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Vendaval -> "Grandfather's ghost story leads to mysterious mass grave" (8/24/2010 2:56:47 PM)
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A fascinating story that illustrates how folklore of the past can lead to discovery in the present.
Grandfather's ghost story leads to mysterious mass grave
By Meghan Rafferty, CNN
August 24, 2010 5:28 p.m. EDT
""This is a murder mystery from 178 years ago, and it's finally coming to the light of day," Frank Watson said.
The brothers first heard about Duffy's Cut from their grandfather, a railroad worker, who told the ghost story to his family every Thanksgiving. According to local legend, memorialized in a file kept by the Pennsylvania Railroad, a man walking home from a tavern reported seeing blue and green ghosts dancing in the mist on a warm September night in 1909.
"I saw with my own eyes, the ghosts of the Irishmen who died with the cholera a month ago, a-dancing around the big trench where they were buried; it's true, mister, it was awful," the documents quote the unnamed man as saying. "Why, they looked as if they were a kind of green and blue fire and they were a-hopping and bobbing on their graves... I had heard the Irishmen were haunting the place because they were buried without the benefit of clergy."
When Frank inherited the file of his grandfather's old railroad papers, the brothers began to believe the ghost stories were real. They suspected that the files contained clues to the location of a mass grave."
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/08/24/pennsylvania.graves.mystery/index.html?hpt=C2
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