“The Body Snatcher” by Robert Louis Stevenson was based upon the Burke & Hare murders. It focused not on them but on the “medical professionals” that purchased the murdered bodies. This story was creepy and terrifying, imagine that the quiet elderly widow that you greet each morning, could one day be presented to you as a cadaver who overnight has died, despite being perfectly fine the previous day. Stevenson takes the people we are supposed to trust explicitly, our physicians, and turns them into murderers. People were afraid that their graves or the graves of their loved ones might be robbed of the deceased body and now they were afraid that they might be killed simply to fill the supply and demand need for medical professionals to have practice cadavers.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a motto that Fettes lives by. He knew what was occurring, but until he saw the body of a woman he knew, he was able to keep up the facade. These bodies purchased at night added to the horror aspect, bad deeds occur at night. People do not purchase bodies while the sun is out and shining.
And at the end of this story Stevenson gives his readers the chills by setting a scene of a graveyard at night, black sky, rain pouring down, and the only light coming from a lantern. A lantern that conspicuously goes out as they are trying to remove a deceased body. A body that transforms into another. Is this a mental error due to guilty minds or a paranormal occurrence sprung forth due to hideous acts against the man named Gray.
Humanities 101 