I found unburied coffin: Woman

A weekend phone call brought back a nearly 60-year-old memory for Brisbane woman Tina Chesterfield, who as a young girl literally stumbled over an unburied coffin, complete with skeleton, in the Greytown cemetery.

Mrs Chesterfield fielded the call from her younger sibling, Gwen Thomson, of Manaia, South Taranaki, after a Times-Age Saturday editorial on the cemetery referred to a so-called legend of an unburied coffin discovery.

The legend was able to be laid to rest and replaced with the facts: Mrs Chesterfield, as a young Tina Stuart, uncovered the coffin while horsing around in the cemetery with her younger brother, Alex, in the early 1950s.

Speaking from Brisbane yesterday, Mrs Chesterfield said she and her brother had gone to the Greytown Cemetery from their Ward's Line home with parents Richard and Alice Stuart to tend a grave.

The two kids, aged about 12 and 8, had been chasing each other through the undergrowth of a portion of the cemetery, near an old gazebo, which in those days was more or less uncared for.

The vine-covered coffin had presented young Tina with an opportunity to test her hurdling skills, but it was covered in large thorns and one lodged in her leg just above her knee.

"At first, dad tried to cut it out with his pocket knife but ended up having to take me to Dr Doug Banks' surgery, where he cut out an inch-long thorn."

The upshot of her painful jump was that it flattened the undergrowth, to reveal the wooden box which, on her father's closer inspection, was found to be a coffin.

Thanks to later investigation it was revealed that the coffin housed the remains of a 1918 flu epidemic victim, who had somehow been overlooked for burial at a time when flu deaths were mounting rapidly.

Mrs Chesterfield said she believed the remains were those of a woman. Subsequently, other unburied coffins holding flu victims' remains had been located in the old, rough part of the cemetery.

The bizarre find all those years ago still popped up at times as a family talking point.