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Mummified Irish New Yorker Identified After 128 Years
Mummified Irish New Yorker Identified After 128 Years
Known only as "Stoneman Willie", James Murphy was an alleged thief who died in a local jail in 1895, no one had claimed his body.
IrishCentral 10 OCT 2023
More than 128 years after he died in a Reading, Pennsylvania, jail, a man who was accidentally mummified and left at a funeral home without any identification will finally get his long-awaited burial.
Known only as "Stoneman Willie", the man was an alleged thief who died in a local jail in 1895 and was taken to the Theo C. Auman Funeral Home after no one claimed the body.
Undertakers at the funeral home accidentally mummified the body and it has remained on display there ever since.
"Fast-forward 128 years and he's still here," funeral home director Kyle Blankenbiller told AFP ahead of the burial on Saturday.
Blackenbiller revealed that researchers are almost certain that Stoneman Willie was James Murphy, a New Yorker of Irish descent who was in Reading for a firefighters' convention when he died of kidney failure in the local jailhouse on November 19, 1895.
A known alcoholic, Murphy was arrested on October 1, 1895, for public drunkenness before being arrested again on October 7 for burglarizing the Morris Brown Boarding House.
On Saturday, Murphy was interred at Reading's Forest Hills Memorial Park cemetery.
Dressed in a fitting 19th-century tuxedo, Stoneman Willie was named as James Murphy during Saturday's funeral service following a colorful procession that saw his coffin transported via motorcycle-drawn hearse.
Both Stoneman Willie and James Murphy are etched on his black tombstone, although his real name is only in small print at the bottom of the tombstone.
A large informational bronze plaque detailing his story will be installed at the gravesite in the future.
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