On Monday, September 28, 1987, Hendricks County Sheriff’s deputies followed up on a report of a recently reopened grave in a remote cemetery plot north of Plainfield, Indiana. A hiker discovered the disturbed area near a tributary of White Lick Creek while exploring the surrounding farm fields and wooded areas. A six foot deep hole had been dug at one grave site and the remains removed, while several inches of topsoil had been cleared from two other plots.
The site was an old family cemetery belonging to the Carters, an early pioneer family who in 1823 settled 240 acres in that part of Guilford Township. One grave belonged to Ruth Hadley Carter, who died at the age of 68 on April 24, 1869. Another grave belonged to a two-month-old infant, and the third grave was unmarked.
Regarding what would motivate an individual to remove centuries old remains from a remote and obscure settler grave, there weren’t many good theories. Hendricks County Sheriff Lt. Stephen G. Golden speculated that the robbers could have been looking for antique jewelry, or the disturbance was possibly just a sick prank.
Christopher S. Peebles, director of the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology at Indiana University, was also uncertain of what the vandals would have found in the grave other than skeletal remains. “I don’t know what would have been left in this case, but it all comes down to thievery, pure and simple. It’s pretty sick for someone to dig up graves for no apparent purpose. I suspect it’s someone with a screw loose,” Peebles said.
There was one thing investigators did know for sure, the present scene of a recently looted grave in Central Indiana was not an isolated incident. Only a month earlier, residents of nearby Brownsburg and Greenfield, Indiana, went to clean up an ancient family cemetery near Brownsburg and discovered one of the graves dug up and the remains missing. Walker Cemetery, as it is known, sits along 56th street near Brownsburg about a mile west of the Marion County line. The missing remains belonged to Ann Walker, a member of one of Brownsburg’s founding families.
Whether it was someone with a screw loose, a thief in search of valuables, or some twisted, rogue member of the local historical society was anybody’s guess. However, in 1987 there was one theory that explained a lot of grisly and macabre behavior: devil worship. In the climate of the time, it was difficult to understand a series of grave robberies as having any explanation other than dirty deeds done in service of the dark arts. And as the discoveries of disturbed graves and missing remains continued, and tales of strange hooded figures deepened the mystery, the spectre of Satanism spread like a fever until all became infected with its delirium.
Sources:
The Indianapolis Star
The Indianapolis News
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