They only moved the headstones

Happy Halloween and Día de los Muertos! It’s the one time of year when people can dress like pirates, prostitutes, penguins or bikers and nobody makes fun of them. It’s also a chance to dig up some creepy stuff from local closets and smear it in the local paper … so let’s get right to it.

Want to have a picnic on top of dead people? The Mono County seat can accommodate, complete with manicured lawns and benches on top of a nineteenth century graveyard with some of its residents still in place. A survey map from 1877 courtesy of the Mono County Historical Society shows the corner of Main and School streets in Bridgeport as the site of the original cemetery. The spot was taken over by a gas station and houses and later the Silver Maple Motel and grassy space and playground across the driveway. The graves were purportedly moved to the new cemetery, but according to a geophysical study, very few if any bodies were located beneath the wooden snow poles marking the sites of the relocated graves at the new cemetery. Only about 20 percent of the bodies were moved.

Paul Dostie’s cadaver sniffing dog, Buster, has come across the scent of some bodies in the backyard of one of those homes. Dostie says he chuckles every time he drives by and sees kids playing on the grass on top of dead people.

The unmarked sites on Main Street in Bridgeport are not the only ones in the county. A archaeo-geophysical report was conducted on Mono County cemeteries in January, 2013. Dr. Chester Walker recorded 63 possible unmarked graves in the county, 35 in Bridgeport and 28 at the Mono Lake cemetery. Walker used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), an unobtrusive method of finding out what’s underneath the ground. An infrared map of the sites showed human body-length objects located 6 to 8 feet underground.

No study was performed at Mono County’s now defunct Poor Farm near Green Creek, just north of Bridgeport. A grave was started down the hill from the farm and the bodies still remain.

A poor farm is like a poor house. Before there was Social Security and 401(k)s, people worked until they died. If they didn’t die before they’d worn out their usefulness and nobody else could take care of them, they went to the poor house or farm. The county hospital was moved from Bodie in 1879 to Green Creek, and eventually became the Poor Farm, according to historian Frank Wedertz.

Finances for the county were as tough back then as they were now. Wedertz writes in his book, “Mono Diggings” that county supervisors were taken aback when they found out the Farm’s biggest expense was for whisky and medicine, likely laudanum, a precursor to heroin. The supervisors, being fiscally minded, proposed buying booze by the barrel and drugs by the case to save money.

Unmarked graves are not uncommon in the West. As the country expanded West in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, illness, the elements and other hostiles killed off plenty of pioneers, some of them buried with just a stick for a marker.

There are plenty of Native American burial sites on the Eastside as well, unmarked at least to white residents, but the Natives know where they are. Residents who dig up burial grounds sometimes suffer curses; plenty of them end up being prosecuted, while some die suddenly. A Bishop man enjoyed sifting through a Native American site just outside town and showed off his collection of beads and points to anyone who would look. The man died suddenly of colon cancer months after he started digging.