While completing design work for the City of Centralia’s Westside Connector Phase I Project in July 2024, a subcontractor for the city’s design engineer may have found a grave discovery.
Crews used ground-penetrating radar technology in the grassy area between Mountain View Cemetery and North Scheuber Road and found two anomalies in the ground. Cemetery co-owner Stephen Morrison believes the two anomalies could be unmarked graves.
The city received the radar report in July 2024, while Lewis County notified the coroner regading the anomalies the following August. The cemetery was contacted in the fall.
No digging has been done, as the ground-penetrating radar uses radio waves to create images of the subsurface. Typically, the waves on the radar will be consistent if there is nothing underneath the ground, but a void or a difference in density can cause the graphs to change.
But Patty Page, Centralia city engineer, noted that the oddity of the discovery lies in the two anomalies being located right next to each other about 30 feet from the property of the 126-year-old cemetery.
“We don’t know anything that’s there. We’re just preparing in case there’s something there,” Page said. “We just did this as a preventative thing just in case there might be something outside the actual fence of the cemetery because we knew we would be digging between the roadway and the property line.”
City contractors and cemetery staff planned to dig up the ground Wednesday morning and potentially exhume the contents of the potential graves, but Page said Wednesday that the investigation has been postponed due to involvement with the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation. Tribal Chairman Dustin Klatush was contacted but did not respond before press time.
Page said it’s possible that only one of the anomalies is dug up as one is within the work area and one is not. If there are indeed graves buried outside the cemetery, Mountain View Cemetery has offered to provide two graves at no charge and to oversee the excavation and reburial. Centralia Monument would provide markers without cost for the graves with the inscription “Person known only to God,” and the cemetery would conduct a brief burial service after the reinterments in the prairie section of the property.
“They should not be there, but things were fairly wild in the old days,” Morrison said of the potential graves, adding this is the first time he and the two other owners have experienced this kind of discovery since taking over ownership in May 2024. “We don’t know anything about them. It’s a part of the past of Centralia. I wish I knew more about them, but I don’t.
“We’re fairly confident that it’s a grave.”
Page tells a different story.
“It could be nothing,” she said. “We’ve done ground-penetrating radar before thinking that we found voids or something and found nothing. It’s possible it’s just that the density of the soil is different in that location, but the fact that they’re two-and-a-half feet wide by five-feet long, it kind of leans more toward a grave.”
Page said she was told of a previous instance from 15 to 20 years ago where city engineers dug near Mountain View Cemetery and found that vaults were in the right-of-way and not in the cemetery. When the older sections of the cemetery were created, fencing did not exist, Page explained, therefore the limits of the cemetery are not completely clear.
Mountain View Cemetery, located at 1113 Caveness Dr. in Centralia, was established in 1899 and has graves dating back into the mid-19th century.
The Westside Connector Phase I project is in its first stage, which includes the construction of improvements on North Scheuber Road between Mt. Vista Road and Galvin Road to include roadway reconstructing, widening, stormwater improvements, joint-use pedestrian/bicycle walkway, Americans with Disabilities Act-compatible sidewalk ramp installation, street lighting, asphalt paving, striping and signage. Phase I also includes updating the type/size/location for the future Westside Connector bridge, right-of-way needs assessment, environmental and geotechnical evaluation for the future road and bridge over the Chehalis River that will connect North Scheuber Road near Mt. Vista Road to South Scheuber Road near the Providence Centralia Hospital.
