Name: The Strange Reason Ben Franklin's Basement Was Filled with Skeletons
Uploaded: 2022-08-03T17:02:13.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Strange Reason Ben Franklin's Basement Was Filled with Skeletons' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Strange Reason Ben Franklin's Basement Was Filled with Skeletons' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-03. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
Dude, you ever hear about what Ben Franklin was? Okay, that's a different story,
but what did he do?
You never heard that like what he was found in it. They found in his house. No,
like tons of bodies, bro
What? Ben Franklin, they found tons of bodies in his- Ben Franklin was a serial
killer?
No, he was like doing some weird shit, dude. Bodies- Like experimenting with
bodies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is this real?
Everything I say- Was Ben Franklin's basement filled with skeletons?
Repairs on Franklin's old London house turned up 1,200 pieces of bone from at
least 15 people
Holy shit
For nearly two decades, by the way, this is from the Smithsonian. This is not
some wacky conspiracy thought- This ain't samtriplee.com
For nearly two decades leading up to the signing of the Declaration of
Independence
Benjamin Franklin lived in London in a house on 36 Craven Street. In
1776, Franklin left his English home to come back to America. More than 200
years later
15 bodies were found in the basement buried in a secret windowless room beneath
the garden.
In 1998, conservationists were doing repairs on 36 Craven, looking to turn
Franklin's old haunt into a museum.
From a one-meter-wide, one-meter-deep pit, over 1,200 pieces of bone were
retrieved.
Remnants of more than a dozen bodies, said Benjamin Franklin's house, six were
children.
Forensic investigations showed that the bones dated to Franklin's day.
Holy shit
The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by
Benjamin's young friend and protege, William Hewson
Oh, just an anatomy school
Yeah, and we're just gonna bury them downstairs
Okay, anatomy was still in its infancy, but the day's social and ethical mores
frowned upon it.
A steady supply of human bodies was hard to come by legally, so Hewson, Hunter,
and Fields' other pioneers
had to turn to grave robbing, either paying professional resurrection men to
procure cadavers
or digging them up themselves to get their hands on specimens.
Researchers think 36 Craven was an irresistible spot for Houston to establish
his own anatomy lab.
The tenant was a trusted friend, and the landlady was his mother-in-law, and he
was flanked by convenient sources for corpses.
Bodies could be smuggled from graveyards and delivered to the wharf at one end
of the street, or snatched from the gallows at the other end.
When he was done with them, Houston simply buried whatever was left of the
bodies in the basement, rather than sneak them out for disposal elsewhere
and risked getting caught and prosecuted for dissection and grave robbing.
Franklin was probably aware of the illegal studies going on in his building,
says the Benjamin Franklin House, but it's doubtful that he was involved
himself.
Still, we can't imagine that.
Curious man that he was, he didn't sneak down and check out the proceedings at
least once or twice.
Of course he did.
Could you imagine if you're my friend and we live together, and I say, Sam,
what are you up to?
You're like, bro, we've got to find out how people work, and there's only one
way to do it.
We've got to look at bodies.
Whoa, how are you going to do that?
We've got to find a place where we can fucking legally or secretly look at
bodies.
Well, I'm going to a basement.
Okay, so what do we do with the bodies?
We're going to bury them, bro.
But back then, when they were studying medicine, isn't that what they did?
Like, all those people that, like, studied anatomy back then, how did they, if
it was illegal to study anatomy, if it was illegal to study bodies, how else
would they find out how anatomy worked?
That seems weird, but who knows?
They had weird laws back then, but.
It does seem weird, but it makes sense, right?
Because if they had never studied anatomy before, and then all of a sudden it
came along, and they're like, well, we've got to fuck up your grandpa.
Right.
We've got to carve grandpa up like a turkey to find out what makes people tick,
you know?
It's a weird note to add in another article about this.
Oh, boy.
It's just that.
Franklin's history as a Mason was one of the historian's initial points of
inquiry.
Though shrouded in secrecy, Masonic rituals have dark, known undercurrents,
which have, at times, gone horribly wrong.
For example, in a 2004 initiation ceremony, a new member was accidentally shot
by a member who meant to fire an empty gun, but instead fired a loaded one.
Yeah.
They fake shot at each other?
Yeah.
But when historians dug deeper into what was going on in the Franklin home
during the years, the bones dated back to, they discovered the real culprit
behind the bones is one of William Houston.
The real article's the same.
Yeah.
They're basically saying the same thing.
Crazy, right?
Yeah.