Dead bodies suck.

No, really. I feel incredibly sorry for the owners of this land:

Some people have skeletons in their closet.

Others have 'em buried beneath their house.

That's the life lesson a group of construction workers learned in Fairmount on Saturday, when they unearthed seven old graves.

Police spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore said the workers made the bone-chilling discovery as they were excavating an empty property site on 20th Street near Poplar about 1 p.m.

"They dug through a heavy concrete plate," Vanore said. "At a certain depth, they found seven shallow graves and some remains."

Police and a representative from the city Medical Examiner's Office were called to the scene, as was an archaeologist.

Based on a preliminary analysis, the bones appeared to be about 100 years old, Vanore said.

"It's possible that land could've been a cemetery at one point," he said, adding that so far, the discovery has not merited a criminal investigation.

According to another piece, workers had already removed the remains of five bodies, but two more were found:

According to police, while remains of two bodies were recovered, five others were apparently loaded into dumpsters by workers and removed earlier in the week.

"It appeared through the investigation that some of the material had already been taken to another location by the contractor," Lt. Vanore said.

The city's medical examiner's office will take custody of the bones that were recovered to make sure that after a century or longer, they will be properly placed into a final resting place.

The investigation into the bizarre discovery is ongoing.

To most people, this is one of those odd little human interest items, but it's a property owner's worst nightmare. Reading through some of the laws that deal with dead bodies was a real eye-opener. I don't know what the situation is in Pennsylvania, but in Virginia, removing dead bodies from their resting place -- regardless of their age -- is a felony.

Cemetery Preservation
Frequently Asked Questions

What do I do if I find human bones or an unmarked grave? First of all, don't remove anything. Vandalizing a grave regardless of its age or ethnic identity is a felony.

If there are bones exposed you should leave them in place and report your find to the local or state police. They need to determine if there is evidence of criminal action--either a modern homicide or vandalism to graves.

If you know of graves that are being dug up, or gravestones, cemetery fences, etc., that are being damaged, contact your local law enforcement agency or Commonwealth's Attorney to report possible vandalism to a cemetery.

That sounds callused (although it probably wasn't illegal at the time), but the bureaucratic alternative is a genuine nightmare. Not only is it painfully slow, but the bodies have to be relocated, by professionally trained people, and reburied in new graves. And the property owner has to pay for it -- even though he did absolutely nothing wrong. It is horrendously unfair, especially when you consider that people used to be routinely buried on private land and in many cases this was never recorded officially so there is no way to know. It strikes me that if you have title to land, you should own whatever the hell is buried underneath it.

But like it or not, the presence of dead bodies can alter the legal status of your land, as even a private cemetery can be a permanent easement on the land.

Which is why title insurance policies contain standard recitals like this:

The Seller(s)/Owner(s) has/have no knowledge of any highways, abandoned roads, lanes, cemetery or family burial grounds, springs, streams, rivers, ponds, or lakes bordering or running through said premises.

It's someone else's problem, but whose? Why stick it to the current property owner? Philosophically, how long should we be encumbered by long-forgotten human remains? Bones eventually disintegrate, and depending on the soil, many bones of that age are already gone. I remember peeking into an above-ground crypt through a large (3 inch wide) crack and the bones had been reduced to fragments of rubble. Had it been scattered on the ground, it would have looked like nondescript debris of the sort you'd see anywhere in the dirt. When dead bodies are cremated, bones and bone fragments (not "ashes") are what remain behind, and they have to be fed through a grinder. Here's what they look like after they come out of the furnace,

And here they are, going into the grinder:

While options as to the disposal of "cremains" vary, people scatter them everywhere, and it is legal to scatter them on public land. As to whether they can legally be discarded in the trash (which will end up in a landfill), I don't know. Why do we not consider such bone material to be dead bodies? Because they have been ground up?

For the life of me, I'm having trouble seeing 100 year-old bones as a "dead body." I see no reason why they can't just do to these old bones what many people do with modern bones and simply feed them through a grinder. It wouldn't bother me.

And isn't the Golden Rule "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you?"

That's all good and fine, but who is you? If I wouldn't mind having my cremains tossed in a landfill, does that mean I have the right to do that to other people? Are bones (which consist largely of calcium) "people"?

If so, do we have to go back in time and respect the unknown sensibilities of long-deceased strangers?

Whatever happened to "ashes to ashes, dust to dust"?