Just after lunch on January 17, 2017, Jack Wrenn, a PhD student at the time, wandered around parts of Brown University’s campus where he “shouldn’t be” with his friend who worked for the Department of Public Safety and was consequently armed with campus keys. Wrenn was drawn to a locked closet 14a in the basement of Sayles Hall, and when he opened it, he found the unexpected: the tombstone of Archie Van Griffin.

On June 14 of this year, the headstone was returned to the Brayton Cemetery in Warwick.

“I knew Brown had skeletons in their closets but tombstones, too?” Wrenn said. “I thought it was pretty cool and mysterious.”

Immediately upon discovering this artifact, Wrenn said he knew he had to do three things.

“The first was to find out how long the stone was there, the second was to find out where it rightfully belonged and the third was to find out how to get it out of there without incriminating myself,” he added with a laugh.

At Brown

Closet 14a in the basement of Sayles Hall is now part of the media services office. In order to access the closet, especially after hours, one must work through three locked doors: the front door, the door to the media services office and the closet door.

Franklin Almada said he first came across the headstone in 1991 or 1992, around the same time he became the custodian in Sayles Hall. According to Archie Van Griffin’s entry on FindAGrave, the headstone had been missing from the cemetery since at least the early nineties, so this account aligns with that timeline.

Almada called his predecessor, Antonio Alves– who worked there 4 or 5 years before Almada– to see if he recalled seeing the headstone. Alves said he never saw it, but he also could not remember if he ever went inside that closet.

Almada first opened that closet when he was searching for a safe place to store his vacuum that was “like gold.” Originally, he said, the headstone was upside down, so he did not think much of it.

“I thought it was just a piece of stone,” he said. When he flipped it to make more space for storage, he realized it was a headstone. “It was heavy,” he added.

Almada, who also worked as a custodian in the John Carter Brown Library, was used to seeing old artifacts around campus, so he thought “it was normal” to find something like that in a “historic building at Brown” like Sayles.

He said he did not tell anyone about it until the media services office moved into the space adjacent to the closet. During the pandemic, Almada showed the tombstone to Jason Cornell, Lead Audio Visual Support with media services.

“He keyed it open one day when we had a slow day,” Cornell recalled. While gesturing to a dusty area in the back of the closet, he said that “there was a tombstone, and it was actually resting precariously on a piece of infrastructure.”

“It’s a crazy thing to find in your office,” he laughed.

Cornell recalled that there was a blue post-it note on the tombstone that said “if you need to move, call” a phone number. He never called the number nor did he remember the digits. Wrenn said he put the sticky note there with his phone number so that he would be alerted if anything happened to the stone.

“We assumed that someone knew it was here and had ownership of it in some sort, so we just left it as a bit of odd decor,” Cornell explained. Cornell added that maybe some people who work in the basement of Sayles Hall– media services, facilities and maybe some event services staff– knew about the headstone.

Wrenn said when he first discovered the headstone he utilized his connections to conduct his own investigation into its history at Brown. At the time, Wrenn was the Director of the Brown Inning Club which he described as “a student and staff organization that seeks to document in part the history of students doing things they aren't supposed to do and often being places they aren’t supposed to be.” This secretive organization supports an underground archive of photographs, written and oral materials about nooks and crannies around campus.

Wrenn reached out to alumni within this network, and some of them from the mid-2000s recalled seeing a tombstone in that same closet. Wrenn believes that it could have been there “for way way longer because Sayles Hall is a very old building.”

Jennifer Betts, the University Archivist, said that there was no additional information in the archives about this headstone being housed in Sayles Hall. Rob Emlen, former Brown University Curator, said that he never came across any information about this particular gravestone.

According to Amanda McGregor, Deputy Director for News and Editorial Development, Brown DPS was notified on September 10, 2022 about the headstone. That same day, they verified that “it was in fact a real headstone and not a theater prop” and took a report. As with any lost property, DPS logged the object into evidence and conducted an investigation into how the stone ended up where it did. Sayles Hall is not only used as a performance, concert and meeting space for the university community, but it is also rented out to external groups for events. This was factored into the investigation process.

McGregor said that the “detectives were ultimately unable to determine how and when the headstone made its way to the Brown campus.”

In-Depth Research

Wrenn put the project on hold while he was working on his PhD in Programming Languages and Computer Education. It was not until the pandemic hit, and he “got stir crazy” that he decided to start researching again. He used genealogy records to try to find information that would lead him to where Van Griffin was laid to rest. His death certificate revealed Van Griffin was buried at Brayton Cemetery. At this point, Wrenn reached out to Pegee Malcolm, Chair of Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries and Warwick Historic Cemeteries Commissions.

Malcolm said that they conducted thorough research because they “didn’t want to just plant him anywhere.”

Mark Brown, a member of the Warwick Historic Cemeteries Commission, puts together biographical sketches for all of the “residents” of the cemeteries in the area, so he spearheaded the commission’s research about Van Griffin. Consulting birth and death certificates, census records, World War I draft registration information and other documents at city hall, Brown put together a profile of Van Griffin.

Van Griffin was born in 1885 in Warwick, Rhode Island. According to his draft registration card, he was a Black man with brown eyes, an average height and average build. According to census records from 1910, 1920 and 1930, Van Griffin first worked at a cotton mill and later drove a cotton truck for the Warwick Coal Company for the last 25 years of his life. He married his wife, Louise Lester “Lulu” Griffin, in 1905, and after he passed in 1935 at the age of 50, she returned to Virginia. After she passed, she was buried in Brayton Cemetery as was her daughter Louise who died before she turned one.

While they were able to piece together some biographical information, Malcolm explained that they can never be completely certain about the exact location of Van Griffin’s headstone due to the lack of cemetery records. She added that the cemetery was severely mismanaged: the owners were not following state guidelines and were improperly managing money. Afraid that they would get in legal trouble, the owners burned all of the records.

Wrenn recalled a conversation he had with an employee at the Hill Funeral Home, where Van Griffin was embalmed, when he began his research journey.

“At the mention of Brayton, the man I was speaking to took a very deep breath,” Wrenn recalled. “Grave sites had been reused and nearly all of the records were unceremoniously thrown out when the whole place shut down in the 90s. Only one box of records happened to be saved by a passerby by total chance.”

Moving the Stone

During this multi-year process, Wrenn moved around while working on his dissertation. When he returned to Providence, he was eager to be reunited with the stone. He said that Provost Richard Locke made a “friendly introduction” between him and Detective John Remka with the Department of Public Safety. At that point, Wrenn was frustrated that the project kept losing momentum because of gaps in research, so he was delighted to receive an email from Sue Cabeceiras, an employee of the Warwick Planning Department and member of the Warwick Historic Cemeteries Commission, volunteering to pick up the headstone.

On June 14, Cabeceiras pulled into the DPS parking lot in her van. Wrenn, who now lives in Wickford, made the trip to Providence for the occasion. Two employees moved the headstone from the evidence closet in the basement of the DPS building to the trunk of Cabeceiras’ car. As a member of the commission for more than 15 years, Cabeceiras said it was “no big deal” to drive to Brayton Cemetery with a tombstone in the back of her car.

“It’s in Brayton now, so we’re happy,” she added.

Enlisting the help of her “strong friends” Mike Lannigan and Levi Leland, they placed it near a presumed relative, Bertha Griffin. Currently, the headstone rests, without a base, next to Bertha’s tombstone which is covered in a film of mossy dirt and sandwiched between two trees. Brown said he is not sure if Bertha is related to Archie.

The mystery of where to put the headstone is compounded by the fact that Louise May Griffin, Archie’s daughter, is buried about 50 yards away from this shady place, right off one of the cemetery paths. Tall grass surrounds this small, white marble gravestone shaded gray by the elements. Just in front of this tombstone is a base without a headstone. The ground around it is raised a little higher than where Louise’s tombstone rests, and the soil around the base seems loose and fresh. An American flag and ceremonial crest recognizing military service sit in front of this base.

“It's possible that after an examination of it, we may decide to use it for Archie's headstone,” Brown said.

Brown added that the commission will be discuss placement of Archie’s headstone in their next meeting, and his guess is that “it will be placed next to his daughter.” Cabeceiras said that the commission is holding off on officially placing the tombstone until they can conduct more research. She does not know how long that process will take.

We May Never Know

In the absence of any substantial leads, people who know about the headstone have been quick to develop their own theories to try to make sense of the mystery.

Throughout his research, Brown could not figure out how or why the headstone ended up where it did. “That would be wonderful if I could find out,” he laughed. “We have no idea whatsoever.”

Wrenn said he has been confined to theorizing. At first, he thought it could be connected to the school tradition of the midnight organ concert in Sayles Hall in which the organ player is carried out in a fake coffin. “We have a coffin,” Wrenn said. “We have a tombstone, maybe they're connected.” When he reached out to Mark Steinbach, the current organist, he thought that Wrenn was kidding.

Cabeceiras, when developing her theories, kept coming back to “why Warwick?” There are cemeteries in Providence closer to Brown’s campus, but it was a tombstone from Brayton that was found in the closet. She thinks that maybe there was a football player or coach named Archie Griffin, and a bunch of football players stole the headstone as a prank.

“The only reason I said football is it’s got to be big strong people to pick up and move the headstone,” she laughed.

Emlen said that every once in a while, someone steals a headstone from a cemetery “to use as a coffee table or living room decoration, but they always belong with the burial of the person they were intended to memorialize.” The fact that Van Griffin lacks a direct connection to Brown University makes this situation more curious.

Malcolm said this was not the first time she received word of a discovered headstone in a place other than the cemetery. She said that during the past 10 years, she’s been called about 5 different headstones, usually by the police finding them in woods, fields or walkways.

“There's more than one, and they find them and they don’t know what to do with them,” Malcolm added “There’s no reason why they ended up in a field or something.”

As for the layers of mysteries wrapped up in this stone, Malcolm said “we may never know.”