Inexplicable phenomena, one way or another connected with the cemetery, at all times frightened and worried people. Coffins moving in graves and growing crosses are not evidence of the existence of an afterlife?
Fire on the graves
“One summer my friend and I were repairing a monument at the grave of relatives,” writes Alexander S, a worker from Tomsk. - We returned through the entire cemetery. It was evening, not a soul around. A bonfire was noticed in the distance among the graves. They decided that they were homeless people. We went there to intimidate them, and we see: there are no homeless people, and no one at all, and a tombstone is burning on someone's grave. It was a marble or granite monument. It burned well, as if doused with gasoline. And the strangest thing is that something burned for a very long time. My friend and I were even creepy. We left without waiting for it to go out.
And the next day we had to go there again - the day before we had not finished the work. In the morning we deliberately turned towards those gravestones. Which one burned - we did not remember. They searched for him, but never found him. All the monuments were intact, not a trace of soot anywhere. It turns out that the flame did not even leave traces!"
A similar picture was observed in England in 1979 at a cemetery near the city of Ipswich. Several eyewitnesses saw the burning of a granite tombstone of a certain Robert Milkins, a very devout man who donated his property to an orphanage. At first, people also decided that it was a vandal action. The fire went out pretty quickly - even before the water was brought. As in the case described by Alexander S., no traces of burning were found on the monument. They did not find any signs of a combustible liquid, without which granite simply could not be engulfed in flames.
The phenomenon of unusual fires on graves has been observed before. What is most striking is that the fire appears on its own and just as suddenly disappears without causing visible damage to the tombstone.
At the end of the 19th century, a wooden cross was engulfed in fire in the cemetery of the Sicilian city of Palermo. The flame went out as soon as a man approached him with a bucket of water. The cross not only remained intact, but not even charred. Later, it was suggested that this fire could be somewhat similar to the one that appears once a year in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
Mysterious lines and circles
Another unusual cemetery phenomenon is the signs and drawings appearing on tombstones. It could be mistaken for someone's nasty joke, but it's not that simple.
In 1995, in an old cemetery near Parma (Italy), on one of the granite tombstones of the early 20th century, carved lines were discovered that outwardly resemble the lines of some incomprehensible letter. The restorers examining the tombstone were amazed: the depth of the lines reached four centimeters, although they themselves were less than a millimeter thick. The edges of the lines are absolutely even and made at right angles. The granite didn't even crumble. It is impossible to create such a thing even in a specialized laboratory. The meaning of the lines and the entire inscription remained unsolved, as well as who and why could have done all this.
In 1988, strange circles appeared on marble tombstones near Antofagasta, Chile. The circles were perfectly flat and deeply cut into the stone. Some of the circles contained curving lines or patterns inside. The incomprehensible images were repaired, but soon on one of the tombstones the old drawing appeared through the retouch, becoming even more noticeable. Only after the third putty did the image stop appearing. After 15 years, French experts became interested in the phenomenon. When they removed the layer of material hiding the design, it was discovered that instead of the previous deep cuts, only a barely noticeable outline of mysterious signs remained on the marble.
Abnormal signs and patterns on the gravestones appear not only "cut with a chisel", but also applied with the help of other "technologies". For example, in the Czech Republic, on one of the gravestones, an intricate pattern was as if burned out. Experts concluded that it was impossible to apply this on marble with a soldering iron or welding machines.
In England, a woman's face, framed with long hair, appeared on a mossy tombstone of the 18th century (this despite the fact that a man who has become bald almost from a young age lies in the grave!). On an ancient gravestone in Argentina, rusty streaks formed into the Latin word for "hell". The streaks scraped off, but after a while the inscription appeared again.
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Growing headstones
Perhaps of all the ways the perfume reminds of itself, the most striking is the growing gravestones. The most famous stone cross in the cemetery in the Belarusian city of Turov. It began to stretch upward, pushing the ground, in the mid-1990s, and its growth continues to this day.
Less known is another tombstone - a rectangular stone stele in a cemetery in Indianapolis (USA). For the first time its growth was noticed in 1982. The ground around the monument suddenly turned up in a strange way. This gave rise to Tom Lee, the grandson of the buried, to measure the base of the stele and compare it with the surviving drawing of the monument. It turned out that the monument was almost an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide. Since then, the stele has continued to grow, albeit very slowly. Measurements in 2003 showed that the stele had grown another half-inch in length.
Several other growing stone tombstones are known. In Hungary, in one of the cemeteries, a strange swelling of a vertically placed stone soldered into a horizontal slab led to the cracking of the latter. According to experts, the nature of the cracks on the slab speaks precisely of the expansion of the vertical stele. No rational explanation has been given for this phenomenon.
Coffins rise from the graves
No less mysterious is the phenomenon of "moving" or "floating" coffins. Its manifestation took place in Bulgaria in the early 1960s. The general public learned about him only thirty years later.
It began with the fact that in a simple village cemetery on a grave mound, the earth began to swell. At first, the villagers did not understand what was the matter, until finally the edge of a half-rotten coffin appeared from the ground. There were people who, in the mid-1940s, attended the funeral of a person buried here. They unanimously declared that the hole had been dug to a sufficiently large depth. How the coffin could rise to the surface remained a mystery, especially since the neighboring graves were in perfect order.
During the reburial, the coffin was opened. The deceased was surprisingly well preserved, and his clothes and entire body were soaked in something oily, odorless.
An almost similar incident occurred in the 1920s in Argentina, in an old cemetery near Rosario. After the last rains from the grave, to everyone's surprise, the edge of the coffin emerged. The coffin seemed to "float" out of the ground. In it rested a certain Maria de Lera, who died at the age of 65. It was known about her that she spent most of her life in paralysis. The coffin, without opening it, was reburied next to the previous grave, but after 28 years it was again on the surface.
By order of the priest, the coffin was taken out of the cemetery fence and buried for the third time. Since then, it has not "surfaced" again, but, according to a local newspaper, in 1959 the authorities decided to disturb the grave again. The coffin was at the same depth, only for some reason it was tilted. Its headboard was raised at an angle of about 30 degrees, which looked rather unusual. There were witnesses who claimed that the coffin was in a horizontal position when buried in the ground.
The coffins fall into the ground
Coffins can not only rise from the ground, but also descend into it. This could be explained by soil erosion by groundwater, if the same thing happened with neighboring graves. But when it plunges> into the ground, moreover, dry, only one coffin out of many buried in the same cemetery, it looks more than strange.
In the 1930s, in South Africa, at a rural cemetery near Johannesburg, the soil on one of the grave mounds sagged all the time. The relatives of the deceased had to pour in new soil to restore the hill. The earth, however, continued to sink. Moreover, what is most surprising, the resulting pit corresponded to the length and width of the burial.
Since nothing of the kind happened to the neighboring graves, they decided that someone was joking. But later it turned out: the earth itself was sinking. Excavations have shown that the half-rotted coffin is almost three meters below the depth at which the dead are usually buried in this cemetery. They could not determine the reason for the strange lowering of the coffin, they decided that witchcraft was involved.
It was not possible to find a natural explanation not only for this, but also for other episodes of this kind. Therefore, there is nothing left but to enroll the cemetery phenomena in the category of paranormal and wait - maybe more than a dozen years - until, finally, science explains what the matter is.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №18. Author: Igor Voloznev