In Victorian era, a prolific grave robber haunted communities across Atlanta

In the second half of the 19th century, metro Atlanta was haunted by a crime that is virtually nonexistent today. Victorian Atlanta was plagued by the spooky scourge of grave robbing.

By the latter part of the 1800s, Atlanta was home to three medical schools — Eclectic Medical College, Southern Medical College and Atlanta Medical College — each of which required students to take anatomy courses. With hundreds of students needing practice dissecting bodies, demand for fresh corpses was great.

Back then, Georgia had no legal infrastructure through which the deceased could donate their bodies to science, as there is today. Thus, the medical schools were left to their own devices to acquire recently deceased bodies for students to dissect.

To keep their dissecting rooms stocked, the schools turned to the (literal) underground market.

Perhaps the most notorious and prolific graverobber in Atlanta’s history was George Vaughn.

Punishment did not deter Vaughn

During the Jim Crow era, Vaughn was a Black man who worked as a janitor at the Atlanta Medical College. By day, he cleaned the halls of the college. By night, he supplemented his income by moonlighting as a body snatcher.

With three medical schools and hundreds of students to educate, the need for freshly dead corpses was great. Grave robbers like Vaughn took advantage of this market to make quick cash. The demand was so great that cadavers could fetch up to $100 per body, well over $3,000 in today’s money.

We will never know how many bodies Vaughn stole from Atlanta’s cemeteries, but local newspapers give us details of his forays into the underworld.

We first meet Vaughn in the historical record in December 1879, when he was caught robbing a grave near Marietta.

In an article titled “Stiff Subject,” the Dec. 19, 1879, edition of The Atlanta Constitution reported that Vaughn had been arrested for robbing the grave of William Johnson, an “old and highly respected citizen of Cobb County.”

According to the article, “some of the friends of the deceased passed by the graveyard and noticed that the mound over the grave of Mr. Johnson appeared rough and irregular.”

They became suspicious and disinterred the remains.

“They found pieces of clothing in the loose dirt in the grave. The coffin was reached, opened, and found empty! The corpse had been snatched.”

During the Jim Crow era, Vaughn was a Black man who worked as a janitor at the Atlanta Medical College. By day, he cleaned the halls of the college. By night, he supplemented his income by moonlighting as a body snatcher.

With three medical schools and hundreds of students to educate, the need for freshly dead corpses was great. Grave robbers like Vaughn took advantage of this market to make quick cash. The demand was so great that cadavers could fetch up to $100 per body, well over $3,000 in today’s money.

We will never know how many bodies Vaughn stole from Atlanta’s cemeteries, but local newspapers give us details of his forays into the underworld.

We first meet Vaughn in the historical record in December 1879, when he was caught robbing a grave near Marietta.

In an article titled “Stiff Subject,” the Dec. 19, 1879, edition of The Atlanta Constitution reported that Vaughn had been arrested for robbing the grave of William Johnson, an “old and highly respected citizen of Cobb County.”

According to the article, “some of the friends of the deceased passed by the graveyard and noticed that the mound over the grave of Mr. Johnson appeared rough and irregular.”

They became suspicious and disinterred the remains.

“They found pieces of clothing in the loose dirt in the grave. The coffin was reached, opened, and found empty! The corpse had been snatched.”

Vaughn was found guilty of grave robbing and fined $600.

But this didn’t stop him. The demand for bodies from medical schools continued to grow, and the cash rewards proved too good to give up.

Vaughn was caught again seven years later, in 1886, in Decatur.

Under the cover of darkness on a winter night in January, he was caught digging up the grave of Israel Sanford. Sanford had recently died after being crushed between two train cars at a train depot in Atlanta and was buried in the Decatur City Cemetery.

The discovery caused a fervor in Decatur. According to The Atlanta Constitution, “the most intense excitement prevails at Decatur and throughout the surrounding neighborhoods on account of the well-founded belief that a systematic robbery of the cemetery at Decatur has been going on.”

After Vaughn was caught digging up Israel’s body, the mayor and City Council members investigated whether other graves had been disturbed. They found that Vaughn had also recently stolen the body of Simon Read, a 75-year-old man. When his grave was opened, the paper reported, “it was empty, save for a pair of breeches.” His body “had been taken away, and was then, no doubt, being well cured in some dean’s vat.”

Vaughn faced the judge again. This time, he was fined $1,000 and spent three months in jail.

New law allowed deceased to rest in peace

By the summer of 1886, the problem of body snatching and the ruckus it stirred in Atlanta had reached such a fever pitch that a legal solution was necessary.

That year, state Sen. Charles Murphy Candler introduced legislation allowing medical colleges to legally claim the corpses of recently deceased paupers. If the bodies of Atlanta’s poorest citizens remained unclaimed for 90 days after death, medical colleges could take their bodies to stock their dissecting rooms.

The law worked as intended. Instances of grave robberies plummeted, and Atlanta’s deceased could rest in peace.

As for Vaughn, he continued working as the janitor at the Atlanta Medical College and died in March 1891.

His record ends with a March 29, 1891, obituary in The Atlanta Constitution. The obituary called him “the man who procured subjects for the dissecting room” and said he “had been connected with more inopportune resurrections than anybody in Atlanta.”