Hidden Bodies: How a Harvard Chapel Renovation Unearthed Human Remains

In July 1999, anthropology student Rachel Sexton stood in Harvard University’s Holden Chapel as a construction crew went about renovating its basement. Her teacher John Gerry had wanted someone on hand if any artifacts came to light.

As workers tore down walls, they revealed a long-forgotten feature embedded in the basement’s dirt floor: a round brick dry well roughly four feet across and one foot deep. Its sandy bottom allowed water to filter through it, preventing the room from flooding—or at least it would in theory. But this well clearly hadn’t functioned as a well in a while, because there was a bunch of stuff in it.

Sexton clocked test tubes and shards of glass, the detritus of what seemed to be scientific experiments. And then there were the bones—some human, by the looks of them, which associate anthropology professor Carole Mandryk confirmed when Sexton called her in to double-check.

“My first thought was, ‘Oooohh, an old Harvard murder,’ ” Mandryk told The Harvard Crimson at the time.

It wasn’t a murder, but it was a particularly macabre piece of Harvard history—one that went far beyond a single body.

Meet the Spunkers

Holden Chapel, Harvard’s third oldest building, has lived many lives since its construction in the 1740s. First it was a chapel, built with £400 from the estate of the late Samuel Holden, whose will had authorized his wife and kids to donate to causes “promoting true Religion … Sobriety, Righteousness and Godliness.” Then it cycled through use as a lecture room, army barracks, a fire station, a storage space, and a woodshed, among other things. By the early 1800s, it had become the site of Harvard’s still-fledgling medical school, which physician John Warren (Harvard Class of 1771) had helped establish in 1782.

Warren and other students hadn’t let the lack of a medical school stop them from studying anatomy during their undergrad years; they ran a club called the Anatomical Society dedicated to that purpose. The society primarily dissected animals—horses, dogs, etc.—and also owned a human skeleton, which they used to give presentations on various bones.

The society’s other exploits are a matter of debate, in part because certain members belonged to another grassroots anatomy organization known as the Spunker Club. The division between the two is unclear, and some scholars think it was actually just one club with two names. (The term Spunker is yet another mystery; maybe it was chosen after spunk in the “mettle or courage” sense, which entered the lexicon during that era.)

The finer details of the Spunker Club’s activities are buried six feet deep, so to speak—it’s only mentioned by name in a handful of letters to and from presumed members, Harvard undergrads and alumni alike. But there is a consensus about what the Spunkers got up to: They were resurrectionists, hunting for human corpses to study. Since demand for bodies exceeded legal means of securing them—and the general public disapproved of dissection to begin with—Spunkers often conducted their business on the fringes.

In one October 1773 letter, physician (and future governor of Massachusetts) William Eustis told Warren about an attempt that he and other Spunkers made to acquire the body of an executed burglar named Levi Ames. “You must know that [Dr. John] Jeffries (as we heard) had applied to the Governor for a warrant to have this body. The Governor told him if he had come a quarter of an hour sooner, he would have given it, but he had just given one to Ames’ friends, alias [Reverend Dr. Samuel] Stillman’s gang,” Eustis wrote. 

What began above board devolved into lawlessness as the Spunkers decided to steal Ames’s body from its transport boat. “[W]e searched and searched, and rid, hunted, and waded; but alas, in vain! There was no corpse to be found,” Eustis wrote. “We have a [corpse] from another place, so [Dr. Benjamin] Church shan’t be disappointed.”

Battleground Body Snatchers

As an army surgeon during the Revolutionary War, Warren took advantage of his access to the bodies of soldiers with no relatives to claim them. Not all body snatchers were quite so discerning or low-key, as evidenced by an incident that Warren’s son Edward Warren recounted in a biography of his father.

“In November, 1775, the body of a soldier was taken from a grave,” he wrote. “Much general indignation was excited, and the practice was forbidden for the future, with stern reprobation by the Commander-in-chief. It was done with so little decency and caution, that the empty coffin was left exposed. It need scarcely be said that it could not have been the work of any of our friends of the [Spunker] Club. It must have been the act of a reckless agent or a novice. In cases of this kind, where the necessities of society are in conflict with the law, and with public opinion, the crime consists, like theft among the Spartan boys, not in the deed, but in permitting its discovery.”

In other words, it wasn’t a crime if you didn’t get caught—and the Spunkers were apparently good at not getting caught. One grave robbery in 1796 by a party including another son of Warren’s, John Collins Warren I, was almost foiled by a man smoking near the cemetery wall. One of the body snatchers peeled off to distract him by feigning drunkenness and picking a fight, which another member then defused by steering the stranger “off in a different direction to some distance,” John Collins Warren recalled, leaving the coast clear.

“When my father came up in the morning to lecture, and found that I had been engaged in this scrape, he was very much alarmed; but when the body was uncovered, and he saw what a fine, healthy subject it was, he seemed to be as much pleased as I ever saw him. This body lasted the [entire anatomy] course through,” he said.

Still, the younger Warren admitted that early-19th-century crackdowns on grave robbing forced his legion of resurrectionists “to resort to the most dangerous expedients,” and they did occasionally get arrested. “No occurrences in the course of my life have given me more trouble and anxiety than the procuring of subjects for dissection in the medical lectures,” he wrote.

A Sorry Cemetery

The way Spunkers and supporters like Edward Warren discussed body snatching illustrates a high level of clinical remove from subjects’ personhood. What Sexton and company discovered in Holden Chapel’s hidden dry well reinforces that perspective.

They excavated more than a dozen levels of materials reaching about two and a half feet beneath the basement floor—a hodge-podge of human bones, animal bones, buttons, leather shoes, chamber pot fragments, microscope slides, beer bottles, and various glass containers, not to mention hazardous substances like arsenic and mercury. The materials are all from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, and as anthropologist Christina J. Hodge wrote in a 2013 article published in the Journal of Social Archaeology, it’s likely that this trash pit “represents a ‘house cleaning’ of detritus” right before a big renovation of the chapel in 1850.

Eleven left tibias were identified, meaning the collection includes at least 11 people. But most of the remains are mere fragments, some with nails driven through them for display. Others bear different marks of their experimental and educational value; Hodge listed “lower jaws sawn in two, transversely cut femurs, sawn-off cranial vaults, dissected fetuses, and limb amputations” that line up with descriptions in Warren’s lecture notes.

“In Holden Chapel, bodies were not treated as people but as instructional props. Beneath Holden Chapel, parts of people’s bodies were not buried as individuals but were disposed piecemeal alongside broken test tubes and crucibles, bottles and chamber pots, chemical residues and architectural debris. This charnel pit was a perversion of burial that destroyed the potential for affective relations between living and dead,” Hodge wrote. “It is not simply that unclaimed bodies were treated as secular and scientific resources; there was a profanity in this discard that undid personhood and embodiment itself.”

Harvard has tried to rectify that disregard by painstakingly cataloging the artifacts and preserving them in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. You can see digital images of animal remains and other items found in the well, but all the human bones are restricted from view.

Though the 1999 excavation delayed the renovation of Holden Chapel by several weeks, it reopened in late November 1999 as a new and improved home for a few music groups that had already been using it as such. At their first rehearsal in the refurbished space, Harvard Glee Club members sang the building—so freshly scrubbed of all signs of death—a rousing round of “Happy Birthday.”

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