Cemetery occupants sometimes took their stories to the grave

The weathered gravestone in Vale Cemetery is decorated for autumn now, with red and yellow leaves near its base.

There are few visitors in the southeastern corner of the yard. Fewer still know the story of the “Little Stranger,” who has been at rest in the Schenectady cemetery’s old county burial plot for nearly 130 years. It’s the only name the infant ever had.

Paul Tracy and Bernard McEvoy occasionally walk the 15 rows and look at some of the stones that convey a sense of mystery. Some of the men were buried without names — “Unknown Man” is their inscription for eternity.

“Every one of them was a living, breathing soul,” said Tracy, a volunteer tour guide at Vale. “They probably had some fascinating stories, fascinating lives. We’ll never know … it’s just sad.”

McEvoy, president of the Vale Cemetery Association, says there are other mysteries in the 60-acre cemetery. Historians at other cemeteries said there are things out of the ordinary in their fields, too.

Sometimes, mysteries can be unraveled in old newspapers.

That’s where the story of the “Little Stranger” was found, in 1884 editions of the Schenectady Evening Star. The headline read “Born to be Murdered.” Fisherman William Shutter, working on the Mohawk River just after noon on April 7, found a market basket snagged in his fishing lines. Heavy paper covered a blanket in the basket, and the blanket covered the remains of a male baby.

An autopsy was conducted, and doctors concluded that the baby was strangled shortly after its birth. The Yates undertaking service prepared the body for burial, and women from the city stopped at the business to pay their respects.

“Many were the expressions of sympathy for the babe and disgust and denunciation of the mother’s act offered by these callers,” read the Star’s story on April 9. The piece concluded with information that the baby would be buried in the county plot on April 10 — the date inscribed on the gravestone for the “Little Stranger.”

“Dan Italian” is also among the unknowns. He died in 1906.

“That’s suspicious,” McEvoy said, adding that the unknown man was apparently only known for his ethnicity. “If they were immigrants, you’d think other immigrants would know them.”

Another mystery is connected to the grave of A.E. Carmichael, who died on Jan. 10, 1919. His identity and cause of death are not in dispute; Carmichael’s family put the details of the young man’s death on his marker. “Shot by one of five American soldiers while performing his duty Jan. 10, 1919 at Trier Germany,” the stone reads.

Carmichael was 32 at the time. McEvoy said the young man was a military policeman in Trier, reputed to be one of the oldest cities in Germany. World War I had ended in November 1918, and Carmichael was part of the force maintaining order in the country. Carmichael encountered the American soldiers, McEvoy said, and apparently reprimanded them for some offense. One member of the group shot him.

McEvoy said the authorities did not prosecute the soldiers with much vigor.

“After the war, they weren’t going to be harsh on them,” McEvoy said. “Obviously, the family was upset enough to put it on the grave. They didn’t forget about it.”

The Carmichael grave is located on the Sanford Street side of the cemetery. People can find it by looking for James E. Haigh’s stone dog.

The statue of the dog, “Lion,” guards the entrance to the small Haigh mausoleum, which is right across the path from the Carmichael burial plot. Haigh, born in Nottingham, England, died Jan. 1, 1912, at age 74.

“The way I heard it, after his master was buried, the dog came every day and waited for him,” McEvoy said. “It sounded an awful lot like a story that would have come from Scotland. One day, they found the dog frozen to death, and the cemetery workers bought the statue of the dog that’s at the front of the mausoleum. The name ‘Lion’ was carved into the mausoleum.”

For a while, people used to wonder about the Albany orphans buried in St. Agnes Cemetery in Menands.

Kelly Grimaldi, historian for Albany Diocesan Cemeteries, said Mary Breen, 16, Grace Burns, 19, and Mary O’Brien, 20, perished together on Saturday, Sept. 5, 1903.

Grimaldi said the girls had spent most of their lives in an orphanage and eventually enrolled in St. Joseph’s Industrial School, where they learned domestic skills such as sewing. Members of the Daughters of Charity religious order were school instructors and treated students to a Labor Day weekend outing on that late summer Saturday.

The party was held near Fernwood Pond, which was then located near St. Agnes.

After lunch, the girls decided to wade in the water. “They climbed on an old raft which was floating in the water and peddled a short distance from the shore,” read an account of the accident in the Schenectady Gazette. “In some manner, the raft tipped over, throwing the girls into the water. They were unable to swim and were drowned within 50 feet of the shore.”

The girls were buried in unmarked graves and forgotten for decades. In 2010, Grimaldi found newspaper clippings of the story and took action. “I just started talking about this story to various people,” she said. “I though it was a shame they were unmarked.”

The single grave marker, which contains the names of all three girls and their date of death, was the gift of an anonymous donor.

Grimaldi said visitors began asking questions. They would see three names on the single stone and wonder what had happened on Sept. 5, 1903. “They’d think that maybe they were murdered, but no, they just couldn’t swim,” Grimaldi said.

Because of all the requests for information, the cemetery put the girls’ story on its walking tour guide. One hundred and ten years later, people still pay their respects.

“They get visited; people feel sorry for them and put flowers on their graves. Little rocks are placed on their stones,” Grimaldi said. “They get flowers at Easter and at Christmas from strangers. I don’t know who’s doing it.”

Grimaldi believes there are many mysteries in older cemeteries. In St. Agnes, many lots may look like open fields. But there are graves under the grass — they just aren’t marked.

“There’s a substantial amount,” Grimaldi said. “Most of the people in St. Agnes were Irish immigrants, poor, working-class people who had hard lives and died young. You’re not going to spend $7 on a granite stone. That’s about what they cost in the 19th century. That could have been three weeks’ pay.”

There’s a single “unknown man” in Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Niskayuna. Burial took place in 1927, in an unconsecrated lot within the Roman Catholic cemetery. The space was once reserved for babies who died before baptism.

Maureen McGuinness, the cemetery’s family services manager, said records reveal that the man was 40 years old and had suffered a broken pelvis. But McGuinness said strange facts about the case are also buried in the cemetery record books.

“After looking at the lot card of the ‘Unknown Man’ and seeing that the county paid for the grave, it makes the mystery even more interesting,” McGuinness said. “I had assumed that the diocese or parish had arranged the burial. With the county having paid it, it is interesting that at that point in time they would have picked a Catholic cemetery to bury him in. We also wonder who paid for him to have a granite marker.”

McGuinness said there must have been some reason for the Catholic placement — especially during a time when she said anti-Catholicism was not uncommon. “Was he found with something Catholic, like a scapular or rosary?” McGuinness asked. “Something had to indicate that he might be Catholic.”

McGuinness said people can often answer cemetery questions if they remember their history. Small children dying in 1918-20, she said, could be linked to major news of the era. “You say, OK, that was the big flu epidemic,” McGuinness said. “I think it depends. History and mystery often go together.”

In Corinth, the name of Civil War era soldier Philip Rice is listed on two monuments. Rachel Clothier, historian and curator of the Corinth Museum, knows the story, which once baffled a few people.

Clothier said Rice was the first Corinth resident to die in the war. He was remembered with a 2-foot-tall, government-issued marble stone that was installed in Corinth Rural Cemetery.

“In the 1890s, the family decided to buy one large monument,” Clothier said. “They had all the names included on that monument. The other stone — it was good marble — ended up under the front porch of the Rice house as a foundation piece, a nice square piece of marble. Then, in the 1980s, it had been forgotten, but the house had been sold. Other people did renovations and jacked up the front porch, and ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a tombstone here.’ ”

The new homeowners sold the stone at a garage sale. Clothier said it eventually ended up at a Wilton flea market, where a local Civil War re-enactor decided to buy it. The man returned it to the town of Corinth, and it was later returned to the cemetery it left during the 1890s. It’s now in the veterans’ circle, Clothier said, so Rice has two monuments in Corinth Rural.

She will discuss the strange case this afternoon at Brookside Museum, the home of the Saratoga County Historical Society in Ballston Spa and its “Very Grave Indeed” program. Discussions on local cemeteries will be held from 2 to 4 p.m.

Clothier added that Rice himself could be the subject of another mystery.

“I can’t be sure, but I don’t even think he’s buried there up there,” she said. “I presume he’s buried on the field where he died.”