27: Harvard’s Dirty Secret: Bejeweled Skulls and Grave Robbing

Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries

History, Fiction, True Crime, Drama

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The manager of Harvard's Medical school was just indicted for selling human remains to oddities shops, but the history of Harvard's involvement in black market corpse dealings goes back over 250 years. Let's travel through the morgue, past the skeletons found in Harvard's walls, all the way back to the most high profile murder to ever happen at the school. Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaelyn Moore. Music from Artlist Shownotes: https://www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/harvardmorgue To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listener discretion is advised.
0:11.1	Cedric Lodge walked out of the morgue at the Harvard Medical School, just like he had almost
0:17.0	every day for the last 30 years. He was the manager of the school's anatomical gift program,
0:24.9	a program for people who had elected to donate their bodies to medical research.
0:30.4	It was a humble job that had the potential to help shape the future of medicine.
0:35.6	But that day, May 6, 2023, would be his last.
0:43.2	Within a month, Cedric would be walking out of a new Hampshire courthouse,
0:47.8	swarmed by cameras and reporters. He and his wife would be facing federal charges for allegedly
0:55.0	snatching bodies from the morgue, bringing them to his new Hampshire home and selling the body
1:00.6	parts online. What Cedric was a part of was a much larger black market for the trafficking of
1:08.0	human remains. But I would also argue that it was part of a long-standing tradition.
1:14.6	See, Harvard has been in the body-snatching game for over 200 years, and the history of medical
1:21.9	schools using corpses for research is deep and dark. Today, I want to take you to where my
1:31.0	curiosity led me, through the back channels of Cedric's body ring, to the dark history of Harvard's
1:37.8	medical school, all the way to the most high-profile murder to ever happen at the university.
1:45.1	And just a heads up, this one's a little morbid.
1:51.4	It's that feeling. When the energy and the room shifts,
1:57.3	when the air gets sucked out of a moment, and everything starts to feel wrong,
2:04.0	it's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's
2:09.3	seeing, it's when your heart starts pounding. Welcome to Heart Starts Founding, a podcast of horrors,
2:19.6	hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. Today's episode definitely falls into
2:26.7	the horror category. It's a great example of where dark curiosity can lead you, which is perfect
	...

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