Oak Grove Cemetery: Bones And Caskets Popping Out At Iowa Graveyard (VIDEO And PHOTOS)

Bones Popping Out of the Ground At Iowa Cemeter
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That which is buried six-feet-under, should probably remain six-feet-under.

So when one Iowa woman visited her relatives in Lehigh's Oak Grove Cemetery only to find herself stepping onto the set of a horror film -- complete with exposed bones and jutted out caskets -- she felt nothing short of disturbed.

"To me it's just the lowest form of disrespect," Karen Long-Fladeboe, told Des Moines' KCCI-8.

The graveyard's resemblance to "Night Of The Living Dead" is now of public interest, but caretakers have actually known about the erosion problem for at least two years.

In 2009, heavy rains washed away the wall supporting part of the cemetery, leaving misplaced gravestones, bones, and coffins littered along the property.

"The whole hillside just dropped into the ravine, and there's nothing nobody can do about it," Phil Burgland, a township trustee, told local ABC affiliate WOI-DT. "The whole hillside just slid."

Burgland says that he and the other trustees "don't want a situation like this," but the protocol for moving the deceased isn't exactly cut and dry. Any relocating of a gravesite requires "cause of death, date of death, and next of kin," according to Burgland. With the cemetery in shambles and many of the headstones worn over the course of a century, finding that information is almost like catching a ghost.

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Before You Go

Oak Grove Cemetery
Oak Grove Cemetery(01 of05)
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Oak Grove Cemetery(02 of05)
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Oak Grove Cemetery(03 of05)
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Oak Grove Cemetery(04 of05)
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Oak Grove Cemetery(05 of05)
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