Article published Jun 10, 2006
The strange tale of the petrified corpse
Macabre story was top headline
By Terry Shulman/contributor

One would be hard-pressed nowadays to envision a front-page newspaper
article about a corpse turning to stone, but Stauntonians wouldn't have
thought twice about the appearance of such a story in the summer of
1909. The Victorian fascination with the grave had carried over into the
new century, after all, and it would take a grisly World War to show
small-town America what the word "macabre" really meant.

Meanwhile, everything from grisly accounts of local manglings to an
old-fashioned case of lockjaw could be counted on to rivet public
attention. And, should it be combined with a dash of the supernatural
perhaps, all the better for selling newspapers.

On June 10, 1909, the Leader reported that while exhuming the body of a
Buckingham County woman so that it could be reinterred next to her
recently deceased husband, workers found the coffin to be unusual heavy
and decided to have a look inside. Prying open the casket lid, they
found the body had undergone "a complete change" and was "thoroughly
petrified."

"A most remarkable feature of this rare circumstance," the paper noted,
"was a lovely tinge of pink could be seen upon each cheek of the
deceased. The lady had been buried over thirty years, in a metallic
casket."

An odd coincidence then, that a woman from the same county should have
dreamed of a corpse turning into stone some six years before the
exhumation. "And stranger yet, the lady told the dream to the daughters
of the deceased six years ago. In that neighborhood, the theory was that
the petrification probably took place about the time of the dream."