John Boyle

jboyle@citizen-times.com

The contrast is as striking as life and death.

Down the hill, on the other side of the building, school children run and play and shout on the playground, burning off energy between classes. Their voices carry easily to the small, fenced cemetery where the remains of more than 600 people are interred, a quiet clearing in the trees noticeable as a cemetery only because of the small depressions in the ground where the simple wooden caskets have disintegrated.

This is Buncombe's "County Home Cemetery," also called the "Potter's Field" or "Pauper's Cemetery," a 1.18-acre parcel largely forgotten and overgrown until earlier this year. The cemetery was relocated in 1973 to this spot, just above where Eblen Intermediate School now stands off Lee's Creek Road, to make way for the new Erwin High School,

"I don't think it's ever been cleaned up since the 1970s when they moved it over here," said Jerry VeHaun, director of emergency services for Buncombe County and a certified mortician. "They moved it all over here in (1973), and that's probably when they stopped caring for it."

While most of the human remains were moved — one count puts it at 613 people, another at 604 — hundreds were not moved and remain underground on the Erwin High School property, near the football field and stadium concession stand. That creepy twist of history, driven by a lack of funding for a full relocation, has led to a robust legend that the school is haunted.

Buncombe County spent about $15,000 this year to bush hog the current cemetery, remove trees and brush and erect a six-foot fence around the perimeter, as well as a white wooden sign at the entrance that explains the history.

VeHaun sort of inherited the project on behalf of the county, but Belinda Shelton, who's worked in the scanning department at the Buncombe County Register of Deeds office for the past 17 years, really got the ball rolling. A request came in last spring from a person trying to locate the remains of a loved one, and that began Shelton's sleuthing.

A forgotten place

Even the location of the current cemetery had become a mystery after four decades. When the cemetery was relocated, the land, part of the 200-acre County Farm, was a rolling hillside that at the time was all grass. But over the decades, it had returned to woodlands.

"All anybody could tell me was the cemetery was across the street and up the hill," Shelton said.

In those days, the poor, the elderly with no family, the stillborn babies, were buried in simple wooden boxes, with no headstones or markers.

Shelton spent countless hours researching the cemetery's exact location, which she found with help from the Old Buncombe County Genealogical Society and a plat map there. She also has found death certificates of more than 800 people who died at the Old County Home and were buried there in the cemetery, and she keeps them on file at the Register of Deeds office.

For her, it's simply a matter of respecting the dead buried there, who were often poor and died with no one to care for their bodies.

"It is people; it's our people," Shelton said, sitting in her small office in the Courthouse, a binder of old death certificates on her desk. "Whether I have a person up there or not, it's our people. We did something tremendously wrong back in the day."

Shelton found two death certificates showing former County Home residents were buried in the cemetery as late as December 1972. A news article from the time said some bodies were interred there as late as spring 1973.

The relocation project, controversial at the county commissioners and school board levels, began that fall.

A long history

The Pauper's Cemetery dates to the 1800s, although no one is sure just how long the deceased were interred on the site of the current Erwin High School. The deed to the property dates to 1834 and states in part that the land should be kept "forever in trust for the use and benefit of the poor of the county of Buncombe..."

The property has long been home to a county farm and a home for the elderly. The Old County Home, a sturdy brick and stone edifice that is now the site of Buncombe County's 911 call center and emergency operations, originally was a home for troubled boys and then a home for the elderly.

It sits across Erwin Hills Road from Eblen Intermediate and about a half mile from Erwin High School — and those graves that were never moved.

Former Citizen-Times columnist Bob Terrell wrote about the original Pauper's Cemetery site in November 1970, describing it as a forlorn place where just one grave had any marker at all. That same headstone, which now sits in VeHaun's office, reads "In Memory of Charlotte K., wife of J.N. Snelson. Born Sept. 30th, 1856. Died May 3rd, 1883."

Even then, the graveyard was unmarked. Terrell interviewed George Laster, who became manager of the County Home in January 1947. Laster described how one casket had been buried no more than seven inches deep, one of several shallow burials.

Terrell also related how shortly after Laster took over the home, he hired some boys to plow up the graveyard's surface, as it was mostly brambles. When Laster went to check on the boys' progress, he discovered "seven or eight human skulls on the cemetery's fence posts," Terrell wrote.

"Boys being boys," Laster told Terrell. "They'd stuck those skulls on the fence after plowing them up. I made them dig another grave and bury them together."

The decision to locate Erwin High on the site and move the graves at all was controversial, in part because of the disturbance of the dead and partly because of the expense.

In September 1973, the School Board hired Phillip Ellen Contractors of Southern Pines to relocate the cemetery at a cost of $79.99 per grave. But once his crews started digging, it became obvious that the initial contract estimate of 200 graves on the site was way too low, according to a Citizen-Times news article.

A chart attached to the deed, now on file at the Genealogical Society and in Shelton's records, shows hundreds of numbered grave sites that were moved, but it also has two large areas with the notation, "Cemetery Area Not Moved."

"My guess would be over 1,000 (people) were buried there," said Ruth Dilling, with the Buncombe County Genealogical Society. "When they ran out of money, they stopped moving them. This (chart) certainly demonstrates they did not move all of them."

A Citizen-Times article on Oct. 12, 1973, about the grave relocation quoted Laster as saying the site may hold "thousands" of bodies. That story also quoted one of the contractor's crew, a 21-year-old grave digger who had worked for Ellen for months but said the Erwin site removal would be his last.

Most of the graves held skeletons, but not all.

"We were digging on the other side of the field and struck one that was still intact," the worker, Steve Belcher, told the newspaper. "I mean, it really bothered me."

In the same article, Laster related a story about one of the souls interred there, whom the reporter related as a woman who was "an alcoholic and a deadbeat who hung around the Lexington Avenue bars in Asheville. She died about 1965 at the age of 35, alone and forgotten. No one else would claim her, so the county buried her at the taxpayer's expense."

The story also noted that "many stillborn — mostly illegitimate — infants" were buried there, but most of the interred were "elderly men and women."

Dilling said it's important to remember that while many of the souls buried in the Old County Home Cemetery were forgotten, those people were as much a part of the county's history as anyone. Some had fallen on hard times during the Great Depression, or they just lost everything due to medical issues or bad luck.

"People tend to think of paupers being there because of some fault of their own, and that is so untrue," Dilling said.

Another news story, dated Oct. 30, noted the School Board had unanimously agreed to halt further grave removals. School Superintendent Fred H. Martin said a contractor had moved 604 graves but an estimated 250-300 graves at the old site would not be moved, a number that came from the contractor.

"That certainly has helped build the legend of Erwin High School being haunted," Dilling said.

A 'floating head'

Leicester resident Chad Nesbitt, who graduated from Erwin High in 1988, actually made a video about a decade ago called, "The Search for the Erwin Ghosts," which he used as a fundraiser for the Erwin Boosters Club.

"It was supposed to be a funny thing, and then we really experienced it," Nesbitt said.

They staked out a coach's office above the media room, not far from a hillside where the bodies remain buried. Nesbitt said most of the bodies remain in an area that's about 100 feet by 100 feet and located "directly behind the concession stand of the football field."

"When we cut the lights off, we saw a bright blob that went across the room," Nesbitt said. "At one point, I was the only person in the room, and I heard the sound of someone whistling or humming. We saw what looked like a floating head. I know it sounds crazy, but we could not have any explanation for it."

Joshua Warren, a paranormal expert and author who graduated from Erwin High in 1995, said when he went to school there, "People talked constantly about strange phenomena in the building.

"It was common to hear the janitors say at night that they would think kids were trying to break into the building — they would hear chattering and talking in the hallways," Warren said. "Teachers would talk about objects flying around their rooms. One teacher...said a projector flew off the table when I started talking about ghosts."

Building on or disturbing a graveyard creates a classic atmosphere for ghost sightings, Warren said. He related a story a teacher once told him about taking a group of students to observe the excavations.

"At one point they cracked open one of the wooden boxes, and when they looked down in it they saw the skeleton of woman wearing a pale gown, and the woman had long red hair flowing from skull," Warren said. "And in her arms she was cradling a baby."

VeHaun said the old cemetery was in the area Nesbitt described, but he, like Dilling, said it's possible more remains could be scattered elsewhere.

The county has no plans to excavate the site or try to remove the other skeletons. If the cost to remove each grave was $80 in 1973, VeHaun said that could easily hit $500 each today.

The disturbance also would be unseemly and logistically difficult.

"Number one, we can't swear that there are any left, and we don't know exactly where they are," VeHaun said. "It would be like moving an ancient cemetery."

Buncombe records unearth slave data, expansion planned

Families upset by plans to remove Avery's Creek cemetery