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The Flemingville Stone
By Gavin Callaghan
FATE :: February 2007
I discovered the stone in the early autumn of 1995, in the cemetery behind the United Methodist Church in Flemingville, New York, while making a study of local history and antiquities. Strangely, just before this, the story of Joseph Smith’s youthful stone-gazing activities along the Susquehanna in the 1820s and his discovery in Palmyra, New York, of the supposed hieroglyphic plates of the Book of Mormon (1830), had been on my mind.
As Whitney R. Cross observes in his book The Burned-Over District, “Across the rolling hills of western New York and along the line of DeWitt Clinton’s famed canal, there stretched in the second quarter of the nineteenth century a ‘psychic highway.’” Weird visionary sects; the 1869 discovery of the supposedly fossilized stone man known as the “Cardiff Giant” in Onondaga County; the hundreds of unexplained stone cairns that dot the local hills; the decayed cemeteries that lie hidden and untended in the backwoods and in the corners of countless farmers’ fields; and, even as late as 1964, the well-publicized close encounter of Newark Valley, farmer Gary Wilcox with the supposed inhabitants of a UFO: all of these strange happenings served to reinforce the dark and almost apocalyptic sense of mystery prevalent throughout the area.
The Discovery
The Flemingville stone was situated near the back of the cemetery, leaning loosely against a farmer’s fence to the right. The moss growing along its front and the various insect cocoons that adhered to its back suggested it had been there for a while. The missing left portion of its face, partially obscuring at least one character of its inscription, hinted that at some time in the past it had been damaged, or even violently effaced. Unlike all the other gravestones in the cemetery, most of which dated to the mid-1800s, this one had no clear date or name. The crudeness of its carving, and the tiny marine fossil visible along its back, indicated that it had been carved from local rock, as is found lying along the nearby dried creek beds.
The stone measured one foot, seven and a quarter inches from top to base, the width of the stone narrowing toward the base. It was about three inches thick along the undamaged side, while the inscription itself measured about five inches from top to bottom. It appeared that someone had tried to provide it with a base on which to stand. The smoothly hewn exterior contrasted with the irregularity of the inscription. The back of the stone on the right appeared just as damaged as the left half on the front. I photographed the stone from all angles, and made crayon rubbings of the inscription that I later traced and photocopied to decipher the inscription on the front.
Strange Inscription
An unknown character, shaped like an angel, is repeated at least five times throughout the text. It may be either a decorative symbol or a cryptographic marker. Whether the inscription is an epitaph or message is unclear, although the layout and the slight attempt at decoration, with the top fourth separated from the bottom portion by a line and colophon, is certainly consistent with that of a tombstone.
I checked the records of the Flemingville churchyard in the Tioga County Historian’s office, but I could find no name matching the “Bob Y Didf” on the stone. Of the language of the characters, I am not qualified to judge, though I note a similarity between the letters here and some transcripts of so-called spirit writing reproduced elsewhere....
Read the rest of this article in the February 2007 issue of FATE
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