A Coffin That Didn’t Stay Buried

You can find all sorts of discarded items on a city street, but the one shown above is particularly unusual: It's an old, dilapidated coffin, which was recently found by a retired bus driver at the base of a dead-end street in Brooklyn. Inside were a glove and a sock, each containing some small bones.

The police turned the coffin over the medical examiner's office, which was able to identify the coffin's manufacturer -- the first piece of the puzzle. The rest of the pieces soon came together, as the authorities were able to figure out where the coffin had been buried, whose bones were left inside of it, and how it came to be discarded on a Brooklyn street.

The full story is spelled out in this article, which is both entertaining and mildly disturbing — recommended.

Photo by Stephanie Strasburg, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Chris Togneri, a writer for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, was recently doing some work on his 1890 house. While tearing out an old attic, he found a bunch of items, including the framed display of old century-old baseball cards you see above.

The cards are from the T206 series, which was produced from 1909 to 1911 — the same series that included the famous Honus Wagner card that's generally considered the most valuable baseball card of all time. Unfortunately for Togneri, the cards he found in the attic didn't include a Wagner, although they did feature several other Hall of Fame players. You can read more and see additional photos here.

My favorite part of that article is this passage:

[B]ecause of [the house's] age, it provides countless little treasures. ... While tearing water-stained walls out of the attic, I found old Pittsburgh Press clippings. While digging around in the backyard, I found a tombstone. (It did not come with a body, thankfully. After contacting the family, we were told that Barbara Tremel [the name on the tombstone] was buried in Reserve Township. They could not explain the duplicate tombstone, but were glad to take it off our hands.)

Wow! The baseball cards are cool, but a duplicate tombstone — that's much more PermaRec-ish! Indeed, what is a tombstone if not, literally, a permanent record? I wish Togneri had written more about that instead of relegating it to a parenthetical mention. (Update: For more on the tombstone, scroll down to Taha Jamil's comment below.)

(My thanks to Brian Justman for bringing this one to my attention.)