2 A Graveyard Mystery

Harry Spitz seemed like an ordinary little boy. He had his father's looks, with blond hair and brown eyes. He liked to laugh and play with his toys.But was Harry really just an ordinar child? That's the question people began to ask in July 1975. By then, Harry had been dead for 63 years. But something happened that summer that made everyone remember him. It made them think perhaps there was more to the little boy than met the eye.

Harry Spitz's grave, shown here as it looks today, is located next to his parents' graves. Harry's vault popped out of the ground on this same spot in 1975.

Harry Spitz was born in 1909. He lived with his parents in Morgantown, West Virginia. There his father worked in a glass factory. The family did not have a lot of money. Still, by all accounts, Harry was a happy child. When he was three years old, though, tragedy struck. Harry came down with cholera, a deadly disease. Eight days after catching the disease, he died.

Harry's parents were crushed. With heavy hearts they made arrangements for the funeral. His body was dressed in a blue and white outfit. Flowers were placed in his hands. His favorite toy—a little stuffed lion—was put into the casket with him. The Spitzes had two engraved plaques made for the casket. Each read Our Darling.One went inside the casket. The second one was set on top.

Many of Harry's playmates came to the funeral. Afterwards a horse-drawn carriage took the casket to Oak Grove Cemetery. There an open grave lay waiting. Several feet down was a concrete vault. The casket was lowered into the vault. The engraved plaque was placed on top of the casket. Someone laid a single flower on it. Then workers sealed the vault with a three-inch-thick concrete lid. They shoveled several feet of dirt on top of the vault to fill up the grave.

Everyone thought that was the end of Harry Spitz. And for 63 years, it was. But on July 2, 1975, Harry was back in the news. That morning the caretaker of Oak Grove Cemetery saw a small pile of dirt near Harry's tombstone. Walking closer, he saw a bizarre sight.The ground over Harry's grave had buckled. The burial vault was poking up through the grass. The caretaker could see that a corner of the vault had split open, and the lid was resting at an angle. It didn't look like someone had dug up the vault. All the earth had been pushed up from underneath the ground.

The caretaker wasn't sure what to think. He wondered if some kids had set off fireworks near the grave. Perhaps one backfired and ruptured the grave. In any case, he called the police. Chief Bennie Palmer and Officer Ralph Chapman took the call. Before seeing the grave, Palmer thought he knew what had happened. From time to time a strange group of people gathered in the cemetery. They tried to make contact with the spirits of dead people. He figured the group had come again in the night. He suspected they had set off some kind of explosive device.

When Palmer checked out Harry's grave, however, he changed his mind. “There was no evidence of such a device, ” he said. In fact, there was no sign of an explosion at all. “We didn't find any evidence of charred earth or gunpowder residues.”

Next Palmer wondered if there was a natural gas leak in the area. Perhaps that could have blown the vault up out of the ground. He called the gas company and asked them to check. Workers did check, but found no leaks.

Palmer and Chapman could not think of anything else that would have caused the vault to pop out of the ground. Yet that's what it had done. Clearly no one had dug up the grave. There was not a single spot where anything had cut into the ground. “It was a real mystery, ” Chapman said. “There just weren't any signs of tampering from the outside.”

For the next few days many people tried to figure out what had caused Harry Spitz's grave to open. Scientists and professors were consulted. None of them had any answers. There had been no earthquakes or tremors in the region. There had been no build-up of gases in the ground or in the vault. As Chief Palmer said, “It was really baffling.”

At last officials decided to open the vault and take out the casket. Harry's body needed to be reburied anyway. When the lid was removed from the vault, the mystery just got deeper. The engraved plaque was still perched on top of the rounded casket. So was the single dried flower. This meant no explosion could possibly have pushed the vault up through the ground. Anything that shook the vault that much would have caused the plaque and flower to fall off.

The case was already an eerie one.But it got even spookier when workers opened the casket. Harry's body was indeed lying inside. But it did not look like it had been there for 63 years. “The body ... was not in the bare-bones state, which it should have been after all that time, ” said Chapman. Everyone had expected to see little more than a skeleton.Instead,they saw a little boy who looked like he was sleeping. His hands still held a bouquet of dried flowers.“The body still had intact skin, ”said Chapman. That skin was a little leathery, but everything else about Harry was in remarkably good shape. “He even had lots of long blond hair.”

No one could explain it. But many people were a bit frightened by it. They wondered what it all meant. They wondered what forces had been at work in the grave. And they wished they knew more about the little boy who was buried there.

On July 12, 1975, Harry Spitz's body was buried for a second time. His casket was put into a new, sealed vault. Since then the vault has remained where it belongs—deep in the ground. But no one knows how much longer it will stay that way.