In 1998, a conservation team restoring the house at 36 Craven Street in London lifted the floor of a back room and found a pit. It was roughly a meter wide and a meter deep. Inside were more than 1,200 fragments of human bone.
The house was Benjamin Franklin’s. He lived there for most of the sixteen years he spent in London, from 1757 until 1775, and it is the only one of his residences still standing anywhere in the world.
What was actually in the pit
The remains came from at least fifteen people. Some of them were children.
Researchers from University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, led by Dr. Simon Hillson, examined the bones and found something more specific than an old grave. The marks on them were surgical. One femur had been cut cleanly through in a way that demonstrates amputation technique. Pieces of skull carried trepanning holes, the drilled openings used to relieve pressure on the brain.
These were not bodies that had been hidden. They were bodies that had been used.
Buried alongside them were the leftovers of a working laboratory: microscope slides, traces of mercury, and a segment of turtle spine.
The man in the basement
Franklin’s landlady at Craven Street was Margaret Stevenson. In 1770, her daughter Polly married a young anatomist named William Hewson.
Hewson was not a crank. He was a serious researcher who worked on blood and the lymphatic system and isolated fibrinogen, the protein responsible for clotting. He had trained under William Hunter, the most celebrated anatomist in Britain. After the two men fell out, Hewson needed somewhere to run his own private anatomy school.
His mother-in-law had a house with a garden and a good address, a short walk from the Thames.
The mercury and the turtle spine tie the pit directly to him. Both appear in the experiment he presented to the Royal Society in 1770, in which he injected mercury to trace the flow of the lymphatic system.
Where the bodies came from
This is the part that is easy to skip past.
Anatomy schools in eighteenth-century London had a supply problem. The law permitted dissection of executed murderers and almost no one else, and demand from students vastly outstripped what the gallows could provide. The gap was filled by men who dug up fresh graves at night and sold what they found.
Craven Street sat within reach of both the gallows and several burial grounds, and it backed onto the river. A body could arrive at that house without ever passing through a front door.
When Hewson was finished with a corpse, he could not return it. Handing remains to a churchyard would have advertised the crime. So the pit in the garden was not a hiding place so much as a disposal system, dug and refilled and dug again over years.
What did Franklin know
He was living in the house. The school operated in the same building. The pit was in the garden.
Historians generally conclude that Franklin knew and did not participate. He was a man of the Enlightenment, personally invested in the advance of science, and he was close to Hewson. When Hewson cut himself during a dissection in 1774 and died of sepsis at thirty-four, Franklin wrote that he “died last Sunday morning of a fever which baffled the skill of our best physicians.”
That is the historical consensus, and it is almost certainly right.
But notice how thin the line is. The most careful reading of the evidence still leaves you with a founding father who lived for years above a room where stolen bodies were taken apart, who was friends with the man doing it, and who never said a word about it in a lifetime of famously prolific correspondence.
The question the record cannot close
History can tell you what was found. It cannot tell you what was thought.
Franklin kept a record of nearly everything. The weather. His debts. His visitors. He wrote about order as a virtue and made lists of his own faults. He was one of the most documented private lives of the century, and the documentation goes quiet exactly where the bones are.
That silence is where fiction lives.
The novel
Benjamin Franklin Serial Killer by Patrick Salway takes the Craven Street evidence and follows it one step past where the historians stop. It runs on two timelines. In 1750 London, a young surgeon named William Hewson enters the world of anatomy after his sister’s death and is drawn into Franklin’s orbit, and into an obsession Franklin’s public reputation was built to hide: the search for the human soul. In 1998, a renovation crew lifts a floor.
Hewson was real. The school was real. The pit is real. The novel asks what it would have meant to be the man who finally understood where the bodies came from.
It is a lean 122 pages and it is out now, available everywhere books are sold.
Sources
- Benjamin Franklin House, Craven Street Bones
- Smithsonian Magazine, Why Were There So Many Skeletons Hidden in Benjamin Franklin’s Basement?
- Tania Kausmally, William Hewson (1739-1774) and the Craven Street Anatomy School, UCL Discovery