The Body Snatchers Behind A Grim Phrase

We use it all the time to mean a hidden, shameful secret: a “skeleton in the closet.” A scandal in someone’s past, a dark truth they would rather keep buried. But the phrase paints a genuinely macabre picture — the image of a family that has literally hidden a human corpse in the house, and kept it concealed so long that it has rotted away to bare bone.

And the most popular theory about where the phrase comes from points to one of the darkest and most ghoulish chapters in British history: the era of the body snatchers.

The phrase itself is old, appearing in print by 1816, and it was later popularised by the great Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote of there being “a skeleton in every house.” But the eerie theory about its origin takes us back to a genuinely horrifying real problem that gripped Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — a problem that led to grave-robbing, and even to murder.

The Horror

The problem was corpses.

As medicine advanced, the medical schools of Britain desperately needed human bodies to teach anatomy and dissection to their students. But there was a strict law standing in their way: for much of this period, anatomists could legally dissect only a very limited number of bodies, principally the corpses of executed murderers.

And here was the grim arithmetic that created a nightmare: the number of people being executed came nowhere close to meeting the soaring demand from the booming medical schools. There were far more eager anatomy students than there were legal corpses to give them.

And where there is desperate demand and short supply, a black market always appears.

And so was born one of the most ghoulish trades in history: the resurrectionists, or body snatchers. These were men who crept into graveyards under cover of darkness, dug up the freshly buried bodies of the recently dead, and sold the stolen corpses to surgeons and medical schools, often with few questions asked.

Technically, English law did not treat a dead body as ordinary property, which made prosecution complicated. But the practice was hated by the public, traumatising for grieving families, and deeply entangled with a medical system desperate for bodies.

It became so widespread that terrified families began going to extraordinary lengths to protect their dead. They fitted graves with heavy iron cages called mortsafes, hired watchmen to guard cemeteries through the night, and built watchtowers over burial grounds, all to stop their loved ones from being dug up and sold to the anatomist’s table.

But the trade led somewhere even darker than grave-robbing.

Because if fresh corpses were valuable, then why wait for someone to die and be buried at all?

This is the horror behind the most infamous names of the era: Burke and Hare.

In Edinburgh in 1828, William Burke and William Hare realised there was a shortcut to a fresh body. They did not dig up graves. They murdered people.

Over the course of about a year, Burke and Hare killed at least sixteen victims — luring the vulnerable, the poor, and the friendless to their deaths and smothering them, leaving few marks — and sold the fresh corpses directly to a respected anatomist, Doctor Robert Knox, for dissection in front of his students.

Murder for the anatomy table.

The Modern Relic

So here is how the theory connects to the phrase.

In a world where possessing a human body or skeleton could be tangled up with this illegal, unspeakable trade, a doctor or anatomist who kept human remains for study might have every reason not to leave them on display for visitors to see.

Instead, the story goes, they would keep them hidden away, tucked out of sight in a cupboard or closet — a literal skeleton in the closet, concealed because it was evidence of a grim and possibly criminal business.

And so the hidden bones became a metaphor for any dark secret a respectable person needed to keep locked away.

But now for the honest twist, because this is a phrase where the truth is genuinely murky.

Etymologists who have studied it carefully point out that there is actually no direct evidence that the phrase came from body snatchers at all. It is a popular and deliciously creepy theory, but it remains just a theory.

The phrase may have come from somewhere else entirely.

It may simply have been a vivid piece of imagination, inspired by the Gothic horror stories that were wildly popular at the time, tales like those of Edgar Allan Poe, in which murderers hide their victims’ bodies within the walls and floors of the house.

It may echo the old and terrifying legend of Bluebeard, the murderer who kept the corpses of his dead wives hidden in a forbidden room.

Or it may just have been a striking metaphor that caught on because it so perfectly captured the idea of a shameful secret hidden at the very heart of a respectable home.

There is even a real and famous skeleton in a cupboard that has nothing to do with secrets at all.

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832, left instructions in his will that his body be preserved, dressed in his clothes, and displayed sitting upright inside a wooden cabinet. This “Auto-Icon,” as it is called, contains Bentham’s actual skeleton, padded and dressed, though the head now displayed is a wax substitute rather than his real one.

Bentham, of course, was not hiding anything — he wanted to be seen forever. But he remains, quite literally, one of the most famous skeletons in a cupboard in the world.

So the true origin of “skeleton in the closet” is a mystery in itself, fittingly enough for a phrase about hidden things.

But whether or not it truly came from the body snatchers, the phrase is forever linked in our minds to that genuinely dark chapter of history it evokes so perfectly.

And the reality of that chapter is more disturbing than any metaphor.

The public horror at the crimes of Burke and Hare, and other murderers who killed to feed the corpse trade, finally forced the government to act.

In 1832, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act. It allowed medical schools legal access to unclaimed bodies, many of them belonging to poor people who died in workhouses and hospitals, and reduced the financial incentive for the resurrectionist trade.

It did not instantly make body-snatching vanish. But it brought the worst years of the corpse black market toward an end.

The skeletons came out of the closet, so to speak, and into the light of the law.

But for decades, the fear had been very real: that the dead were not safe in their graves, that a knock in the night might come for a freshly buried loved one, and that behind the respectable doors of a surgeon’s house, there might be a very real, very illegal skeleton, hidden away in a cupboard, where no one was ever meant to find it.

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