Finding fossils like shark teeth, crocodile teeth, whale bones and even a human bone along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay is not uncommon, but two weeks ago, a Calvert County man made an amazing discovery.
George Oliver frequently walks the shores near his home looking for fossils, but what he came across recently during a low tide was a surprise: a nearly intact coffin with an almost complete human skeleton inside that appears to be at least 100 years old.
“You could see there’s a coffin there, but it’s completely under the water,” he said.
“Once I found it, I called the sheriff’s department,” Oliver said. “They called the archaeological society.”
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Experts examined the remains but did not remove any. Oliver carefully removed them and dug up the coffin, concerned about what might happen if they were left there.
He pieced together the coffin again. Based on its construction and the condition of the bones, the remains appear to be at least a century old.
But where the coffin came from remains a mystery.
“When I first found it, you could not tell that there was human remains,” Oliver said. “You just thought that it was full of beach sand.”
Oliver turned the bones over to the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office. Crime scene technician Kelcey Ward said it is not unusual to find human remains hundreds of years old but an entire skeleton is rare.
“This is probably the most we’ve had of one body,” she said. “Typically, we might find a leg bone or an arm bone or just not this much of one skeleton, and that’s just because they found it in the coffin.”
While she is unable to determine the age, race or gender, there is a clue as to how the person died.
“We did think it was quite interesting that he had a kind of a [non-natural-looking] defect to his skull here,” Ward said. “See, if I was working this as a more recent case and I found that, I would venture to guess maybe a gunshot wound or blunt force trauma of some sort, but obviously not having the rest of the skull makes that kind of difficult.”
The bones and the coffin will be reinterred at a local church cemetery, though Oliver would prefer to see the coffin preserved.
“This is somebody’s craftsmanship,” he said. “It should be displayed.”
“It’s a shame that it had to happen the way it happened,” Oliver said. “But I think it’s awesome that we found him or her, and now they’ll be able to rest.”
It wasn’t the first time Oliver found human remains. He found a leg bone about 15 years ago. That bone also was interred at a local church cemetery.
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