Sunday Gun Day Vol. III Ep. III - The Macabre Tale of Cemetery Guns
By Ward Clark | 11:00 AM on August 10, 2025 | RedState
Once Upon a Time…
Back in the day, and by “back in the day” I mean in the Victorian era, medical students and other folks who were engaged in the study of human anatomy sometimes had to resort to creative means to find study subjects – those being cadavers. Add to that the practice of the time in which dead people were buried with personal possessions, like jewelry, and you inevitably had criminal activity involved. Those criminals were grave robbers.
I’ll get around to writing about guns, by the way. Promise.
Every action, as they say, has an equal and opposite reaction. The grave robbers were, of course, active at night, when most ordinary folks, including bereaved families, were not hanging around in cemeteries. This led to some interesting innovations on the part of cemetery groundskeepers.
So why is this relevant in this piece, a column about firearms? Because some of those countermeasures were guns. Booby-trap guns and infernal devices, intended to deter grave robbers, and perhaps to put them in an early grave of their own.
This is how that happened. First, in Britain, back when they still were America, Original Recipe.
The Cemetery Guns
“Cemetery guns” were set guns, basically a short-barreled gun set up with a trip wire. The gun was loaded, primed, planted securely, and the trip wire attached to the trigger. These were originally used for camp defenses against bears and wolves, but were adopted for use in graveyards, and around 1700, the pattern for cemetery guns was more or less formalized; a large-bore flintlock smoothbore, with a belled muzzle like a blunderbuss. Most of them were attached to a heavy plank with a spike that could be driven into the ground to hold the gun firmly in place.
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Some more kind-hearted graveyard keepers would load these guns with rock salt or light bird shot to hurt and discourage grave robbers. Some keepers, though, sought to indirectly increase the population of the cemeteries they guarded by loading the cemetery guns with buckshot or heavy round lead balls.
These guns were typically set up in the evening and removed before any visitors or mourners showed up in the morning, because accidentally wounding a grieving widow just wouldn’t do. When a would-be grave robber tried to sneak in, say, through a hedge, or by climbing the fence, the notion would be that they would hit the trip wire, and BOOM! One messed-up ghoul, with several new orifices somewhere about his body, depending on how the set gun was aimed. In time, the British government deemed these to simply not be sporting at all, old chap, and their use faded – but in America? Leave it to us Americans to take a good idea and take it to the next level.
Casket Guns, Too!
American cemetery keepers got more crafty, though, and made the whole “deterring grave robbers” thing a bit more personal. While the British cemetery guns were generally set up on the grounds, near hedges, fencerows, or anywhere a clandestine entrance to the graveyard might take place, Americans had a better idea. After all, once inside and busily digging up a grave, an enterprising ghoul might reckon himself safe–unless he encountered a casket gun or worse, a casket torpedo.
After the grave guns were banned in Britain, a few other countermeasures popped up over there. Iron and concrete vaults were often used to contain coffins, and some cemeteries used wrought-iron fences with sharp spikes to deter thieves. That worked – for the British. American groundskeepers were inclined to take a more direct approach.
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The grave gun technology wasn’t done yet. In the United States, they were just getting started. In 1878, an enterprising gun crank named Phil Clover, of Ohio, designed and built a short-barreled shotgun that would be placed just inside a coffin lid. Were the lid to be opened, the shotgun would discharge a load of .36-caliber revolver balls into the robbers’ faces, which, as you can imagine, would probably ruin their whole day. Another creative type invented the “grave torpedo,” which was in effect a land mine to be placed in the grave or coffin; some of these contained up to ¾ pound of black powder, placed under a metal plate; this was one of history’s first shape-charge weapons. The only confirmed deployment of one of these I’ve been able to confirm was in 1881 in Knox County, Ohio, where one of three putative grave robbers found an early grave for themselves. Another received a broken leg, while the third was unscathed, although probably scared half to death.
Various state laws, such as the Pennsylvania Anatomy Act of 1883, eventually allowed medical practitioners and schools to legally obtain cadavers for research and education. That, combined with refrigeration, which allowed the longer-term storage of cadavers, cut severely into the grave-robbers’ trade, and made the grave explosives and other morbid weaponry happily obsolete.
These Days:
We’re more civilized these days. Aren’t we? Set guns for these and other purposes were outlawed in Britain in 1827, and most of the United States similarly banned the use of coffin guns and torpedoes in the late 1800s. That’s probably for the best.
These guns would, of course, not be legal now anywhere in the civilized world, including the UK and the USA, and that’s as it should be; a set gun of the kind described would not discriminate between a grave-robber and a couple of kids on a dare, and that’s not good. The casket guns and torpedoes would be even less choosy.
But all the same, it’s an interesting little piece of firearms history, even if it would be more appropriate for Halloween than late summer.
I would note that our oldest granddaughter is in medical school right now, in our more civilized modern era. We recently learned that she has started work on a cadaver, but we feel certain that the cadaver in question was legally donated – no grave robbers or booby-trapped coffins involved. And that’s a good thing.
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