In the Beginning There Were Missing Pages

Performance artist Berenice Rarig borrowed her husband's 1863 family Bible for a special project.

She opened the Bible to the beginning, where illuminated letters started the first book, Genesis, where God brings order out of chaos.

Her hands grasped the gilt-edged pages.

And pulled.

Rarig knew her fellow artists would appreciate the value of a family heirloom. And they would understand how much it would cost her to deconstruct it.

Rarig tore the book of Genesis into one-inch squares. She wove the squares into scarlet silk fibers, making a 20-foot cloth that floats with words and glows with light. [Link]

Deconstructing the Bible

I have mixed feelings about this story. Jack Bacon, the pastor of an Oregon church, got a rare 1599 Geneva Bible as a Father's Day gift from his son, who had picked it up at a yard sale for a buck. Now he's selling the Bible off, page by page, to raise money for repairs to his church.

"I opened the binding and found some hair. Wouldn't that be something if that was Pilgrim hair?" he asks.

There are also burn marks, souvenirs of fireside readers, and mistakes from early printing presses, Bacon says.

"Some of the lines slant down and then come back up," he says. Inside the distressed tome are messages in faded handwritten script that details births, deaths, marriages and other important milestones. He recently discovered a note from an early owner of the bible, Helen Crombie.

"My daughter Jean Stephen was born June 26th one thousand seventeen hundred and twenty eight. Likewise my son William Stephen was borne July the eighth one thousand seven hundred and thirty years."

If he can find Crombie's "great, great, great, great grandchildren," he'd like to send them a few pages of their ancestor's Bible, Bacon says. [Link]

The pastor's intentions are noble, but I can't help be reminded of the horrible practice of slicing up atlases and selling off the maps. Even a heavily damaged 1599 Geneva Bible is worth more than the sum of its parts. Though perhaps not enough cash to fix a church roof.

A Meticulous Grave Robber

The body of Sarah Symonds was dug up in Hillsborough, N. H., sometime around Halloween.

Someone dug up her coffin and her remains, leaving behind only a few shards of wood, a meticulously dug hole -- and a mystery for the local police.

"It was dug in a very strange manner. It's perfect," said Hillsborough Police Chief Brian Brown. "You'd have to see it. The sides are all squared. The bottom's level."

"We just don't have any answers right now," he said.

Gilman Shattuck, 80, a resident who is active in the local historical society, said he had researched Symonds since the incident had hit the news and learned she was born on March 29, 1794. Her headstone listed June 18, 1824 as her date of death. She was never married. [Link]

Graveyard Revisionism

Richard Hill has been arrested in North Carolina for desecrating the grave of his ancestor, who served on both sides of the Civil War War of Northern Aggression.

According to the warrant, Hill, apparently a sixth-generation descendant, "tore down and removed a tombstone on the grave" of Stephen S. Shook, who is buried in a family cemetery behind Upper Laurel Baptist Church near Mars Hill, "then replaced the stone with a Confederate stone."

According to the warrant, Shook was "a Union soldier who died on June 10, 1902."

But before that he was a Confederate, the family agrees. [Link]

You Can't Judge a Book While It's Covered in That

About 2,300 leather-bound ledgers were found in a barn in McHenry County, llinois, that may contain historical tax records and property assessments. But nobody wants to open them to find out.

That’s because the books came into contact with raccoons, pigeons and other critters that left their marks.

While the animals didn’t shred or otherwise physically destroy the books, they did defecate on them, [county Records Manager Bill] Draths said. [Link]

Standish Home Damaged by Yobs

The ancestral home of one of the Pilgrims is in dire need of a makeover.

The 17th century lodge at Duxbury Park, off Bolton Road, has been neglected for years, and yobs have smashed windows, scrawled graffiti on the walls and started fires.

The lodge, a former coach house and an ancient barn are all that remain of the ancestral home of the Standish family.

Their most famous son Myles Standish, born 1587, became the military captain of the Pilgrims and was one of the first settlers to land in America. [Link]

Get Your Heirlooms Smashed on TV

On the Chinese version of Antiques Roadshow, sentimental value counts for nothing.

Losers go away not just disappointed that their "family heirloom" has turned out to be a dud. At the end, if a panel of experts decree it to be a forgery, the host wields a golden hammer and smashes it to smithereens.

Before the experts pass verdict, the audience gets to vote - a red, smiling face for genuine, a blue, sad one for those they would consign to the hammer. [Link]

Contestants on "Collector's World" can opt out before receiving the final judgment, but have to sign a contract allowing the destruction of their item if they want to receive an appraisal.

They'd Pave Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot

This unusual notice appeared Tuesday in a UK newspaper:

RELATIVES are being invited to collect their headstones from a graveyard which will be turned into a car park.

Bolton Council Planning Committee gave the go-ahead for Lee Lane United Reformed Church in Horwich to be turned into 11 two-bedroom apartments with parking spaces. [Link]

The decision was not without its critics.

Ashes to Asphalt

This is not the way you want your relatives to end up. An undertaking outfit in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, has been accused of mishandling the cremated remains of its clients.

Undertakers have been accused of using human ashes to grit the path outside their funeral home.

It is also claimed staff disposed of ashes which were later to be claimed by a bereaved family by accident.

One worker said that, when the family arrived, their urn was filled with ashes which had lain unclaimed in the office for 50 years. [Link]

A Bad Place to Store Your Photos

Just a month after this strange episode, unusual items have been found in a second Yonkers, N. Y., cemetery.

Yonkers cops are investigating the bizarre desecration of a freshly dug grave after a cemetery worker discovered four smoked fishes - gutted and stuffed with photographs of unidentified people - inside the tomb.

The fish were each wrapped in black cloth and had several spices accompanying them. [Link]

You Can't Get Blood From a Stone, But You Can Repossess It

John Tate failed to pay the £740 he owed for the headstone on his 14-year-old son's grave. So, the memorial company repossessed it.

The stone was put in place at Joe's grave in Holy Cross Cemetery, Wallsend, on December 5 last year.

But on Friday a worker was spotted hammering at the foundations and breaking the stone free before taking it away.

Greg Brown, 60, owner of Brown Memorials, said it was the first time in 40 years of business he had been forced to remove a headstone.

"I've been doing this 40 years and this is the only occasion I've had to take a headstone down. The last thing I want is to remove it, I'd prefer to be paid." [Link]

Sounds Like My Last Birthday Party

A few headstones were toppled in a Yonkers, N. Y., cemetery Tuesday night. It was the objects left behind by the vandals—including an animal heart—that made the crime as nonsensical as it was senseless.

The items left among the headstones included more than a dozen unlit black candles, black handkerchiefs and a photograph of an unidentified man wearing a suit and smiling. The animal heart had pins in it.

Nearby, police found a partially buried statue of a rooster, wrapped in a bandanna with a pair of underwear around its neck. [Link]

And I thought that leaving a rooster statue half buried in a cemetery wrapped in a bandanna with a pair of underwear around its neck was a tradition only in my family.

Update: It appears that this was a Palo Mayombe hex ceremony, and that the smiling man in the photograph was the target of a curse. He can rest easy, though: it only works if you use a live rooster.

It Was Due to Natural Causes

A Nova Scotia news channel should have consulted the man in charge before reporting vandalism at his cemetery. The report triggered a flood of visitors worried that their relatives' stones had been damaged.

"It’s like there’s a funeral going on 24 hours today," Gate of Heaven Cemetery supervisor Raymond Coolen said in an interview Monday afternoon.

ATV News reported that several headstones had been toppled by vandals last weekend. But rather than roaming hooligans, the damage was caused by Mother Nature.

"I’ve been watching these stones fall now for a couple of months," said Mr. Coolen, explaining that frost heave is to blame for the fallen headstones. [Link]

Sometimes They Fight Back

I must be slipping. I don't know how I missed reporting this in January—the latest in a string of tombstone attacks where revenge was clearly the motive.

Police in Lilburn, Ga., were called to the cemetery adjacent to Luxomni Baptist Church at 2:40 a.m. one morning in January to investigate reports of a man screaming for about two hours. They found Ezekiel Dejesus-Rodriguez, 24, pinned under a gravestone (with a bloody, broken leg) and said he had apparently been knocking over headstones for fun until one fell on him. [Link (original story (Thanks, John!))]

Is Nothing Sacred When Selling Soda?

A Dr Pepper promotion that involved finding a hidden coin worth $10,000 in Boston's 347-year-old Granary Burying Ground has been called off after city officials locked the gates to prevent contestants from entering.

Cadbury Schweppes PLC, which makes Dr Pepper, canceled the Boston portion of the 23-city coin hunt promotion yesterday after acknowledging it had stashed the coin, in a leather pouch, amid the remains of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and other historic figures. The coin is still missing.

"The coin is inside the park," Cadbury Schweppes spokesman Greg Artkop told the Globe. "We agree with the Park Department's decision to lock the gates. We wouldn't do anything to desecrate this cemetery." [Link]

... except hide a valuable prize inside and invite people to trample the graves of Boston's ancient dead—all to sell a few more cases of a beverage I wouldn't drink on a dare.

The Sitting Bull Memorial Snack Bar

Sitting Bull's descendants want his remains removed from South Dakota to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana because they object to the "improvements" planned for his burial place.

The catalyst for the great-grandchildren's decision apparently was a proposal by the nonprofit Sitting Bull Monument Foundation, which recently purchased the grave site from a private owner. According to its Web site, the foundation's plans include preservation and protection of the grave site and development of an educational and cultural center and museum. It would also include riverfront recreational development, an amphitheater, snack bar, restaurant and gift shop. [Link]

Ellis Island to Be Destroyed

An important part of the "Ellis Island experience" is only visible at low tide. The ferry that shuttled millions of immigrants from the island to Manhattan between 1904 to 1954—the Ellis Island—sank at its moorings in 1968.

For nearly 40 years, the remains of the ship have wasted away just a few hundred feet from where boatloads of tourists hop on and off newer ferries to visit the museum and trace the paths of their ancestors. At low tide, the corroded hull of the Ellis Island can still be spotted poking through the surface.

In June, the park service intends to have divers slice the ferry into pieces that can be hoisted onto barges, park service officials said. “There’s not much there at all,” said David L. Conlin, an underwater archaeologist for the park service. But he added that there were “a couple of pieces we’re very interested in,” including the engine and propellers. [Link]

Millions of Americans have a personal connection to this vessel, including me. I assume that my great-grandparents were among her passengers, as neither was a strong swimmer. Now that I know she stills exists, it's a shame to see her go.

You can read more about the Ellis Island here, here, and especially here.

The Pen is Mightier Than the Pocketknife

Bob Battle—then a young newspaper reporter—remembers hiding in Nashville's City Cemetery one night in the mid-1950s, waiting for vandals to arrive.

I only had a big Boker pocketknife on me — no guns and nothing else to protect me. I didn't even own a pistol, much less know how to fire one at a "target."

But I squeezed that knife as if it had been a loaded revolver!

Suddenly, there was movement nearby!

Sticking my head around the monument, I yelled, "You come one step closer and I'll shoot to kill. This thing in my hand is loaded for BEAR!"

Oh, my voice was trembling. What a liar I was! Could the vandal tell? I wondered. [Link]

Vandal Gets the Roodhouse Blues

A teenager was tipping tombstones in Roodhouse, Illinois, recently when one of his victims decided to fight back.

Authorities say it took four firefighters to lift a 600-pound gravestone off the 16-year-old boy's leg early Tuesday after he helped knock over that headstone and dozens others. [Link]

Don't Bury Me Near the Trailer Park

From the Detroit (Mich.) Free Press:

A cemetery, a trailer park and one lonely headstone

Man looks for more than dead relative's grave

December 19, 2005

BY JOEL THURTELL

The biggest problem for Southfield's pioneer Beekman Cemetery is not its long history of abuse -- from the gravel pit operator who ran dump trucks over graves in the 1930s to the trailer park residents of later decades who stole headstones and used them as doorsteps.

It's biggest problem is that few know it's a cemetery.

[snip]

On Friday, [Clark] Risley brushed snow off the inscription of Samuel Beekman's monument. Yellow paint from graffiti stains the stone. "Logically, the first thing to do is re-mount it," said Risley.

[snip]
[Read the whole story]