The Mystery:
Is George Pullman buried under steel and concrete in Graceland Cemetery?
Is George Pullman really buried under steel and concrete? Was Walter Newberry buried in a rum barrel? And who is the Girl in Glass? Geoffrey Baer explores with Adam Selzer.
Railroad titan George Pullman, who made his fortune from his luxurious Pullman sleeping cars, was not a particularly adored boss in his day. In 1894, Pullman’s employees went on strike. Many of the workers lived in the company town of Pullman, and amid the economic downturn of 1893, their boss cut wages but didn’t reduce their rent. Frustrated, the employees walked off the job and brought rail traffic in much of the Midwest to a halt. In the weeks that followed, violence erupted between police and strikers, and the strike eventually fizzled. The employees’ demands were not met. When George Pullman died three years after the strike, there were concerns about grave robbing or disgruntled employees desecrating his grave. “After he died, there’d been a lot of high-profile grave robberies lately, [bodies] being held for ransom,” local historian and author Adam Selzer told Geoffrey Baer. “This was only a few years after the big Pullman strike, too, so that might’ve been on people’s minds, as well, that some of the employees weren’t quite done getting revenge.” A New York Times article from 1897 describes Pullman’s grave as having an 18-inch “concrete flooring of a pit of 13 feet long, 9 feet wide, and 8 feet deep,” and that “the body itself had been placed in a lead-lined box wrapped in tar paper. Under and around the box was an inch of asphaltum.” But, according to Selzer, “Whether it's true or not, we don't really know.”
