Novelty Vandals Reconfigure West Cemetery
West Cemetery has been a pillar of downtown for centuries. Home to poet Emily Dickinson, and other corpses of proud citizens, it provides a place to walk, reflect, and aspire to be like those who once were.
The PIA is sorry to report that last weekend West Cemetery fell victim to the latest in a series of “novelty” crimes, in which people commit crimes for the sole purpose of being “novel”.
In this case, a dozen or so individuals entered the cemetery during a midnight rainstorm. When nobody was there to see them, they dug up the surface-level dirt around every gravestone in the cemetery except for Emily Dickinson’s, rotated each stone in some deliberate fashion or another, and re-packed the dirt afterward.
Originally, there were suspicions of mass grave robbery, but these suspicions turned out to be bunk. These people were vandals, not thieves.
As explained by a note left on Emily Dickson’s grave: “We did not steal anything. We did not provide anything new this time. We simply rearranged the puzzle pieces in a way such that they would be optimally novel. With the poet’s symbol as the centerpiece, we encoded the outline of the symbol of our cause in the bird’s eye view of the cemetery. Now, those living above us, whoever they are, may see it.”
We used a drone to examine the cemetery from above. And truly it has taken a new form. From above, the outlines of the graves form the shape of four inward-facing pyramid shapes, converging towards a depiction of the international space station.
Both Amherst Police Department and UMass Amherst Police Department deny that the gravestones have moved. When asked of the obvious fresh dirt exposed around the graves, Tom Johnson (Sergeant, UMass PD) promptly asserted that the rain storm must be the cause.
Peripherally go the winds of progress...
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