Exact site of Burke`s lodging house, 1828

The West Port area was once home to the lodging house where William Burke and William Hare turned murder into a business in eighteen twenty-eight. Here, in the crowded slums of Tanner’s Close, the two Irish laborers realized that a lodger who died of natural causes could be sold to medical anatomists for a significant profit. They soon chose to stop waiting for death, luring vulnerable people into the house, plying them with whisky, and suffocating them. This specific method of killing, designed to leave the bodies unmarked and fresh for dissection, became known as burking.