Builders dig up child death mystery

Sydney police have a century-old child death case on their hands.

Builders renovating a 130-year-old Birchgrove house have found the bones of a child under a sandstone fireplace.

Police Inspector Gary Koschel says the placement of the bones indicates that they are older than the house.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1081454.htm

Casshew said:

Sydney police have a century-old child death case on their hands.

Builders renovating a 130-year-old Birchgrove house have found the bones of a child under a sandstone fireplace.

Police Inspector Gary Koschel says the placement of the bones indicates that they are older than the house.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1081454.htm

Click to expand...

Fascinating. Would like to know more about this one. Talk about Cold Cases.

There are legends about human sacrifices being made to complete a building. Usually a child (orphan, street urchin), they were often walled up in the foundation alive, or killed and buried beneath the hearth. To ward off evil spirits, bad weather and the like...

I've read about immurement being practiced in Scotland, England, Ireland, Germany (as well as other places, the Great Wall of China supposedly has thousands of bodies entombed in it!). Archaeologists in England have found quite a few. It was done for bridges, too.

In later years (I read one case that occurred in the mid-1800's), a workman was said to have been killed and buried beneath the foundation as it neared completion. Some societies used a virgin, or any woman. Still more recently, the practice of walling up shoes took the place of a human sacrifice. The shoes are even found during renovations on old homes in New England to this day. The cornerstone in a building supposedly grew from this practice.

I wouldn't be surprised if these bones turn out to be one such sacrifice.

You can do a web search for "immurement" and "foundation sacrifice" for some pretty interesting stories- fact & folklore.

Here's a Masonic book about it: http://www.booksurge.com/author.php3?accountID=ANCH00013

Sometimes families would bury a child under a hearth if it died in winter, and couldn't be buried outside if the ground was too cold or frozen.

This is probably neather here nor there, but I know that you folks like to hear from me once in awhile.
Many years ago I bought an old "goat farm" that took me ten years to remodel. This was one of the things I had the energy to do while working full time, owning apartments, and raising a family. (In that order, unfortunately!)
Back to story! It seems that I had purchased an "old" parsanage where the cleric, at the time of the Civil War had made a secret room for the "runaway slaves" heading toward Canada.
I had awoken one night, thinking about a bathroom I wanted to put on the second floor, reolized I was missing some space on the first floor to run the pipes, and went down and smashed open the wall that I suspected.
No, not drunk, that is just how bad the house was. What is one more hole?
Long story short? Nothing that I wanted to find, other than a crawl area entrance from the "tight" area below.(The minister had taken the effort to totaly inclose a walk in pantry with a lath and plaster wall, and had made a trap door to the crawl space)
P.S. Ran my pipes through it. Eventually sold the house. I do not believe that the new owners have any idea that the area is even there.
OUR SECRET