On a cold, gray morning in 1922, a railroad worker stumbled upon the gruesome discovery of a dead body in a boxcar, which became the subject of not one but two of Richmond’s strangest mysteries.
The body, discovered on the morning of Feb. 22, was found hanging from a rope, an apparent suicide, inside a railroad car at Clopton Yard in South Richmond. The male body had no identification on him, and he was estimated to have been hanging there for a week before he was found.
Even more peculiar, the body seemed to be unusually well-preserved, despite not having been embalmed, raising two questions that, 102 years later, remain unanswered: Who was he, and how did he become, in essence, mummified?…