Post #56103 by ikitnrev on Tue, Oct 21, 2003 9:55 AM

I'll add to Al's great story with my own true-life experience.

My very first regular paying job was working in a cemetary over the summer, doing things like cutting grass and setting sprinkler heads to water the lawn. One week the guy who regularly dug the graves (by hand, with a shovel) went on vacation, and for that week, that task fell to myself and one other employee - both of us around 16 years old at the time.

We had a burial request, in the older part of the cemetary, which was perhaps 100 years old. The caretaker showed us the location for the grave, watched as we started cutting and moving the sod away, then went to attend some meetings held elsewhere.

Me and my co-worker started digging - about 3 feet down, we started hitting large splinters of wood. I started paying closer attention, and soon found some old ornate screws. Knowing that we were in the old part of the cemetary, we knew that we had come across an old grave site. It was very creepy, as the day was windy and overcast. I knelt lower into the grave, and brushing my hands through the dirt I came across a vertebrate and what I think was a quarter-sized piece of skull (with hair still on it)

We stopped digging, and waited for the caretaker to return, to learn what our next step should be. Which ended up being told 'We have a funeral coming two days from now, and we need an empty grave for them' and were instructed to continue digging. We were way behind schedule, and had to rush a bit to finish the job. We encountered many more wood splinters, but fortunately didn't find any more body parts - perhaps because we chose not to look for any. Our job was to dig the grave quickly, not to act as archaelogists.

By the way, I was attending Catholic high school at this time, but the nuns there were generally quite friendly, and had no role whatsoever with the above story.

VErn