The Howff continued to outrage public sensibilities long after its closure.
There was big interest in my last blog on the famous Dundee graveyard, so I looked further into our archives and found that, within months of the last burial, the place had become a den of impurity.
Men and women made it a place of rendezous where scenes were exhibited that a Dundee Advertiser correspondent could not bring himself to describe.
The perpetrators of these deeds seemed to glory in their shame. They made no pretence to conceal themselves.
Daily the district police officer and the gravedresser had to drive the cavorters from the ground.
There was a second group of people who made the Howff a meeting place after burials had ceased.
These were the whisky-drinking card players who lay on top of grave slabs to gamble and speak coarsely.
They bawled out at the pitch of their voices, cursing and swearing and using the most revolting language, according to the paper.
On my trawl through the archives I came across the name of Geordie Mill, the long-time gravedigger of the Howff.
Towards the end of the 19th century he was eulogised in some publications as a great character and servant of the town.
But there is a hint of somethng darker about Geordie Mill, dating from the time of the resurrectionists.
I’ll be digging into this and trying to bring you more about Geordie in my next print column on Tuesday, February 4.
I suspect he may have been a victim of the hysteria that surrounded the mass of burials following the cholera epidemic. But in the 1830s a poem did the rounds alleging Geordie’s deal with Edinburgh medics.
I will tweet any early findings @C_CFerguson.