Strange Thoughts Whilst Listening to Japanese Music

Me, several lifetimes years ago, looking ... bemused?

Okay, so I see this article online: “An Indiana teen died in 1866. How did her skull end up in an Illinois house's walls?”

Intriguing. So I read it.

In November 1978, a man in Batavia, Ill., was renovating his house when he knocked down a wall to reveal what appeared to be a human skull lying between the studs.

Almost half a century later — thanks to community fundraising, sophisticated DNA testing and a cooperative descendent — the identity of that skull has finally been confirmed.

It belonged to an Indiana teenager who died from childbirth complications in 1866.

“We now know the skull found in the wall in Batavia as Esther Granger,” Kane County Coroner Rob Russell announced at a press conference on Thursday, surrounded by county officials and standing beside a replica of the skull in a glass box.

Then, there’s a picture of what’s identified in the caption as: 

A resin mold of the skull that DNA matched to Granger. Employees at a local museum discovered the skull in 2021, leading to the reopening of the decades-old cold case.

Kane County Coroner's Office

The skull of resin sits on a cloth the color of a gray flannel suit, its sunken eye sockets gazing, not mournful, but almost contemplative. Wondering what happened to its nose, now simply a hole in its face. There is no lower jaw. It isn’t a grinning skull. Simply a set of former eyes and former nose without a mouth.

So, I read on:

Granger was born in October 1848 in Indiana, and married her husband Charles in 1865 at the age of 16, authorities say. She died the following year shortly after giving birth to her first child, a girl.

Public records show that Granger was buried in Merrillville, Ind. — about 80 miles away from the Chicago suburb where her skull was found over a century later.

“So the question remains: If she died in 1866 in Indiana, how did she end up in a wall in a house in Batavia?” said Russell.

Investigators believe Granger was a victim of grave robbing, which was both common and profitable at the time. Perpetrators could make three to four months’ worth of earnings off a single body — often selling them to medical schools for anatomy study — and were rarely apprehended by law enforcement, Russell said.

The working theory is that somebody who lived in the Batavia home obtained the cadaver (or parts of it) for medical study and, knowing the ramifications, later hid it away in the wall.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting: