On Halloween, workers dug up a headstone in Emily Dickinson's front yard.
This might explain that poem of hers that beginsBut exactly what Gen. Thomas Gilbert's headstone was doing under 18 inches of dirt in Dickinson's front yard has some experts stumped -- especially knowing his remains are buried in a nearby cemetery with a more ornate grave marker.
"What do you do with a used gravestone?" asked Jane Wald, the museum's executive director. "It might have been used as a step or used to cover a hole in the ground. We don't know exactly why it was placed there." [Link]
THE DISTANCE that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.
