A Temple of Graves. I'm Rebecca Leib. I'm Jason Horton, and this is Ghost Town. In the 1950s, Temple University and the city of Philadelphia

disinterred an entire cemetery to expand temples campus and dumped 28,000

headstones into the Delaware River.

Wow, wow, it's horrifying.

I was just in Philadelphia for the week, and my little bit of an adopted city for me.

I spent a lot of time there.

I just had Philly on the brain.

You have Philly on the brain.

I love that. I love when you're there and you find a story, a case, you know, a piece of information and you're like, I'm here, I'm learning about this in this place. We don't often get that luxury and that's a really exciting thing.

And Philly's wild.

Mm. My brother told me he was had to stop and work so just like walking around he's like,

watch out if you lean up under any poles they could

spray animal fat on the poles because people climb up them if the Phillies win or lose.

You never know what's going to happen. So just kind of watch out for that.

Wow. Wow, that's amazing. I've got to go visit. It's a wild city and this is sort of a wild story and we talked about when I was in

San Diego and I went to Old Town and the way they kind of just paved over.

Yeah, we don't have a lot of respect for the dead.

Even we did an episode two on an elegian park and that was also an old Jewish graveyard too.

It's a lot of turnover in these different places just based on space and development and it can lead to a lot of problems.

In the 1950s it was a time of rapid growth in progress and also bore witness to a forgotten chapter in the history of Temple University. of An entire cemetery was disinterred and echoes of this event still resonate today.

The cemetery, once a sanctuary for the departed, became a focal point of controversy.

Monument Cemetery in Philadelphia and its grounds held the memories and stories of generations going back to

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