Chilling tale of murder, Frankenstein experiments and a book bound by human skin
Her white gravestone, on the edge of a churchyard in Godmanchester, Cambs, sends a chill down the spine of anyone who comes across it.
“To the memory of Mary Ann Weems,” it reads, “who was
Murdered in the 21st Year of her Age.”
Even more hair-raising, though, is the epitaph engraved on the back of the stone, which recounts details of how she met her death “as a warning to the young of both sexes”.
It reads that Mary became “acquainted” with Thomas Weems at an early age, “terminating in a compulsory marriage”.
It continues: “Wishing to be Married to another Woman he filled up the measure of his iniquity by resolving to murder his Wife which he barbarously perpetrated at Wendy on their Journey to London toward which place he had induced her to go under the mask of reconciliation.”
A eerie verse at the bottom of the gravestone, meanwhile, reads: “Ere Crime you perpetrate survey this Stone, Learn hence the God of Justice sleeps not on his Throne, But marks the Sinner with unerring Eye, The suffering Victim hears and makes the Guilty die."
And while she was laid to rest at the 800-year-old church St Mary The Virgin, her murderer Weems' fate was even more macabre.
He was executed, experimented on, then his skin used to bind a book now sitting on the shelf of a Cambridge University library.
Because of the barbaric nature of his crime, there was so little public sympathy for him that authorities agreed to allow his body to be used in the strange experiments, which involved passing electricity currents through it to see if parts of the body could be revived.
“Professor Cumming had prepared a powerful galvanic battery with the intention of repeating some of the experiments lately described by Dr Ure of Glasgow”.
The experiments involved applying to parts of the body some “‘220 pairs of double six inch plates charged with dilute sulphuric and fuming nitrous acid" to give the galvanic batteries "intense action".
Finally and even more bizarrely, a square piece of Weems’ skin was sent to the University bookbinder, which was made into the macabre cover of a book and shelved for posterity in Sir Christopher Wren’s library.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/chilling-tale-murder-frankenstein-experiments-16155430
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