ND students find remains in Appalachia
Maureen Smithe
Associate News Editor
While most students spent their spring breaks relaxing in the sunshine of a tropical locale, one group of nine Notre Dame students and one from Saint Mary's spent the week cleaning up an abandoned funeral home in Charlestown, West Virginia.
What was supposed to be just another Appalachia Seminar sponsored by the Center for Social Concerns quickly turned into a week resembling a horror movie as body parts and cremated remains were found in the darkened corners of the funeral home.
"It was very strange," Notre Dame senior Brett Perkins said about the funeral home, which had been suddenly abandoned more than two years ago when the home no longer had a licensed embalmer.
Left behind were cabinets filled with client files, plot records, embalming tools and chemicals and a refrigerator with rotted food.
When the United Methodist Church recently bought the building to turn it into a community outreach center, a major clean up and rehab became necessary.
"The house looked like the owners closed up at 5 p.m. on a Friday with the intent of returning on Monday morning, [but never did]," Perkins said.
Students spent the first day at the home cleaning up the public areas. The second day brought the first surprise: the cremated remains of 19 bodies. Perkins said everyone initially thought it was just kitty litter or de-icer.
"In the back of my mind, I was wondering if they were ashes. As we went through more stuff we found canisters with the same stuff. I flipped one over and saw a label that said `American Crematorial Supply,'" Perkins said. Students promptly called the police to come and collect the remains.
Then, a few days later, police were called again when the group began cleaning out the embalming room. While going through the room's closet, two Notre Dame sophomores found what looked to be a glass pickle jar. When they turned it over, they noticed a label that read," Collin's fetus."
"One girl said that we just have to be ready to get immersed in death," Perkins said." We were so surrounded by death that by the time we found all this stuff we all just became numb."
But the fetus was not the end of it. Half an hour after that discovery, students found a clear plastic bag with a preserved left arm from the elbow to the hand. Fingers were sticking out of the plastic, Perkins said.
Overall, Perkins said the trip was a worthwhile experience, even if it offered some fright along with the feeling of doing a job well done.
"It was kind of creepy at first, but then it became sad. These were people just like us with lives and friends and family. For all this time they were in limbo," Perkins said.
As a result of the students' discoveries, new legislation in West Virginia requiring the use of metal tags in cremated remains has been proposed. The police are considering opening an investigation.
All News Stories for Tuesday, April 3, 2001
