Coffin Torpedoes: The Explosive 19th-Century Answer to Grave Robbers

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Picture it. You've spent half the night digging up a fresh grave, you finally prise open the lid and the corpse you came to steal greets you with a face full of lead shot. That was the whole point of the coffin torpedo, a gadget designed to turn the dead into their own bodyguards.

It sounds like something out of a cartoon, and in some ways it was. But it came out of a very real panic in 1870s America, and at least one newspaper swore it had blown a body snatcher to pieces.

Quick Answers

• What was a coffin torpedo? A booby trap fitted inside or above a coffin that fired shot or exploded if someone disturbed the body.

• Who invented it? Columbus artist Philip K. Clover patented the first in October 1878. Former Ohio probate judge Thomas N. Howell patented a buried version in 1881.

• Why were they made? Medical schools needed far more corpses than the law allowed, so body snatchers raided fresh graves to fill the gap.

• Did one ever kill anyone? An 1881 Ohio report claimed one killed a robber called Dipper, but local papers at the time didn't believe it.

Why Ohio Was Terrified of Body Snatchers

After the American Civil War, medical schools sprang up all over the US and anatomy sat at the heart of a doctor's training. Students needed bodies to cut up, and the legal supply was tiny: executed criminals and the odd donor. In Cincinnati alone, more than 1,000 students a year were studying medicine and the Ohio Medical College could get through 300 cadavers a semester, as Cincinnati Magazine points out. Nobody was donating at that rate, so the shortfall came straight out of the cemeteries.

Ohio had form. WOSU Public Media lists riots against the state's medical schools in 1811, 1845, 1847 and 1852. The digging carried on regardless.

It didn't help that people took death incredibly seriously. Working families scrimped for years to pay for a decent burial, and this was the era of elaborate mourning dress, post-mortem photography and death masks. The thought of your mum ending up on a slab in a lecture theatre was about as bad as it got.

The Harrison Horror

Then came 1878 and the case that made the whole country sit up. John Scott Harrison, a former congressman, son of President William Henry Harrison and father of future president Benjamin Harrison, died at his farm in North Bend, Ohio, in May that year. His family knew the risks. A young relative, Augustus Devin, had just been snatched from a nearby grave, so they buried Harrison in a brick vault reinforced with cement.

It didn't work. The day after the funeral, Harrison's son John went to Cincinnati with a search warrant to look for Devin. At the Ohio Medical College he noticed a rope running down a chute, felt a heavy weight on the end and hauled it up. Hanging there, as the National Constitution Center tells it, was his own father.

*From left to right: Clippings from the Cincinnati Daily Star, Marshall County Republican and Janesville Daily Gazette.*

The body had been stripped and his distinctive waist-length beard shaved off, presumably so nobody would recognise him, The History Blog notes. Devin turned up weeks later, pickled in a vat of brine at the University of Michigan. The college janitor was arrested, the college paid his $5,000 bond and the scandal ran in papers across the country. If a president's son wasn't safe, nobody was.

Philip Clover's Coffin Torpedo

Enter the inventors. Philip K. Clover was a well-known artist in Columbus, and the Hagley Museum and Library points out he filed his patent the month after the Harrison story broke, living about a day's train ride from where Harrison had been buried. His US Patent 208,672 was granted on 8 October 1878 under the gloriously deadpan title Improvement in Coffin-Torpedoes.

It was basically a tiny shotgun. The undertaker screwed it to the inside of the casket, usually at the head end, and slotted the cartridge in just before the lid went on for good. Hidden trigger wires connected it to the body, so anyone who opened the coffin and tried to drag the corpse out would take a blast of lead balls to the face.

Clover thought of everything. His patent suggests hiding the device under the casket trimmings or the dead person's clothes, and waterproofing it so it'd stay live until the body had rotted too far to be worth stealing. In other words, the family could walk away from the graveside knowing granddad was armed.

Hagley still holds Clover's original patent model, a little thing of iron, steel and paperboard barely six inches long. Clover himself lived until 1905, presumably without ever needing to use one.

Thomas Howell's Graveyard Landmine

Clover didn't have the market to himself for long. Thomas N. Howell, a former probate judge from Circleville, Ohio, patented his own grave torpedo on 20 December 1881. Rather than sitting inside the coffin, Howell's version was a shell buried in the soil above it and wired up. Robbers would hit it with their spades before they ever got near the body, which made it more landmine than shotgun.

Howell wasn't shy about selling it either. One advert, dug up by Atlas Obscura, promised grieving families a torpedo "ready to make minced meat" of anyone who tried to cart their loved one off to the dissecting room.

Ohio wasn't the only state at it. A trawl through old papers by Readex turned up a whole catalogue of anti-snatching kit:

• A coffin torpedo patented by a New York man

• A dynamite bomb for the tomb, invented in Massachusetts

• A grave annunciator that rang an alarm in the cemetery watch house if a coffin was disturbed

• A Cincinnati coffin safe made of wrought-iron bars, much bigger than the coffin itself

The Body Snatcher Called Dipper

This is the story that gets repeated everywhere. On the night of 17 January 1881, three men went to rob a grave near Gann in Knox County, Ohio. As their picks bit into the soil they struck a torpedo, which went off. The blast killed a man named Dipper and mangled another's leg. The third man, who'd been keeping lookout, supposedly loaded his injured mate into a sleigh and fled. The Stark County Democrat ran the report a few days later and the Richwood Gazette picked it up the following week.

It's a brilliant tale. It might also be rubbish. When Knox Pages went back through Mount Vernon's own newspapers, it found the local editors weren't having it. The Democratic Banner told a rather different story, and the Republican News didn't even give it a headline, burying it in a column of local snippets.

There were no follow-up reports, no inquest and no police investigation, which you'd expect if a man had been blown up in a churchyard. Nobody could find a Dipper in central Ohio who died in 1881 either, though it's an odd name to invent for a hoax. And even if something did go bang near Gann, Atlas Obscura writer Lucy Tiven told WOSU it sounded more like a homemade booby trap than one of the patented torpedoes.

Did Coffin Torpedoes Actually Work?

Probably not very often. Historians who've studied the American funeral trade reckon the torpedoes barely made it out of the patent catalogues. Anthropologist Kate Meyers Emery has described them as oddities cashing in on public fear, and pointed out that simply paying someone to watch the grave for a few weeks, until the body was too far gone for anatomists, did the job just as well.

Megan Springate, who wrote the book on 19th-century American coffin hardware, thinks the gunpowder stories in the papers mostly referred to general explosives rather than proper patented devices. The things archaeologists actually find are hidden locks on casket lids, cast-iron coffins and coffins buried inside sealed shipping crates.

There's one intriguing exception, though. The Hamilton East Public Library in Indiana says a real grave torpedo is on display at the Cass County Historical Society. It was found in 1940 when workers accidentally uncovered a grave from 1885, meaning a live explosive had sat in the ground for 55 years with nobody any the wiser.

Plenty of people thought the whole idea was daft at the time. The Pittsburg Dispatch lumped cemetery explosives into an 1890 round-up of hare-brained inventions, and a Grand Rapids paper joked in 1900 that one model could fire a body snatcher clean over the tallest church steeple. Best of all is an 1882 Montana joke column about an Ohio grave torpedo being tested on a mule. It went off, the mule lifted one hoof and carried on grazing.

Meanwhile, Back in Britain

Britain had been through all this decades earlier. Before 1832, the only bodies anatomists could legally get were those of executed murderers, so resurrection men did a roaring trade, as a history of Aberdeenshire's mortsafes explains. The panic peaked with Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, who skipped the digging and murdered their victims instead.

British families mostly went for brute force over gunpowder. The mortsafe, a heavy iron cage padlocked over the coffin, appeared around 1816 and was often rented out until the body had rotted enough to be worthless. In 2013 archaeologists in West Bromwich found one with a young woman still inside, and Strange Remains reports she'd had a disfiguring bone disease that would've made her body especially valuable to anatomists.

Firearms weren't unheard of on this side of the Atlantic either. Belfast's Clifton Street Cemetery bought two rifles for its night watchmen in the 1840s, a story pieced together by Great Place North Belfast after the gun licence turned up in the archives. And in May 1881, London's The Graphic told readers about a terrified father who'd fixed a box containing a deadly contraption to the top of a coffin, with wires running to all four corners, as this local history post recounts.

How the Grave Robbing Finally Stopped

It wasn't torpedoes that killed off the trade. After the Harrison scandal, Ohio's doctors and lawmakers amended the state's anatomy law, and by 1913 most US states let medical schools take the unclaimed bodies of the poor. Better refrigeration meant schools could store cadavers for longer, and as microbiology, X-rays and new surgical techniques took over, dissection slid from the centre of medical training to an introductory course. Fresh corpses simply stopped being worth the risk.

So the coffin torpedo ended up as a footnote, half genuine invention and half tall tale. But it says a lot about how desperate people were that strapping a gun to grandma's coffin felt like a reasonable idea.