Two hundred years after the Salem witch trials,
farmers became convinced that their relatives were returning from the
grave to feed on the living
Children playing near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves. One
ran home to tell his mother, who was skeptical at first—until the boy
produced a skull.
Because this was Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially
thought the burials might be the work of a local serial killer named
Michael Ross, and they taped off the area as a crime scene. But the
brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than a century old. The
Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon determined that
the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery. New England is full
of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical of the
1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them children, were laid to
rest in thrifty Yankee style, in simple wood coffins, without jewelry or
even much clothing, their arms resting by their sides or crossed over
their chests.
Except, that is, for Burial Number 4.
