are perpetrated simply for revenge, or else for pure deviltry. A special despatch to the Detroit Free Press, from Point Pleasant, W. Va., relates an instance of this kind as follows:—
“Salt Creek, a small stream, empties into the Ohio River three miles south of this. Two miles from the mouth is a church called Pisgah, attached to which is a burying-ground. This morning when the sexton went to dig a grave, he was horrified to find half a dozen graves open and the bodies taken from their coffins and stretched on the ground. In one or two instances the limbs were severed from the bodies. The graves had been opened without regard to family. The bodies lay in one place arranged in the shape of a Greek cross. There is no clue to the perpetrators of the sacrilegious offense, and no reason can be imagined. The bodies evidently had been exposed for a day or two.”
The funeral car of the late A. T. Stewart was followed by six carriages laden with gorgeous floral offerings; yet in spite of the more than regal magnificence of his funeral, and of his great wealth, only a few days later his body was stolen by sacrilegious robbers, and has never been recovered. Need I remind you of the mortification our nation felt on hearing that guards had to be set to watch over the graves of our lamented presidents, Lincoln and Garfield.
Not only in our country is body-snatching a frequent offense, but also in England, as will be seen by the sequent quotation from Mr. Walker (p. 202):—
“An undertaker who had charge of a funeral went with a friend into the vault of a chapel. A coffin recently deposited was taken under his arm with the greatest ease. His friend, doubting, poised the coffin, and was affected to tears from the conviction that the body had been removed. Several other coffins were in the same condition.”
The corpse of the late Earl of Crawford was stolen from the Dun Echt mortuary chapel in Aberdeen.
There is one case of outrage on the dead on record that, for hideousness and devilishness, surpasses all others. I refer to that grave-digger of Koenigsberg, Prussia, who fed his swine with human bodies.
One of the most abominable modes of outrage on the dead is that where men (beasts is the proper designation for them) have gratified their animal passions by outraging the fresh corpses of young and pretty women. It seems incredible, but this violation was known in the most ancient times, and is not yet extinct in the present age.
Herodotus already reports in the 89th chapter of his second book, that the Egyptians of old did not deliver up the bodies of ladies of quality or the remains of young and beautiful women to the embalmers until decomposition had set in, so that these men could not have coition with them. For it was said that an embalmer had once surprised a colleague in the act of outraging the corpse of a youthful woman, and had reported the case to the authorities, who punished the inhuman offender promptly.
The evening edition of the National Zeitung (published at Berlin) of Nov. 21, 1874 (No. 544), relates that in Lichtenberg, which is situated near the capital of the German Empire, in the night from the 4th to 5th of November, two children, recently buried, were disinterred and removed from their coffins. On the morning of November the 5th the corpses were found on the ground near the graves,—the shrouds were torn,—and one body, that of a little two-year-old girl, bore all the signs of a recent outrage.