From "Illustrated Police News," March 3, 1877
The dead, they say, tell no tales. Cincinnati’s gravediggers were another matter. Every couple of years, one of the local newspapers would send a reporter out to interview the boneyard excavators. Here is a selection of their yarns.
Guards! Guards!
In 1877, poor little Fannie Belle Talbott, four-year-old daughter of Sarah and Albert Talbott of Rising Sun, Indiana, died and was buried in the Cedar Hedge Cemetery. Fearful that body snatchers might attempt to dig up her body and sell it to some medical college, the family hired a couple of local men to stand guard over their daughter’s grave. Unbeknownst to the family, Mayor William Gillespie also expressed concerns over grave-robbing and deputized several local men to stand guard at Fannie’s grave as well. The mayor’s troop arrived first and, when the Talbott family’s guards showed up, they were mistaken for grave robbers. Gunfire erupted and two men, one on each side, were seriously wounded before everyone’s identity was established.
The Gravedigger Strike
In 1946, the United Cemetery Workers, the union representing the gravediggers at Spring Grove Cemetery, went on strike. They complained that the gravediggers just up the road at St. Mary’s in St. Bernard earned $1.47/hour while they had to get by at $1.35/hour. The strike lasted nine days and resulted in delayed burials for 26 bodies. The president of Local 1334, Mr. Talmadge Zipperer, had assigned one of the striking workers to ride a bicycle around all the entrances to Spring Grove to prevent non-union replacements from gaining access to the cemetery. For the record, Mr. Zipperer died in 1958, aged 65, and is interred at Zion Lutheran Church Cemetery in Guyton, Georgia.
Easy On The Starch
When George Weisbrode was sexton, a cab driver pulled up at his cemetery and announced that he had on board the corpse of a child who had died from smallpox or cholera or some other dreadful disease and needed to be buried at once. Weisbrode and his gravedigger quickly shoveled out a hole and the cabbie unloaded a hefty bundle and dropped it in. The grave was quickly filled in. About two hours later, the cab was back, the driver pounding on Weisbrode’s door. There was a mistake, he said. The bundle he had dropped off was the family laundry. The corpse was still in the cab. The grave was reopened, the laundry retrieved, the hapless victim interred, and life—or death—went on.
Naked Corpses Scandal
It was no secret at all that the Cincinnati Infirmary out in Carthage, also known as the “Poor House,” sold the bodies of its deceased residents to Cincinnati’s medical colleges. This fact was so well known that the archbishop of Cincinnati provided funds so that Catholics who died at the Infirmary could receive a proper burial in consecrated ground and not be sold to anatomists nor dumped in the Potter’s Field. John Kellerman, sexton at St. Mary’s Cemetery in St. Bernard, received one of these departed Catholics in 1891 and found, because the lid was not properly fastened, a completely naked corpse, dumped without ceremony into a plain pine box, not even wrapped in a winding sheet. Archbishop Elder blamed the Franciscan brothers assigned to ensure proper burial, and the Franciscans complained that the archbishop was stingy with his burial funds. The administrators of the infirmary hemmed and hawed, but it does not appear that anyone changed anything. And death went on.
All Night Long
When Adolph Strauch, who personally designed the original layout of Spring Grove Cemetery, served as superintendent, he lived in a cottage on the cemetery grounds. One day, a young man was buried not too far from Strauch’s residence. Among the mourners was a young woman. Once the grave was closed and the bereaved had departed, she was nowhere to be seen. She was not at the cemetery and not at her house and her friends became concerned. Next morning, they went looking for her and discovered she had hidden among the trees when everyone left the cemetery and had maintained a night-long vigil atop the grave of the young man, who had been her fiancée. Although she was taken home and cared for, she continued to pine away and was buried not far from her departed lover within the year.
From "Cincinnati Enquirer," January 31, 1892
Overcome With Grief
Meyer Helwitz was both gravedigger and night watchman at the United Jewish Cemetery in Walnut Hills. It was his custom to sleep on a cot next to any new grave. While on watch, he would tie his dog’s leash around his leg as a sort of alarm system. One night while thus engaged, his dog growled and tugged at his leash. Awakening, Mr. Helwitz was alarmed to see a white figure hovering over a nearby grave, uttering the most unearthly sounds. He unholstered his revolver and approached the figure, only to discover a deafmute daughter, clad only in a nightdress, wailing at her mother’s eternal resting place.
Not A Ghost At All
It was Meyer Helwitz himself who inspired a legend about his own cemetery. One sultry night, unable to sleep, he got up and took a stroll through the cemetery. It was such a warm night that it never occurred to him that he might have thrown on something over his nightshirt. Nor did he imagine what a passerby might see if, on his midnight ramble, he indulged in a cigar. A woman’s scream shook him from his reverie, and he discovered that a neighborhood matron, passing the local graveyard, assumed she saw a ghost with glowing red eyes perambulating among the headstones and fainted straightaway.
A Real Mourner
In the early days at Spring Grove Cemetery, so-called professional mourners were a continual irritant. They weren’t professional in the sense of being paid, but they followed mourning families out to the cemetery, enjoyed the free train ride, engaged in baleful histrionics at the grave, and then feasted on the funerary lunch afterwards. At the burial of a young child, the Spring Grove staff thought they had one of these professionals on their hands. She pathetically wept and moaned, throwing herself at the ground and at other mourners. She eventually attempted to leap into the grave itself. Luckily, the child-sized grave was too small for this purpose, and she was escorted away from danger. At that moment, another mourner informed the staff that this was no professional, she was the mother of the deceased. It was said the poor woman never regained her sanity.
Actual Ghouls
According to Henry Esselmann, sexton of St. John Cemetery in St. Bernard, an unusual little girl died and was buried in 1885. She had suffered from a congenital condition that significantly deformed her body and the attending physician offered her grieving father a substantial sum of money if he could preserve the corpse for anatomical study. The father refused and told the sexton about this offer. The sexton, suspecting body snatchers might have a similar sinister interest, decided to keep watch on the grave. He was called away at one point and, on returning, found two men attempting to disinter the girl. Resting his shotgun on a tombstone, the sexton fired twice, striking one of the ghouls full in the back and legs. A couple of the monuments at St. John’s still have buckshot scars to this day.
Macabre Mustache Wax
Sexton Esselmann had another claim to fame, or to infamy, depending on your scruples. He pomaded his mustache with the flesh of a corpse. When mineral-rich water seeps into graves dug into Cincinnati’s limey soil, corpses often saponify—essentially turn to soap. Mr. Esselmann showed an Enquirer reporter in 1892 a strange artifact he carried in his pocket, a lump of white tallow adhered to a bit of deteriorated wood. The sexton explained he was digging up an old grave one day and found this bit of saponified flesh clinging to the splintered remnants of a coffin. He showed the reporter how he rubbed it on his whiskers, declaring the morbid substance superior to any commercial hair oil.
The New Wife
John Henry Dahman of the German Protestant Cemetery tells the tale of a woman who died one winter. It was common practice back in the day for the coffins of people who had died while the ground was frozen to be stored in a receiving vault until springtime, often delaying burials until May. The woman had been lying in the receiving vault less than a month when Dahman was surprised by the widower, accompanied by a woman, demanding his late wife be buried immediately. Dahman showed him the cold ground and asked him to wait, but the man insisted. Pointing to the living woman, he said, “This is my wife now,” he said. “She says this must be done.” So Dahman had a grave dug, the coffin lowered and the new wife said a prayer and shed some tears over her predecessor’s frozen grave.
From "Cincinnati Enquirer," November 22, 1891
Davis’ Dilemma
James H. Davis, an assistant at John Wiltsee’s undertaking establishment, found himself with a truly intransigent “customer” one day. The corpse was that of an elderly minister, above 80 years in age, with a wig and false teeth. Davis had given him the deluxe treatment while the old guy was stiffened with rigor mortis but, just an hour before viewing, the corpse grew limp. The false teeth fell down its throat and Davis had the devil of a time fetching them and getting them back in place, when he noticed that his client was now bald. He found the errant wig at the bottom of the casket but, try as he might, he couldn’t get it to sit right on the ex-minister’s head so, in a fit of inspiration, he plopped it onto his own head and trimmed it a bit at a mirror before installing it upon its intended cranium, where all of the attendants the next morning swore it looked perfectly natural.
In Their Cups
Two battered men were hauled up before the judge in Cincinnati’s Police Court in 1904. They were George Wood and Edward Kalene. Both were gravediggers at St. Joseph Cemetery and neither resisted the urge to have a nip during working hours, downing a schooner or two in the Crow’s Nest at the end of Eighth Street. Each of the men began boasting of his superior skill at digging graves. The argument devolved into fisticuffs and the barkeep summoned the gendarmes when the pair practically demolished his saloon. The judge, recognizing the combatants’ necessary occupation, sent them off with a warning.
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