Warehouse 13 Artifact Database Wiki
Warehouse 13 Artifact Database Wiki
William Burke’s Quill

Origin

The Burke and Hare Murders

Type

Writing Quill

Effects

Suffocation

Downsides

Eventual insanity

Activation

Using

Collected by

Warehouse 13

Section

Alcatraz-3563

Aisle

56265-5098

Shelf

34487-0516-478

Date of Collection

1940

[Source]


Origin[]

In 1928 medical schools were in dire need of cadavers to learn on. William Burke and William Hare came up with a plan to obtain dead bodies and sell them to a local doctor for dissection at his anatomy lectures. Scottish law required that the bodies be only from those who had died in prison, killed themselves or from orphans. Hare ran a local hotel and after a lodger passed away he went to Burke for advice, it was Burke who came up with the plan to sell the body to the local school. When another lodger moved in, who looked like she was going to die soon as well, the pair decided to help her along by killing her. In order to preserve the bodies they killed her and the next fourteen other victims by suffocating them in their sleep. When arrested the police declared Burke to be behind the spree and sentenced him to hang. The crowd was rumored to be twenty five thousand large and his autopsy was the first to be witness enmass. At one point the doctor in charge, Alexander Monro, wrote a note to the public. The note, which was written in Burke's own blood, read "This is written in the blood of Wm Burke, who was hanged at Edinburgh. This blood was taken from his head." Burke was so hated because his murder scheme took elderly from all families even if they weren’t sick.

Effects[]

Writing someone’s full name with it causes suffocation. Overuse causes insanity by way of seeing dead bodies animating