Who Buried the Babies in the Church Cellar?
Modern apartments now stand along Christian Street in Philadelphia, just south of Sixth Street, where a church used to stand more than a century ago. This church, Mount Zion Christian Church, would have seemed unremarkable from the outside; for it was just one of numerous houses of worship in the City of Brotherly Love. However, a gruesome discovery took place in the spring of 1898 when seven little bodies were found in the church cellar, hidden beneath heaps of rubbish, thus making this simple church the center of one of the most intriguing mysteries in Philadelphia history. After the discovery in the cellar, further investigations uncovered the improper burial of three infants in other places- including an abandoned well on church cemetery property. The general belief was that an unscrupulous gravedigger had pocketed the money for burying the dead and haphazardly discarded the corpses to cover his misdeed. But who was the fiend responsible for such a dastardly deed? Suspicion i...
