Lost Lancaster

One morning, visitors to this cemetery noticed something strange.

A man stood alone among the graves, digging into the frozen earth with an old, broken spade. He was not preparing a burial. He had no coffin. No name. No permission.

He was looking for a village.

The man was Thomas Mullen, an escaped inmate of the Buffalo State Hospital. After slipping away from the institution, Mullen wandered until he reached Tonawanda—where he was found digging here, in this very cemetery, by Patrolman John Kreher.

When questioned, Mullen gave an explanation that chilled those who heard it.

He said he had come from Lancaster seven years earlier—and that the village had since been submerged. According to Mullen, the only way to find it was to dig.

So he did.

Using nothing but a damaged spade, he cut into the cemetery soil, searching beneath the dead for a place that existed only in his mind. Hospital attendants later identified him by markings on his clothing. He was known at the asylum only as Patient No. 12.

By evening, he was taken back to the institution.

The hole he dug was filled in. The cemetery returned to silence.

But stories like this remind us that cemeteries are not just places for the dead. They have long drawn the lost, the grieving, the desperate—and the unwell. For some, the quiet offers comfort. For others, it becomes a stage for their fears and delusions.

This is the dark side of the city: where memory, madness, and mourning intersect—sometimes in the open ground beneath our feet.