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Arthur's Seat Coffins

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gerardwilkie

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Every time I visit Chambers Steet Museum in Edinburgh , I make a point of having a look at these . They were 17 tiny coffins , each containing a small figure , and were found buried on Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh back in the 1936 . If I recall correctly , thes coffins also formed part of the plot of Ian Rankin's novel The Falls . Today I read this article in The Mail on Sunday :

DNA Key to the Murder Dolls

Genetic testing of DNA from one of Scotland's most infamous serial killers could solve one of the country's most baffling mysteries.

Nobody has ever been able to discover who made and hid a macabre collection of wooden dolls in coffins , discovered in 1936 by children playing on Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh.

Clothes worn by the staff were dated back to the 1820s-and led to speculation that the murderer William Burke made a doll to represent each of his victims.

Now DNA has been recovered from Burke's skeleton to compare with samples taken from the dolls- and the results will be revealed in a new TV documentary.

The 17 small , carved figures , found tucked away in ledges under a grassy knoll , are now kept at the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Museum curator George Dalgleish said:'I can't over-emphasize how unique these dolls are. There is absolutely nothing around to which they compare.Someone bothered to create them and buried them in a special way. I would love to know why.'

A tiny fragment of bone has been removed from the heel of William Burke , hanged in 1829 for a spate of murders committed in the name of medical science and whose skeleton is kept under lock and key at Edinburgh University.

Analysis of the DNA took months but experts are so impressed with the clear results they acquired from such old material that the techniques could be applied to many unsolved murders from the 19th century.

Burke , along with William Hare , murdered a string of people in Edinburgh in the 1820s to satisfy the demand from the medical profession for newly dead corpses.

The two Irish labourers lured their victims to their room in the West Port area of the city , where they suffocated them in a way that did not leave marks on their bodies.

They then sold the bodies on to surgeons at £10 a corpse. In all , they committed 17 murders - which could correspond to the 17 dolls.Burke and Hare were eventually caught at the end of 1828. Hare testified against Burke to save his own life and his partner in crime was hanged in January 1829.

But it would be another 107 years before the discovery of the dolls in the coffins , their eyes all painted wide-open. At the time , Burke was rumoured to be the creator of the tiny carvings which became known as the Murder Dolls.

Police paperas revealed how the killer had shown dreadful remorse for his crimes and it was suggested he had carefully carved the dolls and placed them one at a time in the Arthur's Seat hiding-place as some sort of cleansing ritual.

The museum called in DNA expert Mike Barber whose forensic skills are normally used to solve more recent crimes.

Mr Barber , who is based at the DNA science centre in Yorkshire , said:'The fact we got such clear DNA results from such old material is going to be a huge help in the future.We just didn't think it was possible'.
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The programme is called Murder Dolls and will be broadcast on the National Geographic channel on Dec 5 at 9pm.
 
gerardwilkie said:
Every time I visit Chambers Steet Museum in Edinburgh , I make a point of having a look at these . They were 17 tiny coffins , each containing a small figure , and were found buried on Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh back in the 1936 . If I recall correctly , thes coffins also formed part of the plot of Ian Rankin's novel The Falls . Today I read this article in The Mail on Sunday :
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I realise you're quoting the newspaper article so I am not criticising you but it was 1836 they were found

Gordon
 
Sounds really interesting. I don't have or know any one who gets National geographic so be sure to post back in here with what they said if you can! :yeay:

(I always make a point of seeing the stuffed platypus-a very fortean creature! And cute..)
 
Doesn’t really add anything to the subject but I’ve always thought the coffins look like a piece of what these days is called Outsider art. For some reason they remind me of the work done by Angus McPhee originally from Uist, who was virtually mute and spent 50 years in an institution - he made shoes, clothing and other objects out of grass and a vest out of the wool gathered from barbed wire fences. There’s absolutely no connection between him and the coffins but for some reason one always reminds me of the other.

I suppose the only point I might be making is that we always tend to try and find significance in things like these coffins - in why they were made and where they were placed - whereas, sometimes the only significance is buried inside the long gone head of the person who made them.
 
Managed to see it after all on tape. Quite interesting but full of very annoyingly gruesome clips of autopsies, eyeballs being cut up etc. What was the point of that?

And needless to say the genetic testing didn't solve anything at all but it was still quite interesting to hear a few ideas like why Burke may have made them in the first place. If it was him it must have had more to do with the fact the bodies weren't buried than with the murders as the first body was not a murder but just happened to have died and was needing disposed of. Once they found out how much cash could be made they progressed to murder.

I also wonder where the material came from. Each doll had different clothes in days where most people, particularly of Burke and Hare's class would have probably only had two sets of clothes. Could they have come from the victims?
 
I must have missed this thread first time around as I'm sure I wouldn't have forgotten something this bonkers.

As it is, I just heard about the tiny coffins from this video - they get a segment around 1.20 - you might want to stop it before 2.32 as the next segment is a bit gnarly.


I can't help thinking that the little bodies have incredibly long arms for their size, apart from the two which don't seem to have any at all.
 
I keep meaning to have a look at them when I'm in Edinburgh. One of these days I'll get round to it

Author claims to have solved Edinburgh coffin-doll mystery


They are perhaps one of the capital’s most enduring mysteries, made famous by TV documentaries and fictional novels. Now, a US-based Scottish author has claimed he has solved the mystery behind Edinburgh’s famous coffin dolls. A startling discovery Almost two centuries ago, a group of young boys who were local to the area were said to be on Arthur’s Seat in search of rabbit warrens when they made a startling discovery - a small cave, inside of which were the most intriguing items any of them had ever laid their eyes upon. Hidden away within the recess on the north-eastern face of the hill were seventeen miniature coffins containing intricately-carved dolls. Since that day in 1836, the strange items have baffled experts and historians who have been unable to ascertain the origins of the eight remaining figures which have survived to this day and remain, in varying states of decay, on display in the National Museum of Scotland.
etc
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https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/...olved-edinburgh-coffin-doll-mystery-1-4726323
 
I always remember this part of a poem

"Up the Close and down the stair,

so it is with Burke and Hare.

Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,

Knox the boy that buys the beef."

I remember that partial poem because I made up a nasty little rhyme about a former boss of mine and an employee he seemed to favor.
 
gerhard1 said:
I always remember this part of a poem

"Up the Close and down the stair,

so it is with Burke and Hare.

Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,

Knox the boy that buys the beef."

I remember that partial poem because I made up a nasty little rhyme about a former boss of mine and an employee he seemed to favor.
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Heh, I love Burke & Hare. Once managed to shoehorn them into a talk I was giving on an aspect of crime on public transport.
 
escargot said:
Heh, I love Burke & Hare. Once managed to shoehorn them into a talk I was giving on an aspect of crime on public transport.
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I knew a Burke and O'Hare duo, two teachers in Belfast. Sadly Danny Burke has shuffled off this mortal coil but Fergus O'Hare is still going strong. Saw recently that he was speaking at some history meeting. I remember he wrote a pamphlet on the 1907 Belfast Carters and Dockers Strike, the police went on strike as well! The dockers leader said: "I see no difference between a man who works with a shovel and a man who works with a truncheon"!
 
This sounds a bit more plausible than the Burke and Hare theory which sounds quite neat until you consider that almost all Burke and Hare's victims were women but the surviving clothes on the dolls are mens clothes.

Mike Dash has written an excellent summary of the mystery.

https://mikedashhistory.com/2010/08/31/the-miniature-coffins-found-on-arthurs-seat/

I am (very slowly) on this case so I may come back in a few years time with a new theory!
 
Min Bannister said:
This sounds a bit more plausible than the Burke and Hare theory which sounds quite neat until you consider that almost all Burke and Hare's victims were women but the surviving clothes on the dolls are mens clothes.

Mike Dash has written an excellent summary of the mystery.

https://mikedashhistory.com/2010/08/31/the-miniature-coffins-found-on-arthurs-seat/

I am (very slowly) on this case so I may come back in a few years time with a new theory!
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Interesting that this article was shared online before being more or less verbatim printed in FT.

The piece does touch on the idea of serial killers, in Burke and Hare, but I wonder if there could have been another at large in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas in the early 1800s.

Would be interesting to look at any unsolved murders, or even murders that were solved but with the perpetrator strongly disputing his guilt, during this period to see if any pattern emerges. Could be an Edinburgh serial killer who got away with it and never reached public notoriety.

The clothing made from the victims own clothes, the rows of eight seemingly added to over time, the trait of serial killers to take a trophy or to register their kills. The fact that it made it into an Ian Rankin novel shows that it fits the bill for this kind of scenario.

For certain, the article in FT370 reminded me that it has been too long since I visited Edinburgh.
 
Min Bannister said:
Well we don't know that, that is just speculation! But yes, another undiscovered killer is very feasible. Burke and Hare were only caught as they eventually murdered someone well known.
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No of course, just speculating the parts of the story that would fit the theory. Would be interesting to see if any Edinburgh police records from that time survive and record any murders where snippets of clothing had been taken.

Presume if they were men from the lower classes or vagrants there would be little investigation if any. Would have been very easy for a cunning killer to rack up 17 murders over a lengthy period with limited detection if selecting his victims wisely.
 
McAvennie said:
Presume if they were men from the lower classes or vagrants there would be little investigation if any. Would have been very easy for a cunning killer to rack up 17 murders over a lengthy period with limited detection if selecting his victims wisely.
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Yes definitely. Especially if they had B&H's downfall to learn from. I am not sure whether the police would really have kept records in those days. I think they sort of gradually took over from the constables who mainly bopped people on the head with sticks rather than going full Colombo I think. The National Archives holds records from the police from 1845 which is too late unfortunately.

https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/c/F111338

I think a patient newspaper microfilm trawl might be the only way to try to solve this mystery. Some papers are archived on the internet but you would need to know what to search for. Could be worth a try.

Well I guess I know what I am doing today then since I am on holiday!
 
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