‘Help, My Home’s on a Secret Burial Ground!’

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Home renovation can be an unsettling process. You might sledgehammer a wall and find a rotten joist. Or try to replace a socket only to expose ancient wiring that could easily catch fire. But sometimes, renovation can be downright terrifying. Instead of finding ho-hum structural problems, some overhauls unearth true houses of horrors—all sorts of nasty bits in the basements and backyards, more fitting for an undertaker than a DIY-er.

In an homage to Halloween, we bring you a few real-life “Poltergeist”-style stories of homes that once served as burial grounds before the living moved in. Read on … and be afraid. Be very afraid.

Who’s that girl?

In May, Ericka Karner and her husband decided to renovate their home in the Richmond District of San Francisco. When construction workers broke through a concrete floor in the garage, they found a tiny bronze coffin containing the remains of a 3-year-old girl.

Experts whom they consulted in the wake of this discovery believe she had died around 1870, and although her name remained a mystery, it was clear that she’d been lovingly interred. She was buried wearing a white christening dress with hand-stitched lace, her hair decorated with sprigs of lavender, while on her chest lay a rosary of eucalyptus seeds.

As news spread of this haunting discovery, the public clamored for answers. It turns out that back in the late 1800s, the Richmond District was full of cemeteries, but once the area was developed in the early 20th century, the graves were removed. Clearly, though, they forgot one. The “happy” ending? Bay Area residents banded together to give the young girl’s corpse a proper burial. She now rests in peace in Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma, CA.

Ben Franklin’s home was hiding bones, too

Ben Franklin—of Founding Fathers fame—lived in London as an ambassador for the colonies from 1757 to 1775. (He gave Britain the boot when he signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.) Cut to 2014, when Franklin’s house in England was getting a facelift while in the process of becoming a museum. That’s when construction worker Jim Field found a human thighbone sticking out of a dirt pit in the basement. A total of 1,200 bones were eventually dug up.

Is this a grim, murderous footnote on our favorite kite flyer? Nope. During his 18 years of tenancy, Franklin invited William Hewson to open an anatomy school in his home. Slight problem: Dissection was illegal at the time. Dead bodies were illegally supplied by “resurrectionists,” aka actual body snatchers who stole the cadavers of the recently deceased for anatomy experiments. But getting rid of the bones presented yet another problem. Hewson apparently got around this obstacle by using the basement like we all do—as a place to store stuff we can’t quite part with.

Criminals need to be buried somewhere, too

Convicted criminals who end up dead or executed don’t always have family or friends who give a hoot about giving them a proper burial to say goodbye. Still, their remains have to go somewhere, right?

In 1873, prison warden Louis Carpenter at the Auburn Correctional Facility in New York bought a parcel of land at 63 Fitch Ave. and started secretly burying inmates in this unofficial cemetery in the dead of night. Newspaper articles around that time describe neighbors peeking through curtains at secretive prison wardens lowering pine caskets into the ground, containing the remains of over 300 prisoners, including Leon Czolgosz, the man who assassinated President William McKinley.

Warden Carpenter was supposed to move the deceased convicts when he sold the property. But he clearly was a criminal himself, and left the dead in this forgotten plot, which were unearthed just this June by Eric Johnson, a hapless homeowner who was leveling the area to build a swing set for his 2-year-old son. His discovery raised concerns over just how widespread this secret cemetery was. As Fitch Avenue resident Leo Shaw pointed out to the New York Times, “Maybe that’s why my vegetables taste funny.” Ew.

Skeletons in the … attic?

Skeletons aren’t only found buried underground, but in attics, too. In September, New London, OH, resident Cortney Hoffer was rooting around upstairs above her garage for a hair dryer when, instead, she encountered human bones—79 in total, dated to be around 30 years old. Plus, “I’m not 100% convinced that we found everything,” a cop told Fox News. “There’s so much junk in that garage.”

So where’d these bones come from? That remains a mystery, although the home’s previous owner was none other than the mayor of New London himself, Darwin Anderson, who had owned the property from 1982 until his death in 2015. Another possibility was that the home was also used as a doctor’s office, which was torn down in 1998 after a fire. So, the plot thickens … but no answers have come to light so far. Here’s the hoping someone unearths an answer, so to speak.

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