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. The phrase paints a genuinely macabre picture, of a family that has concealed a human corpse in the house and kept it hidden so long that it has rotted away to bare bone.
The story you will usually hear is that it comes from the body snatchers, from surgeons in the age of grave robbery hiding illegally obtained bones in their cupboards. It is a wonderful theory. There is no evidence for it at all, and the etymologists who have looked hardest at the phrase tell you to disregard it.
The earliest known use in print is a good deal quieter than grave robbery. In November 1816, a reviewer in the Eclectic Review, writing about a medical treatise on inherited disease, remarked that “the dread of being the cause of misery to posterity has prevailed over men to conceal the skeleton in the closet.” The skeleton there is a family illness, not a stolen corpse. William Makepeace Thackeray later gave the phrase its popularity, writing in Punch in 1845 of “a skeleton in every house” and, in The Newcomes a decade later, of a family with “a skeleton or two in their closets.” The variant with cupboard instead of closet is younger still, first recorded in 1858.
That 1816 date matters, because it lands twelve years before the crimes the phrase is most often attached to. And those crimes have been misremembered just as badly.
The Horror
The problem was corpses.
As medicine advanced, the anatomy schools of Britain needed human bodies to teach dissection. The law barely supplied them. Under the Murder Act of 1752 a judge could send an executed murderer’s body to the anatomists instead of the gibbet, and for eighty years that was effectively the legal supply. It was nowhere near enough. By the mid-1820s the schools were counting hundreds of students against a few hundred bodies a year, and the shortfall had a market price.
So a black market appeared, and with it the resurrectionists, the body snatchers proper: men who opened fresh graves at night and sold what they lifted to surgeons who asked few questions. The law was almost useless against them. A corpse was not property in English or Scots law, so it could not be stolen; the offence was against the grave, or against public decency, and the penalties were slight. Shrouds and coffins, being property, were the part a man could actually be convicted of taking. Prosecutions were rare, sentences were short, and the trade was widely treated as an open secret.
Families who could afford to fight back did. They bought triple coffins and iron-strapped patent coffins, filled graves with stones instead of soil, hired watchmen, built watchtowers over burial grounds, and in Scotland laid mortsafes, heavy iron cages, over the coffin or the whole grave. The poor, buried in mass graves that stayed open for weeks, had none of that.
This is the trade the phrase gets blamed on. It is also the trade that Burke and Hare are filed under, and they do not belong in it.
In Edinburgh in 1828, William Burke and William Hare dug up nobody. They were not resurrectionists and they were not body snatchers. Over roughly ten months, working out of Hare’s lodging house in Tanner’s Close off the West Port, they murdered people and sold the bodies fresh. Their method, which afterwards took Burke’s name as a verb, was suffocation: one of them pinching the nose and covering the mouth while the other lay across the chest, a killing that left no visible wound and that no forensic science of the day could read. The bodies went to the private anatomy rooms of Doctor Robert Knox, who paid between seven and ten pounds each, more in winter than in summer.
Both men eventually confessed to sixteen murders. That figure comes from the confessions of Burke and Hare, not from a court: Burke was convicted of one murder, and the sixteen rest on what the two killers said about themselves.
The record names some of the dead and not others, and the pattern of who is named is itself part of the horror. Among the named are Abigail Simpson, a pensioner who sold salt; a lodger remembered only as Donald, who had died of dropsy owing rent, and whose body was the pair’s first sale; a miller called Joseph; Mary Paterson; Mrs Haldane and, separately, her daughter Peggy; a woman known as Effy, who gathered cinders; Ann McDougal, a relative by marriage; Mrs Ostler, a washerwoman; James Wilson, known in the streets as Daft Jamie, an eighteen-year-old with physical and learning disabilities who lived by begging; and the last of them, recorded variously as Margery or Margaret Campbell, Docherty or M’Gonegal, killed on 31 October 1828. The record cannot settle on her name.
The unnamed were an English pedlar selling matches, visibly ill with jaundice; several older women; a woman lifted while drunk; and an old woman killed together with her grandson, a boy who could not hear or speak. Burke said afterwards that of all of them, the boy was the one he could not stop seeing.
They were poor, and several were ill, disabled or elderly, and that is precisely why they were chosen. A person nobody would report missing was the product.
One intended victim got away. Janet Brown was drinking with Mary Paterson when Paterson was killed, left the house, and came back looking for her friend. She later identified Paterson’s clothes to the police, which is a large part of the reason Paterson’s name survives at all.
It was the last murder that ended it. Margery Docherty’s body was found hidden under a bed by other lodgers, and the police were called. The Crown’s evidence was thin enough that it made a bargain: Hare was offered immunity from prosecution if he turned King’s evidence against Burke. He took it, and confessed to all sixteen deaths from the safety of the witness box.
The indictment laid three murders against Burke, those of Mary Paterson in April 1828, James Wilson in October, and Margery Docherty on 31 October, the last charge naming Burke’s partner Helen M’Dougal as well. The trial opened in the High Court of Justiciary on Wednesday 24 December 1828 and ran through the night. On Christmas morning the jury convicted Burke of the Docherty murder. Against M’Dougal the verdict was not proven, and she walked out of the court.
Robert Knox walked away too. He was never charged, and he was never even called to give evidence at the trial. Burke’s own statement to the police exonerated him, and a committee that looked into his conduct concluded it had seen no evidence that Knox or his assistants knew murder had been committed. What is on the record against him is negligence rather than complicity: bodies arriving warm and undamaged, no questions asked about where they came from. When Daft Jamie’s body reached his rooms, his own students recognised it, one of the most conspicuous faces in Edinburgh lying on the table. Knox denied it was anyone they knew and had the head and feet removed. He kept his liberty and lost his city, ostracised, shut out of university appointments, and gone from Edinburgh by 1842.
Hare was released on 5 February 1829 and put on the mail coach for Dumfries in disguise. He was recognised on the road, narrowly escaped a mob, and was set down on the Annan road and told to walk for the English border. After that there is nothing. No reliable sighting of him was ever recorded, and the familiar tales of him ending his days as a blind beggar in London are stories; no record supports them.
The Modern Relic
Burke was hanged at the Lawnmarket on the morning of 28 January 1829, before a crowd that contemporary reports put as high as twenty-five thousand. The sentence did not end at the rope. The court directed that his body be publicly dissected, the punishment the anatomy trade had been starved of and the one he had built a business on.
On 1 February, in the anatomy theatre of the University of Edinburgh’s Old College, Professor Alexander Monro tertius opened him up in front of an audience. During the dissection Monro dipped his pen in Burke’s blood and wrote a line that still survives: “This is written with the blood of Wm Burke, who was hanged at Edinburgh.”
His skeleton never left. It stands today in the Anatomical Museum of the University of Edinburgh Medical School, articulated and on display, which makes William Burke one of the very few murderers whose sentence is still, in a sense, being carried out. Across the city at Surgeons’ Hall Museums, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh keeps his death mask beside a small pocketbook, inscribed with the date of his execution, which the museum describes as reputedly made from his tanned skin. The museum’s own wording is careful, and so is ours: the attribution is traditional, and the material has not been publicly shown to be his.
Sixteen people had died in the West Port for the want of a legal corpse. It took one more killing, and the wrong city, to change the law. In 1831 a London gang were caught having murdered a boy of fourteen for the dissection table, and the outrage finally moved Parliament. The Anatomy Act received royal assent on 1 August 1832. It licensed anatomy teachers through the Home Secretary, and it opened to them the bodies of the unclaimed dead in workhouses, hospitals and prisons. At the same time it repealed the old provision that made dissection part of a murderer’s sentence, so the anatomist’s table stopped being a punishment and became an administrative arrangement.
The resurrection trade collapsed, because there was no longer money in it. What replaced it was not exactly justice. The people who had been too poor to protect their graves were now the people the law delivered to the dissecting room by default, unclaimed at death because they had no one left to claim them. The same class of person, for the same reason, only now with a statute behind it.
There is one more literal skeleton in a cupboard worth mentioning, and it is not a secret at all. Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher, died on 6 June 1832, six weeks before the Anatomy Act passed, having left instructions that his body be preserved and displayed. His Auto-Icon is his own skeleton, padded out and dressed in his own clothes, seated in a cabinet, topped with a wax head in place of the real one. It has belonged to University College London since 1850 and now sits in a glass case in the university’s Student Centre. Bentham, who argued for body donation, was hiding nothing; he wanted to be looked at forever.
So the phrase and the crimes never did meet. “Skeleton in the closet” was already in print in 1816, meaning a family’s inherited disease, before Burke and Hare killed anybody, and no evidence has ever tied it to the anatomy trade at all.
What is true is smaller and worse than the etymology. For a few decades in Britain, the dead were genuinely not safe in the ground, and for ten months in Edinburgh being poor, ill or alone was enough to make a person worth ten pounds. That much is not a theory.
