Ron Rittenhouse blinked.
And blinked again.
“He just looked like he was sleeping,” the chief photographer of The Dominion Post said, remembering the day he saw little Harry Spitz in his coffin.
Harry was just 3 when he died from cholera. That was in 1912.
Except Rittenhouse was regarding Harry in repose in 1975.
And what happened afterwards set off all kinds of chords: involving fears of the occult, the mourning of a mother for her lost child and, certainly not least, a good-Samaritan couple coming forth, who are also parents, to at least make part of it right.
Before all that, though, there was that warm, long-ago July morning, going on 50 years now, at Morgantown’s venerable Oak Grove Cemetery.
Caretaker Glenn Pierce was the first to discover the disturbance in the earth.
Everything was just kind of humped-up, he observed.
Harry had been interred there for 63 years when … something … caused the concrete vault containing his coffin to move.
At first, Pierce was thinking vandalism — but there were no shovel marks.
Maybe an M-80 firecracker, he wondered?
After all, July Fourth was coming up.
There were no scorched marks or indentations to suggest that, either.
Morgantown Police Chief Bennie Palmer was summoned, and he set about discovering, well, everything else that didn’t happen.
No coal had ever been tapped under the cemetery, so undermining was ruled out.
Besides, that would have caused the vault to sink down — rather than push up.
A thorough inspection by the gas company showed no evidence of a methane or sewer-gas build-up, which could have breached a subterranean utility line.
What Chief Palmer had, by way of investigation, was a sudden and mysterious hole in the ground, through which a cracked vault and the corner of a child’s coffin could easily be spied from the surface with the help of a flashlight.
A boy and his lion
The only other thing that could have happened was more sad than grisly — given that it was Harry.
Bodies don’t go gentle, in sealed coffins.
Post-mortem pressures can build and build in the enclosure, through gaseous decay.
Bodies horribly —or clinically, depending upon your forensic point of view — can swell and burst.
Might that have occurred?
Palmer didn’t have to get the paperwork to exhume the grave. Whatever it was had already taken care of that.
Oh-so-carefully, oh-so-gingerly, the coffin lid was removed.
And there was Harry, with his blonde hair, round face and smooth skin.
There was Harry, in his satin suit with his favorite toy, a plush lion, at his feet.
In his clasped hands was a wilted flower, and on the lid of the wooden coffin was a silver plaque, engraved: “Our darling.”
Harry’s body was remarkably preserved.
Eerily preserved, everybody said.
“I never saw anything like it,” said Rittenhouse, who had seen everything in his job, by then.
Cruel theft
Two weeks ago, another call came into Morgantown PD regarding Harry’s grave.
His headstone that had been placed there after 1975 — the grave had been unmarked until then — had been stolen.
As of this writing, the marker is still missing. Anyone with information is asked to call the police department’s detective division at 304-284-7454.
News of the theft couldn’t help but set off some social media guilt for Jordan Carter.
Carter is a local writer who produced a segment on Harry for the “Appalachian Mysteria” podcast, which looks at unsolved murder cases and other enduring, seemingly unexplainable happenings across Morgantown and north-central West Virginia.
Since her segment recently began re-airing on the podcast, she started wondering that maybe someone who had heard it decided to boost the stone, just for simple kicks or the macabre memorabilia, of it all.
“I wanted to do something,” she said — so she did.
She set up a GoFundMe account to raise money for the purchase of a new headstone.
Grief, and more grief
Visit gofundme.com/ and type “Harry Spitz” in the search field for all the particulars.
For Carter, all the particulars surrounding Harry and his family are both tragic, given his loss, and awe-inspiring, even, given the American tale, up until his death.
Harry’s father, Henry, and his mother, Desiree, were Dutch immigrants, as Carter discovered in her research.
Carter learned that the couple came to the U.S. and Morgantown, so Henry Spitz, a skilled glassmaker, could work in the industry for which the University City was then renowned.
Desiree, Carter said, was a natural in business and launched a successful dress shop in town.
Both were fluent in multiple languages, the podcast author said, and Harry, by all accounts, was likely going to have the same linguistic affinity.
Then came the cholera diagnosis, and Harry’s death, just eight days later.
A mourning shroud came down like the mist in a mountain hollow. Henry Spitz died four years after his son, from tuberculosis.
The Morgantown family, which included Harry’s sister and both sets of grandparents who also journeyed across the Atlantic, lost their money, Desiree’s business and their house during the Depression — but they worked and got most of it back.
Desiree could never get back to what she was before the death of her little boy.
The other side of the veil
For a certain newspaper photographer, the whole thing was unsettling.
Dr. Otis Fansler, the chief pathologist at the then-WVU Medical Center, ordered the examinations and preventive vaccines of Rittenhouse and everyone at Oak Grove Cemetery that day, should any pathogens still be present.
Fansler also took tissue samples from Harry, which ended up being clear — another medical anomaly, given what Harry died from.
Still, there was that woman from the region who proclaimed that everyone who bore witness to the opening of Harry’s coffin would be heretofore cursed — “She said we’d all die horrible deaths,” Rittenhouse remembered.
There were the photographs that he snapped at the cemetery that day, which could never seem to stay put either, he said.
One day, they would be locked in a cabinet and the next day, would be partially out of the drawer. Or on the floor.
Thing was, Rittenhouse hadn’t gone near them.
“I can’t explain it,” he said.
There were also some things swirling around Desiree Spitz who was 95 when she died in 1978, Carter said.
Did all that shifting at the graveyard mean Harry was trying to get back to his mother?
Or that she was trying to regain her son, gone too soon?
By the time she reached her 90s, she was basically non-verbal, Carter said.
Even so, no one wanted to upset her, so she wasn’t told about what happened at Harry’s grave — but she still broke her silence to suddenly start asking for her son.
Rittenhouse encountered her briefly during that time.
She was living in an area nursing facility where he happened to be one day, on assignment.
He walked past an elderly lady, bent in a wheelchair with a doll in her lap.
“That’s the mother of the boy you guys wrote about,” an aide whispered to the photographer.
“She had her back to me at that point,” Rittenhouse said.
“But she turned around and looked right at me. A couple of months later, she was gone.”
Nurturing moments, in marble
Jeremy Bryan was moved when he heard Carter’s podcast.
A couple of years ago, he and his wife, Samantha, started their own contracting firm, Morgantown Handyman.
Both had professional careers before that — all-encompassing jobs, which, more often than not, kept them away from their own two children.
Jeremy couldn’t stop thinking about Harry.
“That was a pretty scummy thing for someone to do,” he said of the headstone theft.
It didn’t take long for Jeremy and Samantha to decide what they were going do after they learned of the account created by Carter.
They went ahead and purchased a new headstone, which is in the process of being engraved.
Carter kept the GoFundMe, because she wants the couple reimbursed.
Bryan agreed, but only because he wants any excess dollars to go solely to the Monongalia County Child Advocacy Center, which legally tends to young victims of crime across the region.
And at the heart of it all, there’s that little boy, and his stuffed lion, in Oak Grove Cemetery.
Replacing his headstone, Bryan said, is both respectful and nurturing.
“Harry doesn’t have any blood relatives left,” he said. “There’s no one to look after him.”
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