The Body Snatchers of Albany - The Hidden History Beneath Washington Park
Episode Overview
Before Washington Park became the heart of New York’s capital city, it was a burial ground. The land that now welcomes joggers, dog walkers, and picnickers once held the city’s poor, the unnamed, and the unclaimed. In the early nineteenth century, this ground became the quiet center of a trade that helped shape modern American medicine
This episode examines how Albany’s early medical community relied on grave robbing to supply its anatomy classrooms, how the creation of Washington Park buried that history, and how the legacy of those taken without consent continues to shape the city’s moral landscape. The story of the body snatchers is not a tale of ghosts, but of the uneasy bargains between science, society, and memory.
Act I – The City’s Hidden Anatomy
The episode opens on the grounds of Washington Park, tracing its transformation from the State Street Burial Grounds to a symbol of civic pride. Listeners learn how the growth of American medical schools created a demand for cadavers that lawful means could not supply. Albany, like other growing cities, became a quiet participant in an unspoken trade: the exchange of the newly buried for the advancement of medicine.
Act II – The Resurrectionists
The narrative follows the rise of the resurrectionists—those who dug by lantern light in unguarded cemeteries to meet the needs of medical colleges. Their work was cold, dangerous, and illicit, but essential to the expanding field of anatomy. Albany’s State Street Burial Grounds became a prime source, and local doctors, including Albany Medical College founder Dr. Alden March, found themselves entangled in this moral contradiction. The episode recounts how the Bone Bill of 1854 sought to end the practice by legalizing the use of unclaimed bodies from prisons and almshouses, formalizing exploitation rather than abolishing it.
Act III – The Field Guide Explores the Ground Beneath
The Field Guide explores what it means to live above forgotten history. As Washington Park took shape, thousands of graves were supposedly relocated, yet records show that many remained. The park became both memorial and erasure—a civic beautification built on disturbed ground. The episode reflects on how the city’s medical progress was built upon inequality and silence, and how its public spaces still hold the memory of those who were never meant to be remembered.
Themes
– Medical Ethics and the Origins of Modern Anatomy– Social Inequality and the Trade in the Dead– Burial, Memory, and Urban Transformation– The Uneasy Relationship Between Progress and Forgetting
About the Series
The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast is a documentary exploration of hidden history, cultural memory, and place. Each episode uncovers the layers of the past that remain embedded in the present, revealing how landscapes remember even when people forget.
Learn More
Read more at restorationobscura.com or subscribe to the Restoration Obscura Substack for essays, restorations, and new field investigations. Field Guide to the Night is available worldwide in print and Kindle editions.
Credits
Written, Narrated, and Produced by: John BulmerSound Design and Mastering: Restoration Obscura Audio
Copyright
© 2025 Restoration Obscura. All rights reserved.Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or broadcast of this episode or any portion thereof is prohibited without express written permission. Restoration Obscura and The Restoration Obscura Field Guide are trademarks of Restoration Obscura Press.
