On Halloween night in the year 1900, a “crowd of medical students” from the University of Michigan Department of Medicine and Surgery raced back to their dorms under the cover of darkness. With their devious plan implemented, and their filthy clothes – soiled from the dissecting room and their nocturnal adventure – now changed, each one dove straight into bed, eager for the coming of the dawn.

The following morning began just like any other. The medical department's janitor arrived early and proceeded to make his usual rounds, unlocking doors and tidying up as he went. But on entering the dissecting room, he noticed something was not right, something was missing. No, make that someone. During the night, “the crowd of medical students” had “spirited away” one of his cadavers.

Meanwhile, across campus, a college attendant made his way toward the university's main hall. As he approached the entrance, he spied something propped against the building's folding doors. It had an unnatural anthropomorphic silhouette and emitted a pungent odor that stung his eyes and nostrils. Drawing nearer, the attendant soon realized that there, ‘facing’ him, stood a “headless corpse of a woman” – the stolen cadaver – her body “still swathed in the antiseptic bandages” of the dissecting room.

Exactly how many students or staff witnessed the beheaded cadaver before it was ‘spirited’ back to the spirits of the embalming tank is lost to history. However, the incident caused enough of a stir that it made both local and national news. Reports called it “a grewsome joke” by area medical students, one that set a new record for “Hallowe’en Pranks” – implying cadaveric hijinks of this nature were an annual occurrence at the University of Michigan. But it wasn't just the act itself that had everyone so upset this time. Tales circulated of a further transgression. For unlike previous medical mischiefs, rumor had it there was tangible proof of this year's macabre scene in the form of a photograph, “taken at sunrise” by one of the medical students.

As Horace Montgomery once wrote: “At the growing edge of human knowledge moral dilemmas multiply.” For a society to move forward, it must leave something of itself behind.