A California homeowner was left “extremely freaked out” after making an unsettling discovery while clearing out his backyard.
The property owner, who lives in Fresno and asked not to be named, told Newsweek he “didn’t know what to believe” after making the eerie discovery. Seeking answers, he shared a series of pictures showing what he found to Reddit, under the handle u/Key-Main955.
“My wife and I are expecting our second child and I was using our tractor to till the land around the house to prepare,” he said. “I came across what I thought was a typical piece of concrete. It was upside down and somewhat buried. The teeth in the tractor just broke it free but didn’t flip it, so I went to flip it over and my heart sank.”
Key-Main955
Visible on the stone were the words “Jacque Arreola” along with the number “1968” and “L6 CR3 R2.” At first glance, it looked very much like the remnants of a gravestone.
“I was extremely freaked out, but not as much as my wife. I had a hunch it was a gravestone, but honestly I did not want to believe it was so I thought maybe it could be some weird survey marker,” the homeowner said. “My wife wanted me to call the police, but I decided to post on Reddit first.”
The U.S. is home to 144,847 cemeteries, which, according to a map created by data visualization expert Joshua Stevens, can be mostly found on the eastern side of the country.
But while California may not have the same number of burial grounds over on the West Coast, the Public Policy Institute of California notes it is the nation’s most populous state, with a population of more than 39 million people.
With projections suggesting that figure could rise to 42 million by 2030, it is not inconceivable to think that the increasing demand for property could result in some long-deceased Californians being displaced.
In posting the pictures to Reddit, this particular California homeowner was able to glean some answers, but more questions remain over what he has come to discover are the remnants of a family tragedy.
“Since the post and my own investigation, I have learned that it is in fact a headstone. Jacque, the name on the stone, was an infant who died the same day he was born,” the homeowner explained.
Key-Main955
It’s not entirely clear how the headstone ended up on his property, though. So far, the good people of Reddit have put forward three distinct possibilities.
One is that the stone was part of a “temporary gravestone” that was replaced by a “full” one, with the temporary version then passed on to the family when the other was installed.
Alternatively, it may simply be the case that the stone ended up being used as “filler for construction.” The third theory is that it was “stolen from a cemetery,” though the homeowner sees this as the most unlikely scenario. This being the internet, he also noted that many have put forward what he has dubbed the “poltergeist theory.”
“They think my property is on a graveyard,” he explained. “According to my deed, my house was built in 1935 and the parcel of property was created in 1896 out of old farmland. It could be likely still because my own records slip away after the 1896 time, but the property was all zoned as farmland.”
Despite the lack of credibility to this particular theory, he’s had plenty of unusual requests. “I’ve had people reach out and offer to buy the grave stone,” he said. “A person offering to perform some weird satanic type rituals around the area…pretty weird.”
The plan now is to investigate further. The homeowner is a professor at a local college and is planning to reach out to a few contacts and conduct his own research to find out who lived at the property and whether the grave can be traced back to another cemetery.