It wasn’t supposed to be anything unusual. A routine restoration project inside Benjamin Franklin House—the place where Benjamin Franklin lived for years while in London.

Then they found a bone.

At first, it didn’t mean much. Old buildings turn up strange things all the time. But as the work continued, more pieces surfaced. Not one skeleton, but fragments. A lot of them.

By the time they stopped, over a thousand bone fragments had been recovered, representing multiple individuals. Some of the remains showed clear signs of cutting and drilling. These weren’t just buried bodies. They had been handled—studied, even.

It’s the kind of discovery that immediately raises questions. Why were there human remains under the house? And how did they end up there?

The answer has less to do with crime and more to do with how medicine worked in the 1700s.

At the time, a man named William Hewson had been living and working in the same building. Hewson was an anatomist, focused on studying the human body in ways that were still developing and, in many cases, restricted. Dissection wasn’t widely permitted, and legal access to bodies was limited.

So people in his position worked around those limits.

Bodies were often obtained through informal or outright illegal means. Once used for study or teaching, there wasn’t a formal system for handling the remains. In some cases, they were buried nearby—quietly, and without much documentation.

That’s what investigators believe happened here. The basement of the house functioned as a kind of private anatomy workspace, where Hewson conducted research and taught students. When the work was done, the remains were buried on-site.

Franklin’s role in this is less clear, but most historians agree he likely knew what was happening. There’s no strong evidence that he was directly involved in the dissections, but it’s difficult to imagine he was completely unaware.

The discovery feels strange now because it sits at the intersection of two ideas we don’t usually connect: a well-known historical figure and the realities of early scientific research. But at the time, this kind of work—while hidden—was part of how medical knowledge moved forward.

What was found under the house wasn’t evidence of violence in the way people first assumed. It was evidence of a period when progress came with fewer rules, less oversight, and a different sense of what was acceptable.

It doesn’t make the discovery any less unusual.

But it does explain it.