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Grave Robbing: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:Graverobber.png|link=Girl Genius|
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* In [[Arcanum]] You are required to dig up 2 graves (1 if you know where you are going) to beat the game. You can also dig up various other graves.
* One of the Imperial City sidequests in ''[[The Elder Scrolls]] IV: Oblivion'' sees you investigating a trader who sells stuff at ridiculously low prices. It turns out, his "goods" were actually supplied by the local grave digger gang.
* Quite a few ''Zelda'' games have Link go into tombs or graves to find items. One of the better known times is in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time]]'', when he goes into the former keeper of the Graveyard's tomb and races the ghost to get the hookshot (on the other hand, the ghost willingly hands it over, so does that count?) A more obvious example in ''[[The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask]]'' would be on the Third Day, when the keeper of ''that'' graveyard breaks into the Royal Family tomb and not only openly admits to Link that he is looking for treasure hidden there, he asks Link to help him.
* Tingle too has to steal from the dead in ''[[Freshly Picked Tingles Rosy Rupee Land]]''.
* One early quest in ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' requires you to rob the grave of a deceased legendary wizard so you can get the key to his tower. Humorously, before you can rob his grave, you have to win a grave robbing shovel from another enemy in the area called a grave rober (yes, it's supposed to be spelled like that, the area in question is the Misspelled Cemetary). And later on, you can fight grave rober zmobies, who keep trying to rob their OWN graves, and get pissed and attack you out of frustration because they keep failing to find anything to rob.
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* In ''[[Endstone]]'', [http://endstone.net/2009/03/30/issue-1-page-9/ what started the present-day story.]
* Done adorably in ''[[Frankie and Stein]]'' when Stein, armed with his book "Graverobbing for Dummies" goes a'hunting for the perfect parts with which to make a friend.
* ''[[Girl Genius (Webcomic)|Girl Genius]]'' [[Mad Scientist|mad scientists]] need bodies for the same reasons as ''[[Frankenstein]]'', so this was mentioned both in the continuity and [[Side
* In ''[[No Rest for The Wicked (Webcomic)|No Rest for The Wicked]]'', [http://www.forthewicked.net/archive/03-08.html they found Claire digging up what they thought was an old grave.] [http://www.forthewicked.net/archive/03-09.html They took her for a ghoul or some such, and didn't care what she was after in it.]
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== Real Life ==
* In Scotland back in the day, selling corpses to medical schools could be quite lucrative as mentioned in the article. Thus, many were obtained through not-so-legal methods.
** Not just Scotland, the practice was common in many countries. "Doctor riots", mobs beating up medical professionals after a grave had been found desecrated, occurred in several US cities in the nineteenth century. Scotland is most famous because of those jolly chaps [
** Still true today, as a number of U.S. cases have been in the news lately. Not just selling to medical schools, but also body parts such as bone, skin, and other organs to be transplanted into patients.
** Note that at the height of the British graverobbing trade, stealing the corpse itself wasn't actually against the law: officially, a dead body had no monetary value, so taking one wasn't a criminal offense. Stealing anything buried with the corpse ''was'' illegal, so graverobbers often stripped a body naked and threw everything it wore back into the coffin. This legal loophole existed because the government knew that medical schools needed bodies to study, so dragged their feet about closing it.
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* In South America, "dentista da meia-noite" (midnight dentistry) is a common practice in which the grave robber breaks into mausoleums and steals gold teeth from the corpses.
* Ed Gein, the infamous source of inspiration for [[Psycho|Norman Bates]], [[Silence of the Lambs|Jame Gumb]], and [[The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Film)|Leatherface]], exhumed bodies from graveyards and created trophies out of their bones and skin.
* The [[Values Dissonance|United States]] [
* Thanks to the recent economic recession (combined with a strong lack of morals,) some morticians have developed a new form of grave robbing: Cremating blocks of wood or burying 150 pounds of concrete or garbage, leaving the real bodies to rot in a storage shed, and charging the surviving family members for services rendered.
** [[Fridge Logic|Not sure how this gains anything,]] since the same amount of work (or more) is going into the fake burials. Then there's the smell and health hazards of the real bodies lying around.
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[[Category:Crime and Punishment Tropes]]
[[Category:Grave Robbing]]
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