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A soldier's grave mystery

Written by DeadGirl
Saturday, 24 June 2006
By J. D. Mullane Bucks County Courier Times Philadelphia--It angers Fred Hems that a deserter could be among the honored dead in Bristol Cemetery. “Deserter — that’s what he is. A-W-O-L!” Hems hissed over the phone. He has no incontrovertible proof. But he has clues, which he first showed me four years ago. Now, he said he’s on the verge of a breakthrough in the case. You decide. About 10 years ago, Hems, a Korean War veteran, noticed a grave in a portion of the cemetery reserved for Bristol’s American Legion Robert W. Bracken Post 382. The grave was peculiar because its stone marker was blank. “Who was in there? That’s what I wanted to know,” Hems said. When he asked at the Bracken Post, either nobody knew or no one would talk. Cemetery caretakers had no record of a burial in that spot. Yet, Hems noticed the gravesite was concave. Was someone there? Hems’ brother, Ellsworth, provided a clue. In the mid-1950s, a longtime member of the Bracken Post died. Ellsworth was among the honor guard who escorted the man’s remains from Bristol to a U.S. Army cemetery in New Jersey. Shortly after that, the Army called Bracken and said the dead man’s military records showed he was absent without official leave from service during World War I. The man’s family had 48 hours to remove the body or the Army would leave the deserter’s remains outside the cemetery gates. What happened next is sketchy. Hems said he’s been told by older veterans that a local undertaker quietly buried the man in Bristol Cemetery. Bracken commanders at the time may have approved, because they wanted to spare the family public embarrassment. In recent years Hems nagged the Bracken members to investigate, but he could never get a second to his motion to exhume the grave. In a compromise, Bracken had cemetery representatives insert metal probes into the gravesite. The probes did not contact anything. Hems would not drop the case. If the grave was empty, who put the stone marker on it? Why was it blank? This was resolved in 2002 when a Bracken officer admitted that he had obtained a discarded stone from the Department of Veterans Affairs. If Hems was right, the officer said, he didn’t want the grave disturbed. Hems’ brother, Ellsworth, stunned him in 2002 when he said he wanted to be buried in the spot. “I asked my brother, ‘Why do you want to be buried with a deserter?’ He said ‘I’ll keep an eye on him.’” When Ellsworth Hems died in 2003, his remains were placed in the mystery grave, per his request. “My brother was cremated, so they only dug out a small portion of the grave [site] to put his ashes,” Hems said. Without a full exhumation, Hems remains convinced the deserter is there. He has a file on the suspect. (He gave me the dead man’s name, but I’m withholding it, since nothing has been proven.) He has a photograph of the man, knows that he worked as a restaurant dishwasher in the 1930s and ’40s, and even knows the man frequently spoke of becoming an actor. The mystery will be resolved, he said. “I talked with a guy, an old timer. He told me ‘Fred, you’re right about the deserter. He’s in there and I have the documents to prove it,’ ” Hems said. However, the old timer doesn’t want to be caught in a controversy. “He told me that when he dies, the papers will be sent to me,” Hems said. Stay tuned. http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/219-05282006-662693.html

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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

Taphophiles Speak

Have you decided on eternal repose?

	earthen burial
	entombment
	cremation
	donation to science
	cyrogenically frozen
	you mean I'm still alive?

Quote Repository

“To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?”

Logan Pearsall Smith