“Pardon (noun): the action of forgiving or being forgiven for an error or offense … A remission of the legal consequence of an offense or conviction … ” (The New Oxford Dictionary of English)
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“I tell you—we’ll burn in Hell, we will, for our part in this crime against God’s great creation!”
“Shut your pie hole, and do what you were well paid to do! Really, now; whining over a lot of foul papists! Really, now!”
“I tell you, we’ll burn for sure … For sure!”
And there were other such men of conscience, although they were but a small minority amongst the two dozen men from the New England township of Pardonsfield. But they felt at least the same amount of fear of God’s wrath as they did guilt, and they weren’t forced to spend the following six nights digging a large pit into increasingly rigid, early November 1767 ground. In fact they rather hastily willingly accepted the five-times the usual pay for such labor during such hours and cold time of year. Once it was wide and deep enough, they began filling the pit with the bodily remains of the ‘undesirables’—some still putrid flesh while others naught but dry skeletons.
The undesirables were torn from their true graves, their supposed ‘final resting place,’ and then callously dumped into the big hole, located just inside of the town’s westernmost boundary. The pit’s location was adjacent to the very small piece of Pardonsfield consisting of the tiny homes of the poorest, unhealthiest segment of the township’s populace.
The human remains were from Pardonsfield Cemetery (the only cemetery within the township’s official boundaries), callously removed and ‘relocated’ because their close proximity there was unwanted by the majority citizenry. They were the contents of the graves of mostly impoverished, sickly, Catholic Irish and Eastern European immigrants who’d sought better lives in the New World, thousands of miles away from their birthplace, for themselves and their descendants.
What they instead received at their new home, however, was mostly hardship and often untimely, difficult death due to various rampant illnesses.
Perhaps needless to mention, all of the graves of non-undesirables were left to rest in peace.
Pardonsfield’s governing council consisted of five elected wealthy, motivated men (one of whom received the four others’ approval to act as council chairman) of good standing—at least amongst the dominant desirable citizens of the township.
A recent council meeting saw the first forwarded motion unanimously passed, resulting in the township immediately initiating the development of a much needed hospital or ‘sanitarium’ to treat the often overwhelming number of tuberculosis or Consumption sufferers.
The large structure’s foundation, it was then mentioned, would require that it reach fifteen feet below ground level.
Council Chairman Charles Renfield hastily coldheartedly forwarded a motion that one-third of the structure should be built upon the precise portion of the graveyard collectively occupied by the remains of undesirables. With the exception of the sole nay vote by the emphatically-opposed Councilman Richard Jitens, the council callously passed the motion.
With lightening striking the same spot twice, Renfield forwarded a second motion that again was opposed by Jitens though nevertheless passed, that the headstones crowning the undesirables’ graves be removed and stored for re-sale immediately upon the names and dates engraved on them being chiseled away.
In a third and final four-to-one council vote, it was also decided, according to anonymously worded council meeting minutes, “that the said occupants’ remains be exhumed and relocated to a location yet to be confirmed and then made fully public in the near future.”
But the council majority’s votes and decisions regarding the pit plan remained secret—even with the persistent holdout presence of Councillor Jitens. He reluctantly remained quiet about the council’s immoral pit-plan actions, lest the very small number of living Catholics eventually make their great offense public and thus be conveniently permanently silenced.
However, regardless of being an extremely malicious act, Jitens was aware that it would unlikely meet any resistance worthy of the council majority’s concern. Since pretty much all of those who were related to the grave-robbed-and-relocated papist undesirables were deceased papist undesirables themselves—mass deaths due almost entirely to the great consumption outbreak of twelve years prior—there conveniently was to be no public outrage of any sort.
“But God in Heaven will not overlook such a brazenly sacrilegious act, even if your church elders do,” boldly stated Councillor Jitens, a member of the local Presbyterian denomination, to his fellow councilmen. “It’s plain damn-well wrong!”
Chairman Renfield abrasively commenced his rebuttal by snapping back, “What do you know about ‘God in Heaven’ and what He does or does not condone?! What we do know is that He condemns idolater papists; not us for cleansing our cemetery of such foulness!”
Furthermore, added Renfield, it wasn’t just a matter of cleansing the graveyard of papist undesirables, “who do not even speak our language, at least not properly. But the sanitarium simply has to be built.”
Jitens remained silent as Renfield continued: “What we also know is that a large part of the cemetery land—a third, to be more accurate—is required for the sanitarium, which is already behind schedule. Therefore, the one-third portion sacrificed might as well be the specific third voted for by us; that’s why we’re acquiring the other two-thirds portion from the large MacDormid land just outside of that specific one-third cemetery portion for which we already voted four-to-one in favor of developing.”
His three in-favor fellow councilmen looked at one another, nodding in noble agreement, with pompous frowns on their lips and white brows raised.
As a whole, the council felt compelled to act as a useful tool for the wealthiest citizens in achieving their monetary goals. They even insisted that the council, in the case of the papists’ remains, vote on and pass legislation making Pardonsfield Cemetery officially off-limits as a final resting place for deceased undesirables.
Of course the men with wealth and influence wholeheartedly agreed with the council majority regarding their four-to-one vote decision as to the most convenient and desirable location for the construction of the new sanitarium.
The pit had originally been planned for a location on territory that had still belonged to local aboriginal peoples, but they were most outraged by what would actually end up filling the large pit. They were greatly offended by just the concept of the white settlers desecrating their dead folks’ graves, regardless of race, as well as where the disturbed human remains would forever be.
When the initially political confrontation turned deadly physical as hired township men forcefully began digging on the native land, seven diggers were brutally killed. They were thus honored for ‘their sacrifice’ and respectfully buried in the majority desirable portion of Pardonsfield Cemetery, with each of all seven plots marked with a magnificent statuesque stone. …
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A half-dozen years later, however, the pit of human remains would soon include those of a recently deceased reverend of the Protestant faith, who in life had been an overly boisterous fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone preacher. Once well respected, Reverend Michael McPeters was beaten to death by the husband (Sean Murray) of a woman (Sarah) with whom the preacher had been practicing adulterous relations.
When Mr. Murray proved to the townsfolk that the affair did indeed occur, the church’s flock was so shocked and outraged that they demanded the township council outlaw the very mention in public of the disgraced name of the fallen reverend. For all of his continuous loud quoting of Scripture “to my flock, which is righteously free of Satan’s papists,” his former faithful followers felt bitter over his hypocrisy and deceit.
The presence of the zealous preacher’s ghost angered the soured spirits of the pit. They sought retribution against all those who had enabled or even conveniently turned a blind eye away from the outrageous violation of their graves and plunder of their stone markers. To them the reverend was amongst the very worst of offenders, as a supposed Earthly representative of God Almighty.
Upon its production in full, many of the new sanitarium’s attendants immediately began experiencing frightening supernatural phenomena. Notably, every Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the translucent spirits of the preacher and his in-life-and-death followers could be seen in some extra-dimensional state of ‘church service’ within the sanitarium’s integrated house of worship.
It would take hours to calm the nerves of extremely upset observers, some of whom claimed witness to the sanitarium being frequently infested with lost souls who’d blindly follow the preacher’s ghost anywhere (including purgatory, if only they believed in such).
“The reverend was amongst the very few who’d learned of the council majority’s vile intention pretty much from its very inception, yet he was forever completely silent about the awful scheme,” Reverend Patrick O’Connar of Pardonsfield’s sole Presbyterian church told a half dozen of his parishioners as they all attended a local fair, though two and a half centuries later. “As far as he was concerned, the Roman Catholics’ souls were damned anyway, and he seemed perfectly at ease with himself.”
Some of the ghosts devoutly following the corrupted reverend’s spirit even turned physically vindictive. They attacked Sarah Murray—whom they solely blamed for the preacher’s moral decay and violent death—pinning her up flat against her ceiling thus scaring her nearly to death. Then, while Sarah was away, the same angry spirits ensured that husband Sean became trapped within their burning home.
Sarah buried her husband in the newly desirable Pardonsfield Cemetery, purchasing one of the many stolen headstones to mark his resting place. However, some weeks later the stone’s undesirable non-corporeal original occupier retaliated against Sarah. Not long after she’d told close friends about her nightmare in which a specter touched her chest, she was stricken with consumption yet still denied death until after suffering many physically-wasting months of misery.
Following her unattended unceremonious funeral, a Pardonsfield council majority decided to have her emaciated corpse dumped into the pit in order to make a potent example of her adulterous relations with the reverend, who himself had received such punishment for his role in the shameful affair.
Again, frightening translucent manifestations greatly upset sanitarium attendants.
Considered to be the most disturbing of all apparitions reported there were those of grotesque likeness to—and poetically accompanied by the certain putrid odor of—human flesh and bone, certainly belonging to so many undesirables rejected port mortem by their living desirable Pardonsfield counterparts.
Said to be of the most benign specters witnessed would appear in the sanitarium’s largest room, in which consumption patients would either mend or inevitably perish. The ghost of a recognized deceased Irish nun, who had succumbed to influenza decades earlier only to be later added to the pit, would rush from one astonished patient to another, her lips hurriedly moving but not making a sound.
While alive, Sister Maggie tended to the very sick, especially during serious illness outbreaks, at a convent located about a mile outside of the township. It had been converted into a makeshift Catholic church when the actual church, situated less than fifty feet from the convent, flash-fire burned to the ground only an hour after an All Souls Day mass service almost thirty-five years prior.
Then there were those of the most bizarre—manifestations of three dozen spirits lying motionless in neat uniform rows as though each was returned to his or her own individual grave plot. They all were reported to be floating about two feet off of the sanitarium’s icy cold, expansive basement floor.
When it was eventually shutdown and redeveloped (1926) into Pardonsfield’s first city hall, it was inexplicably plagued by electrical and plumbing problems, with every attempt at rectifying any of the problems being unsuccessful. Less than a year before the elected council and mayor unanimously voted in favor of closing down the relatively new city hall structure in 1943, almost all archived records pertaining to Pardonsfield and its past were destroyed on the same night by both fire and flooding.
Although, quite conspicuously the sole and virtually untouched surviving archival record was that regarding the township’s earliest (majority-vote) council’s blatantly discriminatory and ugly conduct in creating and maintaining Pardonsfield’s pit.
In the spring of 2007, specific ethnic and religious segments of the U.S. organized to strategically vote into power officials willing to open up the centuries-old though still embarrassing matter, even if only as a symbolic gesture.
Immediately following confirmation through delicate excavation that the pit was a shameful ugly fact came an attempt at reconciliation by way of official acts: A formal apology was made by Pardonsfield’s municipal government just before the ceremonious sanctification of the pit site, having been officially designated its own fully guarded graveyard status. Furthermore, the municipality provided funding for a large memorial marker in acknowledgement of the great wrong committed against the Pardonsfield pit victims.
Just a few months after that, the newly designated graveyard was granted permanent special protection as a location of historical significance and reminder of an immense injustice, regardless of what historical context in which it was committed.
Although few in number, to the present day there are additional testaments of apparitions seen but not heard at the site of the formerly unmarked infamous Pardonsfield pit. They’re said to be specters of the zealously ranting preacher at what appears to be his ghostly flock. “I’ve heard some people say that it’s as though his followers in life will revere the man for eternity,” noted Rev. O’Connar in finality. “The same people also feel that the preacher much appears oblivious to his non-corporeal existence. So it’s said.”■
Frank G Sterle Jr
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