Halloween may have passed weeks ago, but the macabre is very much still alive in Los Angeles.
We’ve got La Llorona howling through our hills. Dark history steeping in our streets. Peanut butter in our chocolate.
And now, a grim discovery inside of L.A.’s oldest cemetery may bode something more malicious yet: a pint-sized, potential mummy.
According to Newsweek, the find was made in Boyle Heights’ Evergreen Memorial Park and Cemetery by a man named Tarpit, whose video of the encounter is blowing up on TikTok.
In the clip, Tarpit approaches the stump of a recently cut-down tree while collecting kindling for his kiln, where he zooms in on a tiny, decaying old box wrapped in frayed twine and half-buried. It looks like something cursed from a horror movie that somebody should definitely never ever touch.
And… just like the people in those kinds of films, dude immediately begins messing with the thing.
Peering in from the side, one can almost see what looks like a charred object with the simulacrum of a face. Declaring it “gross,” Tarpit plunges in further, opening the box to reveal a wee string-wrapped form, hard to identify as much from the other side of the screen. “Is that a mummy?” he asks.
Then, in the guy’s smartest move of the day, he decides to put it back together, stow it back in the stump cavity, and leave it the hell alone with the final words, “Fuuuuhh…”
Could it really be a mummy? Or a conceivable hoax by a guy who seems to love finding random shit in graveyards? Or perhaps something more sinister yet?
The post has 2,298 comments, many of them warning Tarpit of the likely demonic possession to visit him soon. But within them is a reasonable historic suggestion.
One Christina Breen notes, "People used to do that with babies that were miscarried. They would bind them and stick them in trees. Pretty sure that is what you found."
Dayna Marquina also suggests it could be a “pet or baby.”
Indeed, burials in hollow spaces beneath trees for children who are yet to reach teething age have been recorded, as in a common practice by the Toraja people of South Sulawesi in Indonesia.
Such a discovery isn’t completely unprecedented locally, either. In 2010, two women in L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood were cleaning out a storage room and uncovered a pair of mummified infants once falsely believed to be linked to author J.M. Barrie*. In the mid 70s, a prop mummy on a Long Beach set of The Six-Million Dollar Man was revealed to be an actual mummified corpse of an infamous bank robber used in a traveling carnival.
Might we have our very own museo del momias under the L.A. soil? Or even just some kinda subterranean museo de muñecas?
Could it be that Evergreen, which was founded over 144 years ago, has more bodies than officially acknowledged?
What is absolutely certain: It’s all waaaaaay creepy. And all but given that Tarpit now has an ancient malady disguised as a demonic nun stalking his hallways by now.
Take a look at the video and let us know what you think this wandering TikTok adherent has unearthed in Boyle Heights.
*we know because we had to correct the story after saying it ourselves. Whoops! Thanks to @high_tower for the correction.
