Some people collect lighters, others - miniature alcohol bottles, still others - postage stamps.

And there are those who collect human remains, writes "Telegraph".

Quite seriously.

And as most collectors are so addicted to this hobby that they will do anything to get a "rare specimen" - skeleton of a crippled person, skull of a giant or a dwarf, etc.

The abduction of corpses dates back to the Middle Ages.

It is associated with both healing and practicing spells.

In the sorcerer's arsenal there are various rites with different parts of human bodies.

A human thigh bone rubbed in wine was once thought to be of great help in rheumatism, and skull dust to cure epilepsy.

Of course, stealing corpses has always been a pretty risky business.

Kidnappers were caught, sometimes beaten to death at the crime scene, jailed, burned at the stake, or hanged.

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In 1300, an official church ban was imposed on the use of corpses on the grounds that desecration of the dead body harmed the immortal soul of the person.

The greatest peak of corpse theft was in the period from 1750 to 1830. During this time, numerous medical schools were already in operation.

Future medics simply have nothing to practice on.

In Britain for a long time it was allowed to use only the bodies of criminals, but they were catastrophically in short supply.

The shortage of dead bodies accordingly raised their price.

The kidnapping of corpses became a profitable trade - for just one body they paid up to 70 dollars.

The threat of abduction of the remains of loved ones forced the relatives of the dead, in turn, to invent various devices to protect the graves.

The simplest way was to temporarily place a huge stone or a specially prepared iron cage on the grave.

Wealthier people hired guards who guarded the grave in special booths.

Sometimes at night, explosions could be heard from the cemetery.

In the morning, they found torn corpses of kidnappers near the graves.

This happened because of special explosive devices placed at the request of the relatives.

Some of the graves were literally mined.

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Laws against body snatchers varied greatly from country to country.

In England, corpse hunters could breathe easy, because the theft of corpses there was not considered a capital crime, they only had to steal the dead body naked... The thing is that only the theft of clothes and jewelry from graves was punishable by prison .

A typical example is the case against a kidnapper, who during the search found 30 dead bodies.

They managed to sentence him to seven years only for stealing the cloth cover of one of the dead.

It is believed that the end of this sinister craft was put by two Edinburgh people - Burke and Hare.

They decided it wasn't worth desecrating graves at night and being on the lookout for getting caught as they pulled out another corpse.

Instead, they started killing people and selling their corpses.

The sinister business of the two was profitable.

They were caught only after delivering dozens of "fresh corpses" to the dissecting table. The criminal affair received a great response. In 1832 in England it was decided to officially secure 600 corpses a year for research and teaching purposes. Other countries also began to look for ways to solve this problem. At the end of the 19th century, in most civilized countries, as a result of the measures taken, corpse thieves were left without "work".

It seemed that with the solution to the problem of supplying corpses for student training and research purposes, the gravediggers would disappear.

But even nowadays one sometimes hears about such a practice.

Mentally ill people suffering from necrophilia fool around with the corpses of women and girls they liked.

The dead are buried with brass wedding rings and crowns removed, so as not to arouse the unhealthy interest of prospectors.

However, the most exotic are the cases of abducted human remains for the purpose of obtaining a ransom.

The abduction of the body of the Italian rich man Salvatore Mataresi received a wide response at the time.

But the greatest resonance in the world is caused by the life's work of the Bulgarian Kuncho Kunev in collaboration with the Pole Roman Starek.

On March 1, 1978, the two exhumed Charlie Chaplin's remains from a cemetery near Corsier-sur-Veve, Switzerland, and offered his widow Una a ransom of half a million Swiss francs.

Her first reaction is to reject the "offer". She declares: "I'm sorry, my man is in heaven and in my heart".

With great difficulty, the police managed to persuade the widow to enter into negotiations with the kidnappers in order to establish the location of the call.

Thus the adventurers were detected and arrested.

At first they intended to simply bet that they had exhumed the corpse by digging a deep pit.

Only time was against them.

The rain quickly filled the hole with softened earth and water.

They had to remove the coffin, which weighed 240 kilograms, and carry it to a car van.

The abductors were from Zrevania, both of them worked in a car repair shop.

Therefore, although difficult, they coped with this task.

The grave with Chaplin's remains was buried in a wheat field next to Lake Geneva, after which they took the next step of contacting the widow.

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Such crimes, of course, are not a mass phenomenon.

But corpse snatchers are still seriously feared in Haiti.

Here the Haitian Bokors (voodoo magicians) step into that role.

There are beliefs that some of them are capable of reviving the dead and turning them into zombies, a kind of bio-robots, silently performing any work.

The zombie phenomenon is completely real.

With this detail that some researchers are of the opinion that bokors revive only those who have drugged with special herbal potions and brought to a state of pretended death.

In any case, the local residents are very afraid that a deceased loved one of them can be turned into such a terrible creature, devoid of memory and will.

That is why they do everything they can to avoid such a possibility.

Security measures are sometimes drastic.

Some bury the deceased face down, nailing the jaw to the bottom of the coffin.

Others pierce the body with a knife, thinking that this will thwart the possibility of it coming back to life and turning into a zombie.

Still others make imposing concrete sarcophagi above the graves.

Still others appoint guards until the body decomposes.