The Vatican has found suspected human remains near a site where an Italian family was told to look for the body of their daughter, 15, who has been missing for 36 years.

Fox News reports that two sets of bones were found near the tombs of two 19th-century German princesses, raising hopes that they could be the remains of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, a Vatican official said.

Her family’s hopes of finding her were dashed last week when the tombs were opened and found to be empty.

But the mystery flared again when staffers found bones while they were inspecting other spots the princesses may have been moved to in the cemetery of the Pontifical Teutonic College, Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti said.

Those inspections “have so far led to the identification of two ossuaries placed beneath the floor of an area inside the Pontifical Teutonic College,” Mr Gisotti said.

“These are closed by a trap door, and these ossuaries have been sealed for subsequent examination and possible retrieval of material stored there.”

The trap door will be formally opened this week.

Mr Gisotti said the remains of the princesses could have been moved during an expansion of the college in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Orlandi vanished in 1983 after leaving her family’s Vatican City apartment to go to a flute lesson in Rome. Her father was a lay employee of the Holy See.

Her case has been one of the enduring mysteries of the Vatican, kept alive by the Italian media and a quest by her brother Pietro to find answers and closure.

Over the years, her disappearance has been linked to everything from the plot to kill St. John Paul II to the financial scandal of the Vatican bank and Rome’s criminal underworld.

The last major twist in the case came in 2012 when forensic police exhumed the body of a reputed mobster Enrico “Renatino” De Pedis, who was buried in Sant’Apollinare basilica - near to where Emanuela was last seen - after a tip-off suggested it held a clue to her disappearance.

The search turned up no link.

The new search was undertaken in the cemetery after Orlandi’s family received an anonymous tip with a photo of an angel sculpture, and an instruction to “look where the angel is pointing”. The message led the family to two tombs inside the Teutonic Cemetery.

This story originally appeared on Fox News and is reprinted here with permission.