We're thrilled to be expanding the Little Prairie Community Orchard by planting 22 more fruit trees on March 25th from 9:30am to 12:30pm with our wonderful partners at the Giving Grove. This is a family friendly event that will be educational and fun for all.
In just a few years, the fruit from these trees will be able to be harvested by anyone within the community.
Volunteers should dress for the weather (only really bad weather is likely to postpone this event), bring garden gloves if they have them, and may wish to bring a water bottle. If they have a shovel and want to bring it that’s great, or we / the Giving Grove will have extras. If the actual planting of fruit trees is done before 12:30 PM, volunteers may be asked to help with other orchard or garden maintenance tasks.
Little Prairie Community Garden is located just north of the intersection of Peterson Road and Nigel Drive, behind a small playground. Using Google Maps, you can search for Little Prairie Community Garden Lawrence KS and it should direct you there. Or, if you put 515 Nigel Drive Lawrence into your phone, the garden is across the street from this house.

Disclaimer: First time posting anything on Reddit, apologies in advance for any offence caused - if anything needs editing, I will do so.

SPOILERS FOR THE WHEEL OF TIME SERIES

What if ASOIAF draws inspiration from The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, and the timeline is actually circular instead of linear?
In an oversimplified nutshell, the world of the Wheel of Time goes cyclically through 7 ages lasting thousands of years, each a spoke on a wheel which keeps turning. Souls are reincarnated through the ages, there are events that are destined to happen and themes specific to each age and it's possible to make things better or worse by how the people of the age react to disasters. Millions or thousands of people survive depending on how they are prepared for. The series is awesome and will fill a hole in your heart while waiting for TWOW if you haven't read it yet.
A shred of proof for this theory:
​

"Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again, he said." (The Kraken's Daughter, AFFC)

​
I read ASOIAF before WoT (and am now rereading ASOIAF while also reading copious amounts of theories and analyses on Reddit). Connecting the dots this time has proved very interesting as have the instances of history repeating itself e.g. a woman connected to royalty having three bastard children and getting away with it for a long time, a "Young Dragon" and a "Young Wolf" having huge military success and then dying after being betrayed.
Both epic sagas make pains to point out that time and distance warp reality. ASOIAF has the Maesters of Oldtown, multiple faiths and many powerful families also rewriting history to their advantage.
Accepting that time is circular (or is just screwy because magic), and history gets altered over time and tellings, let's take a look at Garth Greenhand and his fabled children, how history might remember them and who they might be reincarnated as / inspiration for / simply historical patterns repeating. You will now have to put your tin foil hat on tight and embrace some madness.
​

• Garth Greenhand = Bran Stark: A god-like figure who is also a greenseer works for both of them, particularly if you ascribe to any of the Fisher King/Must Always Be A Stark In Winterfell theories for Bran. Garth is famous for living thousands of years and planting physical seeds. Bran could end up visiting the past multiple times spanning thousands of years, planting "seeds" to point humankind to their saving. The fact that Garth is known for walking and Bran can't walk at all is delicious irony. At a stretch, Garth kind of sounds like is could be moulded into Stark over time.
• Bran of the Bloody Blade = Brandon Stark (Ned's brother): BotBB is known for being very violent, spilling so much blood he turned a blue lake red. Brandon Stark started a war for his sister. Maybe the Sothron Conspiracy and Tourney of Harrenhaal stack up, and he was a key player strategising for war long before it started adding to the weight of this.
• Bran the Builder = Jon Snow: In some tales, Bran the Builder is a grandchild of Garth Greenhand, the son of BotBB. Interesting that the text points this out. Could be that Jon Snow is remembered as Brandon Stark's son (doesn't matter if it's true in this context, only that Jon is part Stark). Both Bran the Builder and Jon Snow are involved with the Wall, giants and the Gift. More delicious irony in Jon Snow being remembered only for Wall-related activity, despite playing a massive role in the Song.
• John the Oak = Brienne of Tarth: Gender-swapping here, not surprising because of the height. Both notably tall and chivalrous. Involves Brienne at some adopting an oak sigil and maybe starting a new order of knights.
• Bors the Breaker = Gendry: Both associated with bulls and great strength. "Bor" sounds like Baratheon and Gendry is a contender to end up acknowledged as a Baratheon. Bors is associated with blood too, and maybe Gendry ends up in some kind of blood sacrifice because of his king's blood.
• Florys the Fox = Margarey Tyrell: Both married three times, both known for being clever. Florys is actually the cleverest of Garth's children, and the Tyrells are certainly coming up top for now. Florence means "blossoming, flourishing" or to put it another way, "growing strong".
• Harlon the Hunter and Herndon of the Horn (twins) = Samwell Tarly. All from House Tarly. Sam is remembered as Sam the Slayer (the Hunter side) and Sam the Something to Do With Uncovering Information About Horns (the Horn side).

Going to write a Part 2 tomorrow. Would love to have more ideas on Garth and his brood. I'll address the rest in part 2:

• Foss the Archer
• Meris the Maid
• Owen Oakenshield
• Rose of the Red Lake
• Ellyn Ever Sweet
• Rowan Gold-Tree

Brother Proof has returned to his duties! More below.
​
Maxwell,
The Road, Dwarven Kingdom of Hasandri.
14th of Anael, First month of Snow.
2290 years since the New Gods came.
Bri asked me about the family finances today... Finances...Money... I told her it wouldn't be a problem. She told me that I snore (I do NOT snore. The hell you don't!) and that if I didn't want her to make an issue of it, I needed to come clean. I came clean this evening. I showed her some of the contents of the trunk. There will be a peaceful tent tonight.
Brianna,
14th of Anael,
I had a “wonderful” chat with Maxie today during our lunch break about the family finances. I explained about my dowry, and how it was meant to set up a proper household (and that I didn't expect to use it for another fifty or so years), but also that I was concerned about how we were going to pay our expenses on this holiday trip. He looked at me like a mouse caught stealing the cheese, and said “Don't worry about it. We are good on that.”
I felt that I needed to press my case, as I have been properly taught to manage a household, and he hasn't. Brandy and the god Bjorn (may he live forever) both told me in confidence that Maxie is a bit of a spendthrift at times. He is apparently an excellent businessman, but when between businesses he spends money like water over the waterfall.
I pressed my case, and pointed out the occasional wasteful bits of spending here and there, and he laughed! I NEVER! He did eventually apologize, but still. I then threatened to publicly mock his snoring. He eventually caved and promised to lay it all out for me in the evening.
He showed me his battered trunk this evening. I am...dumbstruck. It is an ancient chest of holding. For a simple box that is 2' x 2' x 3' in size, it holds a rooms worth of goods. Mostly tools of his various trades; but also enough magical weapons and armor to outfit a platoon; potions of healing and mana recovery; gold enough to buy a royal palace; and an untold number of jewels and jewelry. Then there was the collection of more than a dozen items pilfered from the temples of various current and previous gods. I liked the little miniature statues of people in the strange, and brightly colored, clothing; they were painted in such a lifelike way.
I believe we are more than “good” on the financial side of things. Did I mention the racks of clothing? They are worth more than a kings ransom. Maxie made them ALL himself. I don't think we will need to hire a seamstress once we settle down.
Maxwell
18th of Anael,
Bri shot a stag today. Good clean heart shot. Good food tonight. Snow is getting thick. We have made it out of the mountains proper. Our speed should increase to around forty miles in a day tomorrow. Should only take us seven days to make the next trade city, Littledate.
Maxwell,
22nd of Anael,
Bandits. Idiots. At least some had the sense to run. Bri got two with her bow from worg-back, Then slaughtered several more with her curved saber. I will need to remember not to get into a real fight with her. I would win, eventually, but at what cost? English got one with a ball of flame, then cast several defensive spells on the rest of our group. I don't know how many Magni got, but he had a fair amount of loot when he got back, and some horses. Nomvula was covered in blood and smiling about “Putting it to the English”.
When you're hungry horse is good eating.
Brianna,
22nd of Anael,
I agree with Maxie, I dislike bandits.
- - -
The bandits had blocked the road with a pair of large trees, and stood behind the barrier with crossbows displayed in a threatening manner. They balked slightly when the travelers they had sighted came up slowly on worgs, but they had faced a few smaller packs (what they thought were packs) and come out on top. Two shouldered their crossbows as their leader started to talk.
“If you value your liv---” The leader's throat sprouted an arrow, and Bri loaded another arrow and fired. One of the prepared bowmen went down. The second bowman caught a ball of fire to the chest and fell, smoke billowing from the hole.
“Charge!” Bri yelled, digging her heels into her worg, and the combat commenced in earnest. Chester 'The English' Grants started chanting shielding spells, and directing their placement on his comrades, Nomvula jumped from her mount, rolled forward under a downed tree, and ran a bandit through with her spear, laughing all the way. Magni cartwheeled around the side of the blockade and threw a dagger into the eye of his nearest opponent.
Some of the surprised bandits tried to route, dropping their gear and fleeing into the forest. Most stood and fought, and died for their trouble. Bri entered into the melee, swinging her saber down and across, cutting the bandits from above as her mount jumped from place to place savaging all around with it's teeth. One of the bandits made a solid strike with his spear into her side. The spear broke on the magical shield Chester had cast. Brianna removed the shocked bandits head.
Nomvula brought her shield to the front, and stood taunting the bandits, “What's wrong English? Scared of a little girl?”
A bandit brought a large sword down at her, and she blocked it with her shield, then ran him through with her spear. She cackled, “Who's next?” She pointed at a random bandit with her spear, “You?” She lunged at the bandit next to the one she had pointed at, and planted the spear in his guts, then she twisted it before pulling it out. “Next?”
Magni ducked, rolled, and cartwheeled his way through the bandits as they tried to flee the field of battle. Using a long bladed carving knife in each hand he targeted ankles, wrists, and more than once the inner thigh of the bandits. He occasionally giggled to himself as a form of battle madness settled over him. At one point he misjudged a strike and a knife got stuck in bone, so he grabbed a blade from a fallen bandit. A knife that oozed green fluid along the blade. When he had finished off the fleeing men, he stopped for a while to calm down, and then searched the bandits and their makeshift camp.
- - -
Maxwell,
24th of Anael,
Around midday tomorrow we should reach Littledate. The lowlands are still green in spots, but mostly brown. At least the cold isn't too bad as of yet.
Brianna,
25th of Anael,
The town guard balked at the worgs being allowed into the city. I had words with them, just as mother taught. We got in. Shopping for a group this small is relatively easy, as compared to the lords household I was placed in charge of in my thirties. We now have proper equipment for the snow; provisions for three weeks, including food for the worgs; proper updated maps; and other sundries, such as a “wand of cleanse”. Men. How do they survive their own smell?
Maxwell,
26th of Anael,
Brianna is a wonder, and terror, when she shops. I would hazard that ninety percent of what she purchased, she got at less than retail. We left the comparative safety of the city at dawn. Another forty miles under foot. About 2540 miles to Demonia; 63 days. I hope they can hold out that long. I feel myself being dragged that direction, and I don't like that. Feels too much like being a “Hero”.
I need to figure out how to go faster. Faster...
Maxwell,
28th of Anael,
Chester and I have been talking for the last couple days about the theory of magic, as it pertains to making us travel faster. This evening he told me that he found a spell in one of my tomes that might help. He said he will need a few days to learn and practice the spell. I have no choice but to trust him as my magic revolves around the forge, enchanting, and the woods.
Brianna,
28th of Anael,
Maxie is afraid. He worries at night, and doesn't sleep enough. When he does sleep, he has nightmares. He refuses to talk about it, except in the most vague terms. Something about people burning and screaming his name.
Brianna,
29th of Anael, Morning,
Maxie has disappeared. He was in the tent with me last night. This morning everyone was awakened by him screaming. I tore down the sheet we hang between our cots, and he was gone. Brandywine is...very angry about this development, and is yelling at the one-eyed cat; it's not like the poor creature can understand what she's say--- Oh. Oh my.
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Original - First - Previous - Next
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With the weather showing a bit more sun, my mental health is improving! Sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy. I hope y'all are enjoying the perspective of Brianna. I am trying to make her seem/write like a Victorian era noble woman. Am I hitting that mark? What do i need to improve?
The raffle is going well. I have the new computer lined up. A Dell XPS desktop (please don't diss me too badly in the comments; they were the only ones that would give me the customization (and payments) I require). I finished this chapter off last night, and the next chapter is almost half done today! Maybe I will actually get a backlog going?!? (Probably not, my ADHD makes me kinda 'lazy' without a deadline looming over my shoulder.)
A special "Thank you" to all my donors! Without you I would probably given this project up. And I promise (really I do!) there will be new items in the store this week.
Anywho, time to shake the donation box.
Shakes donation box:
Ko-Fi https://ko-fi.com/vastlisten1457
Patreon https://www.patreon.com/VastListen1457

Hey Mods, hope this okay but if not please let me know how to fix and I will repost.
First off all I flew from Toronto Canada to Zermatt Friday March 17th. Getting to Zermatt with skis is a pain and while easily doable I suggest renting if its in your budget. We had three pairs of skis in one Rossignol bag. They where 88, 93 and 96 under foot. This made for a very heavy bag and we needed to take two train transfers and moving our luggage and skis was brutal but again doable if you are on a budget. Just make sure you have a team (I had my wife and kiddo and my friend and his wife and their 2 kiddos). Our fiends had two more ski bags and luggage. All trains are equipped to transport your stuff but look for the train with the "bike" symbol.
Once you get to Zermatt its absolutely incredible, the town, the vide etc....make sure you have your reservation for dining booked for the first night or else you will be eating Pizza by the train station like we did. Even though the service there was one of the worst I have seen the pizza was incredible.
Skiing in Zermatt is just awesome. Yes the snow kind of sucks compare to NA but the scenery, the food and apres more than make up for it. The cost though is insane so we ate breakfast at the hotel and then ate a beautiful meal at lunch of dinner and then ate some baguettes and ham/cheese, olives, pates etc....with wine in the evenings.
Apres is a must you cannot skip this. Its not about being shitfaced as we are in our 40s with kids. Our kids are 15, 16, 17. Might seem like we are bad parents no one gives a shit about drinking age in Switzerland and our kids were drinking (lightly) in our presence and no one said a thing. My 15 year old loved the Lemoncello and the atmosphere.
Restaurants. OMG where do I start. We ate at Chez Vrony x 2, Zum See, Restaurant Batten and Osteria Bella Italia. All superb. All 5 stars in our opinion. None of them cheap. Chez Vrony was the top of all of these IMO. The only place that sucked (big time) was Hornex which was on our hotel the Alpen. I should mention the Alpen Hotel was absolutely perfect but the restaurant was not. I won't mention the pizza place as the service is so bad its laughable but the pizza was in fact terrific but it was like we were bothering them by coming in. LOL
I think that is it for now. I will edit as I think of other things I maybe have forgotten. I would like to thank the group for giving us so much advice.
Also forgive the spelling and grammar. I am on the Irish whiskey from duty free to relax while I think of my amazing family trip!!!!

I resent everyone in my life, and hate my life.
Title pretty much says it all. From no fault of their own it's how I feel.
My wife, my friends, my family, anyone with aspirations, kicking goals, happiness etc. Makes me pissed off or mad.
I'm in a rut and have been for the last 3 years.
I was in an awesome job for 12 years and due to a medical illness I was fired at 32 years old (35 now), I was given a pension for the rest of my life. Some may say thats great, but I can't work again or I lose it.
So I'm stuck.
My condition prevents me from driving. I drove once 3 years ago and had a car crash at 80km an hour with my kids in the car hitting a tree and nearly killed us all. This is why I can't drive anymore.
I have an awesome wife who is succeeding immensely in her job and university, which makes me feel like more of a failure because I'm achieving nothing in her shadow. My kids are straight a students and I'm in their shadow as well.
Everyone tells me to find a hobby etc etc, that does nothing in regards to finding purpose. Purpose is what drives the human experience. A hobby isn't purpose. It's what we do outside of our purpose.
I'm just stuck and need a vent. Any advice will help. If anyone has been in a shitty spot like this how did you get out of how did you unstick yourself.
Honestly feel I'll just be here til I die. At 35 it's a long way to go til that happens

From the Diary of Catherine Price, written on November 20th, 1887:
"Dearest Diary,
Today began like any other day since my arrival in this frostbitten place they call New London. I awoke before the dawn, shivering beneath my meagre blankets, and hastily prepared myself for another day at the sawmill. My hands, once delicate and smooth, are now chapped and rough from the toil I must endure to survive in this harsh environment. The sound of the whirring saws and the acrid smell of sawdust seem to have permeated my very soul.
The icy wind nipped at my exposed skin as I made my way to the sawmill, but I felt a strange warmth within me. It was the flame of hope that Major Wilkins had ignited with his impassioned speeches about the Brotherhood of the New Order. Oh, how I wish to be part of this brave new world he envisions, where even women might have a place outside the home.
At the sawmill, I joined the other labourers, our breaths visible in the frigid air. We exchanged weary smiles and words of encouragement before we began our day's work to transform the frozen trees of the Crater into refined lumber, which will be vital for further construction. The men and women of New London must work together to overcome the desolation that surrounds us and I feel an immense sense of pride to be contributing to our survival.
The work was gruelling, as ever. The once relentless rhythm of the saws now served as a reminder of our shared purpose. I worked alongside Mary, a newcomer to the city hearkening from poor Winterhome. She confided in me her fears for her daughter, traumatized by the catastrophe and now dependent upon the kindness of strangers for their care. Her eyes welled with tears, and I could not help but share her sorrow, for the fate of my own family is a mystery to me.
As we worked, I noticed a young man across the mill, a member of the City Watch. He seemed to be observing our labour with a mixture of curiosity and admiration. I must admit, Diary, that I felt a flutter in my chest at the thought of being noticed by such a dashing figure. Perhaps, in this time of darkness, there is room for love to blossom.
The day's work finally came to an end, and as I trudged back to my lodgings, I could not help but marvel at the resilience of the people of New London. Despite the hunger gnawing at our bellies and the cold that numbs our limbs, we press on, united by a dream of a better future.
The evening air was filled with the clamour of voices from The Pipe & Hole, where the followers of Major Wilkins had gathered to discuss his ideas. I longed to join them, to be part of this movement that promises to shape the very future of our society. But, alas, I am nervous that they will not recognize that my place is to be among them. It is my prayer that, in the New Order they speak of, I might find a voice and a purpose beyond what has ever been offered me. Tomorrow, if God still harbors some small mercy for my sake, I will find that young guard and request his company at the nightly meetings of the Brotherhood.
I must retire now, Diary, for another arduous day awaits me. But I write these words with the belief that, someday, the pages of this humble journal may bear witness to the birth of a world in which the sun rises on a New London, built upon the foundations of our determination and sacrifice."

A while ago I posted here wondering how I could find my father’s biological parents from a 3rd cousin match on Ancestry. I took the advice and found the common ancestor, which I have now concluded would be my father’s second great-grandfather. I understand now I have to go through all of this man’s great-grandchildren to locate the parent of my father.
Only these people are still living, so they aren’t linked in any trees, publicly. I can’t find any names. No other matches or family members of this match will respond, or just aren’t active.
Do you have any advice for methods that would be helpful in finding them? I know I could try going through obituaries, but it’s quite complex.

Hello everyone! Warm greetings from across the pond.
I hate to flood this subreddit with yet another "visiting Wales" post, but I'm trying to get some advice on a potential vacation I'm planning. I appreciate any thoughts or suggestions you all are willing to give!
Without boring you all to tears, my father and I recently finished a project where we mapped out our family tree, and ended up finding our first ancestor who immigrated to the US (spoiler alert, he was Welsh!) It was a pretty fun project in that we ended up connecting with some long lost cousins that my Dad hadn't seen since he was 2 years old. Said cousins were able to fill in some of the gaps in the family tree.
Family history aside, once we learned of this ancestor (we ended up finding the immigration records stating where he was from, wife and kids names lined up with what we had, etc) we decided that it'd be cool to see where we came from in a sense. Neither of us have visited Europe before, but would love to get as much of a "quintessential" experience of Wales as we could.
I'm thinking of doing a week long vacation sometime in the summer, as I've seen some of you comment about the seasons and weather. (We live in North Carolina, rain doesn't bother me but I don't think it rains here nearly as much as there!) I'm looking at several locations now and trying to iron out where all to stay and go, but wanted to go ahead and ask a few questions:
-How easy would it be to attend a football game - and how far in advance should I try and get tickets? How long does the season last and, forgive the stupid question, but does the national team have any specific rivals? Any do's and don'ts for fans that I should be aware of?
-Cuisine - I'm a bit of a foodie and love trying new things; google searches don't reveal a whole lot about welsh dishes. Any meals in particular I should go for? Any specific beer or spirit recommendations?
-Best beach? I'm a bit of a wave addict, but a peaceful bay with great views is also hugely enjoyable.
-Any golf course recommendations?
-Lastly - while I have no problem seeing larger cities and visiting tourist traps, are there any smaller, quietemore rural villages that you recommend? Generally speaking, some of my favorite vacations have been when I could get away from the hustle and bustle and see "the countryside."
Sorry for the long post, and again, thank you for your time and advice!

Day 1: Casablanca-Meknes-Volubilis-Fes
You will be met on arrival at Casablanca airport or at your hotel and then driven the short distance to Casablanca, Morocco's largest city and the modern, economic capital. here you'll be welcome to enter the impressive Hassan II Mosque, one of the largest in the world and one of only two in the country that allow access to non-Muslims. In the afternoon, you will travel west towards Fes, stopping off at Meknes and Volubilis. Meknes, surrounded by vineyards and rich arable land, is an important, historic, Imperial city of the Sultan Moulay Ismail of the 17th and 18th centuries. Here you can see the mausoleum of Moulay Ismail himself, the Bab Mansour gate with its beautiful zellij mosaics and marble pillars, and the Sahrij Soanni Bassin, a huge reservoir that supplies the city and the Imperial gardens. Next, are the nearby Roman ruins of Volubilis dating from the first century BC and you'll be able to walk through the Triumphal Arch and see many beautifully preserves mosaic floors depicting scenes from the Roman myths. Then onward to Fes, through fertile valleys in the foothills between the Rif and Atlas Mountain ranges. arriving in the early evening to check into your traditional riad in the heart of the ancient, medieval medina where you will stay in B&B overnight.
Day 2: Investigating Fantasic Fes
After a traditional breakfast in your riad, it will be time to explore the cultural capital of Morocco, the ancient medina (old city) of Fes, passing though its narrow, winding alleyways among the hustle and bustle, donkeys and horses, the exotic sights and smells of a working, medieval city; the largest urbanized pedestrian area in the world. Here you can see the delicious fresh fruit piled high, mountains of aromatic spices and intricate. You will visit the famous traditional tanneries and to the Al Qaraouine university which is the oldest in the world. In the afternoon, after a satisfying lunch in an authentic Moroccan restaurant in the heart of the medina, Your journey will continue with a visit of the Jewish quarter, the King's Palace, ceramic factory and the Merenid Tombs, perched on a hillside overlooking the medina and providing a breathtaking panoramic view of the old city. Then you will return to your riad home for the night.
Day 3: Fes - Middle Atlas Mountains - Sahara Desert
Following breakfast, it's off to Ifrane, a charming Alpine-styled, chalet filled town, nestling prettily in the mountains and known as the " Switzerland of Morocco", Catching tantalising glimpses of both the Middle and High Atlas mountains as you yourselves ascend into them, you'll next stop at Azrou, "The Rock" in the local Berber language, a lovely village in the heart of the magnificent cedar forests, the most extensive in the country. Here live the Barbary Apes, actually a type of macaque monkey, who may steal your lunch. As you get nearer to Merzouga, your destination for the night, you will see a gradual change in the landscape as the desert begins to creep in. On we go, through the mountain pass of Tizi Ntalghamt to Midelt and then through the verdant Ziz valley, carved by a river through volcanic rock. There will be plenty of stops for photo opportunities along the route. Passing through quaint Berber mountain villages and then the larger settlements of Erfoud and Rissani you will come to the village of Merzouga during the evening to spend the night in a Kasbah/hotel where dinner and breakfast are provided as well as delicious, hot, sweet, mint tea on your arrival. Very refreshing.
Day 4: A Camel Trek and a Night Camping in the Sahara
First, a sumptuous breakfast and then a chance to visit the village of Khamlia and interact with the Gnawa, the local people who are descended from slaves brought to Morocco from the Sudan. They have a unique lifestyle and they will play their delightful, traditional music for you. Later you'll get the chance to explore Rissani, the original home of the Alaouites who created a dynasty and are still the ruling royal family in Morocco to this day. Rissani is a walled town, or ksar, with numerous high towers and has a large open nomad market. Then you will be driven back to Merzouga, where your camel awaits! An experienced professional guide will take you on an unforgettable ninety minute camel trek through the shifting desert sands and ergs (dunes). After you arrive at your desert camp you will have the opportunity to watch a spectacular sunset over the glittering desert dunes. It's the wonder of camping in the desert tonight, where the stars are so numerous and so bright that you really feel that you could just reach out and touch them. Dinner and overnight in a berber camp.
Day 5: The Gorgeous Gorges of Todra - Ouarzazate
An early start, as you are awoken to experience the splendour of the sun rising over the sand dunes, then you will ride your camel gently back to a hotel for breakfast, during which ride, you cannot fail to notice the shifting and changing of the shadows cast by the dunes, lengthening and shrinking as the day progresses. After breakfast, the journey to Ouarzazate begins with a drive through the 300 metre deep canyon of the Todgha Gorges cut through the easternmost tip of theHigh Atlas Mountains where you can enjoy some hiking around the pretty village of Tinghir. The Tinghir and Todgha gorges are the highest and narrowest in Morocco and, some would say, the most beautiful. The next stop is "Rose City" the Berber town of Kelaat Mgouna, where every year, usually in mid-May (though the times may vary), at rose harvest time, there is a celebration of the Festival of Roses. This provides an opportunity for the local growers to meet up ans sell their wares, most notably rose water which will leave your clothes, body and bed linen smelling sweetly long after it is applied. After this you will travel on to the fertile oasis of Skoura, surrounded by huge groves of palm trees with stunning views of the mighty Atlas mountains. Finally, you'll finish your day with an evening arrival in Ouarzazate where you will enjoy your dinner and stay overnight in an hotel.
Day 6: Rose City - Kasbahs - Marvelous Marrakech
After a hearty breakfast explore the film sets and studios of Ouarzazate, "Africa's Hollywood" whose astonishing scenery and topography have lured some of the world's leading film-makers and directors to make use of the landscape. These are the most famous and largest film studios in all of the African continent. You may visit the studio museum where you can see props and other items of interest from films such as "Gladiator", "The Mummy" and "Indiana Jones" as well as parts of the popular TV series "Game of Thrones". Afterwards, you will visit Ait Ben Haddou Kasbah, the biggest in Morocco. Take a stroll to explore the traditional Moroccan architecture that composes the kasbah, home to the Glaoui people, descendants of one of the last great Berber chieftains, Et Hami El Glaoui who ruled in the 18th century. This central region of the country is vibrant and exciting and surely one of the most romantic areas of Morocco, huddled between fertile, green river valleys with their extensive palmeries and burnished red mud-brick houses, roasting under the blazing Moroccan sun in dazzling colours beneath an azure sky. Then it's time to continue on your journey, through the astounding Tizi n'tichka Pass, over two and a half kilometres above sea-level, along twisting, turning mountain roads dotted with picturesque Berber villages until you reach Marrakech. The tour ends when you are safely deposited at your hotel or riad.

I 24f asked my fiancé 32m to consider therapy. We've been together for 4 years. Usually, we have a great relationship! But, the main thing I've noticed with him over the years, is how he says he will do something and doesn't take action, causing me to become a "nagger" in my opinion. A couple examples. We have my (10f) stepdaughter most holidays. She's a great girl! My fiance was big on presents before I came along, so she's always been materialistic, which is fine by me, seeing as I love gift giving too, I had saved up throughout the year to buy the kids presents, and started buying towards the end of the year, the year before, I had brought her some gifts, seeing as my fiance couldn't afford it at the time, but she didn't end up spending Christmas with us that year, my fiance said she could open them the next year and he "put them away". Now fiancé is making better money, but I still offered to get her present along with our other two children's, I asked him what she would like, but he insisted, even got mad that I kept offering to get her gifts throughout December, and assured me he would get her some, I reminded him weekly and he told me not to worry. Christmas day rolls around, you can guess what happened? I had taken all our younger children's presents to my parents and had hoped he had just hidden them away, but come Christmas morning, there was nothing for her. All of us, his family, the kids were under the tree, and they were looking to me for explanation? He was in the room, on his Xbox, leaving me to rustle something up of money and chocolates to give to her, he said he had looked for her last years presents, but that he couldn't find them. She was grateful for what she got, but I later heard her on the phone with her grandparents, saying her dad never got her anything for Christmas. He told her he'd keep in contact with her every week, yet she messages me most days, asking me to ask her dad to ring, or her mum messages me saying their daughter is waiting for his call, he always gets annoyed when I tell him to ring her because they've asked, but I remind him of what he's told her. He's always putting me in situations where he's told me he'd do something, and if he hasn't, with plenty reasonable time and opportunities to do so, I'm always the one left with the fall out, and tho I defend him to the best of my ability, and ask him how do we fix whatever problems been caused, he always turns it around so he's the biggest victim, over exaggerates his plan to help by using emotionally harmful tactics to me and just all in all makes me feel like I shouldn't have brought it up in the first place. I myself attend therapy, to help with some problems in my relationship that I try to bring forth with him but he shuts down and thinks I'm being mean, I suggested couples counseling or therapy for himself, but he won't acknowledge it and thinks I'm bullying him for being "himself" AITA?

Posted this over in germangenealogy and I realized I forgot to crosspost it over here.
Trying to do some research on an ancestor named Angela Mertens. FamilySearch Link.
Angela was from Borlinghausen and married a Joannes Henricus Mertens in Kleinenberg. Her marriage record says her father was Joseph Mertens, a farmer from Borlinghausen.
A while ago I tried to sort out all of the Mertens listed in Kleinenberg, and I was able to find a Joes Joseph whose second daughter Gertrud married Gregorius Mertens -- Angela's brother-in-law. The father was born in Kleinenberg, however, not Borlinghausen.
Honestly I think I have them all tangled wrong. Given that Mertens seems to be a fairly common name in the Paderborn area, I think I screwed up somewhere. Finding some info from Borlinghausen might be the key to helping untangle them.
I did find a possible birth record: https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/deutschland/paderborn/DE_EBAP_12110/KB002-01-T/?pg=80
This is from Willebadessen, which looks to be just north of Borlinghausen, but I'm not sure that would be the right diocese for the family. Also the father's name in the record - Joanne Bernardo - does not match the name given on Angela's wedding record.
Can anyone help me sort this out?
This is a transcription of Angela's marriage record: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K0Hu1L2M7U_Wp4fnFwOrUk7xC0CwpoFP/view?usp=share_link
Here's the actual marriage record: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oAVD11tPplrLHBEdwE_ZtDCVz9fl9-A-/view?usp=share_link
Here's a transcription of Angela's death record: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wZCVoKtRO5iEDioWLBnFTxMcsvJgWeCx/view?usp=share_link
And here's the actual death record: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CcX9aLDyh3QW1F89MT2TQJ_BRdcYxafB/view?usp=share_link
Any help would be much appreciated. I feel like I screwed this whole line up.
I'm sorry...I missed out on a detail or two.
I focused my research on Kleinenberg because that's where her husband and descendants were from. I dug through the indexed records on FamilySearch for all the Mertens from that town and pieced them together like a big puzzle hoping to find what I could about her family. During this, I was able to put her together with supposed father and sister. But I couldn't find a birth record for Angela. Through all this, I had totally forgotten about the notes saying that she was from Borlinghausen.
So now I started digging for records from Borlinghausen and I'm questioning everything I put together before. Neither FS nor Ancestry have records for Borlinghausen, but I thought maybe I found it through Matricula (as mentioned in my post), but I'm not sure I have the right church book. Just like I found a record for AN Angela Mertens who fits the right time of birth, but not the right father. Unless he went by Joannes and Joseph.
Basically, I've got myself all screwed up in uncertainty and I don't know what to trust anymore.

​
When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.

​
When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.

​
When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.

​
When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.

Not sure if this is allowed here, will probably get a few hate comments, but I figured I’ll just broadcast a signal to the universe and if nothing comes of it, I’m grateful for doing it regardless. We’re 8 billion people on earth, a cosmos of energy, all connected. There are infinite possibilities that exist.
There very well could be an person/s reading this who has lived life of abundance, and doesn’t have a “lack” mentality. Maybe they have limited time left on earth, and don’t have any immediate family to leave their crypto to when they pass away. Maybe they don’t look at conventional charity. Well I’m just dropping this ETH wallet address at the end of this post.
Maybe out of 8B people, one person reading this, sends their crypto to this wallet and slowly once people realise the idea, it could gain momentum. It’s a crazy idea , and I’ll leave it to the universe to unfold as it should.
Why would I even write this post. As a social / global consciousness experiment. Think of it as a “version of Mr Beast/ except without having his budget he amassed over many years, this would be using the crypto for bootstrapping the idea, like having a crypto Patreon sponsor. For me it would be to take a break away from 9-5, pay it forward, tap into my creative , adventurous side. I’m a bit crazy and go against conventional thinking. If funds do appear, I’d let them accumulate until I can roll out a plan. That plan so far would be:
NB- instruct the sender to leave a note in the transaction on “etherscan” on what I should do with their funds. It could be donating to a specific charity, going to a destination and doing something fulfilling/rewarding like planting trees for a reforestation project, helping stray dogs on the streets of Asia or living their dream vicariously through me.
If this took off I’d want to start a YouTube channel geared around this, and share /film each etherscan message, the funded amount and carry out the act with filming an epic YouTube video and documenting it. Could go viral. (Note: I’d be saving my own funds to get the travel/camera gear, unless a sender sponsors that in their transaction message). I’d also need about 2 years to save my own money (as I’d quit my full time job), settle some debts But the main goal for this is sharing love, helping humans and animals all while this being the most spontaneous experiment.
Anyway I will probably edit this post as more ideas come to mind. Feel free to make suggestions in the comments
Here is the address
0xe6E70675234841bcbdbB9A54A7B9500a269B2F71

​
When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.

​
When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.

​
When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.