Dublin Folktales Read Free

changed the gravity of the crime while also leading to a wider selection of potential sources. The act gave physicians, surgeons and students legal accessto corpses that were unclaimed after death, in particular those who died in prison or the workhouse. But the practice of grave robbing continued in Dublin, for some time.
    In 1842, five watch towers were erected in Glasnevin cemetery and bloodhounds were used to patrol the cemetery at night to deter the theft of newly buried bodies. On the other side of the city, Malachi Horan, the storyteller, related an account of how a mother’s body was stolen on her first night in the ground, in Saggart. Her adult son was so upset at what he saw as his failure to guard her body that he neither ate, drank nor slept for three days or nights, after which he expired himself. His neighbours were so angry at the needless suffering of the son and the theft of his mother’s body that they mounted an armed guard on his grave through the nights that followed. It was the practice of the Sack-’em-Ups to pay local informants for news of fresh internments. No doubt, they soon heard of their pending good fortune in extracting two bodies from one grave.
    The watchers’ patience and diligence were rewarded when the Sack-’em-Ups began to dig in darkness in the silent Saggart graveyard. The watching men, once they were sure of their target, fired a volley into the shadowy Sack-’em-Ups. One was shot dead and fell among the graves.
    He was discovered to be a medical student and son of the famous Surgeon Colles of Dr Steevens’ Hospital. Colles was a professor of anatomy, surgery and physiology, but whether he was aware of the activities of his student son, we do not know. In a strange twist to the story, Colles is said to have been the only man knowledgeable enough to save the boxer Dan Donnelly’s arm from amputation following injuries sustained in a street fight with some sailors when Donnelly protected a woman they were attacking in a side street. Donnelly, in turn, was to be a victim of the Sack-’em-Ups himself when he died and was interred.
    To this day, Dr Steevens’ hospital is known to Dubliners as the ‘Butchers’ Hospital’. It’s an appellation that is not so much a comment on the quality of its medical care as an old description of its staff and their practices. The hospital lies not far from the Bully’s Acre at Kilmainham. The site was a communal burial ground and was easily accessed.
    Heinous as their crimes were, grave robbers or Sack-’em-Ups were not murderers, though they dealt in death. Some people called them Resurrectionists because they hauled out the bodies from the grave and re-integrated them into society; even if the dead person’s participation was not as active as it been prior to their demise.
    There was no financial charge levied to be buried in Bully’s Acre. Many of the city’s poor were buried there, though no one seems to know how many bodies were interred there for few records were kept but there were many and they were the poorest of the people. During the cholera epidemic of 1832, thousands of people’s remains were buried, as expeditiously as possible, in Bully’s Acre. The burial ground at Kilmainham was a prime target of the Sack-’em-Ups. They would come with wooden shovels, ropes and hooks to haul the recently dead from the ground, out to the road, and onto a horse and cart for taking away to a no-questions-asked medical client. Their horses were shod with leather to quieten their step in the dead of night. For if the crime was a misdemeanour in the eyes of the law it was a scurrilous act to the bereaved who would act decisively against any grave robbers they could find.
    In Irish winters a heavy cotamore coat that reached the ankles was worn by those that worked outdoors. Attached to it was a cape and beneath the coat were corduroy or moleskin breeches above grey stockings.