Workers on a project for new condos in Chicago, IL found a surprise at their construction site in late January 2016. Old tombstones and broken up wooden materials were found sticking out of big mounds of dirt on the site. The broken up wood materials were later identified to be parts of old caskets.
Whose Tombs were they?
Pictures of these tombs were sent to I-Team by an extremely disturbed pedestrian. Two of the tombstones uncovered were marked back to the 1800s. On the tombs were the names of two men named John Engman, 1866-1925, and Rudolph Yaeche, 1863-1936. William Jefferies interviewed with ABC7’s reporter Jason Knowles:
“How many headstones have you seen here?”
He replied “Four I think.”
Jefferies said that he and some of the other workers were the ones who dug up and excavated the site.
I- Team’s camera man went to the scene the next day to collect images of the piles. From the public
sidewalk he had a hard time making heads or tails of some of the materials, as they were mixed in with the dirt. One was definitely a square block that looked to be carved from stone, another was made out to be a grave marker that was dug up during the construction.
Jefferies expressed his concern for finding the dead bodies to reporter, Knowles, though they haven’t seen any yet. I- Team then took it upon themselves to call the developers who own the site. The cemetery next door, and the mayor of Oakbrook Terrace own the land. All reported that no bodies were buried there in the first place, the property use to be cemetery property but was sold approximately 15 years ago. The construction site runs along the side of a current graveyard where supposedly the real graves of Engman and Yaeche are. Spokespeople won’t show their actual resting place “out of respect for the privacy of all the families we serve.”
How did they not know about the Tombs?
The Oakbrook Terrace Mayor Tony Ragucci said that the property was annexed by the city before it was sold to the current developers. He said that he was told the wooden materials are pieces of empty caskets and the headstones must be a duplicate of the grave markers from the maintenance area housed there. A spokesperson came to developers again and said that the workers never discovered remains on that property before.
The public wants to know how and why exactly the tombstones and caskets were buried in the mounds. I- Team attempted to contact the relatives of the two men but had no luck hearing back from them.
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