After more than a century living with a macabre mystery, Reading, Pennsylvania, on Saturday closed the casket on its oddest-ever resident — a mummified man who was finally buried.
Crowds of people had lined up in the past few days to pay their respects, snap photographs or gaze with bewildered awe on a scene unlikely to ever be repeated in the US.
“Stoneman Willie” was the nickname bestowed long ago on an alleged thief who died in 1895 in jail and was taken to the Theo C. Auman funeral home when no one claimed the body, before being accidentally mummified by undertakers.
Photo: AFP
“Fast-forward 128 years and he’s still here,” funeral home director Kyle Blankenbiller said ahead of the burial.
At his interment, a crowd gathered under overcast skies, circling around Willie’s black tombstone at a local cemetery for one final farewell.
The man who became known as Willie was revealed to have been James Murphy during Saturday’s ceremony, a fitting end to his life — and bizarre afterlife.
Photo: AFP
His gravestone was unveiled at the climax of funeral events, which also included his remains joining a recent parade commemorating Reading’s 275th anniversary. Both names are etched on the tombstone, although his real name is only in small print at the bottom.
Murphy was attending a firefighters’ convention in Reading when he died in the local jailhouse of kidney failure on Nov. 19, 1895, Blankenbiller said.
Blankenbiller said at the funeral that Murphy’s real name was known to Theo Auman, the original director of the funeral home in 1895.
Photo: Reuters
The name had been passed down within the funeral home over the past 128 years, but it was not until the latest decision to give him a proper burial that the research was done to conclusively confirm his identity.
Local officials were unable to locate relatives, local historian George Meiser said.
“Weeks passed, months passed, years passed and no one claimed the remains,” Meiser said at the service.
Willie’s cellmate allegedly said the man arrested for pickpocketing adopted the fictitious name James Penn because he did not want to shame his wealthy Irish father.
On his death, no next of kin were located and the body was sent to Auman’s.
It took some historic sleuthing by local historians digging through records from the prison, funeral home and other documents to confirm his name.
The corpse has been in an open casket for almost his entire stay at the funeral home, until being loaded into a motorcycle-drawn hearse on Saturday.
His leathery skin and smooth sunken facial features have been the object of fascination for thousands, including countless curious locals, researchers and, in decades past, schoolchildren on class trips.
Willie had become a quirky fixture of Reading history, “our friend” who now got a well-deserved send-off, Blankenbiller said.
With embalming still an emerging science, Auman experimented with a new formula, Blankenbiller said.
“The intensity of the concoction that he used” led to Stoneman Willie’s mummification, a moisture removal process that forestalls decomposition.
“He’s been gawked at enough,” Blankenbiller said.
Burying Stoneman Willie during anniversary commemorations for the city was the “reverent, respectful thing to do.”
Among those saying goodbye in the past few days was Berks County resident Michael Klein, who was fascinated by the “mystery of who this guy really was,” he said.
Stoneman Willie was buried in a vintage black tuxedo, fittingly from the 1890s.
“Everyone comes to America to live the American dream. Nobody comes to die in a prison unknown,” Klein said.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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