Strange cemetery finds: explosives, goat heads, a mini horse and 200 aliens

New York City’s Marble Cemetery has contained the remains of Preserved Fish, a nineteenth century whale oil tycoon, Marinus Willet, a Revolutionary War hero and John Lloyd Stephens, a swashbuckling Mayan archaeologist.

There is also John Ericsson, inventor of the ironclad Monitor, President James Monroe, six Roosevelt’s and all of the Kip clan, prosperous Dutch settlers who in 1655 established a farm in a section of the city now named after them. But last Sunday something other than famous bones was found in the quaint cemetery, which lies in New York City’s bohemian East Village neighborhood: a decaying garbage bag filled with 10 pounds of military-grade C-4 explosives. The explosives, in the shape of bricks, were individually wrapped in plastic and had green and yellow military-like markings. “We thought it was like a movie prop,” said a Marble Cemetery board member. “It was sort of crumbly, the plastic was coming off. It clearly said explosive on it, but it had been outside for so long that the plastic was sort of delaminating.”

The New York City Police Department is currently investigating just how old the explosives are and where exactly they came from—a nearby Hells Angels clubhouse and a bookstore known to be a congregating site for anarchists are potential targets. Given the heightened concern over terrorism the find is particularly disturbing, but cemeteries are notorious for strange and unexplainable finds.

This past August in a cemetery in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania police investigating a grave robbing learned about a host of weird objects that somehow ended up in the cemetery. The body of 9 year-old Paula Ream was laid to rest at Lancaster’s Riverview Burial Park almost 50 years ago, but sometime in mid-August her remains were dug up and stolen. Investigators believe it happened on either August 12 or August 13, which was a Friday. “It was raining that day, and I got here and ran into a guy wearing an action figure like outfit,” said Jeff Miller, the cemetery superintendent. “He jumped and threw something, maybe a jar of blood, at me and it hit me in my shoulder.” Miller described other items he had recently found in his cemetery: chicken heads, a pig head, a goat head and candles dug into the ground in the shape of a circle.

Earlier this summer in South Carolina the LeVeille family lost Pixie Dust. The two month-old miniature horse was stolen from her mother’s side while grazing in a field. The worried family spent hours posting fliers then received a strange call, someone had found the 20-pound horse roaming in a cemetery. Pixie was dehydrated but survived.

Deep in the jungle of Rwanda, in central Africa, is a cemetery that contained one of the strangest finds of all, alien bodies, about 200 of them. “Surprisingly, they were very well preserved,” explained Swiss anthropologist Dr. Hugo Children, at a November 2009 press conference. “Now we are trying to find out where they appeared on Earth.” The graves held about five bodies, each close to seven feet tall. The heads were disproportionately large and there were no signs of a mouth, nose or eyes. “I guess they communicated with each other telepathically and moved like bats, with the help of some biological radar,” commented one blogger who wrote about the find. It is thought that the aliens were killed by a deadly virus they had no immunity to.

The Rwanda find was not the first alien cemetery. In 1937, in the remote mountains of the Bayan-Kara-Ula region on the Tibet-China border a professor from the Beijing Academy of Sciences discovered a cemetery in a honeycomb like cave. The bodies were only four feet long and had disproportionately large heads and thin limbs. There were drawings of the sun, earth, moon and some unknown world with a chain of dots leading off, thought to be the markings of an interstellar flight path. There were also strange ceramic discs with a hole in the center and small obscure icons on the outside. A Chinese professor named Zum Um Nui made a partial translation of the inscriptions on the disks and revealed that the beings called themselves the “loot” and had made an emergency landing in the area that destroyed their craft.