In Brief
In one corner of Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, 699 children lie in a single mass grave, buried under numbers instead of names. No one knew they were there until an intern went looking through old records. People who stand near the memorial say they hear them.
The Full Story
There is a corner of Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis where 699 children are buried in one grave. They were put in the ground with numbers instead of names, and for most of a century, almost no one knew they were there at all.
The cemetery calls the spot Community Hill. The children came from three city orphanages: the Indianapolis Children's Asylum, the Board of Children's Guardians Home, and the Asylum for Friendless Colored Children. They died in that care between 1892 and 1980, most of them from disease. Slightly more than half were boys. The youngest were a few months old; the oldest was 15. As each one died, the orphanage that held them sent the body here, to Section 37, lowered it into the single pit, and recorded a number where a name should have gone.
The grave stayed forgotten until an IUPUI intern named Anna Sturgeon was sent to look into an old deed tied to the cemetery. Working through the handwritten records at the Children's Guardian Home, she began counting the dead, and the number kept climbing. When she finished, it came back near 700. Nearly seven hundred children, every one of them lying under the hill with nothing but a figure to mark the spot.
So in 2006 the cemetery gave them their names back. On June 4 it dedicated the Hearts Remembered Memorial over the grave: three black granite stones set around a bronze of two seated children, with all 699 names cut into the stone, front and back. After more than a hundred years in the ground, every child in the pit finally had a name above it.
What people say happens at that memorial is not written down anywhere official. Visitors who stand near the stones say they hear children, laughing and playing close by, and crying that seems to rise out of the grave itself. The accounts pass between the people who come to see it; no record confirms a single one. In 2007 a documentary about children's graves was made, and the story goes that its crew filmed this section, though even that connection is more rumor than fact.
Crown Hill is the third-largest non-governmental cemetery in the country, with more than 200,000 graves across 555 acres. A president lies here, and three vice presidents, and the bank robber John Dillinger, whose family sealed his body under concrete and scrap iron to stop souvenir hunters from chipping at the stone. None of those graves is why people stop at Section 37. They stop for the 699 who waited a hundred years to be called by name.
