03/12/2026
Before he became a co**se himself, Simon Kracht was Louisville’s premier "resurrectionist," a Civil War nurse turned medical school janitor who spent his nights dragging fresh bodies out of Cave Hill Cemetery. While the city slept, Simon used a spade and a rope to haul cadavers to the University of Louisville for students to dissect, allegedly tossing the leftovers down a forgotten well on the outskirts of town. He was a criminal in the eyes of the law but a hero to the faculty, even surviving a high-profile arrest in 1872 when he was caught red-handed unloading four bodies from a wagon.
The irony of Simon’s life is that for a man who knew exactly how to handle a body, he botched his own exit. Driven by a terrible marriage and a bad bout of depression, he swallowed 25 grams of morphine after a heavy meal on a Tuesday night in 1875. He panicked and ran to the school for help, where doctors pumped his stomach and even zapped him with an induction coil. Unfortunately, the food in his stomach acted like a sponge for the o***m, releasing a steady, lethal drip that no amount of coffee or electricity could stop. By midnight, the man who spent his life digging up the dead finally stayed down.
