[BITList] You Can't Fix Stupid!

[HUGH]

Frank,

I believe them all, especially the one about the surprising discovery of bodies in a mausoleum.

Our family moved "up the hill" in 1946, and a favourite place to play was around Broadfield House, once the residence of the Wingate family, cousins of Ord Wingate of Burma fame, WW2. The house was demolished a few years later, being in the way of some development or other, but the nearby wood remained (getting smaller by the day). Near the edge of the wood was a small roofless stone building with no door and a small barred window opening. We called it The Pepper Store, and we used to sit on the flagged stone floor on moonlit nights telling ghost stories.

Time passed, and we grew up.  I came home one day from Kincaids for my dinner (now we say "lunch"), and was told there were men digging for bodies in the wood.  I walked to the end of the road and they were, indeed, doing that, with Police supervision.  I have a vivid recollection of a man holding up a long bone and a skull.  The Pepper Store was no more - the foundations of an intended house crossed its site, and they had found bones.  It was a mausoleum, and (as happens) they were surprised to find human remains in it. I don't recall how many individuals were buried there, but there was a lead, or lead-lined, coffin, still closed.

Not long after, our family moved even further up the hill, and when I got married I moved even further up than that.  The house they built on top of the mausoleum is still there, but the house we lived in is no more, long since demolished along with its neighbours. The much reduced wood is enclosed in a chain link fence with Keep Out notices. This is where they store the machinery and materials for the fancy houses being built where ours used to be.  They can't even get the name of the area right on the large boards announcing the development.

Hugh.
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