So on Saturday, Dec. 27, we decided to go on a mini “Damned” photo tour to get some images to go with the places we’ve written about — we went to the Melon Head roads in Shelton and Trumbull, Stepney Cemetery in Monroe and the renowned Union Cemetery in Easton, where we came upon a mystery more perplexing than the fabled White Lady.
While trudging among the snowy graves, Steve noticed a set of unusual footprints winding through the graveyard. Entering from the southwest corner off of Route 136, they went diagonally through the heart of the cemetery to — and then along — the back (northern) edge, before turning again to the south, winding among the gravestones and then exiting over the fallen fence at the southeastern corner near the church.
The first thing that made them unusual was that they were much darker and more distinct than the other tracks in the snow. Upon closer investigation, it seemed as though every one of them was filled with some sort of tree debris — pine needles and other little tree buds. My guess as to how they formed is that when the snow first fell, someone decided to take a stroll through the cemetery, making the original deep tracks. Then, with the windy weather we had last week, the pine needles and other stuff got blown into the depressions the footprints left. As the steps were larger and less defined than other prints (like ours), it was clear they had been made before it got warmer and then that they had melted a bit.
Okay, here’s the really weird part — in the corner of one of the footprints, we noticed about a half-dozen kernals of corn. There were no other footprints aside from ours around the one with the corn, no animal tracks around it and no logical explanation why there would be corn dropped in the middle of the cemetery.
Really, it makes no sense . . . if someone had dropped it for an animal, why were they feeding it in the middle of a cemetery? If it randomly fell out of the pocket of the person strolling through the cemetery, why wouldn’t it be in other spots, or like a trail of crumbs like Hansel and Gretel? Why wouldn’t other animals or birds have eaten it? If an animal like a squirrel had brought it there . .. well, why would they rather than storing it in its nest? If a bird had dropped it, how did they manage to get it so close together? The more we talked about it, the less sense it made.
If anyone has a theory as to why this small pile of corn was sitting in the middle of a footprint in the snow in the middle of Union Cemetery, we’d love to hear it!