1884 Discovery of “Petrified” Body in Fulton Township, PA

1884 Discovery of “Petrified” Body in Fulton Township, PA

In the final days of 1884, a Lancaster County farmer digging a drainage ditch stumbled upon something far stranger than buried rock or root—he uncovered what was described in the local paper as a petrified human body, perfectly preserved beneath the soggy ground. The corpse, leathery and intact, bore signs of violence. Whispers of an unsolved disappearance from fifty years earlier—a drover who vanished along the route from Rising Sun to Wakefiel…