In celebration of the Halloween season, the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum will present the lecture, Grave Objections: A History of Body Snatching for Science.The presentation will be led by James Henry, a New York City tour guide and a nine-year veteran docent at Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery. Light refreshments will be served following the presentation. 

Tuesday, October 20, 2026, 6:00–8:00 p.m.
Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum | Rotunda
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This talk will explore the dark underbelly of medical history and the 100-plus-year reign of the body snatchers. Driven by a severe shortage of legal cadavers for medical training, professional “ghouls” built a lucrative seasonal industry by secretly exhuming fresh corpses from local burial sites.

This illicit trade disproportionately targeted marginalized communities, igniting public fury and violent “anatomy riots,” including New York City’s massive 1788 uprising. While families fought back with creative defensive measures to protect their dead, the grim business of body snatching persisted for generations, until modern anatomy laws and shifting medical practices claimed to shut it down. Or did they? Join us for a thrilling evening of true crime as we find out where all the bodies aren’t buried.

Guest speaker James Henry is a specialist in New York City cemeteries and burial grounds. He is currently writing and illustrating a novel detailing the global history of body snatching.

LMMM’s 2026 Lecture Series is sponsored in part by The DiNardo-Aiello Family Fund, and The Sante Center for Natural Healing. LMMM’s 2026 programs are made possible in part by LMMM’s Season Distinguished Benefactors: The City of Norwalk, The Maurice Goodman Foundation, Inc., and Lockwood-Mathews Foundation, Inc., LMMM’s Leadership Patrons: Dr. Michele & Attorney Miklos Koleszar and The Sealark Foundation, Inc., and LMMM’s Founding Patrons: The Estate of Mrs. Cynthia Clark Brown.

page images: wikicommons.
Home page image: Thomas Rowlandson “Grave-robbers, with death pictured as a nightwatchman” (1755), pen and ink, with watercolor (Courtesy of The Public Domain Archive, Wellcome Collection, England)