By Joshua Vise – August 4, 2023

Published in Halloweenthology: Jack-O’-Lantern by Wicked Shadow Press. Lulu: Paperback or EPUB

For the briefest of seconds, Stephen felt complete weightlessness, as if floating on the surface of an impossibly calm lake. Then the cool night air rushed across his loose and disheveled clothing and howled in his ears. He was aware that he was falling, and yet his attention was fully enwrapped in the nostalgia of his senses. The wind evoked memories of standing atop the bluffs and looking out across the Illinois bottoms, that flat, fertile strip of land running parallel to the Mississippi river on one side, and the ancient, glacier-hewn cliffs on the other. His mind’s eye envisioned the familiar pattern of neatly platted farmland as it transformed from the dark brown of newly overturned soil into verdant green as the year’s crops sprouted, eventually changing into large swaths of dusty gold after the harvest. His nose sensed the humidity and the deep richness of newly plowed earth. He opened his eyes, and was overcome with the bright, silvery light of a full moon. He reflexively began to raise his hands to his face, but the image quickly went dark as his body slammed through the branches of the trees below. The hiss of the wind in his ears was replaced with the loud rustling of leaves and the snap of branches as his body tumbled and careened through the intermingled canopy of the oaks that stood tall at the base of the cliff. He wasn’t conscious of any individual impact, but felt the entirety of the experience as a deep pressure that radiated from his chest and through his limbs, eventually crashing and pulling at his skin, like the undertow of a great internal ocean. He felt no pain as he slammed into the ground, though he was aware of the dust and dirt gently settling on the exposed skin of his face.

Stephen lay face up on the ground for several minutes as his mind caught up to his senses. The overwhelming noise and brightness of his fall receded from the foreground of his experience, and he gradually became attuned to the subtleties of his current surroundings. The wind, no longer a deafening roar, meandered lightly through the trees. He felt the wetness of the dew, and remembered how early it condensed in the bottoms as the humid river air met the coolness of the limestone cliffs. The moonlight, so intense only a moment before, reached the ground as a soft glow, having been filtered and attenuated by the canopy overhead. An occasional pebble cascaded down from above, likely a straggler from his own fall.

Slowly, Stephen sat up and propped himself against the trunk of a large oak next to him. Through the copse in front of him, he confirmed what his senses had evoked earlier. The flat expanse of the Illinois bottoms stretched out in front of him. He recalled how in the reddish glow of the setting sun, these bottoms seemed majestic, a vast swath of picturesque nature stretching to the narrow treeline bordering the Mississippi river. Now, in the moonlight, and from his vantage point, those same fields seemed an imposing expanse of nothingness receding into the all-consuming darkness of a distant horizon. 

Having satisfied himself as to where he was, Stephen scanned his own body. The sense of pressure he felt as he plummeted through the branches had dissipated, and was replaced with a deep numbness. Rips and muddy streaks stood out against his white dress shirt, and occasionally he caught a glimpse of the grey skin underneath. His long sleeves were similarly ripped and streaked, though his arms and hands seemed uninjured by the fall. He raised and lowered them slowly, and found no restriction to his motion, though the numbness that pervaded his body extended to his fingertips. His wedding ring was gone, a dark band circled his finger where it had once been.

Stephen’s legs appeared almost invisible, his matte black pants absorbing nearly all of the light that fell on them. Even so, he could see that his right leg was broken. His leg, twisted at an awkward angle below the kneecap, revealed itself as a shadow against the brighter, dew-covered ground. He braced himself, expecting pain as he attempted to move it, but as he rotated the broken limb into its natural position under himself, he felt nothing. He grunted hoarsely as he stretched, reaching for a nearby branch, and stabilized his leg as best as he could, using strips of fabric torn from his shirt to hold the branch tightly in place.

For all of the information his senses had fed to him as he fell, Stephen couldn’t remember just how he had come to fall. Straining and reaching for something familiar, he could only recall distant, hazy memories of the cliffside throughout the seasons. They existed as oil paintings in his head, their imagistic beauty hinting at nothing of the events that brought him to the top of the bluffs so many times over the course of his life, much less giving him any clarity as to why he was there on a night like this one, or why he had fallen. Stephen sat there, remembering nothing specific, feeling nothing but numbness, and only recognizing the moon-cast shadows of a place that existed more deeply as a recollection than as a current reality to him. 

Amid these experiences, something as vivid as a memory and as powerful as an emotion impelled Stephen’s gaze upwards. Through the frame of broken branches, he saw the upper edge of the cliff. Tall grass leaned bravely out over the jagged verticality of the cliff face, their roots secured precariously into a pencil-thin layer of soil that extended to the edge of the rock. In one single spot in the center of his gaze, the grass jutted out at a right angle as if recently compacted.

Stephen studied this spot carefully. From within, he could feel that powerful, vivid something coalescing into a deep sense of instinctual knowing; he KNEW that this spot is where he had just come from, and he KNEW this is where he needed to be. His knowing exceeded the bounds of any rational thought that would have questioned his intentions, that would have told him that he couldn’t climb, and that in spite of his seeming invulnerability to pain, would have told him to seek out a doctor for his injured leg. His knowing overwhelmed the hesitancy and fear that would have created and replayed haunting scenarios of another fall from the great heights of the bluffs, and that would have existed within the breast of anyone not so single-minded. He knew he would climb to the top, and that is all he needed to know.

As he stood, Stephen clenched his jaw in anticipation of the waves of pain that would surely shoot through his broken leg, waves of pain which never came. Instead, he sensed the heaviness of his body wobbling as it searched for balance atop his makeshift wooden brace. He hunched over to his left, favoring his uninjured leg, and began a slow, shambling walk to the stone precipice that he intended to scale. The scree and detritus underneath him clicked, crunched, and scraped as he navigated the incline, and he reached the rock wall with no greater understanding of his intentions beyond his need to ascend. It was as if a sinister opaqueness told him “Up”, and the mere mention of the word triggered an insatiable desire to obey.

The natural layering of the sedimentary deposits that formed the limestone bluffs eroded into deep horizontal grooves, like looking sidelong at a massive, ancient book whose pages had been left untrimmed. Even through the numbness that Stephen couldn’t seem to rid himself of, his fingers quickly found secure purchase among the cracks, and his arms supported his weight as his legs pushed him higher. Upwards he moved, with a rapidity that would have surprised him had he taken the time to reflect upon it. As it was, his obsession with his goal created a mental numbness that paralleled his physical numbness. His clothes, already mangled from his fall, scoured the rock until cold stone rubbed against the naked skin of his chest. Occasionally, his injured leg would buckle under the strain, kicking and sending loose debris tumbling to the forest floor below him as he sought a secure foothold. A breeze blew across the stone, and his tattered clothing lashed his back. Nevertheless, Stephen’s vision never strayed from that single patch of crushed grass at the cliff edge, and his viselike grip easily penetrated the dew soaked dirt of thousands of years of erosion and firmly clenched the rock underneath. 

That same malevolence that drove him up the jagged rock face also attuned his senses to the fulfillment of a primary objective, of which scaling the cliff was only a part. His ears prickled, detecting tiny, whisperlike voices intermingled with the hissing drone of the wind gusts. Any other person would struggle to notice them, but Stephen could not only sense them, but also ascribe to them a directionality. The voices were coming from the top of the cliff, and gained in volume and clarity as he ascended.

Just as he had earlier struggled to discern his current surroundings, Stephen struggled to make sense of the language of the voices. It was intensely familiar, and he was aware that he had heard this language before, and perhaps even spoken it at one point in his life. Still, the powers that compelled him forward were selective in their revelations, and he KNEW that at this moment, it was only necessary to be guided towards the sounds. The degenerate, cryptic logic of whatever force drove him forward told him that understanding would come later, if at all. He need only obey, and his confidence in the realization of his mysterious goal surged as his hands reached the leading edge of the top of the escarpment. His arms curled as he pulled himself up, and his fingers scratched deep ruts into the soft soil as he crawled his way forward. 

Stephen dragged his body over the precipice. He lay in the tall grass momentarily and took stock of his surroundings. He turned and looked out from the rocky heights, and his eyes drank in the silvery radiance of moonlit fields stretching to the edge of the earth. Here and there, small ponds shimmered, appearing powerfully bright against the dark ruts of the recently plowed soil. Beyond the copse that hugged the cliff’s base, individual trees dotted the landscape, their elongated, black shadows imparting to them the appearance of being bent in prayer. The full moon shimmered, its edges wobbling liquidly through a turbulent atmosphere. Stephen recognized this exact spot as the setting of his earlier memories, though he could not remember ever taking in this view at night. Devoid of color, the landscape existed as a photographic negative of his earlier recollections.

All at once, intrusive elements began to leak into Stephen’s peripheral senses. The smell of smoke wafted into his nostrils. It was tinged with a damp, fungal staleness, as if someone were igniting the bark of a long dead tree after a recent rainstorm. The sickly fetor intermingled with the sounds of human voices in conversation. No longer impeded by distance or obstructions, the voices resounded in the cool night air, punctuated by the crackle of a bonfire. Despite this, only fragments of meaning impinged upon Stephen’s consciousness, but even these scraps of conversation triggered cascades of deep-seated awareness within him. The sinister, opaque malevolence that controlled his thoughts and actions suddenly and completely revealed everything to him. He KNEW where he was, who these men were, and what they were doing. Even as Stephen’s realization of his current situation fully took hold, he was unswayed by any upwelling of passion or careful consideration. The same instinctual knowing that had driven him up the wall would continue to drive him forward, and neither rationality nor emotion would play a part.

Stephen stood laboriously, his makeshift brace straining as he found his balance. In the direction of the voices, a monolithic granite structure loomed in the near distance. The flat face of the building was easily two stories tall, and a heavy, triangular roof was supported by four Doric columns. An intense, yellow light radiated from the surface of the complex, save for the doorway, an impenetrably black rectangle between the centermost columns. Beyond corners of the structure, massive brick walls tapered away, following the natural contours of the hill in which the edifice was embedded. In the clearing just in front of the intimidating building, bright flames surged from between the thick logs of a bonfire, overpowering the moonlight and giving life and motion to the shadowy world at its margins . Against this backdrop, two silhouettes flickered intermittently between the swaying of the tall grass. Two men crouched as close to the flame as they could bear, their backs to the cliff edge. 

Stephen lurked towards the shadows. The intense knowing that had guided him this far took on a predatory aspect, and he KNEW what he would do once he had these men in his numb grasp. The cold night air, fleeing the intense heat of the fire, carried with it their halting conversation, and the language that had been such a mystery to him earlier penetrated his mind as an unencrypted stream of information.

“How much longer?”

“What are you in a rush?”

“No…just asking…”

“I’d say an hour. Maybe a bit less.”

“I just don’t want anything to melt is all.”

“Diamonds can’t melt.”

“Gold melts.”

“Relax.”

“Silver melts.”

“I said relax. We already got most of it.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

“Burn the body.”

“But why?”

“You really are hopeless, aren’t you.”

One shadow shifted. Stephen could see his features in profile.

“One, if we missed anything, we can get it when the ashes cool. Two, we destroy the evidence.”

“But why didn’t we burn the other one then?”

“Guys don’t have jewelry.”

“We still could have burned him.”

“Hey, relax! Nobody even comes out here!”

They sat silently, each eyeing the fire. Stephen reached the clearing. He paused at the edge of the grassline, awaiting the guiding force’s next command.

“I was just saying…”

“You’re always just saying.”

“No, but…”

“Shut up.”

The first shadow stood, his arms gesticulating aggressively towards the other.

“Just get your ass in there, and see if there’s anything left! I’ll take care of the fire!”

“I was just saying!”

“Say it walking, alright? You want to go so bad? Let’s get this done and get out of here.”

The weaker man’s resentment was clear as he scrabbled to his feet and marched towards the building. The dancing yellow flames lit the scowling, subservient features of his face as he rounded the fire, and he disappeared into the blackness of the open doorway. 

With the second man gone, Stephen gazed at the lines of the remaining silhouette. The strength in the man’s shoulders, arms, and hands was evident as he reached for a nearby rake and began to prod the fire, pulling at the logs and dispersing their heat and light. Floating embers swirled up, and he paused to bat them away from his face.

“Goddammit,” the shadow muttered. He dropped the rake and began rubbing his eyes with balled fists, standing ignorant to Stephen’s presence, and within reach.

The malevolent spirit within him commanded him to action, and as soon as the man turned away from the fire, Stephen obeyed. 

With a single motion, Stephen’s hand found the neck of his prey. Otherworldly energy surged through his body, his grip tightened, and the man who had once been a shadow transformed into a living reality. The orb of the moon reflected in the shining whites of the man’s eyes as they bulged. He pushed against Stephen’s arm, struggling to free himself, his gurgling, rasping throat desperate to draw air through clenched teeth. Stephen’s grip was unrelenting, and his cold, unfeeling fingers continued to tighten. Thick veins in the man’s neck protruded, quivering and pulsing under the erratic exertions of his heart, mirroring the waves of infernal strength that cascaded through Stephen as he lifted him bodily off the ground.

“Give…it…back.”

The words welled up in Stephen’s core and emanated from his cracked lips in a rasping voice that would seem just as appropriate coming from the dying heart of the bonfire itself. 

The man in Stephen’s grasp kicked and pushed, but to no avail. Stephen spoke again, his cadence slowing as he drew out each word.

“Giiiiiive……iiiiiit……baaaaack.”

A horrifying realization crossed the man’s face, and he released his grip on Stephen’s wrist. Through gritted teeth, and with a shaking hand, he reached into his pocket. The ring he withdrew, a simple gold band, fell from his hand as Stephen squeezed, crushing the man’s trachea with a sickening, wet crunch. Red-tinged foamy saliva oozed from his mouth, and his eyes rolled back into his head as his life ebbed. He hung limply, still in Stephen’s grasp. He knew that this man, no longer in possession of the ring, and devoid of life, was of no further use to him. With a violent shoving motion, Stephen threw the corpse. It landed face-down across the logs of the bonfire, and a great swirl of glowing embers fluttered into the sky at the impact. Yellow flames enveloped the body, climbing across hair and clothing, emitting clouds of acrid soot.

Stephen knelt and ran his hands back and forth over the ground, his fingers scraping the dirt in search of the gold band. It was only the work of a moment before the glimmering metal revealed itself against the dull earth. He held it to the light in his palm, the cool rays of the moon exposing the engraving within. An elegant, looping script spelled out a name, his name – Stephen W. Miles. He slipped it on, and the band settled naturally over the dark line around his left ring finger.

An explosive flood of new sensations surged through Stephen. The numbness that had plagued his body since the fall evaporated instantly. His dulled senses became alive, and his flesh crackled with the electric pulse of nerve endings screaming at the strain of their reawakening. The bonfire, a moment ago only a source of light, radiated intense heat that seared the skin of his chest, while his back, facing away from the flame, prickled from the sharp frigidity of the wind. His broken leg throbbed, and the makeshift brace’s bands dug excruciatingly into him. Each scratch and scrape made its presence known, and threatened to tear wider as Stephen twisted and contorted in reaction to the overwhelming pain.

That pain, however, paled in comparison to the agony that convulsed his body as the malevolent force, the apparition that had guided him to this point, permeated him, merging with his flesh. With it came every revelation that had thus far been hidden. Through a paroxysm of torturous movement, he spun, and recognized fully the view from the top of the cliff. Staring down from above, he recognized the contours of the earth as it receded into the distance. As a young man, he had purchased this farmland, and its upkeep was the enterprise of a lifetime. 

His lifetime. 

Over decades, Stephen had invested a great deal of work in maintenance and improvements, and the fact that his farm had been one of the most consistently productive pieces of land in the county had been a tremendous source of pride for him, second only to his family.

His family.

Stephen turned again, and saw the towering structure in front of him, glowing a ghastly red-orange under the still flickering remains of the bonfire. Above the door, a bas-relief carving bore the name “S.W. Miles”. His success had allowed him to spare no expense, and the smooth Italian marble surface, the thick, scalloped columns, the gently sloping brick walls had all been his design. Though the construction costs dwarfed the costs of many of his neighbors’ entire holdings, it had appealed to him through its gorgeous location, its permanence, and its purpose in justifying the structure’s creation. After all, it was meant to be a place of repose not just for him, but for members of his family over many succeeding generations. It was an impulse intrinsic to mankind; the desire to hold on to the beauty of a life, and to leave a mark on eternity.

Now, that tranquility had been shattered by another instinct equally intrinsic to mankind, and perhaps more powerful; greed. It was greed that gave mortals the strength to tear apart gods when the tombs of the pharaohs were plundered and the pyramids were hollowed. It was greed that filled the hearts of the barbarian warriors as they pillaged Rome, setting fire to all that they could not carry. It was greed that allowed the great pirate hordes to cast their living victims into an unmerciful ocean. Even in this peaceful part of the world, a place populated by those with little inclination towards outward extravagance, it was greed that had spoken to these two men as they desecrated his mausoleum. But that same desirous impulse that led to the defilement of Stephen’s tomb had also awakened him, and as he strode in a halting, injured gait towards the mausoleum’s entrance, he realized that the sinister, malevolent opaqueness that had guided him was his own desire to reclaim what was his. It was, in fact, his own greed.

The light of the fire cast Stephen’s shadow across the floor and up the opposite wall of the chamber as he entered. His nerves, now fully awake, crackled with excitement and pain, and his sensitive eyes attuned themselves to the dark space instantly. On either side, great recesses lined the walls four spaces high. The little light that did manage to find its way in couldn’t penetrate the compartments, leaving each one a black void. The shattered remains of each crypt’s marble front gave them the appearance of a jagged, gaping maw, as if some nested collection of avian monsters were yawning in anticipation of their deathly mother’s regurgitations.

The central chamber, a rectangular corridor, bore witness to the blasphemous indignities that the men had perpetuated. Intermingled with the marble shards and bits of clothing were desiccated body parts. Some were little more than bone fragments, while other, more substantial pieces still bore the chalky remains of hair, skin, and muscle tissue. Some were still identifiable; a woman’s hand clutched into a tense fist, a row of molars still deeply rooted in a single lower mandible, an ankle sprouting from a leather shoe. A silty cloud hung low over the floor, the dusty effluvium an exhalation of previously undisturbed remains having been violently cast to the ground. In the center of this travesty crouched the man, his back to the door as his fingers sorted through bits of debris. As Stephen’s shadow crept over the man, he began to speak.

“Good thing we came back. Look what we missed,” said the man as he raised his hand over his head, revealing his find to the shadow of the man he thought was his partner. A thin golden chain was looped around his palm, a small, oval locket dangling from the delicate, threadlike band.

With a speed motivated by pain, hatred, and anguish, Stephen clutched the man by his upheld wrist, fingers coiling, squeezing, constricting, and crushing. The crack of the man’s wrist bones rippled through Stephen’s tightly clamped grip, and the accompanying pop was audible even over his victim’s piercing screams. Gesticulating wildly with his free hand, the man swung around awkwardly, desperately trying to discover the cause of this sudden, excruciating pain, but each movement only exacerbated his injury. He turned, and saw a shadow, backlit by a rectangular column of fire. 

Stephen ripped the locket from the man’s grasp, and pushed him away. With no means of escape, the man slid backwards into the corner of the chamber, his whimpers punctuated by an occasional panicked scream as he clutched his crushed appendage. His head twisted this way and that, and he reached out with his uninjured hand, searching for anything that might be useful as a weapon, eventually securing a jagged piece of marble facade. He held it out tremulously in Stephen’s direction.

The man continued to scream, calling out for his partner, shouting threats and epithets borne of desperation and hopelessness, but Stephen heard nothing. Instead, the golden locket in his hand became the sole object of his attention. With all of the delicacy he could muster, he pressed the switch, and the small oval opened gently. Inside, on each interior face, was a picture. The first, a handsome man, of older years but still clinging to an energy and youthful vitality, looked out. He was dressed in formal attire, and his gaze was steady, relaxed, confident. Opposite him was a woman of similar age and comport. She was turned slightly to the side, and the ornate pin that secured her hair in a tight bun was just visible. Her dress poofed lightly in the shoulders, and the delicate lace lining around her neck gave her an air of dignity without being too matronly or severe. There was no inscription, no hint of who these people were, but the graceful curve of the woman’s eyebrows naturally drew the viewer’s eyes to hers, and as Stephen looked into the charming effulgence of her gaze, he recognized his young daughter, now a woman. 

Deep in the heart of every father resides an unspoken repository of hopes and dreams for their child; a long life well-lived, a happy marriage and family, comfort and success. These wishes are intertwined with the cold reality that a father is not the one who can give these gifts. One can only hope that, absent our material presence, the grace of providence can bring these dreams to fruition. It is this hope that allows a father to accept his own mortality. Of all of the disorientation and confusion surrounding Stephen’s awakening, of all of the pain he had endured and still carried, of all of the anguish he felt at witnessing the desecration of his mausoleum and the debasement of his family’s remains, there was no experience more conducive to abject spiritual dissolution than that of a father bearing witness to the conclusion of a daughter’s life, and apprehending which of these silent hopes and dreams that he had held in his heart had failed to come true. 

The horror overtook Stephen, and the locket fell from his hands, landing among the debris of the floor, debris he now fully understood to be the shattered remains of everyone he had loved, and everyone who had ever loved him. The deep abyss from which he drew the energy to sustain himself began to collapse under the weight of these new revelations, and he sensed a looming powerlessness that would soon overtake him. Still, as he looked up from the ghastly remains that littered the marble floor in front of him and onto the injured, sobbing creature still wielding the jagged sliver of marble, Stephen knew there was time for one final act of retribution.

*****

Report on fatal accident during criminal trespass action involving Nathaniel Allen Reeves, 39, of Waterloo, Illinois, and Benjamin Harper Moody, 37, of unincorporated St. Clair County.

Incident Date: April 11-12, 1962

Location: Eagle Cliff-Miles Cemetery

Officers Involved: Det Insp. Leonard Chapman, Ofc. James Hayes 

Report Filed By: Det Insp. Leonard Chapman

Case No. 451-1A

At approximately 0335, the Waterloo Fire Department was dispatched to the Eagle Cliff-Miles Cemetery in order to investigate a report of a potential brush fire. Upon arrival, firefighters discovered evidence of potential criminal activity, and the Waterloo Police Department was summoned. 

Prior to my arrival, firefighter personnel had worked to extinguish a blaze that had engulfed the plot of land immediately in front of the Stephen W. Miles mausoleum. The source of this blaze was determined to be from a bonfire, and had spread to the surrounding grass and shrubs. While attending to the fire, the responding firefighters reported human remains within the bonfire, as well as evidence of damage to the front entrance of the mausoleum, prompting the request for police assistance. I arrived on the scene at 0400.

Upon arrival, I instructed Ofc. James Hayes to cordon off the area, limiting access to emergency personnel only. I was led to the area of the bonfire. The bonfire itself had been disturbed by firefighting efforts, but I was informed by firefighters that most of the objects occupied their original locations. Approximately twenty feet in front of the mausoleum entrance was the site of the bonfire, as indicated in photograph 1A. Human remains comprising at least two individuals were discovered. The first, a man presumed to be Nathaniel Allen Reeves, 39, was discovered face down within the central area of the fire. The upper torso and head were burnt beyond recognition (photograph 1B), but initial identification was made based upon a naval tattoo from the deceased’s lower left forearm (photograph 1C), a tattoo that Mr. Reeves was known to have from his service in the Navy during World War II. Initial investigations did not reveal a cause of death at this time.

Additional human remains found in the area of the bonfire comprised various bone fragments consistent with a human skull, torso, and limbs. The extent of damage to the bones was consistent with prolonged exposure to heat, making initial identification impossible, though it is suspected that the remains constitute one individual from the mausoleum. The Monroe County Coroner’s Office was summoned to assist with the collection and identification of these remains, as well as to officially identify and establish a cause of death for Mr. Reeves.

I then proceeded with my investigation of the Stephen W. Miles mausoleum itself. Attending firefighters stated that they had not entered the structure or attended to it in any way, as their efforts did not require such actions. 

The mausoleum itself showed evidence of illegal entry, as the marble slab that sealed the entrance had been broken inward (photograph 2A). Large fragments of the door were found inside the mausoleum near the entrance, further attesting to this hypothesis. The interior comprises a space approximately 20 feet by 20 feet, and 12 feet in height, and is lined on the left and right sides by a series of crypts four spaces high by two spaces deep, constituting sixteen individual crypts. Of these, approximately twelve were occupied.

All of the occupied crypts had had their front facades broken and their contents removed. Individual coffins had been smashed either through contact with the floor or afterwards by perpetrators, and debris from this process were scattered on the floor. These debris included the bodily remains of the crypt occupants, as well as fragments of wooden coffins and pieces of marble facade (photograph 2B). The list of crypt occupants has been established as follows.

Steven W. Miles Sr. (1795-1859)

Esther Miles (nee Wheeler) (1812-1874)

Sarah Miles Everett (1845-1898)

Stephen W. Miles Jr. (1828-1872)

Alonzo Miles (1837-1877)

Sgt. Bernard Everett (1824-1864)

Curtis Everett (1866-1926)

Linda Everett (nee Boyd) (1872-1938)

David Everett (1868-1870)

Henrietta Miles Foley (1814-1879)

Pfc. James Foley (1840-1863)

Alma Foley (1842-1918)

Of these twelve individuals, only two bodies could initially be identified. The body of David Everett was positively identified due to its size and to being largely intact (photograph 2C). The body of Stephen W. Miles Sr. also remained largely intact, and was found near the back of the space (photograph 2D). Positive identification was made due to an inscription on a wedding band on the corpse’s left ring finger. Underneath the body of Stephen W. Miles, the body of a white male was found. The body was positively identified through a driver’s license carried in the decedent’s wallet as being that of Benjamin Harper Moody, 37. A preliminary inspection reveals severe blunt force trauma to the front and top of the head, as well as lacerations across the chest (photograph 2E). Given the position of the bodies, an initial determination was made that the decedent was crushed under falling debris when attempting to move the contents of a crypt. Additionally, semicircular wounds were found on the deceased’s neck, and appear to be bite marks, though the exact source and nature of these wounds will require further examination. The remains, as well as those of Nathaniel Allen Reeves, were released to the Monroe County Coroner’s Office for further review.

Attempts were made to photograph individual human remains in situ (photographs 3A-3R), but the process was hampered by the fragmentary nature of most of the remnants. After photographs were taken, these remains were collected and housed at Taubman’s Funeral Home of Waterloo, Illinois, pending the notification of relatives. The mausoleum itself was temporarily sealed with a wooden door, and iron bolts were drilled into the marble door frame to secure it in place. The investigation into the exact nature of the incident at Eagle Cliff-Miles Cemetery remains ongoing, and has been assigned Case No: 451-1A.