Lightning Or Legendry?: The Chase Vault Moving Coffin Mystery Revisited

The moving coffins of Barbados have been a staple subject of books on the unexplained for over a century, and yet no one has so far provided a wholly satisfactory solution to the mystery. BENJAMIN RADFORD argues that we might have been looking in the wrong place...

- Benjamin Radford

The story of the restless coffins in a Barbadian burial vault (see FT133:40-44, 347:26) was one of the two earliest “unexplained mysteries” that caught my attention as a teenager (the other being the 1855 Devil’s Footprints case in England). I forget exactly where I read it – probably a Reader’s Digest book of mysteries or another of its ilk, which I voraciously consumed at the time – but I distinctly recall poring over the story and getting chills imagining what a ghost or curse would do to me if I crossed it. I took comfort in the fact that Barbados was far, far away, separated from me by at least one sea, and whatever evil possessed the coffins was unlikely to pursue me.

As the years passed the story faded, replaced by newer and more exciting reports of alien abductions, chupacabras, crop circles, and other fortean high weirdness. It was a stale, stuffy sort of distant mystery locked in time – the early 1800s – though superficially and inevitably rehashed in later books on the unexplained. Despite a handful of articles on the story, there was nothing new and little if any follow-up. The coffins were long gone, and nothing notable had apparently happened since. I never bothered to look into the mystery, partly because the West Indies remained just as far away, and partly because there seemed little to profitably investigate at this remove.

Nevertheless, I’ve since become much more familiar with folklore and visited the ChaseVault twice over the past few years, rather improbably discovering fresh angles on the stale old tale. I’d always assumed that the musty mystery, calcifying for two centuries in the sweltering Caribbean sun, would always remain unsolved. I no longer believe that to be the case.

THE CHASE VAULT STORY