A Ghastly Find in the Ruins of the Spokane Mill
Construction debris yields the remains of a man presumed to be a victim of a fire from months prior.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A ghastly find was made today in the ruins of the Spokane mill, which burned last spring. Several boys were at work this forenoon picking pieces of charred wood and other relics from the site. Near a pile of debris at the northwest corner of the foundation, they unearthed what appeared to be the remains of a human being. Startled at the discovery, they ran away and at once notified the police. Officer Fischer went to the spot and corroborated the story. Wedged down between sticks of charred timber lay the complete skeleton of a human being. The arms were folded, one across the other, and the bones of the legs were also crossed. Not a vestige of clothing was found near the spot to indicate the identity of the owner of the bones. The skeleton was complete, and had evidently been wedged into the place where found by the collapse of the ruins. It was exhumed and taken to the morgue and there viewed by the coroner. This makes the fourth body removed from the debris. Identification is out of the question, but the supposition is that it is the skeleton of L. L. Winger.
“Wedged down between sticks of charred timber lay the complete skeleton of a human being.”
Unearthing remains in the rubble of industrial sites was a recurring grim reality in the rapid building and burning of early Seattle. Today, our city deals with the same tension between the rapid destruction of old infrastructure and the buried secrets left behind in the urban footprint.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.