30 Skulls Found In Illinois Attic Updated

[Gypsy Heart]

http://www.hoinews.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=10399
BLOOMINGTON -- A new home owner in Bloomington was shocked to find over the weekend her home had 30 skulls in the attic.

Kathleen Hollonbeck of Rochelle, Illinois bought the Bloomington home in November.

She was cleaning out her attic over the weekend when she made the discovery.

Police saod the previous owner was a dentist who collected Native American artifacts.

The discovery was made at this home at the 500 block of Florence Avenue.

Some of the skulls have "Lake Anderson Mounds - 1933" written on them.

That is an Indian burial ground about 10 miles south of Havana.

A local Native American said the discovery is especially disturbing because of what her culture believes about the sprit world.

"For Native Americans, this is particularly important because they believe the spirt world is right here, and they are aware of what is going on so the sprits of the deceased are aware if their remains are not property respected and interred," said Carol Lakota Eastin of the Seven Circles Heritage Center.

A local archeologist said the skulls will now be examined to see if they belong to any modern tribe. If so, they will be given back to the tribe to be re-buried.

The archeologist said if they can't be traced back to a tribe then they will be turned over to the Illinois State Museum.

 

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[badandy]

Re: 30 Skulls Found In Illinois Attic

That's a bit extreme collecting I think.
badandy

 

[Atlantis0077]

Re: 30 Skulls Found In Illinois Attic

Morning,

I have heard of skeletons in the closet....but skulls in the attic is a new wrinkle. I knew a lady once who dug up a small child's skeleton. She put it all together and sat it in a chair in her house.....a storm came up and it was sitting by an open window...the wind blew it out of the chair and onto the floor where it shattered in many pieces. Always thought that was "bad ju ju" At any rate the lady died several years back, but not before losing both legs to diabetes and suffering a lot of troubles. Not saying her "skullduggery" precipitated her medical troubles, but it is best to leave the dead to their rest I think.

Atlantis

 

[Gypsy Heart]

Re: 30 Skulls Found In Illinois Attic UPDATED

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/chi-0606140171jun14,0,2178093.story

From the Chicago Tribune

Home buyer finds 26 skulls in attic, but it's no crime

Jun 13, 2006

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. -- The attic held a secret: more than 26 of them.

After dentist Dale Fitz-Henry died, his modest bungalow fell into disrepair over a dozen years. Last fall the city sold it for back taxes.

As the new owner tried to clean out the attic, she uncorked a mystery: more than two dozen well-preserved human skulls, ranging from a child of 6 to men and women more than 50 years old.

The McLean County coroner and the Bloomington Police Department quickly determined this was no crime scene. Instead, the skulls were Native American bones collected by Fitz-Henry, an apparent Indian buff whose house the coroner described as a kind of "dusty museum" chock full of antiques and artifacts.

Since the discovery, Bloomington police have kept the skulls out of public view out of respect for the deceased. But police said most of the skulls were intact and that one has a little handle attached atop the cranium so you could flip it open and see a gold-painted tin pan inside--perhaps for use as a container, or even an ashtray. Another had one artificial eye, a material approximating skin on half its face and some fake hair.

State anthropologists who examined the bones said they were the remains of 33 individuals--26 skulls, but also a handful of mandibles, suggesting the dentist may have been studying the teeth.

The skulls were in good condition, dark-colored and treated to prevent decay, police said.

"It's the strangest collection of things in that house you could ever imagine," said archeologist Alan Harn of the state's Dickson Mounds Museum in Lewistown. "You would see that and think this must've been one of the most eccentric men you'd ever encounter."

Police were puzzled when the home's new owner, Kathleen Hollonbeck of Rochelle, made the find, but for scientists, the clues quickly added up.

The apparent location where the bones were unearthed--an Indian mound on an Illinois River bluff in Downstate Fulton County called Anderson Lake--had been written in script on some of the specimens, as well as the year, 1933, and Fitz-Henry's signature. That matched a well-known excavation that year of remains from 600 to 700 years ago of a regional population of a mix of Oneota and late Mississippian Indians, an agricultural community with no modern tribal equivalents, so there are no written records of their history.

Some other artifacts at the home pointed to those Indians, including pottery shards and a spoon fashioned from a mussel shell. Other telltale signs, according to Illinois Historic Preservation Agency physical anthropologist Dawn Cobb, were the shapes of the skull--flat-faced and round-headed--as well as the five-cusped molars.

"The artifacts from the site are very unique to that site," Harn said. "We know what was going there in 1933. We have good documentation of that."

State laws protecting Indian burial sites from excavations were not enacted until the 1980s. In the 1930s, "anyone with a shovel" could dig into these sites, Harn said. Some did so to build personal collections, while others hoped to sell curiosities for cash at the height of the Great Depression.

For those reasons, Harn said it is not terribly uncommon to find human skulls and other bones tucked away in private homes, but it is rare to find this many. IHPA spokesman Dave Blanchette called it the largest collection of human remains found in a private collection in the two decades the department has existed.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Blanchette said. "We can find out about the way people before us lived."

The fate of the bones is up to Hollonbeck, who did not return messages left by the Tribune seeking comment.

Blanchette said Tuesday the agency is in contact with Hollonbeck and is urging her to donate the bones to the state for further study.

But Joseph "Standing Bear" Schranz, executive director of Midwest SOARRING Foundation, a Westchester-based non-profit that helps re-inter Indian remains, said he was "extremely appalled" at the size of this find--and particularly by the skull possibly fashioned into an ashtray. He said he hoped Hollonbeck would decide to return them to the ground.

"We don't want to put them from one [display] case to another," he said. "We want to give them a proper burial. We'll give them that, and we're just eager and anxious to correct what is wrong."

Because the discovery has attracted much interest, police have been posting an officer outside the house to guard it against burglars. With the anthropologists' findings Tuesday, McLean County Coroner Beth Kimmerling declared the "very unique death investigation," from her office's standpoint, "administratively closed."

The house had been empty for 12 years, police said. The last known member of the family, Fitz-Henry's son, Dale II, is believed to have died about a year ago in a fire at a Woodford County cabin, freeing up the city to sell it for back taxes.

"[Hollonbeck] probably got it for a song and now she's getting a dance too," said Bloomington Police Public Affairs Officer David White.

The A-frame bungalow sits on a quiet street in Bloomington. The white paint is chipping away, the roof is covered in tarps and a wall of weeds is growing in the back yard.

But after touring the interior for two hours Tuesday, the coroner and the scientists left in awe of Fitz-Henry's eclectic collection.

"I'd like to spend a month in there. From the basement to the attic, every wall is like a museum," Harn said.

Neighbor LaVon Shultz, 70, said she had lived about two houses from the Fitz-Henry family all her life and never knew what was inside the home.

"I was totally shocked," she said. "I never thought of a bunch of skulls over there."

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[Atlantis0077]

Hey Gypsy,


Got to EBAY and check out a seller named Rocketflyer. He is selling items out of the house you mentioned...even has a little of the story there to go along with it.

Atlantis

 

[steve71]

my former boss said when he was going to school in topalow miss, sure spelling is wrong.they dug up indian graves for the school.some of the kids even kept the skulls.