Employees landscaping over the mass grave at Whitman Mission near Walla Walla, Washington, said something pushed and poked at them, and stopped the moment they stepped off the graves. That grave has been dug up by wolves and emptied once already.
The employees landscaping over the mass grave at Whitman Mission National Historic Site, outside Walla Walla, Washington, reported being pushed and poked while they worked. The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, relaying the account from local ghost-tour operator Nancy Barcenas, prints the detail that makes it stick: the sensations stopped the instant they stepped off the graves. Elsewhere on the grounds, visitors and staff have reported hooves, a horse at a gallop, heard in different spots and never once seen.
The grave they were standing over is called the Great Grave, and the strangest thing about it is that nobody knows who is in it.
On the cold, foggy afternoon of November 29, 1847, a group of Cayuse men walked into the mission at Waiilatpu with weapons under their blankets and killed Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and 11 others. Measles carried west by that year's emigrant wagons had already killed as much as half the tribe, while nearly every white patient at the mission recovered. A hired hand named Joseph Stanfield dug the first grave at the foot of the hill. Tiloukaikt, one of the killers, supplied a bolt of white cotton for winding sheets. The bodies went down in an ox cart.
Within days, while the survivors were still being held captive, a woman came to the door of the Emigrant House to say wolves had dug up the doctor and his wife. Catherine Sager, 12 years old, reached the graveyard ahead of the men. "Mrs. Whitman's leg was dragged out and the flesh eaten off to the knee," she wrote. "We reburied it. Before we left the mission, the remains were again dug up, and morning after morning we would see the wolves ... and hear their snarling."
When the Oregon Volunteers arrived in March 1848, the bones were scattered across the grounds. They gathered what they could find, tipped it back into the pit, and turned a wagon box over the top.
The pit stayed shut until 1897, when two doctors opened it for the fiftieth anniversary and wrote down what came out. Of the ten or so people put in, they recovered the skulls of four adult men and one woman, plus a few loose bones. Two of the skulls had been sawed in two from the nasal bones back, the saw slipping where the operator's hand slipped, a cut that "seems to have been made for some other definite purpose than of opening the skull." One of the doctors offered a theory about a spirit passing into whoever opened the head. The Park Service historian who later studied the burials calls it a mystery beyond solution.
Fourteen names are cut into the two-ton marble slab sealed over the vault in 1898. That same historian does the arithmetic plainly: at the very most 12 of them are under it, and more likely fewer than 10.
