Four days after the Iroquois Theater fire, some victims' families failed to find their loved ones, despite multiple searches of morgues and hospitals. In their frustration, they turned to alternate location possibilities. One theory was that fire victims had been taken to the private homes of strangers for care. The idea was posted in the newspaper, but there was only one such incidence, that of two-ear-old Margaret Dee.

In time, all the families found their victims, with one remaining who was never identified. Immediately after the fire, confusion resulted from bodies being so badly injured that even husbands, parents, and children of the victims misidentified the remains or walked passed the corpse in morgues multiple times. One of the misidentified, the Greenwald boy, was entombed before the mix-up was discovered.

The titillating notion that Northwestern medical students had hidden away bodies was fueled by grief and desperation and rationalized by stories of body snatching for anatomy study in the early 1800s.

The irony of the accusation against Northwestern students was that several had performed heroically to help 35-50 people escape from the Iroquois. With help from painting contractors Charles Cubbon and Joe Leibert, they stretched a ladder, then a scaffolding plank, across Couch Place, for victims to crawl to safety. The students laid the victims in the recitation room, smothering their smoldering clothing and covering them with blankets to conceal immodest exposure.

A few victims were taken to hospitals and survived, but most of those who crossed the plank had been badly burned by the fireball and smoke inhalation. They died and were transported to morgues, but a few family members viewed bodies at Northwestern before beginning the circuit of hospitals and morgues.

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