The Moving Coffins of the Chase Vault, Barbados

Oistins, on the south coast of Barbados. In the churchyard of Christ Church Parish Church stands a vault built partly underground in 1724, reportedly for the Elliot family. Around 1807 or 1808 the Chase family took it over. Its floor was sand. Its door, in Alexander's 1833 account, was "a massive stone which required six or seven men to move."

July 1807. Mrs Thomasina Goddard was laid there in a wooden coffin. In 1808 came Mary Ann Maria Chase, an infant, in lead. On 6 July 1812, Dorcas Chase followed. Popular tradition says she starved herself or killed herself because of her father's cruelty.

9 August 1812. The vault was opened to bury Colonel Thomas Chase. The lead coffins were no longer where they had been left. Alexander describes them "in a confused state, having been apparently tossed from their places."

It happened again in 1816, when the infant Samuel Brewster Ames was buried. And again about two months later, for Samuel Brewster. Each time the heavy lead coffins were disarranged. Mrs Goddard's light wooden coffin, the legend says, stayed in place.

1819. Thomasina Clarke was buried, and the vault was found disturbed once more. The governor, Stapleton Cotton, Lord Combermere, is said to have been present. The coffins were set in order. Sand was strewn across the floor. The entrance was cemented and stamped with seals. The rector, Rev. Thomas H. Orderson, sketched the coffin positions.

On 18 April 1820 the vault was opened at Lord Combermere's request, with Nathan Lucas and Orderson said to have been there. The seals and the sand were reported undisturbed. Inside, the coffins were "confusedly thrown about the vault, some with their heads down and others up." Lucas wrote that a mason struck every part of the bottom with his hammer, "and all was solid. I confess myself at a loss to account for the movements of these leaden coffins." The coffins were removed and buried separately in the churchyard, and the vault has stood empty ever since.

The most common answer is water. Barbados has rain on about half its days, and Brian Dunning of Skeptoid argues that water seeping into a porous limestone vault could float lead coffins, then drain away. Alexander, though, wrote of "no marks of footsteps or water." Dunning rejects an earthquake. Joe Nickell reads the tale as Masonic folklore, while Lang, in 1907, found a near-identical story from Ösel in the Baltic.

Others doubt it happened at all. Beyond the Lucas account, Lang found nothing in the burial register or the Barbados newspapers of the time. Benjamin Radford looked inside in 2019 and found the brickwork intact, with no damage of the kind moving lead coffins would cause. Dunning noted that what is missing is any evidence that anyone was ever placed in the vault.

Supernatural readings persist. Arthur Conan Doyle suggested animal magnetism or psychic force, possibly linked to Dorcas Chase. Another story blames an Obeah curse laid on the cruel Thomas Chase by enslaved people.

Finneran and Welch read the story as "Barbadian Gothic", a reflection of planter-class fear of Obeah and slave rebellion in a society on the edge of upheaval. Bussa's Rebellion came in 1816. The Chase Vault is still there. Visitors can see it. Empty, with the story still disputed.