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West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark

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Cemetery workers say finding human bones is spooky, not uncommon PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Monday, 01 November 2004
Cemetery workers say finding human bones is spooky, not uncommon

October 29, 2004

VICKSBURG (AP) - Susan Mims of Vicksburg just wanted some photographs of headstones for her son's school project. The human bones she found in Cedar Hill Cemetery were more than she had bargained for. "I just happened to look down and at first I didn't think it was anything, but then I looked a little closer and I realized it was definitely a leg bone," Mims said.

The bone was in fresh dirt placed over a grave from 1963 as part of routine leveling and maintenance work. Nearby, more fresh dirt on a grave from 1867 contained other, smaller bones.

"It just really scared me," Mims said.


Lee Anthony Moore, a 15-year employee at the cemetery and supervisor there, said the bones must have been in soil moved from elsewhere in the cemetery.

He said that's not unusual in the 167-year-old municipal graveyard.

"The first time I ran across that, it spooked me. But after years of being here and running across it a couple more times, I got to the point where it doesn't bother me," Moore said. "I just put them back."

Charles Riles, owner of Riles Funeral Home and author of a book about the cemetery, said it's not uncommon for grave diggers to run into older remains because there are thousands of unmarked graves at Cedar Hill. He said the cemetery has mass graves from a yellow fever epidemic in the late 1800s. In the early years, burials were held without authorization and no records were kept or markers placed.

"In a lot of that cemetery, and I mean a lot, there were numerous burials from yellow fever," Riles said.

He said when the city was quarantined in 1878, undertakers went from house to house once a week collecting the dead and taking them to the cemetery. They were then buried in large, unmarked graves. If there were caskets at all, they were wood and have long since decomposed.

After Mims found the bones Tuesday, Moore gathered them and said he planned to find out where that soil came from so he can put the bones back in the same area.

Moore said if he couldn't find out where the dirt came from he would find "a quiet corner in the cemetery" to rebury the remains.

The chance of a marked grave being disturbed is remote and modern graves have burial containers of hardwood or metal, often enclosed in concrete or metal vaults.


http://www.picayuneitem.com/articles/2004/10/29/news/17bones.txt
 
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