A Brief History
On March 2, 1978, comic actor Charlie Chaplin suffered the indignity of having his coffin stolen from its grave in Switzerland. The grave robbers held Chaplin’s remains for ransom, but were soon caught and the coffin, complete with Charlie, was reburied, this time with reinforced concrete.
Digging Deeper
Chaplin was not the only celebrity to be victimized by grave robbers, and today we look at two other notable cases.
Thomas Paine, American revolutionary, was improbably dug up in 1819 by an Englishman that brought the body to England for a more ceremonial interment, but lacking funds, he kept Paine’s body in a trunk in 1835. Paine’s whereabouts today are unknown.
Tassos Papadopoulos, the President of Cyprus, had been dead for about a year in 2009 when his body was stolen from its grave to be used as a hostage to release a prisoner! His body was recovered three months later.
Question for students (and subscribers): What other famous grave robberies can you think of? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Conway, J. North. Bag of Bones: The Sensational Grave Robbery of the Merchant Prince of Manhattan. Lyons Press, 2013.
Cummings, Judy. Tomb Raiders: Real Tales of Grave Robberies. Nomad Press, 2018.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by SilkTork of the graves of Charles Chaplin and Oona Chaplin, his wife, in the graveyard of Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
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