A Hole in His Driveway Opened the Door to a Decades-Old Mystery (2 of 3)
His neighbor Jim wandered over, coffee in hand. “You digging for buried treasure?” he joked. But when Daniel leaned down with a flashlight, the smile vanished from Jim’s face.
Beneath the concrete was a hollow cavity, about three feet deep. The beam of light caught on something glinting in the darkness. At first, Daniel thought it was glass. Then he saw the rest—the pale curve of what looked like bone, the edges smooth from time. His stomach twisted.
He widened the hole. That’s when he realized the “bone” was part of a skull.
It wasn’t animal.
Daniel scrambled back, nearly dropping the flashlight. Jim swore under his breath and stepped away. They both knew they weren’t looking at some old Halloween prank. This was real.
They called the police. Within the hour, the driveway was cordoned off with yellow tape. Officers crouched over the opening, radios crackling. Neighbors gathered on the sidewalk, murmuring. The whispers traveled fast: human remains.
But there was more.
When the county excavation team arrived, they carefully widened the cavity. What they pulled out made the onlookers gasp—an old wooden box, rotted on one side, bound with rusted metal straps. Inside, packed in damp straw, were more bones. A full skeleton. Curled, almost fetal. And around the neck, a chain with a tarnished pendant—its surface etched with a symbol no one recognized.
The lead detective looked shaken. “This didn’t just happen last year,” he said. “We’re talking decades—maybe longer.”
The county records showed nothing about prior burials on the property. But one elderly neighbor recalled a story from the 1950s, about a man who vanished after “crossing the wrong people.” His family left town overnight. No one ever saw him again.
When the forensic report came back, it confirmed the skeleton belonged to a man in his thirties. Cause of death? Blunt force trauma to the skull. The pendant, historians later said, was a hand-carved talisman linked to old Appalachian folklore—meant to “keep the restless spirit bound.”
