Page 37 - The Westerner Magazine Halloween 2018

here and raging. It would only get BB: The coffins survived?
worse through the months of July and
August.

I’ve written a few articles on the cholera
epidemic. You can find them online
under The Sisters of Charity who came

out to tend to people before they died.
Not the murder victims but the
remaining Irish who were stricken. The

Sisters of Charity, the 1832 Cholera
WW: There’s a lot of decomposition.
Epidemic and Duffy’s Cut is the title of the
You can actually see the decomposition
article.
before you actually get to them. The
The railroad quarantined those who got body, unembalmed, oozes out and one
the disease. They wouldn’t let them out. hundred years later there’s a stain in the

We figured the first seven who escaped soil and rust on the nails around the
were the ones we found. We found coffin. There’s a smell to the soil that I
them in wooden coffins, and some of can’t explain—it’s nothing like I’ve ever

them had more than 100 nails sealing smelled before.
them in. No railroad worker would
BB: Fascinating.
have been curious enough to open the
box and see the bloody mess inside.
WW: You can visit the museum at
They would have been afraid of the Immaculata and see much of what
disease and deterred by the
we’ve accomplished. There are no
extraordinary effort to seal the casket.
bones; they’ve been reinterred properly
except for those still under examination
BB: So the bodies you found were inside
at the Penn Museum. And we have
of coffins?
some teeth that we are using for DNA
WW: Yes, but we don’t expect many of identification.
the rest of them to have coffins. We

believe that many of them did die of
cholera. I think the ones we identified
by GPR, last summer, are in coffins and

that they were also murdered.