⚰️ The Coffin Baby of Schenley Park
Genre: Abandoned child case with a haunted legacy
“I wasn’t supposed to survive.”
🕯️ Discovery in the Grove
In October of 1993, a morning jogger stumbled upon something that would freeze Pittsburgh’s blood for years. In a secluded grove of Schenley Park, beneath fog-drenched oaks and brittle leaves, lay a silver-clasped coffin locked, aged, and shockingly small.
When authorities arrived and pried it open, they expected to recover remains. Instead, they found an infant girl alive but barely. Dehydrated, cold to the touch, and wrapped in what investigators described as “ritual linens.”
🧠 Jane Doe Speaks
Now, more than thirty years later, that baby known in headlines as the Coffin Baby has stepped forward. In a rare interview, the woman (requesting to remain anonymous) shared fragmented memories: red candles, robed shadows, and a lullaby not sung by a human throat.
Most hauntingly, she recalls a mark on her foot and the woman she called mother whispering that she was “never meant to leave the earth.”
🌿 The Witch’s Garden
Rumors of ritual sites and hidden altars have long plagued Schenley Park lore. Locals call one ruined greenhouse foundation the Witch’s Garden a place where ivy grows in spirals, sigils are carved into stone, and melted wax circles lay untouched by wind.
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Police never officially linked this location to the case. But in reopened records from 1993, a field agent noted: “possible occult perimeter, recommend secondary sweep.” That sweep never happened.
📖 The Missing Midwife
One year before the coffin discovery, a local midwife named Clarissa Gael vanished. She was last seen entering Schenley Park carrying what witnesses described as “a cradle-sized trunk.” Her last diary entry, recovered from her apartment, read:
“I told them no, but the circle sang louder. I’m scared I said yes.”
The entry was stained with blood. Her disappearance remains unsolved.
🦶 The Birthmark
Hospital staff documented a strange sigil-like birthmark on the sole of the infant’s foot: a serpent coiled around a crescent moon. Despite initial photographs, the mark faded within days, dismissed as “vascular trauma” by doctors.
But Jane Doe still bears the same sigil, now visible on her temple faint, but unmistakable in shape.
🎥 The Robed Woman
Two nights before the discovery, surveillance footage from a public trail camera captured a tall, robed figure pacing at the edge of the grove. The footage grainy and inconclusive was dismissed by investigators at the time as “a prank.”
But locals still swear that the “Witch of Schenley” walks that path when the fog comes low.
🕯️ The Candle Circle
Recent explorers uncovered what appears to be a ritual site: a circle of wax, bones, and bloodied cloth. Within it pressed into the damp soil was a faint indentation shaped like a baby. No official investigation followed.
Only questions remain.
📰 Then & Now
Jane Doe returned to the grove last year, clutching the yellowed newspaper clipping that once defined her. She placed it at the base of the same twisted oak where her coffin once lay.
“They buried me twice,” she whispered. “But I remember the wax. I remember the hum. And I want answers.”
This is fiction all right. There is no Pittsburgh Gazette. No one would remember being an infant. The whole thing looks like something from the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s, when police and pundits told bogus stories of Satan cults killing babies.
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