Forgotten Bones Beneath Philadelphia: How a Historic Graveyard Became a Killer’s Crypt
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
In February 2017, construction crews in Philadelphia’s historic district recoiled in horror as their backhoes slammed into coffins and dragged fully intact human skeletons from the earth. The site — a former parking lot near 2nd and Arch Streets — was supposed to hold nothing but dirt. Church records claimed that in the 1860s, the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia had moved everybody from its 1707 cemetery to Mount Moriah Cemetery. Someone lied.
Workers discovered dozens of coffins, many still sealed. Construction on the new apartment building stopped cold. Since a contractor first spotted bones in November 2016, forensic teams have recovered around 60 remains — adults and children alike — many still inside their original caskets. Experts now believe the true number of burials on the site reached nearly 3,000, far more than the church ever admitted.
The site was a former cemetery for the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia (FBCP). Begun in 1698 as a mission of the more suburban Pennepack (now, Lower Dublin) Baptist Church, the congregants met at an old Quaker meeting house for services. The church soon became the leading congregation for the city, region, and colonies. A cemetery was established on the south side of Arch Street from 1707 until 1860.
In 1855, the congregation moved to a new building at Broad and Arch Streets. According to church records, the remains were said to be exhumed and re-interred at Mount Moriah Cemetery, which is north of the city around 1860. Historians agree that someone didn’t do their job.
Kimberlee Moran, an associate teaching professor and director of the Forensics Center at Rutgers University, said:
“We’ll try to find out anything that these bones can tell us about who these people were in life. This is a rare opportunity to learn as much as we can about the earliest residents of Philadelphia. Ultimately, we want to reinter them at Mount Moriah Cemetery with the rest of the remains from this time period. If there are any living descendants, we are going to try to identify them.
A church record in 1870, after the move date, showed a membership of about 500, so we thought we’d be dealing with a small number of burials, but from City death records and newspaper accounts, there were about 1,700 named individuals. If you included the unnamed, it totaled around 3,000.The area where the church had been had the most dense number of burials. It’s now under a structure, but there are definitely remains under it. There are headstones memorializing folks from FBCP in Mount Moriah, but whether they’re actually under there isn’t clear. Old headstones were also used as walkways in the plot.”
The coffins were far below the standard six feet we know today, but this could be accounted for by layers of road and flooring added throughout the year. Some were found as deep as 15 feet.
Approximately 500 individuals were unearthed, and it’s believed that another 600 to 800 burials were destroyed during the excavation.
According to cemetery records, the church hired a contractor to move the coffins and hand-dig new graves at Mount Moriah in the coldest months of the year when the ground was frozen over. This made a difficult project, back-breaking to say the least, which could account for why so many graves were left behind.
On the edge of Philadelphia, Mount Moriah itself sprawls across 380 acres, spreading into Delaware County and sheltering 80,000 graves. The vast, overgrown graveyard holds Civil War soldiers, Revolutionary War heroes, and the founder of Brown University. By 2011, neglect had turned it into an illegal dump site. Headstones lay toppled. Brush swallowed pathways. Locals knew the place attracted far darker visitors than historians.
In April 2011, the cemetery was abandoned, and the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, incorporated in 1855, began working to restore the property, which had been neglected for many years, leaving it to become an illegal dump site
For five years after the discovery at 219 Arch Street, the Arch Street Project, which has undertaken to recover, study, and rebury all the remains in September 2023 at Mt. Moriah Cemetery, in Section 112 of the cemetery, the specific plot reserved for the First Baptist Church congregation, to honor their original intended resting place.
But not all the bones of those FBCP congregants have been discovered. A mystery persists as to where the actual remains are interred. Some are possibly at Mt. Moriah in section 112, others could be part of the bones being studied by the Arch Project, others could be part of a group deposited in a landfill by developers in 2016, or left behind in their original location on Arch Street, presently under a multi-floor, modern building.
In August, 2024, another old Philadelphia cemetery with 33,000 burials went up for sale for $1 million.
Mount Vernon Cemetery sits on 26 acres in northeast Philadelphia. It opened in 1856, and the last burial took place in 1968. Sadly, there are no accurate maps or records of the burials. There are many historical people buried there, including the Drew and Barrymore acting families.
Louisa Drew married actor John Drew in 1850 and was the mother of Louisa, John, Jr., and Georgiana Drew, as well as the grandmother of Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore, all actors. She managed the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia for 31 years.
The cemetery is currently believed to contain the remains of about 33,000 people, its main historical clientele wealthy German-Americans, a customer case that proved to be particularly important following the Black Tuesday stock market crash of 1929.
Up to 2021, it was owned by Joseph Dinsmore Murphy, who let it fall into complete disrepair and become overgrown.
In April 2025, a Philadelphia County Court signed off on a tentative agreement that would allow Steelmantown Cemetery Company to take possession of the property. The plans are to restore, in a traditional manner, the existing markers and plots, amid a park-like setting.
Mount Moriah, abandoned and desolate, has now caught the attention of more than archaeologists or those wishing to preserve the past.
In late 2025, police were tipped off that someone was damaging mausoleums and crypts inside the burial ground. What they found was beyond what they originally suspected.
In January 2026, police spied bones and skulls in the back seat of a Toyota Rav 4 parked near the cemetery belonging to Jonathan Christian Gerlach. Investigators found dozens of bones and body parts he had stolen from the cemetery. The remains belonged to adults and children, and date back as far as 250 years. As of May 2026, he is still pending trial and held on a $1 millioin bond.
But disagreeable surprises tied to Mount Moriah were not over.
In May 2026, detectives followed a tip in the disappearance of 36-year-old musician and tattoo artist Keith Palumbo. The lead took them straight into a crumbling family crypt at Mount Moriah — the final resting place of Captain A. Cain, who died in 1884.
Inside, they found Palumbo and David Rossillo Jr., 33, a prospective Warlocks Motorcycle Club member. Both men had been murdered. Rossillo died first. Someone had pried open the vault, dragged his body inside, and left it. Months later, Palumbo joined him in the same dark chamber.
Palumbo, a heavy metal guitarist, vanished in 2020 after his childhood friend Michael DeLuca — nicknamed “Kaos” — lured him to a Philadelphia home. Witnesses later told police DeLuca shot Palumbo in the face, convinced he was talking to law enforcement. DeLuca, a fellow Warlocks member, then enlisted help to dump the body in the forgotten crypt.
Pennsylvania authorities consider the Warlocks a violent outlaw gang known for murder and loyalty above all else. In 2023, Michael DiMauro received life without parole for Rossillo’s murder. He shot the victim, tied a rope around his neck, and dragged the corpse into the crypt. DeLuca pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in Palumbo’s death and received 15 to 35 years. Buck Evans and Billy Gibson were charged with abuse of corpse and obstruction of justice for helping wrap and transport the body, while Donna Morelli faced similar charges for providing the vehicle.
The crypt at Mount Moriah had become exactly what killers needed: a silent, rarely visited vault where the dead could hide new secrets.
Centuries after colonial families buried their loved ones, the same ground swallowed the victims of modern evil — a haunting reminder that some graves refuse to stay quiet.