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The Ticking Tomb

The Ticking Tomb served as inspiration for  Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story, The Tell-Tale Heart. The legend behind Vandenberg’s Ticking Tomb dates back to 1760, when famous surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were busy planning out the border between the Northern and Southern colonies. According to the legend, the men were interrupted during their meeting when a small child crawled into their tent and began to cry.

Both men were obviously alarmed to find an abandoned baby wandering around in the woods alone, so Mason quickly scooped up the crying child and began to comfort him with his pocket watch. According to the legend, the young boy opened up his mouth and swallowed the entire pocket watch whole.

When Mason and Dixon brought the young boy back to Landerberg, they discovered his name was Fithian Minuit, and he had managed to escape his parents only to wander off into the forest. That was when his parents noticed the mysterious clicking noise coming from their child’s stomach. It was the pocket watch that had continued to tick from inside Fithian’s small body.

Eventually Fithian grew up and married a woman named Martha, who once told him that the ticking sound was a perfect representation of their love for one another, and as long as the familiar sound continued to emanate from his stomach, their love would be eternal. As people do, both Martha and Fithian died, and were buried side by side in the unnamed cemetery on London Tract Road in Landernberg, Pennylvania. To this day, locals say that Fithian’s ticking watch still echoes from the ground beneath his grave. They named his final resting place The Ticking Tomb.

Of course there’s a far less dramatic explanation for The Ticking Tomb. Years ago there was a spring which ran under the cemetery, and the steady flow of the water probably accounted for the phantom ticking. It might also explain why it’s become more and more difficult to hear the ticking sound throughout the years, as the spring has gradually shifted away from the graveyard. (Source)

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