Bring up the bodies: digging up the dead in literature

You dont need zombies or ghosts to chill the blood. Moira Redmond digs up some of literatures most gruesome graveyard scenes

However depressing the thud of earth on the coffin-lid may be, it is music compared to the rattle of gravel and thump of spades which heralds a premature and unreverend resurrection

Thats from Dorothy L Sayerss 1921 Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, as she describes the gruesome exhumation of a man who may have been murdered. The corpse is carried from the grave to the cemetery potting-shed in the middle of the night, so that a doctor can explore the entrails.

Old Nate Birge was chewing on a splinter of wood and watching the moon come up lazily out of the old cemetery in which nine of his daughters were lying, only two of whom were dead.

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