It is summer in Edinburgh, 1836, and a group of boys are out on the flanks of Arthur’s Seat, the now-extinct volcano that looms over the city. They’ve spent the day hunting rabbits and when they take a moment to rest, they shelter in a small hollow from the wind. It takes a while for one of them to notice something strange about the rocks on the other side of their shelter; three slabs of slate that seem too orderly to be natural.
Their discovery turned out to be a Pandora’s box stuffed with some of the darker secrets of Edinburgh: ghosts and shadows, murderers and resurrectionists, the unscrupulous living and their treatment of the unquiet dead. We’ll take a peek into the box then look at the lives, and deaths, of those who may have inspired its creation.
Paranormal investigator and curator of the supernatural Charles Fort, writing in the London Times on July 20th in the same year, describes what the boys found in his inimitably brusque manner:
Seventeen tiny coffins. Three or four inches long. In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were dressed differently in both style and material. There were two tiers of eight coffins each, and a third one begun, with one coffin. In the first tier, the coffins were quite decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier, the effects of age had not advanced so far. And the top coffin was quite recent looking.
Now on public display in the National Museum of Scotland, the “fairies” inside the coffins are tiny, articulated dolls that glare out of their roughly carved coffins with wide-open eyes. They are dressed in tiny facsimiles of day-wear. One even wears a suit of jaunty, checked material that contrasts strongly with the distressing realization that a handful of the dolls appear to have had limbs removed so they can be fitted into the coffins.
A modern viewer can only wonder as to what they were intended to represent. Their construction is neither beautiful nor skilled. A report by Samuel Pyeatt Menefee and Allen Simpson in the 1994 edition of The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, a journal of Edinburgh history, states that:
“each coffin contains an ‘occupant’ and has been hollowed from a solid piece of wood. Each also has a lid which has been held in place by pins of various sizes, driven down through the sides and ends of the coffin base. the user has apparently not been a woodworker by trade because he has not had access to an edged tool to cut out the base of the recess – and they were obviously not intended for display.”
What are we to make of the so-called fairy coffins? Are they a memorial for miscarried babies or for sailors lost at sea? Or perhaps a witch’s curse-poppets or sympathetic totems? Could they be toy soldiers buried after some great play-battle? Or are they, as The Scotsman newspaper reported in their editorial a week prior to Fort’s, a “Satanic spell-manufactory”? All of these theories seem to harbor a convincing story but, like Edinburgh’s famous sea-fogs, each quickly evaporates into nothingness.
Apart from one. Menefee and Simpson posit that the coffins are actually memorials for the victims of a series of murders that shook Scotland and Victorian science to the very core. To understand how this could be, we must take a step into the fog-cloaked streets of Edinburgh in the 19th century and learn something of the work of the “resurrection men.”
“Up the close and doon the stair,
But and ben’ wi’ Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,
Knox the boy that buys the beef.”
Traditional Song, 19th century Scotland
A few years before the discovery of the coffins in 1828, the less than savory activities of two men had just been uncovered; those men were Burke and Hare. Having moved to Scotland from Ireland, the two men met when William Burke moved into William Hare’s lodging house, near the city’s current West Port and not far from what was quickly becoming a center of excellence for the new science of anatomy.
The work of the anatomist, by its very nature, requires bodies and bodies were in short supply. Some of the only corpses that could be used for medical study were those of murders. According to the Murder Act of 1751, “an act for better preventing the horrid crime of murder,” stipulated that murderers shall “in no case whatsoever […] be suffered to be buried” and that they should instead be displayed on a gibbet as a warning to others or handed to the anatomists for dissection. No other bodies were available as the act of anatomization sat in conflict with a true Christian burial.
Where there is demand, however, there is supply. A dedicated class of grave-robber, the resurrection man, appeared to provide fresh bodies to the anatomy theaters by stealing corpses from graves. Mourning families increasingly turned to the use of cast-iron mortsafes (as shown by this patent for “Certain means of securing the bodies of the dead in Coffins”) and even nocturnal guards to prevent their loved ones from being forcibly ‘resurrected.’ Even now, Edinburgh’s major cemeteries feature the watchtowers that housed these guards. Equally, the work of the resurrection man was not without risk; their punishment was often swift, brutal and unofficial. Julia Bess Frank, in her article Body Snatching: A Grave Medical Problem explains that:
A resurrectionist caught by the police might hope for lenient treatment; many a burglar escaped arrest by claiming to be “only a body-snatcher,” but one who fell into the hands of the mob could be in serious trouble. Crowds maimed or killed perhaps a score of body-snatchers during the resurrection era.
Could the coffins be memorials for Burke and Hare’s victims, their limbless bodies forced into coffins they were never intended to occupy? Samuel Menefee and Allen Simpson believe so, and they continue to outline the theory in their article ‘The West Port Murders And The Miniature Coffins From Arthur’s Seat.’ Some point out the obvious flaw: there were seventeen coffins but only sixteen victims. These dissenters forget that the very idea of acquiring and selling bodies occurred to Burke and Hare after the natural death, in Hare’s lodging house, of a man known only as Donald. He was the first to be sold by the pair, for the price of seven pounds and ten shillings, and he makes seventeen.
Seventeen bodies for seventeen coffins.
Whether this is the true story behind the fairy coffins will never be known. No other evidence has arisen beyond conjecture and the ‘occupants’ of the coffins have remained mostly undisturbed on their museum shelf.
However, in December of 2014, The National Museum of Scotland received a package. Inside this package was a curious thing: a tiny, handmade coffin that held the body of another wooden doll. An anonymous note identified the coffin as XVIII.
Burke and Hare’s seventeen victims have been accounted for. Who is in this eighteenth coffin?
Hare, having turned king’s evidence, was released after trial and Knox was acquitted of any crime, although the episode cast a long shadow over the rest of his life. Burke, however, was found guilty and hanged. In a twist of delightful irony he was then dissected, making him the eighteenth victim of his own scheme, and set in motion the debates that would lead to the creation of the Anatomy Act of 1832 and wider availability of corpses for surgeons to work on.
Why did it take so long for his coffin to join the rest? Well, they say that it is a long, hard road through Hell.
Works Cited:
S P Menefee & A D C Simpson; The West Port Murders And The Miniature Coffins From Arthur’s Seat (The Book Of The Old Edinburgh Club, New Series vol.3, 1994)
J B Frank; Body Snatching: A Grave Medical Problem (The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, Vol 49, 1976)
Unnamed Author; The mystery of the miniature coffins (NMS website)
