Sunday Cemetery - Farming a Cemetery

Published on the 16^th of August in 1902 in the Philadelphia Inquirer out of Philadelphia, PA

BAD LUCK GOES WITH PURCHASE OF CEMETERY

Flower Converted Burial Ground Into a Farm, But Nothing Would Grow

HIS HOUSE HAUNTED

Lightning Strikes His Barn and Flames Destroy the Buildings

Special to The Inquirer.

     VINCENNES, Ind. Aug. 15 – George Flower, a promment young farmer, bought a strip of land at Sand Ridge, near here, on which was located the oldest cemetery in this section. The cemetery was surround by a grove and contained three hundred headstones.

     Flower removed and headstones, throwing some of them in the Embarrass River, and with the rest built a foundation for his house. The cemetery he plowed up and planted it in melons and potatoes. Although similar crops on the rest of the farm grew in abundance, the cemetery crop has been eaten up by a strange bug.

His House Haunted

     Flower’s house is now haunted, and for several nights past the building was shaken violently. Flower, his wife and two children are distracted with fear and have fled form the place. People having  relatives buried there have taken the matter up, and threaten to prosecute Flowers of obliterating the graves without giving them notice, so that they could have reinterred the dead. The grand jury of Lawrence county is investigating the case and may indict Flower.

Flower’s brother and sister and two of his children he buried in the devastated cemetery. Flower secured the money from his father, Frank Flower, in Colorado Springs, to by the farm.

Family May Go Insane

     The Flower family, it is feared, will go insane with fear. The neighbors dare not harbor them. The father seems to be impelled by an irresistible force to visit the haunted farm daily, only to flee again with increased fear.

To-day lighting struck the barn on the Flower place and burned the stock and buildings. The place is in an unfrequented portion of the county, and the little settlement of the vicinity is greatly excited over the mystery.