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Headstone Found 2 Years Ago In Niantic Remains A Mystery

Written by DeadGirl
Monday, 03 July 2006
Headstone Found 2 Years Ago In Niantic Remains A Mystery Marker Was Discovered During Boardwalk Work By Karin Crompton 7/3/2006 New London Day East Lyme, CT â€” On a breezy day in May 2004, while construction workers building the Niantic Bay Boardwalk were excavating the lower part of an embankment near the train tracks, they scooped up an unexpected find: a headstone. The stone is white marble, somewhat dirtied but nearly flawless save for a missing chunk of the right-hand side. Chiseled into its face is the name of a woman who apparently lived during the late 1800s. Her name was Carrie, middle initial E. Because of the damage, the final letters of her last name are missing, but it appears to be Prentis. She lived from 1846 until 1914, if the dates are correct, and above a small bouquet of flowers chiseled into the headstone is the word â€œMother.â€ After two years no one, has found Carrie herself. Town Planner Meg Parulis said no bones were found in the area (the stone was found near the Hole In the Wall end of the boardwalk), and the state archaeologist has no records of the location being a burial ground. And it is unclear whether the woman lived in the region, or the state, at all. â€œTombstones show up in the most unusual places,â€ said Nick Bellantoni, the state archaeologist. â€œWe have found them in people's yards, under patios and during construction. We had a case in the Shelton police department where, after major flooding last year, two tombstones showed up on a riverbank and nobody had ever seen them before.â€ Turns out, Bellantoni said, the headstones had washed down from five miles upriver. Bellantoni said such finds are called â€œorphansâ€ and are more common than one might think. There's the one about the guy who bought a house in West Hartford in the winter, and when the snow began to melt in March, found a tombstone in his back yard. Bellantoni said that one wound up belonging to a man buried in Glastonbury. Another time, crews about to tear down an old Colonial found a tombstone in the house. That one was a goof â€” the carver had made a mistake. â€œThis may have happened (here),â€ Bellantoni said. â€œThey put the wrong date down and they canned the stone.â€ Often, families would erect one large monument to anchor a family plot and then discard the individual headstones. East Lyme Town Clerk Esther Williams said she found no record of a Carrie Prentis in the town's death records. At the Cedar Grove Cemetery in New London, there is a Carrie M. Prentis, but the middle initial is different and she died in 1943. At City Hall in New London, there is no Carrie Prentis in the death records for the years between 1913 and 1919. There is an Emma Prentis, however, listed in records as living from 1840 to 1918. â€œThese mysteries happen all the time,â€ said Ruth Brown, executive director of the Connecticut Gravestone Network, which works to preserve tombstones and cemeteries because of their historical significance. â€œBut it's odd. It's 1914, and in 1914, you'd suspect you could find it a little better.â€ Brown said she searched the Hale Collection, a record at the state library that indexes the state's cemeteries and tombstones. The work for the collection was largely completed during the 1930s, leading Brown to believe the headstone, if it had ever been used, went missing from its plot sometime prior to then. Brown said she also searched census data and came up empty. And she found nothing for the names Catherine or Caroline, nor from a Prentis family genealogy book. Brown said she forwarded the information to a friend who is a professional genealogist. Brown said this isn't the first time she's been stumped by a headstone in East Lyme. She said she was given a broken slate years ago that apparently was found along the Latimer Brook and was told the person sending it to her wanted to remain anonymous. Brown guessed the date as the 1700s and the woman's name â€” that one, too, was broken â€” as Lydia Sawyer. Maybe, Brown said, Carrie was an outcast, or someone had a vendetta against her. â€œIt could be as simple as somewhere, someone decided they really didn't like her, and in an act of viciousness, got rid of her stone when it fell over,â€ she said. â€œ... You'd be surprised how many people do that to try to remove someone from their family.â€ Â

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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

“The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

Ernest Becker