©25 December 2025 Levite
http://themediadesk
1.
I was spending hours upon hours sitting in my car, or sitting on a bench, or walking around, in the middle of the night, in ... A Parking Lot.
And tonight it was raining. Something that was making me seriously reconsider my involvement with my Unusual Cases.
And then... well, let me drop back about two weeks and explain what was going on. Why I was sitting in that particular parking lot with two of my cameras on tripods under an umbrella to keep them out of the rain, while I watched to make sure they didn't 'walk off' is a long story that begins in 1727 when the county seat was established.
The 'new' court house in Riverhead was built in the nineteen twenties. It is a stately, classical-looking building with massive columns out front. It replaced an older building that had been destroyed in a fire. To make room for the newer, larger building they also tore down a jail building that hadn't been used in years. Then, later, two 'modern' additions were stuck on the side and back of the grand central building. The one on the back covered the majority of the rest footprint of the old jail, and its courtyard where public hangings were held until the late eighteen-eighties.
But the problem wasn't inside either the 1927 building or the new additions.
County Public Works had to redo part of the parking lot after some underground utility work had disturbed everything almost all the way across the space to connect, or was it to disconnect, something on the other side of the street. In any case, parking curbs had been moved, trees uprooted, the entrance was dug up, and so on with two long trenches and a giant pit, which meant that either they redid part of it, and try to make it all even again. Or dig half of it up, bring in more back fill, and then regrade and pave it.
For some reason, they decided to do it right. They took out the half that had been cut up way down to the dirt, haul in fill, and start over.
The part that brings me into it was the rumors that began almost immediately of them finding unmarked, and previously unknown, graves in the area that would have been next to the old jail and its execution grounds.
Of course, the contractor, and Public Works as well, denied uncovering any burials, "A post colonial period trash pit, yes. We found one, and had an historian and an archaeological team from the University out to dig through it. And everything they found was cataloged and preserved. But no human burials," The site supervisor said in front of a press conference trying to squelch the rumors.
Eventually, as the parking lines were marked on the new blacktop, and the handicapped signs were replaced, and even the trees and flowers along the fence on the far edge were replanted, the rumor mill moved on to other fodder.
Or so everybody thought for several months.
"Are you the Sheriff's Detective that solves the haunted house problems?" A voice on the phone asked me one morning.
"I have handled some unusual paranormal cases that involve county, or state, property, yes."
"Very good, excellent in fact. I am David Wells, I am one of the managers of facility security for the Suffolk County Court in Riverhead. And we have a problem that you may be able to assist us with. When can we meet and I can show you what I'm talking about?"
"I can come over right now, it won't take me long to get there."
"Excellent. Check in at the information desk and they'll let me know when you arrive."
Traffic was light and I found a place to park with no trouble since I do drive a 'police car'. The directory I checked back in the office said Mr. Wells was on the third floor, and that's where the receptionist sent me.
After a few pleasantries, including his saying that he hadn't seen the TV spot until after this problem arose and somebody said the County Sheriff had an investigator that handled that sort of thing.
"At first I thought it was a joke. But, I've talked to a few people, including a Medical Examiner, and you come very highly recommended." He said with no hint of a smile on his face.
"Thank you, sir. That's good to hear."
"Now I suppose you want to know what sort of paranormal problem we have." I nodded and he continued. "Oddly enough, it's not in the building. Which might be surprising given the age and history of the old building, and what was where the back wing is now."
"So then where is the problem?" I asked him.
"The parking lot behind the building. Specifically the area that was repaved last year after the disused sewer line removal project."
"I'd heard about the repaving, but I didn't know there had been any problems." I answered.
He actually frowned, but only slightly. "There were rumors that during the work that several graves had been uncovered. It's unlikely because they didn't dig down that deep, but the rumors still persisted."
He paused so I volunteered something, "And now people say they are seeing the restless dead up prowling around because their eternal repose has been disturbed."
He took a deep breath, "Not just people are seeing them." He turned his computer monitor toward me and clicked on a file. "This is security footage from..." he paused and read the date, "last Thursday, about three in the morning. Oh three seventeen to be exact. The video begins two minutes before what I want you to see. The camera is mounted high on the building pointing down at the area."
The video began to play showing the area of the parking lot near the building lit up with pole lights. It was centered on the handicapped spots along Court Street, but also showed a good bit of two rows of empty spots. It was a long two minutes, and then I saw something moving. It moved diagonally across two of the handicapped spaces, becoming more defined and almost even solid as it moved. Then it stopped, and appeared to even turn slightly, then it went on across the pavement toward the building, and vanished.
"I can play it again and zoom in slightly on that," Mr. Wells said.
"Please do."
This time I watched for signs of a hoax, but I suspected that unless somebody had suddenly developed a holographic projector that could work outdoors from some distance away, it was a real apparition.
"You must have more. You wouldn't have called me for a one off like that," I nodded toward the screen, "even though that is quite impressive."
"You're right, of course, Detective. That's simply one of the latest appearances. The other was Monday night, but it was just a wisp. There's another video from a different camera on another night I'd like to show you. And I have all of these uploaded to a shared server so you can review them whenever you wish."
"Thank you."
He picked another file and explained what it was as it opened.
"This is from a camera on a pole on the other side of the lot," he said and started the video, "I believe this is around two in the morning, on the twenty-second of last month. Twenty first, sorry."
Again, the parking lot was lit by various mounted night lights. The only thing moving was what appeared to be a stray cat. Then as we watched, the cat stopped, crouched down, looked off to one side and stared for a moment, and then it ran like lightning back the way it came. In another minute or so, we saw what the cat had evidently sensed and ran from. There were two distinct orbs of light, and then a third one that was smaller and dimmer, that moved along a definite path toward the newly paved area further to the south of the last video. As they moved the third one dimmed and vanished, but the other two continued, and you could see the occasional reflection off the pavement from their light. Then as they neared the new pavement, they got closer to the ground, and then, finally, disappeared into it.
Mr. Wells was looking at me, so I had to say something. So I said, "Orbs usually aren't anything to worry about. Mostly being something like an insect or dust, or even static electricity. However, these. And the way that cat reacted to them."
"It was the reaction of the cat, which we see in the area all the time, that convinced me something was going on. And it saw them before the camera did," he said.
"Animals can often sense things that we cannot."
When he played it again I watched the time stamp. It was over three minutes from the time the cat reacted to when the orbs vanished into the pavement. The whole time, the image never wavered and the focus stayed the same, and there was a moment, not long before they began to lower towards the pavement, where I thought I could see more of them than just the light source.
I asked a question as he closed the file, "have there been any witnesses besides the security cameras?"
"Yes. Riverhead Police had reported unusual sightings, as well as the County Police who do after hours security here. And a couple of business owners who have concerns near by, they've noticed things as well. I have a list of all of them in the folder on the server." He handed me a printout, "that's the network address of the folder and the password."
"Thank you. Yes, of course, I'd love to talk to them. But I'm curious about one thing?" He raised his eyebrows at me, so I continued, "Why isn't Court Security handling this as an internal matter?"
He sat there for a moment. "That is a fair question, and I had to answer that to my superiors as well before I called you." A pause. "Because, Detective Elaine." He shook his head, "I don't do ghosts. And," another pause, "neither do they."
"Very well, sir. I'll try to determine what, if anything, is going on here. It could still be a hoax of some sort. Somebody trying to make a point about the rumor of the old graves who has a few high tech toys up their sleeve. Or, it could be what it appears to be, and we may have a problem that we'll have to solve. Either way, I'll do my best to get to the bottom of it."
He stood and extended his hand. "Excellent. Thank you, Detective."
I stood and shook his hand and thanked him for trusting me with his case.
Mr. Wells showed me to an spare cubicle where I could work and after I made a trip out to my car I set up my laptop and downloaded all the videos and other information he had, and there was a lot of it.
Then I spent over an hour watching the recordings from the security cameras, and checking the dates and times. And, there was, almost, a consistent pattern to several of the phenomena.
Almost.
The orbs appeared about every five or six days, at about the same time of night, and moved along a similar path each time. Sometimes there was one, most of the time two, and occasionally, like the one we had watched, a third would be visible for part of the journey. Which always ended with the light moving into the ground, but it, or they, never slowed, or otherwise interacted with the surface, or even with a car that was parked in their way, they simply went through it, at speed, without changing course.
The apparition that appeared near the handicapped parking area had a similar habit. It would appear, then wander a bit, but it usually ended up moving to, or sometimes from, the same general area.
I then found several of Mr. Wells's 'wisps'. And there were more than a few of them. And I thought that maybe some were bits of smoke or fog. but others were moving against the breeze that was evident on the video, and one appeared and moved across the screen during a rain shower. Something a cloud of cigar smoke probably would have a hard time doing.
Later I talked to several of the witnesses, and had a nice conversation out in the parking lot with a Riverhead officer who came by on his day off to tell me about the things he'd seen on patrol around this part of the downtown at night.
He was pointing and said, "I followed one of them from over on Main. It went up the senior apartment driveway, then right through the fence. Not over it, through it. I whipped around and came around the corner as fast as I could, and it was still going, it was over in about the first parking row by then. Then when it got up in here it got smaller, and then it was gone."
"So it was moving, what, maybe a medium walking speed?" I asked him.
"Yeah, not any faster than that. It wasn't in a big hurry I can tell you that."
"Did it ever react to you that you could tell?"
"No. I've seen them, maybe six, seven times in the last six months or so. Maybe a bit more. They never react. And I've kinda gotten used to them."
"What did the others look like?"
"Sometimes just a ball, what they call an orb on TV. Once or twice I've seen what looks like a person over here, but then they just vanish. And then, a couple of three times that cloud of mist, vapor, whatever it is. And they never seem to react. But, I don't get real close to them either."
The officer from court security reported the same sorts of sightings.
He even had a picture on his phone of one that he was happy to send to me.
"At first I thought it was somebody just walking around the parking lot, you know, we get wandering drunks or somebody looking for loose change, all sorts of people. But then I saw that it didn't have any legs, and by the time I got over here, it was sinking into the ground."
"About where did it go into the ground?"
"I'll show you," he said and we walked away from the building. "Right about here." He drew a circle around himself with his hands.
We were across the drive from the corner of the building, in the middle of the parking row about three spaces from the end. If I was correct in my recollection, it about the same spot where the one in the video that started over by the handicapped spaces ended up.
But now the real work began.
2.
I spent a long time going through old maps. Both online and in the library, and in the Riverhead Historical Office. Unfortunately, the lady there remembered me from the high school history project case, and she wanted to talk about it.
Finally I had to remind the lady, who was too nice to be angry with, that I was working on another case and needed to do the research on the site.
"Oh, I can help you with that!" She said excitedly, "what are you looking for?"
"What was behind the original court house, next to the octagonal jail, on the Court Street side? Back in Colonial times."
She thought about it for just a moment, "I know just the thing," she said and led me over to a wooden flat file cabinet. "Let me see...." She opened a drawer and looked at the tags on some of the maps. Some were typed, but most were hand written, and some were so old they were just barely readable.
She found what she was looking for in the third drawer she looked in.
"These are lithos of the original maps when they laid out the town." Then she shuffled the pile a bit, "and this is after they made it the county seat in 1727. And this is after the division in the seventeen nineties."
I looked at the maps with their thin pencil lines and tiny print. "What I need should be here, thank you."
It was.
But now I had to see if what was on the old map was in the parking lot.
The only certain landmark that was on the three hundred year old maps was the original location of the Old court house. The new building was even larger than the one it had replaced, which was larger again than the original. But they were all, more or less, in the same place relative to the streets.
Which meant an odd drawing on one of the maps, marked with a small cross and several tiny rectangles, was bad news.
The spot wasn't labeled on any of the maps, and it was only marked with a cross on the 1794 map. On the copy of the oldest map, from the seventeen forties, the square was there, but there was no other markings in it. And then in most of the later maps it wasn't marked at all.
I stared at the maps. "It's a pioneer cemetery."
As I looked through the other maps, I found one that had a hand drawn asterisk where the older one had the square with the cross in it, but not note about what it was. Then, on a later map, there was nothing there at all.
Now I had a question for Mister Mills at the medical examiner's office.
It took an hour of phone tag, then finally I was listening to him tell me about how he knew Mr. Wells.
"We're really good friends," was all Mister Mills said about Mister Wells, but I could tell there was more to it than that. Then he asked me what my question was.
"How long would a burial from Colonial times, probably in a wooden coffin, and without a vault, last in the ground around here and still be recognizable?"
"ooohhhhh", he said as he thought about it. "It depends a lot on soil in the area and how deep they were buried."
"The plot is a couple of hundred feet from the Peconic River. But is isn't tidal up here. But there is no way to know how deep the grave was." I thought about it for a moment, "but it may not have been all that deep. Maybe four or five feet."
"OK. Just from what I know, unless they've been fully embalmed, the soft parts of the body will be all but gone in a handful of years. The rest of it depends on stuff like whether the coffin is hardwood or something like pine. The skull and pelvis take the longest, and the teeth may never fully decompose, but..." I could almost hear him thinking, "I'd say that the skeleton will be disjointed, the smaller bones may be gone, and the coffin as well, after say, seventy five to a hundred years in our soil out here."
"So if the burial was before 1800. Maybe during the Revolution."
"Over two hundred years...." He whistled softly. "You'd need to really go through the spot with a fine sieve and look for things like bits of the skull and jaw, parts of the larger bones, teeth, maybe their buttons or jewelry, and coffin nails. Again, there's a lot of variables, but, unless you knew what you were looking for, you might never know it was a person."
"So running over the site with a road grader wouldn't be the best way to find a burial from back then."
"No."
So tonight I was sitting in my car some distance from what appeared to be the focus of the activity, watching it rain.
By what I had determined was the pattern to the activity, and the fact that last night was, pun intended, absolutely dead, tonight the orbs should be the crossing from just off to my left toward the opposite side of the parking lot.
But I forgot to notify the long buried dead about their work schedule.
It was after three AM and I was bleary eyed in spite of having taken a nap before I came out. And then I realized I was watching something that was just barely visible moving from over by the fence around the senior apartment building.
I moved as slow as I could and grabbed my backup full spectrum camera, and then rolled down my window in spite of the continuing rain and took picture after picture of what was moving, with direction and purpose, across the parking spaces. I followed it with the camera until it was in front of my car, then I slowly and quietly got out and took more photos of it.
When Mister Wells called it a 'wisp', he was exactly right.
Except later, in the photos the full spectrum camera took I was able to see more than I could in person.
There was a form that extended beyond the central wisp, and it looked more or less the size of a person, but it was faint, and shifting, and gave no real hint of any detail otherwise. And as I looked at it back and forth across several images, I got the impression that it had a feminine look to it.
I woke up from a sound sleep in my apartment with an idea. And with the idea I couldn't go back to sleep until I pulled up a copy of the old map and the satellite image of the parking lot. Then I went and checked some of the photos.
"It's not All paved."
Later that morning I probably looked rather odd with a measuring wheel and some print outs going back and forth, and then checking my laptop in my car, and then measuring some more.
Finally I had enough information to call Mr. Wells and have him, and my boss, meet me out in the parking lot near the handicapped spots right along the street.
After the introductions the Sheriff asked me why were we standing in the middle of the sidewalk.
"Well, sir. Sirs. It's simple, and I think I'm right."
What I had been measuring was where the old graveyard was in relation to the original court house and the street as they were over two hundred years ago. Which was before the street had been widened, and sidewalks added, and the changes to the building. Which meant, that according to my best guess and the measurements I had made, some of the graves that were along the boundary fence on the map from the seventeen nineties should be right under the thin line of grass next to where the handicapped posts were now standing. And we were no where near the old jail and its courtyard had been.
"If they are here, how do we verify it?" Mister Wells asked.
The Sheriff looked at me with a smile, "Ground Penetrating Radar."
"I called them this morning. They should be here any time."
The GPR team arrived precisely one cup of coffee later.
The area of grass between the sidewalk and the curb of the parking lot was just over four feet wide, but the team was able to scan it, and got some interesting results.
"There's clear disturbance a meter and a half to two meters below the surface layer in sector two, and sector three into four, and another in five." They told us after they scanned the area.
We looked at the display and it was obvious that something, or rather, several somethings had been buried about five feet below the current surface.
Mister Wells had a serious question, "will this unit work through asphalt?"
The answer was a qualified 'yes', and that the only way to make sure was to try.
The team took their time, and adjusted their settings and before long they were able to follow the first anomaly from the grassy area some distance into the parking lot, where it ended.
After they got images of the next two underground disturbances Mister Wells and the Sheriff came to the same conclusion.
"From your map, Detective, I would say they are colonial era burials. But I was out here for parts of the repaving, they never uncovered anything like that." Mister Wells said.
The radar unit operator had the answer for that. "The paving work stayed in what is called the plow zone, usually down to about thirty centimeters is the surface disturbance. It isn't unless foundation work is done that digging goes deeper. Or, back in the day, digging a well."
"Or septic tank, or sewer line." The Sheriff added.
The operator nodded in agreement, "Yes, a lot of discoveries of Colonial and even Native American sites were made from that."
"There's only one way to find out for certain," I said.
Mister Wells frowned, "with a shovel."
"I talked to Mister Mills about it, and he agreed to meet us out here first thing in the morning. In case we do find something, he may be able to confirm that it is human and from about when. There's three right here in the grass, that's enough to prove, or disprove, what we've got, and when it is from."
After a long pause, everybody agreed to come back tomorrow. Even the Ground Penetrating Radar crew would come back, just to make sure we were digging in the right spots.
In the morning I learned two things about Mister Wells. The first, and most helpful thing was that his family owned some interesting equipment, and he showed up with his brother and a mini-excavator on a trailer behind a utility box truck full of tools.
"I don't like digging by hand," he said.
The second thing was that he, and Mister Mills, were, very good friends. And we'll leave it at that. But it did explain that while Mister Mills was all in favor of splitting a pizza to discuss work, nothing else was ever even hinted at.
3.
The Ground Penetrating Radar team had spent the evening working to fine tune their unit to get the most precise data out of it possible. We only had a few feet of space to work with and they wanted to make sure we were right on whatever was between the sidewalk and the parking lot when we broke ground.
Today they moved their unit about half of its width at a time and did a type of pulse scan that revealed enough of what was underground to tell exactly where the subsurface had been disturbed and where it hadn't, and, more interestingly, where something solid had been buried. And, crucially for the excavator, how deep it was.
While they were scanning the rest of us put the excavator to good use, pulling up the handicapped sign that, of course, was right in the way of what we were calling 'grave one'.
Then Mister Mills' brother, who said his name was Wilson, set to work with the smallest bucket he had for the excavator.
Wilson was an expert with the machine. He carefully removed the topsoil, then began slowly digging down to what where the target was indicated by the radar unit.
We watched for anything exposed in the ground as he dug down, and then when the shovel was down about four feet the Sheriff hollered and raised his hand and Wilson pulled the bucket up. Then the Sheriff stepped down into the hole and knelt next to what he'd seen.
He brushed some dirt away from whatever it was and then the rest of us could see some badly deteriorated wood shards. "I've got an evidence bag in my pocket, I'll get a piece for testing," he said.
I happened to glance over at Miser Wells, his face was as stoic as it had ever been.
In a moment the rest of us were assisting in removing the layer of wood to see if there was anything under it.
Then it was Mister Mills' turn to come down into the hole and examine what had been found beneath the rotted wood.
"There's not a lot left, but these are human vertebrae," he said, then he looked around and found something else, "and this is a piece of a rib, and, I think, part of a sternum," he didn't disturb anything more than he had to to see it. "And this is, or was, something made of tanned leather."
He took my camera and got several close up pictures of each with a scale ruler next to them. Then I asked a question, "is there anything there that would have DNA that would be testable?"
He sat on his heels and looked at the bones. "A tooth would be ideal. The skull would be up there," he looked at the side of the hole, "we might be able to reach it without tearing up the sidewalk."
And that's what we did. Taking turns carefully digging up the skeleton until we exposed one shoulder blade, then we started very slowly looking for the skull.
"I can see the jawbone and several teeth." Wilson said as it was his turn to dig with a pocket knife and his fingers. "You're on," he said to Mr. Mills as he got up and climbed out.
Mr. Mills had already labeled a sample bag, so it only took him a moment poking around in the opening that reached just under the edge of the sidewalk to find what he needed. After several photos he found a molar that was no longer attached to the upper jaw, and he scrapped it into the bag with the pocket knife. "Got it," he said, "and it looked like it was in pretty good condition."
"Excellent." Mr. Wells said.
We decided to do one more grave, which turned out to be five as it was better defined on the radar display than four, even though it read as having been buried slightly deeper.
While Wilson began digging several of us began back filling and packing the hole under the sidewalk and then Wilson took a second and pushed the rest of the dirt back into the grave with the blade on the excavator.
At some point during that process a supervisor from Riverhead Public Works stopped by to see what was going on. He spent some time talking to the Sheriff and to Mister Wells while I took a turn packing the dirt back into the excavation. Then the next time I looked up, he was down in the new hole checking on something down there.
Grave Five was a full six feet deep, and while the coffin had deteriorated and collapsed, the wood was still identifiable, and we took a sample of it and put it in another evidence bag. Then the work slowed dramatically.
"I've got something shiny," I said during my turn digging by hand down in the grave. "Two." I kept working as slowly as I could and still make progress. "They're buttons, and this one still has some sort of cloth attached to it, but it's way rotten."
They handed my camera down to me with the gauge and I photographed them where they were. Then I tried to dig around them, and I thought I'd found something else. In a moment I was sure of it.
"I've got a small skeleton here, and it's been wrapped in cloth," I said.
Mr. Mills took over down in the hole and said it was definitely a child's skeleton, and it wasn't very old, that had apparently been buried with the adult that was under it.
We worked as much as we could while trying not to disturb the child's remains any more than we had to once we had a very tiny tooth in a sample bag.
In the process of trying to find a tooth from the adult, we found, and I photographed a brooch that at one time had been gleaming brass or maybe bronze, inlaid with small stones, and it looked like it had been painted in bright colors. Now, it was corroded and missing a couple of the stones. We photographed and measured it, then carefully moved it to one side, and kept working.
The bones of the adult were under the buttons and brooch, and the child. Then we could follow them up and found the skull, and a tooth.
"Just from this evidence, I'd say this is a woman with her child that was, maybe three years old or so. They probably died at about the same time and were buried together."
"Or were killed at the same time," the Sheriff added softly.
"That's possible," Mr. Mills said as he looked at what we had exposed. "Just from what we've exposed, I don't see any trauma to either of them. No broken or damaged bones."
"Can you determine a cause of death?" Mr. Wells asked him.
He looked around in the grave. "Maybe... I've heard about a paleo-diagnostic technique. Let me see if anything here looks like it'll have remnants of the soft tissue from the body that might have evidence of disease."
"Shouldn't you be wearing a mask and gloves?" Mr. Wells asked.
"Probably, but mine are in my car." He turned around in the hole and knelt down again, "This might be it. I need another sample bag."
After another round of photos and measurements, we closed the grave as carefully as we could and then stood around.
"Well, we worked through lunch," the Sheriff said. "I know of a place not far from here. I'll buy. Who's up for a late lunch. Early supper. Whichever."
Mister Wells looked at his hands and arms, "can we go inside and wash up first?"
Everybody talked about it, and we decided to take him up on the offer. After we put the handicapped parking sign back where it had been, that is.
It was a good, and interesting, lunch.
4.
It was a while before all the results came back on all the samples we'd collected from the graves.
In the mean time Mister Wells championed the idea that I had put forward over lunch that some sort of memorial be erected in memory of the unknown dead.
"That is an excellent idea. But I'll wait until we at least know approximately when they were buried to have anything installed." He said.
Mister Mills, who was sitting next to Mister Wells nodded, "We should be able to get pretty good dates from what we have."
I assigned myself the task of identifying the buttons and the brooch that had been found with the woman and child. I'd taken several good photos of the front and back of the items, and tried to clean the brooch off enough without taking it out of the grave to see if there was a jeweler's mark on the back of it.
To say I got lucky with it would be an understatement.
Mister Mills called me at one point and invited me out for a pizza and to compare notes before "the big reveal" as he put it.
Of course I agreed.
We were sitting looking at photos and notes while we waited on our order when he laughed at something.
"I still chuckle about when the lady came out and wanted to know by whose authority we were digging up the place." Mister Mills said, "then David, and the Sheriff, and Daniel from Public Works all showed her their IDs."
I laughed at the memory as well, "and all she did was turn around and walk away."
"What else could she do?"
"Get down in the hole and dig like the rest of us." I answered.
We got some strange looks from other patrons in the pizza place as we ate their special 'gut buster' stuffed pizza and went through the test results on the wood, and what I'd found about the brooch, and then he brought out the Holy Grail of the entire project.
"The DNA from gave one was badly degraded, but we did get some results from it. It was a man and he was European, probably in his forties from the tooth itself. Other than that, there's not much more we can say with certainty. He died around Seventeen Fifty."
"That's pretty good." I read along the file and then looked at him, "What about Grave Five."
"I believe the correct expression would be 'bingo'."
We set up the final reveal in a conference room in the courthouse. Four of us had results to discuss, but Mister Mills was the star of the show, so he said he'd go last. Which I was fine with.
I opened the presentation by simply saying that the rumors of graves on the courthouse property was no longer rumor, but I didn't mention the orbs or mists. I clicked the clicker and a photo of the old map with its square and cross came up on the big screen.
"Except they are not where they were thought to be, nor are they what they were said to be. Which was the unclaimed bodies of those executed in the courtyard of the Octagonal Jail. We now know those were buried in pauper's graves at an established cemetery off site. James from the Ground Penetrating Radar team will show you the results that led to the excavation."
There were a lot of people in the room, and they all seemed fascinated by what we had found. But when the photos of the digging showed us putting the dirt back in Grave One the same lady that had come out that day raised her hand.
"Yes, ma'am." I said to her since I was, apparently by unanimous vote, playing the MC for the day.
"You left them there?"
"Yes, ma'am. If we were to disinter every grave indicated on the scans, we'd have to dig up most of the parking lot, and part of the street. The graves are not in danger of erosion or other disturbance at this time, so, why bother them any more than we already have?"
She seemed uncomfortable with the idea, "Well, it's just that..."
"They've been there, as Mister Mills will tell us in a few moments, for a very long time."
There were a few more photos and a bit of discussion about the samples taken and then I brought up the photo of the brooch as uncovered in the grave.
"The brass buttons we found were, and are, very common items. I found several places online that sell Colonial Era antiques, and these are available by the dozen. They say they are real items and not replicas. But they don't say if they resorted to grave robbing to get them."
Some people did laugh at my attempt at a joke.
"But it's the brooch that is more interesting. I found a jeweler's mark on the back of it, and was able to identify where and when it was made." I clicked to the next picture. "It's in the style of the time, which they called Italian Baroque, although it was made in Paris, France, in about 1710 to 1720 or so." I clicked to the best image of the front of the piece. "As you can see, some of the stones are missing, but they intricate a floral pattern that was very popular at the time. And this piece, would have been quite expensive."
I left the image of the brooch on the screen and handed the clicker to Mister Mills. "And now, what you are all waiting to hear," I said and returned to my seat.
"I'll just come right to the point," he said, "We didn't get anything definitive for a cause of death from Grave One. It was a European man, with some German in him, who was about fifty when he died. I can't do any better than that." He clicked to a photo of the child's body in Grave Five.
It took a minute for those in the room who hadn't been out there that day to realize what they were seeing.
"This is a child, a boy, about three years old. He was buried with his mother, who was in her thirties. She was of primary French extraction, with a bit of English. And they died of Smallpox, during the outbreak in the Seventeen Fifties." He clicked to a wider view of the grave where you could see the child lying next to his mother with her arm over him.
"The coffin from Grave One was pine, local pine. Her coffin was made of maple and pine. The maple came from the mainland, probably Massachusetts or Connecticut, but it was made locally as well. And she was buried the English standard of six feet deep, while Grave One was just over four feet deep."
"What killed the man in the first grave?" Somebody asked.
"I can't tell. It might have been smallpox, it may have been almost anything."
"Injuns." The same voice said to a few laughs.
"I didn't see any trauma on the skull that was visible or any of the bones, so a fatal accident or injury, while it can't be ruled out, is unlikely."
There was an uncomfortable silence and Mister Mills looked back at me, so I stood up and went back to the podium. "And, we don't have a name for any of them. I've been looking for burial records from that time, and have found a few, but nothing that leads me to attach a name to any of them." I paused, "Any other questions about what we've got so far before I let Mister Wells tell you what is being planned for the site?"
There were a few, including one about exactly how many graves the radar team had found under the parking lot, so I clicked back for him to the map made from their data.
"We've got anomalies that indicate at least twelve to fifteen burials, but some of them overlap, and a few others that indicate the ground was disturbed at depth, but the results aren't good enough to say whether or not a body is, or was, there." Then he pointed to a spot on the map under part of the sidewalk next to the court building, "and, to me, that looks like either a filled in well or cistern, or another trash pit."
The humor was appreciated. I found where we had been in the slide show and turned the clicker over to Mister Wells.
"We feel that these people, now that they have been rediscovered, should not be forgotten again. While we may never know their names, and, like Detective Elaine with her resources, I have spent some time going through our own archival records attempting to find any record of burials on these grounds. So far, without success. However, we can erect a memorial to those that came before us, and helped to shape this city, and this county, and more, through their lives, and their deaths." He clicked to an artist's rendering of what was planned. "We will place a ground level stone over the burials that were identified in the grassy area, and a bench and tablet will be erected along the walkway commemorating them. The unknown citizens of Riverhead, Suffolk County, New York."
Several weeks later I donned my dress uniform, and stood next to the Sheriff at the presentation and tried not to look uncomfortable as the sun beat down on us.
Fortunately, the presentation, complete with a prayer by a representative of the Salvation Army whose office was nearby, was brief. Then they unveiled the bench and the bronze historic site marker and everybody applauded.
Then we all went to lunch again.
Three months later I checked with Mister Wells and found out that the reports had diminished dramatically.
"You can still see an orb on the camera once in awhile. But the apparition that wanders around, and the wisps, I haven't seen either of them on the security cameras since then. And I do look once in awhile."
"Very good, sir. Remember, if they do show up again, or anything else like that, all you have to do is call."
"Only if you promise not to dig up the parking lot."
I laughed, "I can't promise that. It would depend on the case."
"I understand. Thank you again for everything."
But with that, I marked the case as closed.
- end 'sometimes' -
[NOTE: The above story were written as adventure fiction, and is to be taken as such. While most of the features of Long Island exist, which includes the historic County Supreme Court Building in Riverhead, the rest of the setting is fictional.
Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]
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