Syracuse’s secret league of extraordinary body snatchers
Apr 6, 2019 11:02:15 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Apr 6, 2019 11:02:15 GMT -5
GREAT STORY
1880s: Stories from Syracuse’s secret league of extraordinary body snatchers
By Johnathan Croyle | jcroyle@syracuse.com | Posted April 06, 2019 at 08:05 AM | Updated April 06, 2019 at 10:57 AM
The murder of Dr. Harvey W. Kendall on the night of May 17, 1882 is one of the most mysterious and sensational crimes in the history of Syracuse and Onondaga County.
His body was found in a meadow near the cemetery of the Onondaga County Poor House, shot between the eyes. The murder remains unsolved.
But more interesting than the crime itself, was the reason why Kendall was at the cemetery that night in the first place.
For it seemed that Kendall had a secret profession, one that hid in the darkest shadows of Syracuse. He was a body snatcher, and his death would, ironically, change the way people studied medicine in New York state.
(Note: Details for this story appeared in newspapers from Syracuse and Central New York from the time period.)
Dr. Kendall came to his death'
In the early morning hours of May 18, 1882, a farm hand at the Onondaga County Poor House, Tom Powell, looked out of his window at what he thought was a group of crows out in a farmer’s oat meadow, near the home’s cemetery, where the county’s paupers were buried.
Suddenly, there was a twitch-like motion at the spot and Powell realized it was a man lying on the ground, dressed in black.
Powell and his boss went to investigate.
They found a man shot between the eyes, his face stained red, his eyes swollen shut, and one leg spasmodically twitching. He was muttering gibberish to himself.
He said his name was Dr. Harvey Kendall.
But when asked about who it was who shot him, Kendall became quiet and remained so for the rest of the day, before dying that night.
The police were baffled. There were no eyewitnesses, no apparent motive and no signs he had shot himself.
He was a newlywed and had attended, and failed medical school, in Syracuse and Albany, before graduating from a school on Long Island.
He was the member of a local military company. He was said to have a “morbid” curiosity in weapons and possibly a “morphine fiend.” He was thought to be the “quickest gun” in the county.
A “coroner’s trial” was held but no one was ever charged with Kendall’s murder, the tribunal saying only: “Dr. Kendall came to his death from the effects of injuries received from a pistol shot from the hands of some unknown person.”
A mania for body-snatching'
Although police had no suspects in his murder, they had a good idea what Kendall was up to on the night of his death.
Found around his body was an empty six-shooter, a “bulls-eye lantern,” a pair of shovels and a carpet bag, containing a variety of tools, including a screwdriver, a cant hook, a rope, a jimmy and a bit and brace. His horse and wagon remained on the road.
They all pointed to the fact that Kendall was a resurrectionist, a person who did what newspapers at the time called “ghoul’s work,” that is, body-snatching.
Resurrectionists like Kendall stole fresh bodies from graveyards and sold them to medical colleges to be used as cadavers.
Dr. D.M. Totman testified during the investigation of Kendall’s murder and said he thought that Kendall “had a kind of mania for body snatching.”
Kendall’s wife said her husband promised to give up body-snatching but returned that night for one last score.
The most likely scenario was that Kendall was either double-crossed by a partner or ran into a gang of “Grave Protectors,” a secret vigilante group, whose mission was to protect the dead.
Medical colleges had a need
Following the Civil War, the number of medical schools in the United States grew rapidly.
The study of anatomy became more popular and with it, the practice of human dissection.
In the 1870s and early 1880s college professors had to rely on the donation of human bodies by a deceased person’s next of kin, which meant supply rarely met demand.
At many schools, the professors of anatomy were held responsible for the acquisition of fresh cadavers, which led to the rise of the freelance body-snatchers.
Teachers asked no questions where the body bodies came from and paid for them from their own personal funds.
It was not unusual for students to immediately remove identifiable features of a body, like the scalp, eyes and ears to avoid detection.
The college is always well-supplied with stiffs'
“It is no mystery to our citizens that our city cemeteries and country grave yards as well are invaded now and then by body snatchers,” the Syracuse Daily Courier reported on Oct. 20, 1877, after the body of Franklin Hibbard was removed from his rural Manlius grave and found on a Syracuse Medical College dissection table.
The body was found in “an advanced state of mutilation or dissection.” A Syracuse University student was arrested.
With its own Medical College and “presence of a band of unusually reckless and devil-may-care young men” Syracuse was a hot-bed for body-snatching.
Hundreds of bodies, perhaps more, were stolen out of Central New York cemeteries and sold to the local Medical College, or to others including as far away as Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“The college is always well-supplied with stiffs, there being, week in and week out, from six to eight, besides as many more on the dissecting table,” an anonymous, but prominent, physician told the Syracuse Standard in 1882.
“Night after night stolen bodies are drawn through city,” he added, often hidden in barrels while being driven in the wagon of one of the city’s undertakers, who were in on the plan.
“They (the undertakers) are employed to take along their own rig, and draw the stiffs back to the college, they being experienced in handling corpses,” he said. “Moreover, the chances of discovery are less than they would be in calling at a livery stable for a conveyance.”
And police rarely, if ever, would check an undertaker’s wagon.
The doctor said there was also no shortage of willing participants looking for a little night-time adventure:
“Every student who enters college, with scarcely an exception, wants to have one night’s experience and the demonstrators of anatomy sends them on such errands.”
Strangest incident
The reporter from the Standard asked the doctor what the strangest incident was he could tell about body-snatching in Syracuse.
He did not disappoint.
“The one that is now the most plainly impressed on my memory is that of a student who once graduated from the college in this city in a neat suit of broadcloth taken from the body of a man who died in good circumstances in this city and whose body was dug out of the grave soon after it was buried, and stripped of the confiscated property. The clothes were the finest broadcloth and the student who wore them made a fine appearance, although the suit did closely fit him, the coat being a little too long. All of the students knew perfectly well where the clothes came from, but the student was poor, and he was allowed to wear the suit during the graduating exercises.”
'Shotgun or cremation!'
While the medical profession may have defended the practice, it was still illegal.
New York law held that any person who “shall remove the dead body of any human being for the purpose of selling or for the purpose of dissection shall, upon conviction be punished by imprisonment in a State prison not exceeding five years, or in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by a fine not exceeding $500.”
But these proved little deterrent.
“The time has come to devise some preventative of body snatching,” an Oswego editorial said in 1882. “At present there seem but two – the shotgun and cremation.”
Some well-to-do families, who were more likely to have their loved one’s graves desecrated by grave robbers who would hold the body for ransom rather than sell it to a college, took drastic measures.
A Mrs. Conger of Syracuse had two “torpedoes” placed in the grave of her son to protect it from body-snatchers.
The devil's own work'
In 1881, a reporter for the Syracuse Daily Courier did an interview with a former resurrectionist to get an idea what stealing a body from its grave was like.
Reluctant to talk at first, the snatcher only agreed to it after being given complete anonymity. The reporter promised a story that was both “interesting and startling.”
Body-snatchers often worked in groups, sometimes with four other men. They tended to be young, always under the age of 35.
The regular price for bodies was generally between $20 and $25, but when colleges were desperate, the prices rose to $40 to $50. That works out to roughly $490 to $1,230 in today’s money.
It was a lucrative business. A professional resurrectionist, he said, could “both dress well and live comfortably.”
But the work was mainly seasonal, October to November and during the spring. (Frozen bodies were hard to cut and decomposed too quickly in the summer.)
It was also best to extract the body as soon as possible, often on the same day it was buried.
They preferred to work in the rural cemeteries, Manlius, Cicero, Camillus, Geddes and Onondaga, and as far out as Cazenovia and Chittenango.
The county’s Poor House on Onondaga Hill was especially popular. Little care was given to pauper’s bodies, they were buried sometimes just two or three feet deep. And when a body is taken from there, “no questions are asked.”
“I do not believe that there are a dozen graves in the Poor House cemetery containing bodies,” an official testified during the investigation into Harvey Kendall’s murder.
City cemeteries, like Oakwood were rarely bothered because they were too well guarded, and the resurrectionist said that he tended to avoid Catholic cemeteries.
“They are generally shunned,” he said, “on account of the religion.”
They did their work at night. After digging the dirt above the top part of the casket, the head of it was either broken off or knocked in. The resurrectionist either got into the hole and pulled the corpse out by the shoulders or tied a rope to the body’s neck and pulled it out.
The corpse’s clothing was removed and thrown into the hole.
“The greatest care is taken is taken that nothing is left on the ground to indicate that the grave has been robbed,” the body-snatcher said. “Every flower or sprig is buried again and nothing like a collar, cuff or necktie is allowed to remain in si
The removal of a corpse from a grave usually took about one hour.
“Doesn’t a body-snatcher ever lose his courage?” the reporter asked the informant.
“Well, I confess a resurrectionist feels a little ticklish at times. The worst part is when the coffin lid is broken in. Perhaps the moon will come out from behind a cloud and shine down full into the face in the coffin. I tell you, that is the time that a man’s nerve is tried.”
He called body-snatching a “business,” and added there was “no sentiment” in it.
But he did sound like he had mixed feelings about the profession.
On the one hand it was a necessary evil:
“The colleges must have the bodies to advance science. There is no other way to get them, and on the whole I think it is no sin to steal the subjects. What use are they in the ground?”
But when asked if he would ever return to it, the answer was an emphatic no, calling it “the devil’s own work.”
'Their devilish machinations'
The murder of Dr. Kendall and the interviews with the anonymous doctor and former resurrectionist were all the evidence a resident of Syracuse and Onondaga County needed that the area had a serious body-snatching problem in the 1870s and 1880s.
But they probably had no idea that they were living amongst a secret society of body-snatchers, with a blood initiation, sacred oaths and even their own song.
In 1904, on of all weekends, Easter, newspaper readers across Central New York read about the “body-snatchers league” of Onondaga County, from the confession of Orville Manzer, of Camden.
Manzer had been an Associate Editor for the Camden Advance-Journal and a leading member of the Methodist Church in Central New York, prominent in prohibition circles.
In the 1870s, he became friendly with Harvey Kendall while both worked in Cazenovia.
“We were of the same age and became very intimate,” Manzer wrote.
The friendship ended when Kendall moved to Syracuse but was rekindled in the winter of 1879 when Manzer visited the city while traveling back home after visiting his ill mother in Cortland.
Manzer would never forget what he saw the night he spent in Syracuse with his old friend Kendall, the body-snatcher, though he told nearly no one for a quarter of a century:
“Although for 25 years I have uttered a word to no man other than my most intimate and true-led friends concerning this gang of grave robbers, because I had the fear of death before my eyes,” Manzer wrote. “I now feel that it is my duty to give to the public such information as I possess concerning their devilish machinations.”
Now, with most of the members now dead, Manzer felt it was safe to tell the story.
He insisted that he was “innocent of any wrong, although technically I was a member of the organization.”
'I nearly fainted from fright'
When old friends Harvey Kendall and Orville Manzer reunited in Syracuse in the winter of 1879, it felt like old times.
At first.
“He was very cordial in his manner toward me and urged that I spend the afternoon with him and the night at his house,” Manzer wrote.
“I had no hesitancy in accepting his hospitality, but had I known the character of the night I was to pass, not all the gold in the universe could have tempted me to remain in Syracuse.”
In the evening, Kendall invited him back to his parent’s three-story brick home, where, Kendall said, a group of his friends had gathered in the attic, which he called his “experimenting room.”
“We would pass an agreeable evening,” Kendall promised.
He was brought to the attic. The large room was dark and had a large table in the center and pork barrels along the wall. Eleven young men were in the room, all of them students at the Syracuse Medical College.
Kendall introduced Manzer to the group as an old friend, and as “a man who could be trusted.”
The men started telling Manzer their stories of grave robbing “and other subjects so horrible as to be unmentionable in print.”
He thought that they were playing a prank on him and trying to scare him.
At that point, one of the men grabbed a meat hook and went to one of the barrels. He “brought up from the pickle the head and shoulders of the corpse of a young woman.”
“I nearly fainted from fright. The other barrels were similarly filled,” Manzer wrote.
"On the bones of my forefathers"
Now that Orville Manzer had seen what really went on in the attic, several of the students said he had to be initiated into the “League.”
He was gagged, blindfolded, bound and tossed into a blanket and led to the table in the center of the room.
He was forced to take a knife in his left hand and a Bible in his right.
“I made up my mind to do whatever I was told, believing then, as I do now, that any resistance or opposition would have meant my instant death.”
He was made to swear, “on the bones of his forefathers and the love I bore my mother,” never to tell what he saw and heard that night.
If he did, his heart would be removed from his chest and his body would be hung “on the gateposts of hell as an eternal warning to traitors.”
Then everyone opened a vein in an arm with a knife and poured a small amount of blood and whiskey into a human skull, from which everyone drank.
“During my initiation the twelve men frequently rose from the table and sang in unison a song the refrain of which was ‘saw my leg off,’ When it was reached, each student would raise his right leg and make motions of sawing. They kept time to the tune by banging the table with their clenched fists.”
The heat of an iron stove, the tobacco smoke, the “odor of the rotting human flesh” and the horror of it all, made Manzer sick to his stomach.
He was regaled for another two hours with body-snatching tales, including Kendall’s story of smashing through a woman’s glass-topped casket with a hatchet and finding her still alive. The woman, he theorized, had been put into a trance and buried alive. That was until Kendall accidently killed her with his hatchet.
Manzer was made to sleep in a room surrounded by skeletons and the next morning was followed to the train station by two members of the league.
As he boarded his train for Camden, he was told he could come and work with them any time he wished.
(NOTE: It is impossible to know how much of what was Manzer said and wrote was true and how much of it was exaggeration. Just a few days after his confession appeared in newspapers, the Syracuse Journal ran a short story saying that Manzer was now claiming that newspapers had “exaggerated” his stories. He never saw a dead body that night and did not drink blood or make any oath. He said he looked at the incident as a “prank of medical students.” As a prominent Methodist, he may have received backlash from the church and recanted what he said. He was a career journalist, so it seems unlikely he would have been hoodwinked by a reporter.)
Anatomy Law is passed
Following the death of Dr. Kendall in 1882, the days of the professional body-snatchers were running out.
In 1883, an “Anatomy Law” was passed in New York State, spearheaded by Onondaga County Assemblymen Henry W. Duguid, which gave medical colleges of the State “rights to the bodies of criminals and paupers” under certain clearly defined conditions.
“This law,” the Syracuse Herald wrote in 1904, “was a boon to the medical institutions, and it put a stop forever to robbery of graves.”
expo.syracuse.com/life-and-culture/g66l-2019/04/3c1b19eb0af64/1880s-stories-from-syracuses-secret-league-of-extraordinary-body-snatchers.html
Great story and photo's. I had to make sure the entire story with photo's was on Clippers Corner.
1880s: Stories from Syracuse’s secret league of extraordinary body snatchers
By Johnathan Croyle | jcroyle@syracuse.com | Posted April 06, 2019 at 08:05 AM | Updated April 06, 2019 at 10:57 AM
The murder of Dr. Harvey W. Kendall on the night of May 17, 1882 is one of the most mysterious and sensational crimes in the history of Syracuse and Onondaga County.
His body was found in a meadow near the cemetery of the Onondaga County Poor House, shot between the eyes. The murder remains unsolved.
But more interesting than the crime itself, was the reason why Kendall was at the cemetery that night in the first place.
For it seemed that Kendall had a secret profession, one that hid in the darkest shadows of Syracuse. He was a body snatcher, and his death would, ironically, change the way people studied medicine in New York state.
(Note: Details for this story appeared in newspapers from Syracuse and Central New York from the time period.)
Dr. Kendall came to his death'
In the early morning hours of May 18, 1882, a farm hand at the Onondaga County Poor House, Tom Powell, looked out of his window at what he thought was a group of crows out in a farmer’s oat meadow, near the home’s cemetery, where the county’s paupers were buried.
Suddenly, there was a twitch-like motion at the spot and Powell realized it was a man lying on the ground, dressed in black.
Powell and his boss went to investigate.
They found a man shot between the eyes, his face stained red, his eyes swollen shut, and one leg spasmodically twitching. He was muttering gibberish to himself.
He said his name was Dr. Harvey Kendall.
But when asked about who it was who shot him, Kendall became quiet and remained so for the rest of the day, before dying that night.
The police were baffled. There were no eyewitnesses, no apparent motive and no signs he had shot himself.
He was a newlywed and had attended, and failed medical school, in Syracuse and Albany, before graduating from a school on Long Island.
He was the member of a local military company. He was said to have a “morbid” curiosity in weapons and possibly a “morphine fiend.” He was thought to be the “quickest gun” in the county.
A “coroner’s trial” was held but no one was ever charged with Kendall’s murder, the tribunal saying only: “Dr. Kendall came to his death from the effects of injuries received from a pistol shot from the hands of some unknown person.”
A mania for body-snatching'
Although police had no suspects in his murder, they had a good idea what Kendall was up to on the night of his death.
Found around his body was an empty six-shooter, a “bulls-eye lantern,” a pair of shovels and a carpet bag, containing a variety of tools, including a screwdriver, a cant hook, a rope, a jimmy and a bit and brace. His horse and wagon remained on the road.
They all pointed to the fact that Kendall was a resurrectionist, a person who did what newspapers at the time called “ghoul’s work,” that is, body-snatching.
Resurrectionists like Kendall stole fresh bodies from graveyards and sold them to medical colleges to be used as cadavers.
Dr. D.M. Totman testified during the investigation of Kendall’s murder and said he thought that Kendall “had a kind of mania for body snatching.”
Kendall’s wife said her husband promised to give up body-snatching but returned that night for one last score.
The most likely scenario was that Kendall was either double-crossed by a partner or ran into a gang of “Grave Protectors,” a secret vigilante group, whose mission was to protect the dead.
Medical colleges had a need
Following the Civil War, the number of medical schools in the United States grew rapidly.
The study of anatomy became more popular and with it, the practice of human dissection.
In the 1870s and early 1880s college professors had to rely on the donation of human bodies by a deceased person’s next of kin, which meant supply rarely met demand.
At many schools, the professors of anatomy were held responsible for the acquisition of fresh cadavers, which led to the rise of the freelance body-snatchers.
Teachers asked no questions where the body bodies came from and paid for them from their own personal funds.
It was not unusual for students to immediately remove identifiable features of a body, like the scalp, eyes and ears to avoid detection.
The college is always well-supplied with stiffs'
“It is no mystery to our citizens that our city cemeteries and country grave yards as well are invaded now and then by body snatchers,” the Syracuse Daily Courier reported on Oct. 20, 1877, after the body of Franklin Hibbard was removed from his rural Manlius grave and found on a Syracuse Medical College dissection table.
The body was found in “an advanced state of mutilation or dissection.” A Syracuse University student was arrested.
With its own Medical College and “presence of a band of unusually reckless and devil-may-care young men” Syracuse was a hot-bed for body-snatching.
Hundreds of bodies, perhaps more, were stolen out of Central New York cemeteries and sold to the local Medical College, or to others including as far away as Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“The college is always well-supplied with stiffs, there being, week in and week out, from six to eight, besides as many more on the dissecting table,” an anonymous, but prominent, physician told the Syracuse Standard in 1882.
“Night after night stolen bodies are drawn through city,” he added, often hidden in barrels while being driven in the wagon of one of the city’s undertakers, who were in on the plan.
“They (the undertakers) are employed to take along their own rig, and draw the stiffs back to the college, they being experienced in handling corpses,” he said. “Moreover, the chances of discovery are less than they would be in calling at a livery stable for a conveyance.”
And police rarely, if ever, would check an undertaker’s wagon.
The doctor said there was also no shortage of willing participants looking for a little night-time adventure:
“Every student who enters college, with scarcely an exception, wants to have one night’s experience and the demonstrators of anatomy sends them on such errands.”
Strangest incident
The reporter from the Standard asked the doctor what the strangest incident was he could tell about body-snatching in Syracuse.
He did not disappoint.
“The one that is now the most plainly impressed on my memory is that of a student who once graduated from the college in this city in a neat suit of broadcloth taken from the body of a man who died in good circumstances in this city and whose body was dug out of the grave soon after it was buried, and stripped of the confiscated property. The clothes were the finest broadcloth and the student who wore them made a fine appearance, although the suit did closely fit him, the coat being a little too long. All of the students knew perfectly well where the clothes came from, but the student was poor, and he was allowed to wear the suit during the graduating exercises.”
'Shotgun or cremation!'
While the medical profession may have defended the practice, it was still illegal.
New York law held that any person who “shall remove the dead body of any human being for the purpose of selling or for the purpose of dissection shall, upon conviction be punished by imprisonment in a State prison not exceeding five years, or in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by a fine not exceeding $500.”
But these proved little deterrent.
“The time has come to devise some preventative of body snatching,” an Oswego editorial said in 1882. “At present there seem but two – the shotgun and cremation.”
Some well-to-do families, who were more likely to have their loved one’s graves desecrated by grave robbers who would hold the body for ransom rather than sell it to a college, took drastic measures.
A Mrs. Conger of Syracuse had two “torpedoes” placed in the grave of her son to protect it from body-snatchers.
The devil's own work'
In 1881, a reporter for the Syracuse Daily Courier did an interview with a former resurrectionist to get an idea what stealing a body from its grave was like.
Reluctant to talk at first, the snatcher only agreed to it after being given complete anonymity. The reporter promised a story that was both “interesting and startling.”
Body-snatchers often worked in groups, sometimes with four other men. They tended to be young, always under the age of 35.
The regular price for bodies was generally between $20 and $25, but when colleges were desperate, the prices rose to $40 to $50. That works out to roughly $490 to $1,230 in today’s money.
It was a lucrative business. A professional resurrectionist, he said, could “both dress well and live comfortably.”
But the work was mainly seasonal, October to November and during the spring. (Frozen bodies were hard to cut and decomposed too quickly in the summer.)
It was also best to extract the body as soon as possible, often on the same day it was buried.
They preferred to work in the rural cemeteries, Manlius, Cicero, Camillus, Geddes and Onondaga, and as far out as Cazenovia and Chittenango.
The county’s Poor House on Onondaga Hill was especially popular. Little care was given to pauper’s bodies, they were buried sometimes just two or three feet deep. And when a body is taken from there, “no questions are asked.”
“I do not believe that there are a dozen graves in the Poor House cemetery containing bodies,” an official testified during the investigation into Harvey Kendall’s murder.
City cemeteries, like Oakwood were rarely bothered because they were too well guarded, and the resurrectionist said that he tended to avoid Catholic cemeteries.
“They are generally shunned,” he said, “on account of the religion.”
They did their work at night. After digging the dirt above the top part of the casket, the head of it was either broken off or knocked in. The resurrectionist either got into the hole and pulled the corpse out by the shoulders or tied a rope to the body’s neck and pulled it out.
The corpse’s clothing was removed and thrown into the hole.
“The greatest care is taken is taken that nothing is left on the ground to indicate that the grave has been robbed,” the body-snatcher said. “Every flower or sprig is buried again and nothing like a collar, cuff or necktie is allowed to remain in si
The removal of a corpse from a grave usually took about one hour.
“Doesn’t a body-snatcher ever lose his courage?” the reporter asked the informant.
“Well, I confess a resurrectionist feels a little ticklish at times. The worst part is when the coffin lid is broken in. Perhaps the moon will come out from behind a cloud and shine down full into the face in the coffin. I tell you, that is the time that a man’s nerve is tried.”
He called body-snatching a “business,” and added there was “no sentiment” in it.
But he did sound like he had mixed feelings about the profession.
On the one hand it was a necessary evil:
“The colleges must have the bodies to advance science. There is no other way to get them, and on the whole I think it is no sin to steal the subjects. What use are they in the ground?”
But when asked if he would ever return to it, the answer was an emphatic no, calling it “the devil’s own work.”
'Their devilish machinations'
The murder of Dr. Kendall and the interviews with the anonymous doctor and former resurrectionist were all the evidence a resident of Syracuse and Onondaga County needed that the area had a serious body-snatching problem in the 1870s and 1880s.
But they probably had no idea that they were living amongst a secret society of body-snatchers, with a blood initiation, sacred oaths and even their own song.
In 1904, on of all weekends, Easter, newspaper readers across Central New York read about the “body-snatchers league” of Onondaga County, from the confession of Orville Manzer, of Camden.
Manzer had been an Associate Editor for the Camden Advance-Journal and a leading member of the Methodist Church in Central New York, prominent in prohibition circles.
In the 1870s, he became friendly with Harvey Kendall while both worked in Cazenovia.
“We were of the same age and became very intimate,” Manzer wrote.
The friendship ended when Kendall moved to Syracuse but was rekindled in the winter of 1879 when Manzer visited the city while traveling back home after visiting his ill mother in Cortland.
Manzer would never forget what he saw the night he spent in Syracuse with his old friend Kendall, the body-snatcher, though he told nearly no one for a quarter of a century:
“Although for 25 years I have uttered a word to no man other than my most intimate and true-led friends concerning this gang of grave robbers, because I had the fear of death before my eyes,” Manzer wrote. “I now feel that it is my duty to give to the public such information as I possess concerning their devilish machinations.”
Now, with most of the members now dead, Manzer felt it was safe to tell the story.
He insisted that he was “innocent of any wrong, although technically I was a member of the organization.”
'I nearly fainted from fright'
When old friends Harvey Kendall and Orville Manzer reunited in Syracuse in the winter of 1879, it felt like old times.
At first.
“He was very cordial in his manner toward me and urged that I spend the afternoon with him and the night at his house,” Manzer wrote.
“I had no hesitancy in accepting his hospitality, but had I known the character of the night I was to pass, not all the gold in the universe could have tempted me to remain in Syracuse.”
In the evening, Kendall invited him back to his parent’s three-story brick home, where, Kendall said, a group of his friends had gathered in the attic, which he called his “experimenting room.”
“We would pass an agreeable evening,” Kendall promised.
He was brought to the attic. The large room was dark and had a large table in the center and pork barrels along the wall. Eleven young men were in the room, all of them students at the Syracuse Medical College.
Kendall introduced Manzer to the group as an old friend, and as “a man who could be trusted.”
The men started telling Manzer their stories of grave robbing “and other subjects so horrible as to be unmentionable in print.”
He thought that they were playing a prank on him and trying to scare him.
At that point, one of the men grabbed a meat hook and went to one of the barrels. He “brought up from the pickle the head and shoulders of the corpse of a young woman.”
“I nearly fainted from fright. The other barrels were similarly filled,” Manzer wrote.
"On the bones of my forefathers"
Now that Orville Manzer had seen what really went on in the attic, several of the students said he had to be initiated into the “League.”
He was gagged, blindfolded, bound and tossed into a blanket and led to the table in the center of the room.
He was forced to take a knife in his left hand and a Bible in his right.
“I made up my mind to do whatever I was told, believing then, as I do now, that any resistance or opposition would have meant my instant death.”
He was made to swear, “on the bones of his forefathers and the love I bore my mother,” never to tell what he saw and heard that night.
If he did, his heart would be removed from his chest and his body would be hung “on the gateposts of hell as an eternal warning to traitors.”
Then everyone opened a vein in an arm with a knife and poured a small amount of blood and whiskey into a human skull, from which everyone drank.
“During my initiation the twelve men frequently rose from the table and sang in unison a song the refrain of which was ‘saw my leg off,’ When it was reached, each student would raise his right leg and make motions of sawing. They kept time to the tune by banging the table with their clenched fists.”
The heat of an iron stove, the tobacco smoke, the “odor of the rotting human flesh” and the horror of it all, made Manzer sick to his stomach.
He was regaled for another two hours with body-snatching tales, including Kendall’s story of smashing through a woman’s glass-topped casket with a hatchet and finding her still alive. The woman, he theorized, had been put into a trance and buried alive. That was until Kendall accidently killed her with his hatchet.
Manzer was made to sleep in a room surrounded by skeletons and the next morning was followed to the train station by two members of the league.
As he boarded his train for Camden, he was told he could come and work with them any time he wished.
(NOTE: It is impossible to know how much of what was Manzer said and wrote was true and how much of it was exaggeration. Just a few days after his confession appeared in newspapers, the Syracuse Journal ran a short story saying that Manzer was now claiming that newspapers had “exaggerated” his stories. He never saw a dead body that night and did not drink blood or make any oath. He said he looked at the incident as a “prank of medical students.” As a prominent Methodist, he may have received backlash from the church and recanted what he said. He was a career journalist, so it seems unlikely he would have been hoodwinked by a reporter.)
Anatomy Law is passed
Following the death of Dr. Kendall in 1882, the days of the professional body-snatchers were running out.
In 1883, an “Anatomy Law” was passed in New York State, spearheaded by Onondaga County Assemblymen Henry W. Duguid, which gave medical colleges of the State “rights to the bodies of criminals and paupers” under certain clearly defined conditions.
“This law,” the Syracuse Herald wrote in 1904, “was a boon to the medical institutions, and it put a stop forever to robbery of graves.”
expo.syracuse.com/life-and-culture/g66l-2019/04/3c1b19eb0af64/1880s-stories-from-syracuses-secret-league-of-extraordinary-body-snatchers.html
Great story and photo's. I had to make sure the entire story with photo's was on Clippers Corner.