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[drzombiefinger]

On your home you have locks, chains, window bars or even electronic alarms to keep you safe from intruders. The living have any number of options to protect themselves from thieves or invasions. What do you do when you are dead though? What could you possibly have that could keep someone from breaking in and interrupting your eternal slumber?

Enter the Mortsafe?

Not quite yet. First let us go into a brief history as to WHY grave security was needed, and why such a device was created. In the 18th century schools of anatomy were getting bigger, and the need for bodies was growing to feed this education sector. Parliament created the Murder Act of 1752. The new law allowed judges to substitute the public display of the bodies of executed criminals with dissection. A fate at the time, that was viewed with horror. The state controlled the flow of bodies to research on. The schools would have to wait until the state provided them with one. This demand, created a business model for the supply sector.

There were people who were willing to steal the bodies of the recently deceased. These new criminals earned an interesting name. They were called resurrectionists. These criminals would go to a grave yard, and look for fresh graves. They then would dig up and extract the body, leaving the clothes, coffin, and jewelry. They would then wrap the body up in canvas, and sell the bodies to medical schools. The reason resurrectionists left all the property behind was because stealing a body back then was not a serious crime. Stealing jewellery and valuable property was though, that was considered grave robbing. They knew if they could get a fresh body, the schools would be willing to pay premium for them. This began the cadaver trade. The Resurrectionists  would dig them up, and the schools happy to have them, would't ask where it came from.

The rich at the time could afford heavy iron coffins, or even brick vaults with locks that would prevent their bodies from any theft. The rest of society's bodies were basically open for the taking. In an effort to stop this activity, the local police began putting patrols in the cemeteries closest to the schools that did anatomy work. Police would keep watch for any resurrectionist activity. This new effort by the police did not stop the resurrectionists and the resurrectionists devised a whole new way to get to the treasure inside it's buried capsule. They began literally tunnelling to the bodies. Like death moles, working underground. They would tunnel using wooden spades, in order to lessen the effect of the noise. They would tunnel to the head of the coffin, knock out the top, and extract the body. Always leaving all the the jewelry, and clothes.

NOW enter the Mortsafe!

The Mortsafe was believed to be invented in 1816. It is a complex arrangement of rods, and plates locked together with padlocks. Churches of the era would often buy them and then offer the services to the family of the deceased. How the Mortsafe worked was a plate would be buried over the top of the coffin. Rods with heads were then set into the holes in the plate. A second plate was then slid over the other, to lock the rods into place. It created a very secure place for the dead to safely rest in peace.  It could and would eventually be removed in six to eight weeks by two people who had the keys to remove it. This would give time for the ground under it to harden enough to make digging more effort that it would be worth. The body, in this time predating embalming, would also be unsuitable for any medical purposes.Now days we have concrete vaults where our coffins are seated and sealed in. In it’s time the Mortsafe was and ingenious solution to a serious problem of the day.