--- title: "They Did Dig Something Up. It Cannot Have Been Him." dek: "The whole story is one sentence, in one private letter, from a man who was not there to a man who was not there. The graves at Fort Sill were unmarked until the thirties." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Shadow Governance author: Marcus Oyelaran and Nadia Ferreira-Ost (fictional) published: 2026-08-10T00:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/tomb-unmarked-graves tags: Yale, senior societies, Fort Sill, provenance, repatriation genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # They Did Dig Something Up. It Cannot Have Been Him. *The whole story is one sentence, in one private letter, from a man who was not there to a man who was not there. The graves at Fort Sill were unmarked until the thirties.* Start with the ground, not the building. Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill in 1909 and was buried in the prisoner-of-war cemetery there. Our correspondent asked the post's history office a simple question: in 1918, standing in that cemetery, could you tell which grave was his? The answer was one word. No. > **Figure:** Everything that is documented, in the order it is documented — see https://theyburied.com/article/tomb-unmarked-graves ## The graves had nothing on them The prisoner graves on that ground were not individually identified in any way a visitor could read. The stone that marks his grave now — the pyramid of field stones that people photograph — was built later, in the years after, when the post set out to fix exactly that. Ignatius Sowande-Petrova of the post history office made the point without any drama in it. People were buried, the ground was recorded in a register held in an office, and the ground itself said nothing. A party of officers with shovels and a night to themselves could have dug in that cemetery in 1918. What they could not have done is know whose grave they were in. ## The letter Everything else in this story is one sentence in one private letter, written on 7 June 1918 by one member of the society to another. It reports that the skull, "exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club," is now safe inside the building on High Street, along with some other bones and a bit and a saddle horn. It is a real letter. A historian found it in 2005 in a university library, in an open collection, on a shelf reachable by anybody with a reader's card. Our correspondent requested it and it came out in eleven minutes. > It is genuine correspondence about a genuine belief. That is not the same as a genuine skull. > > — Prof. Delphine Ackerman-Oyibo ## Who was in the room Neither of them. The man who wrote it was not at Fort Sill. The man he wrote it to was not at Fort Sill. It is a letter between two people in Connecticut about something they had been told that friends of theirs had done in Oklahoma. Professor Delphine Ackerman-Oyibo, who studies these societies and belongs to none of them, has read it and thinks it is exactly what it appears to be: a young man delightedly repeating a story he believes. That belief may well have been sincere. It may even have been founded on somebody really having dug somewhere. Neither of those makes the skull his. ## 1986 In the eighties a member wrote, in correspondence about whether the society ought to hand the thing back, that the skull in the building is a child's. The society did not hand anything back. It has never said what it holds, and it did not say so to us: we put written questions three times across four months, to the alumni association and to the university, and received no reply of any kind. Our questions are printed at the foot of this story so you can see they were reasonable ones. ## The lawsuit Twenty descendants sued in 2009 for the return of the remains, from the society, the university, and the federal government. It was dismissed in 2010, and this newspaper wants to be exact about how, because both sides have described the dismissal as a finding and it was not one. The judge did not decide whether there is a skull, or whose it is. He decided that the statute the plaintiffs relied on applies to items excavated or discovered after 1990, and that the federal government had not waived its immunity from being sued in the way the claim required. That is a ruling about who may be sued under which act. It leaves the question exactly where it was, and it left the families exactly where they were, which is the part of this story with a person in it. ## What provenance actually asks This newspaper's document desk applies three questions to everything that comes through the door. Who says so. Were they there. Could what they describe have happened where they say it did. The letter answers the first and fails the second. The burial register in Oklahoma answers the third, and the answer is no. That is not a debunking and this newspaper is not claiming one. Something may be in that building. Somebody may have dug in that cemetery. But the specific claim — that the man in the Tomb is the man from Fort Sill — requires a party of amateurs on a night in 1918 to have identified a grave that the United States Army could not identify for another decade. ## Sources (invented) - The 1918 letter, Private correspondence held in a university library collection — Read in the reading room; photographed with permission; the catalogue entry is published with this story (January 2026) - Ignatius Sowande-Petrova, Post history office, Fort Sill — Interviewed by telephone twice; supplied the cemetery's burial and marking records (February 2026) - Prof. Delphine Ackerman-Oyibo, Historian of American secret societies; has no connection to this one — Interviewed in person (March 2026) - The 2009 complaint and the 2010 dismissal, Court record — Read in full, both (2026) - The society, Approached through its alumni association and through the university — Written questions, three times, over four months (January–May 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2071: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2071 ## What we could not confirm - Whether there is a skull in the building. Nobody outside the society has seen the inside of it and nothing in the public record establishes what is or is not in there. - Whether anybody dug anything at Fort Sill in 1918. The only evidence is the letter, and its writer says what he was told, not what he saw. - Whose remains, if any. This is the part that matters to the families who sued, and it is the part on which there is no evidence at all in either direction. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.