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When 18-year-old Coast Guard Seaman Bob Smith walked up to the mysterious object on the beach on Hog Island in 1956, he would be a witness to the most unusual discovery of its kind ever made on the Eastern Shore, if not the nation.
There, lying on the sand was the body of a man in his suit. A morning patrol of the beach by Coast Guard personnel just minutes before had discovered the body and Smith, along with Chief Petty Officer Robert "Bob" Lawson, had come to take it back to the station on the northern end of the island.
Though it was reported the remains of a casket were seen nearby, the condition of the corpse suggested the man may have just died. It was a curious sight, Smith recalled, because of the color of the skin.
"He was black, as black as could be," he said.
Yet there was no question that, based on the features of his face, down to his mustache, the man was Caucasian.
"I remember that day in October 1956 when Bob was at the Coast Guard's Little Machipongo Station and cook Lonnie Brown went on beach patrol. They found this body they thought had washed out of the grave. Lonnie wouldn't mess with 'im, wouldn't put 'im the Jeep so Bob had to bring him back to the station at the north end of the island. I was the junior man then and Bob told me to go with him. On the way down to the beach he told me about it," Smith said.
"He was layin' on top the sand," Smith recalled. "It was the first body I ever handled. He was a small man, short, wasn't too heavy."
When he and Lawson lifted the body to put it in the Jeep, they noticed it was hard.
The body was more than hard, it was stone hard. The body was petrified.
An article, published in the "Enterprise" of October 1956, noted that the discovery of the peculiar corpse, was " ... an authentic instance of a man whose body turned to stone."
As for the suit Melvin wore, its condition was equally remarkable, Smith recalled.
"Oh, it was real strong, just like new, and even his vest was like new. He had a blue three-piece suit on and it fit him perfectly. I think it was blue and in the vest pocket was his wedding ring."
"The features, a mustache, the teeth and the entire upper portion of the body was reported as petrified into permanence," the paper reported. "The clothing, a blue surge vest, white shirt and blue tie, all were reported in good condition."
"Lawson and Seaman Leonard Carriea brought the stone torso ashore to Quinby and turned it over to the sheriff's department at 6:10 p.m., last Monday. Dr. Joe Gladstone examined the torso and it was concluded that the body had been exposed to the seepage of sea minerals over the last quarter century and in the process had turned to stone in much the same manner as petrified wood."
The writer incorrectly used the noun torso. Deputy Sheriff Preston E. Trower, the article noted, described the body as being "in a petrified condition."
"He was in perfect condition," Smith said, "except he was missing his right leg from the knee down." As for the loss of the right leg, Smith said Lawson theorized the waves had "beat it off the body," and it may very well have been buried just under the sand at the site.
So well preserved was the body that people who had known him readily identified the corpse as that of islander George Avery Melvin who died and was buried in 1934.
"That's what amazed everybody, everybody was commentin' about the great condition he was in," Smith said. "No one could understand how he turned black."
Melvin's body had only been in the ground 22 years when his body became like stone. There were no reports of any of the other human remains exposed by erosion or moved by families that had been "petrified."
The last of the island's one-time population of about 250 people left in the mid-1940s. For years residents had not only moved tombstones and human remains, but houses and outbuildings to the Willis Wharf area.
Melvin's body and others in the Hog Island cemetery were revealed in the mid-1950s when waves from the Atlantic Ocean ate into the graveyard on the barrier island.
"People were going over to get the tombstones and remains of their families out of the graveyard because the ocean was tearing it apart," said Fannie Miles, 90, of Salisbury.
She went to the island just weeks earlier with her stepfather, Vernon Simpson of Willis Wharf, to survey the damage and make plans for removing family remains to the mainland.
She took her new camera with her. At the graveyard the men and her son, then about 10, discovered a battered wooden casket in the sand. Inside, the perfectly preserved body of a man.
"We didn't know who he was. Everybody said he was mummified. There was no tombstone by him. We didn't know what to do as other graves were being destroyed and my stepfather and the others were working to get their families moved," Miles said. "So he was just left there."
That body was probably that of Melvin, and in the days following it came to the attention of the Coast Guard.
People seeing the body, when it arrived at Quinby, readily identified it as Melvin. The family was summoned to identify it.
"He had all his features, he was in that good a shape, but he was real, real black. I heard his daughter identified him," Smith said.
That daughter was Missouri Frances "Lou" Melvin Doughty, also known as Mrs. Charles Doughty. She was not alone. The newspaper account said that "Definite identification was made by Albert L. Doughty. Subsequently identification was confirmed to the sheriff's office by Mrs. Henry, Mrs. Charles and Mrs. Betty Doughty."
According to Jerry Doughty, of Willis Wharf, an Eastern Shore of Virginia historian, all of those who identified Melvin's body were folks who knew the deceased, and that included Melvin's daughter.
"My grandmother and mother went to the funeral home and positively identified the body," said Rick Kellam, Melvin's great-grandson. Kellam, who operates Broadwater Bay Ecotours out of Exmore to Hog Island, routinely visits the area on the barrier island known as Southend. About a half mile off the eastern side of the island is the present site of the graveyard, now submerged in the cold Atlantic Ocean.
"I found out that people had seen parts of skeletons washed out on the beach on Hog Island, but nothing like this," Kellam said.
Then came one of the most curious aspects of the story of the petrified man.
"Jack Doughty, of the Doughty Funeral Home in Exmore," Kellam related, "gave the family a price on burying the body. It was a lot of money. The family didn't have the money, so Jack told them 'I can chisel off, or break off, his other leg and bury him in a (cheaper) child-size casket with the leg beside him. So he family agreed and Jack chiseled off the leg, and put it and the body in a child's casket.
While there had been several reports of petrified bodies found in the United States over the years including the Cardiff Giant 'discovered' in New York in 1869. Every one had been exposed as a hoax. Except, perhaps, one. The Smithsonian, Kellam said, wanted the body.
"Jack later told me that he was approached by someone from the Smithsonian Institution. Because the body was 'like stone hard as a brick,' and wasn't like soapstone or a soft stone, the guy from the Smithsonian who had also contacted my mother and grandmother, wanted to take the body to Washington and study it and, in turn, they would cover all the reburial expenses. My grandmother and the rest of the family would have no part of it," he said.
Then fear set in. The funeral director and the family were afraid someone would dig up the body set to be interred in the cemetery in Belle Haven.
"They were really concerned that someone would dig up the body, steal it and sell it because it was such an abnormality," Kellam said. "They buried the casket in an unmarked grave in Belle Haven Cemetery. Jack said the burial took place outside 'normal' working hours. When I came of age, Jack Doughty and I found the location of the grave. My aunt and I had a tombstone put over it in 2000."
To this day, there has never been an detailed investigation into what caused George Avery Melvin, 82, to turn to stone in 22 years. Curious, too, was how the fabrics covering the corpse appeared new and fresh 22 years later.
According to David Hunt, a physical-forensic anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution, changes to Melvin's body may have been brought on by saponificaion, a process in which fats in the remains turn to soap when alkaline water from the soil saturates the body. The most famous example of a "soap man" is that of a male thought to have been buried in 1800 and discovered in Philadelphia in 1875. It was exhibited for years at the Smithsonian but is no longer on display.
"The best answer would be that the doctor (Gladstone) misinterpreted the adipocere (a waxy substance formed during tissue decomposition) as being stone. Some adipocere can be quite hard and brittle, rather than soft and 'cheese-like'. And this saponification can also take on a discoloration that can be very dark brown or blackish. Of bodies that are preserved by saponification, the chemical transformation of the fats can also leach out into the fabrics surrounding the body and the hair and help preserve the hair and fibers.
"He was just laying' there, like he was waitin' for us, when we found him," Smith said. "I told this story for the next 20 years after we found him and nobody has every heard a story like this."
bstump@dmg.gannett.com
410-845-4653