Grave of the Lady in Red
Oct. 18th, 2016 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charisstomaWhy am I thinking of Sleeping Beauty Snow White and the evil queen won this one.
In summer of 1969 farmhands were digging on Egypt Plantation in Cruger, Mississippi when the backhoe operator felt a crunch. Just three feet beneath the topsoil, he had hit a very, very old coffin—made of cast-iron and glass. The body inside was visible.
It was a young woman wearing a red velvet dress, white gloves, and square-toed boots from sometime in the previous century. The body wasn't decomposed, as one might expect for a corpse in such antiquated garb. The coffin had been filled with preservative alcohol and sealed, and the woman inside looked almost as she did the day she died, her hair a bright auburn and her skin pale white. The glass had shattered when the backhoe hit it, and the alcohol seeped into the ground around it, exposing the body to the elements after a century of rest.
Local historians have attempted to source the woman's identity without any luck. Clues from her clothing and the coffin she was found in indicate she died before the Civil War. She was reburied in Lexington's Odd Fellows Cemetery with a marker dating her estimated birthdate as 1835 and her death date as 1969, the year she was discovered.
No one is sure about who the Lady in Red was or why she was buried in a shallow, unmarked grave. Some speculate that the coffin might have fallen off a wagon and never reached its final burial site. Others predict that she was a passenger on a paddleboat who died while traveling the nearby Yazoo River. Her identity may never be discovered, but if anything that's only fueled the intrigue surrounding the Lady in Red.
Link to the site: The Lady in Red
In summer of 1969 farmhands were digging on Egypt Plantation in Cruger, Mississippi when the backhoe operator felt a crunch. Just three feet beneath the topsoil, he had hit a very, very old coffin—made of cast-iron and glass. The body inside was visible.
It was a young woman wearing a red velvet dress, white gloves, and square-toed boots from sometime in the previous century. The body wasn't decomposed, as one might expect for a corpse in such antiquated garb. The coffin had been filled with preservative alcohol and sealed, and the woman inside looked almost as she did the day she died, her hair a bright auburn and her skin pale white. The glass had shattered when the backhoe hit it, and the alcohol seeped into the ground around it, exposing the body to the elements after a century of rest.
Local historians have attempted to source the woman's identity without any luck. Clues from her clothing and the coffin she was found in indicate she died before the Civil War. She was reburied in Lexington's Odd Fellows Cemetery with a marker dating her estimated birthdate as 1835 and her death date as 1969, the year she was discovered.
No one is sure about who the Lady in Red was or why she was buried in a shallow, unmarked grave. Some speculate that the coffin might have fallen off a wagon and never reached its final burial site. Others predict that she was a passenger on a paddleboat who died while traveling the nearby Yazoo River. Her identity may never be discovered, but if anything that's only fueled the intrigue surrounding the Lady in Red.
Link to the site: The Lady in Red
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Date: 2016-10-18 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-21 05:54 pm (UTC)That coffin was cast iron, but don't the Russians have (Soviets had) a few glass coffins on public display with men of state in them? Stalin?
I wonder if she was a beloved daughter of the family who lived in the area and she died tragically young, so they buried her on the property (as country folk tended to do) and then the grief of her loss caused them to move away and the next owners never knew she was there.
My grandmother lived in King's Valley when I was a kid. The Kings it was named for had headstones against the fence of a descendant' property (between my grandma's and the little country store, so I passed them a lot), but no one knew where they were actually buried as the couple hundred acre valley had all once been theirs.
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Date: 2016-10-23 06:01 am (UTC)