Burial Stones

One of the big stories this week is the vandalism of Stonehenge. If you haven’t heard, two protestors thought it was a good idea to spray orange paint on the historic site. They were both arrested, and the authorities will decide what their civil punishment will be. But I wonder if the protestors thought of the other consequences that might occur from desecrating these sacred stones.

First, they might not have realized that Stonehenge is a burial ground. According to an article at PBS.org, “…new research, though, suggests that the site was used for burying cremated remains for at least 500 years.

“It’s now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages,” archeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield in England told the New York Times.”

So, what happens when you mess with burial stones? Here are just a few examples:

This is from a forum conversation about this very topic: “A town in north MS decided they would build houses in a cemetery. They took all the tombstones and dumped them in a gully. My great-grandmother was buried there.

My grandmother sent one of my brothers to put the marker back on the grave. They moved it many times, and all my brothers had to dig the grave marker out of the gully. Finally, my grandmother told the townspeople not to move it again.

My sister and I were doing genealogy and asked my dad to show us her gravestone. We couldn’t find the marker, but when we turned to go, my sister’s foot slipped on the gravestone. Of all the people buried in that cemetery, only one marker remained.

My dad told me that everyone responsible for removing the tombstones died or suffered great misfortune. In my family, we were taught as children to respect the dead.”

A very wise thing to teach children!

Another entry from that same conversation: “My sister and I lived in a mobile home park in our 20s. We were walking through the woods behind our place and found about 20 tombstones, just thrown out into the woods!!! Apparently, we were living in a graveyard. A lot of “weirdness” happened in that park; when we found the stones, it made sense why!

My stepmother had her church set the stones up in her church’s graveyard. Moved, but at least they weren’t lying out in the woods.”

My Haunted Library.com tells the story of Cheesman Park, which had been the City Cemetery in Denver, Colorado.

“The land that became Cheesman Park originally belonged to the Arapahoe Indians and was possibly a sacred burial ground.

General William Larimer didn’t care much about that when he jumped a claim and founded the city of Denver.  In 1858, he created the 320-acre Mount Prospect Cemetery.

The cemetery was segregated by religion and ethnicity.  Paupers and criminals took up the southwest corner.  There was a section for Chinese immigrants, Catholics, and Jewish people.  The wealthy were interred up on top of the hill.

Unfortunately, the increasing number of criminals, undesirables, and paupers being buried in Mount Prospect helped it earn some other nicknames as well, such as “Old Boneyard” and “Boot Hill.”

The U.S. Government discovered that the cemetery was actually on federal land based on an 1860 treaty with the Arapahoe Indians and sold the land back to the City of Denver for $200 in 1872.  Mount Prospect changed its name to City Cemetery.

By this time, the cemetery was in disrepair: headstones were toppled in places, and cattle grazed among the graves.  Some families and groups maintained their sections of the cemetery, but other parts became increasingly dilapidated.

By 1890, the City Cemetery was an eyesore, and Denver received permission from Congress to use the land as a park.  City Cemetery was promptly renamed Congress Park. Families had just 90 days to move their loved one’s remains to another cemetery, usually Riverside or Fairmount.  

There were so many Roman Catholic folks buried in the Catholic section, however, that the mayor sold that land to the Denver Diocese. It became Mt. Calvary Cemetery and later the Denver Botanic Gardens.

Because so many bodies were left unclaimed in City Cemetery – probably due to the fact that many were criminals, vagrants, and unknowns – Denver hired an undertaker to start digging them up and moving them to Riverside.  E.P. McGovern would earn $1.90 for each body he boxed.  In 1893, McGovern started removing the corpses. 

And tales of hauntings began. 

People living in the palatial houses nearby reported seeing ghostly figures that would knock on their windows and doors and then vanish. Moaning sounds rose up from the excavated cemetery at night.  One gravedigger, who was also allegedly looting the graves, felt a hand touch him on the shoulder while he was working. He ran away in fright and never came back to the job.

The worst was yet to come.  McGovern realized he could make a bigger profit by using child-sized caskets instead of full-sized adult ones.  He hacked up the bodies, often mixing the bones of multiple bodies together and using as many as three caskets for one body.  Onlookers watching the exhumation swooped in for a little discreet – or not so discreet – grave robbing.  Body parts lay everywhere.

Fortunately, a local newspaper, the Denver Republican, got wind of the story, and its headline on March 19, 1893, read “The Work of Ghouls!” 

Denver Mayor Rogers quickly terminated McGovern’s contract after the Health Commissioner investigated the debacle, and the city put up a wooden fence around the cemetery.  In 1894, grading started for the park even though the rest of the bodies hadn’t been removed and some graves still stood open, left that way from McGovern’s hack job.  The park was finally finished in 1907, leaving as many as 2,000 corpses still buried beneath its grounds.

 …Some visitors report feeling either a sense of terrible sadness or anxiety there.  Small wonder, given the desecration of so many graves and displacement of so many bodies.

Others claim that when they lie down on the park-like grounds, they feel as if they are being held down by an unseen force and are almost unable to get up.

At night, apparitions of a singing woman and those of small children playing are said to wander the park, vanishing on approach.  The outlines of old gravestones eerily appear to frighten other nighttime visitors.  Some people say they heard a terrifying susurration of ghostly voices coming from the fields where graves once stood open.”

I’m not planning on picnicking in Cheesman Park any time soon – how about you? (By the way, great word – susurration – in the article. It means whispering, murmuring, or rustling.)

Then, of course, there is the final nail on the proverbial coffin (forgive the pun)—Poltergeist (1982), based VERY loosely on the true story of the Herrman House. (Have you ever noticed that a lot of very scary movies are based on homes in New York?)  

Anyway, according to SCREENRANT.com, “On February 3, 1958, in Seaford, New York, James Hermann returned home after work to his wife Lucille telling him an unbelievable story. According to Lucille, she and their two teenage children heard popping noises throughout the house earlier in the afternoon. While investigating, they discovered various common household substances uncapped and placed upside down. In addition, all the bottles were suddenly warm to the touch. A bottle of Holy Water was spilled all over a bedroom dresser. Five days later, the popping phenomenon repeated itself when James Hermann was home to witness it. Police were called to investigate the Poltergeist activity, but they couldn’t determine the cause.

Soon after the incidents began, the Poltergeist story went public, and the events were televised, becoming a nationwide sensation. After going public, more incidents occurred, and James decided to move his family out of the home temporarily. Upon returning home, things escalated with larger, heavier items being moved and manipulated. Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University joined the investigation and determined that the presence of the hormonal teenagers may have somehow caused the poltergeist activity. All activity stopped on March 10, 1958, after nearly 70 unexplained events were witnessed by the Herrmanns and others from February to March.

The Poltergeist activity at the Hermann home became the inspiration for one of the most iconic and influential paranormal films in history. Although much of the script is embellished, viewers can certainly recognize the parallels between the Spielberg movie and the Hermann story.”

In the movie, the reason for the paranormal disturbance was that the subdivision developers decided to build over a cemetery rather than move it to a different spot. And, of course, bad things happened.

Bottom line—don’t mess around with burial stones. Your actions may come back to haunt you, literally.

Happy Friday!!!