When Excavators Dug Beneath the Old Church, They Found the Devlin Family’s “Final Meal”

There are places where the earth holds secrets it was never meant to surrender. In the autumn of 2019, a construction crew broke ground beneath St. Matias Church in rural Pennsylvania, preparing to install new drainage systems. What they found 17 ft below the limestone foundation wasn’t water damage or forgotten burial vaults.

It was a dining room, complete, untouched, and around a table set for 8, the Devlin family sat exactly where they’d been left in 1893. The meal before them had long since turned to dust and bone, but the arrangement of their bodies told a story that made even the coroner refuse to write the full report.

This is what they found. This is what they tried to bury again. Hello everyone. Before we start, make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and leave a comment with where you’re from and what time you’re watching. That way, YouTube will keep showing you stories just like this one. He Delin family name appears in Clearfield County Records as early as 1847 when Thomas Develin purchased 300 acres of farmland 2 mi west of what would become the town of Granton.

He was a second generation Irish immigrant, a man known for keeping his word and keeping to himself. By 1872, Thomas had built a modest fortune in timber and livestock. He married late at 41 to a woman named Catherine Maro, a French Catholic from Quebec, who spoke little English and smiled even less. The marriage produced five children in rapid succession, three boys and two girls.

Their names were recorded in the parish ledger at St. Mattheus Michael, born 1873. Patrick 1875, Bridget 1877, Sha 1879, and the youngest, Mary Catherine, born in 1881. By all accounts, the Develin children were unremarkable. They attended church. They worked the farm. They were seen in town during market days, standing close together, speaking only when spoken to.

What made them strange, according to surviving letters and diary entries from neighboring families, wasn’t what they did, it was what they didn’t do. The Develin children never played. They never laughed in public. They never looked strangers in the eye. One school teacher, a woman named Abigail Storo, wrote in 1886 that young Sha Develin, then 7 years old, had been caught carving something into his desk during arithmetic lessons.

When she asked him what he was writing, he looked up at her with what she described as the eyes of an old man who’d seen the end of something and said only this, “We have to finish before it finds the door.” By 1890, Thomas Develin had stopped coming to town entirely. Catherine was seen only at Sunday mass, always veiled, always silent.

The children were withdrawn from school. Deliveries to the Develin farm were left at the gate. And then in March of 1893, the family simply vanished. No one reported them missing. No one asked questions. It was as if the town had collectively agreed to forget the Devins had ever existed. The farm was quietly seized for unpaid taxes.

3 years later, the house was dismantled, and in 192, St. Matias Church built an extension directly over the spot where the Develin home once stood. For 117 years, Sunday services were held above the Devlin family. Baptisms, weddings, funerals, thousands of prayers passed through that church, and no one knew what was beneath their feet.

The church archives contain no mention of the land’s previous use. The deed transfer lists the plot as vacant farmland, unoccupied. But in 2014, a local historian named Raymond Clauss began researching property records for a book on Clearfield County’s immigrant families. He found something that didn’t make sense.

The tax seizure documents for the Devlin property listed livestock, equipment, and household goods to be auctioned. But there was no auction. There was no inventory. There was only a single handwritten note in the margins dated April 19th, 1893. signed by the county sheriff. Property to be sealed by order of the parish. No sale, no entry. God have mercy.

Clauss tried to find out what that meant. He contacted the dascese. He searched newspaper archives. He interviewed descendants of families who’d lived in Granton in the 1890s. What he found was a pattern of silence so deliberate, so coordinated that it could only have been intentional. In private letters between parish priests from 1893 to 198, there are references to the Devlin matter and the unfortunate necessity.

One letter written by Father Edmund Voss in 1897 contains this line. We did what the bishop commanded. We buried it deep. We built the house of God over the mouth of it. Let no man speak of it again. Clauss published his findings in a small historical journal in 2016. He argued that something had happened to the Devlin family, something the church and the town had conspired to hide.

He theorized they might have been victims of a crime, or perhaps they’d died of disease and been buried in secret to avoid quarantine. He requested that ground penetrating radar be used to scan beneath the church. The dascese denied the request. Clauss appealed. He was denied again. And then in August of 2017, Raymond Clauss died in his home.

The coroner ruled it a heart attack. He was 54 years old. His research materials, including all his notes on the Develin family, disappeared from his office before his estate could be settled, but the question he’d raised refused to die with him. In May of 2019, St. Matias Church began experiencing structural problems.

The floor in the eastern wing had developed a depression, a gradual sinking that caused the pews to tilt and the floorboards to crack. Engineers were brought in. They determined that water damage had compromised the foundation. The dascese approved excavation work. By September, a crew from Harding Construction out of Pittsburgh had begun digging exploratory trenches along the church’s eastern wall.

The foreman’s name was Daniel Costello, a thirdeneration contractor who’d worked on dozens of church restorations. He told investigators later that the ground beneath St. Matias didn’t feel right from the first shovel. The soil was too loose, too dark. It had the consistency of earth that had been disturbed and then left to settle unnaturally.

At 9 ft down, they hit limestone, which was expected, but the limestone had been cut shaped. They were looking at handcarved steps descending into darkness. Costello called the dasis. A representative arrived within two hours, a man in his 60s who identified himself only as a church attorney.

He examined the opening and made a phone call. 20 minutes later, he informed Costello that the excavation was to stop immediately, that the crew was to fill in the tran H and leave the property. Costello refused. He said he had a legal obligation to report any archaeological finds. The attorney offered him $50,000 in cash to walk away and forget what he’d seen.

Costello took a photograph with his phone and called the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. By midnight, the site was swarming with officials. The church attorney vanished and by dawn, a team of forensic archaeologists had descended into what they initially believed was a root cellar or storage vault beneath the old Devlin homestead.

What they found was a room 12 ft x 14 ft. The walls were stone fitted without mortar. There was no damage from water, no evidence of collapse or intrusion. The air inside when they first broke through was described as stale, but not foul, as if it had been sealed away from time itself. And in the center of that room was a table, oak, still solid, set with eight place settings, plates made of putter, cups made of clay, and arranged around that table in chairs that hadn’t rotted, sat the remains of eight people who’d been waiting there for 120 to 6 years.

The forensic team worked in shifts for 3 days, documenting everything before any remains were moved. What they recorded has never been fully released to the public. The official report filed with the county coroner and the state police contains only clinical summaries and redirects inquiries to the dascese legal department.

But two members of that forensic team spoke anonymously to researchers in 2021 and what they described contradicts every natural explanation. The bodies were arranged with precision. Thomas Develin sat at the head of the table, his skeletal hands folded in his lap. Catherine sat opposite him, her skull tilted downward as if in prayer.

The five children were positioned along the Sid. S youngest to oldest, left to right. In front of each of them was a plate, and on each plate were the remains of what had once been food. Bread that had petrified into stone-like fragments, something that might have been meat reduced to a dark crystalline residue, vegetables that had mineralized into unrecognizable shapes.

But it was the eighth place setting that made the lead archaeologist, a woman named Dr. Helena Marsh, physically ill. The chair at the far end of the table, opposite Thomas, was empty. The plate before it was also set with food. The cup was filled with a substance that had dried into a black resonous mass, and carved into the table directly in front of that empty chair were words, deep, deliberate letters cut into the oak with something sharp.

The words read, “He ate with us and we knew him not.” Dr. Marsh ordered photographs taken from every angle. She documented the position of every bone, every object, every detail. And then she noticed something that the initial sweep had missed. The door to the chamber, the only entrance and exit, had been sealed from the inside.

The iron bar that locked it was still in place, rusted, but intact. There was no other way in or out. No windows, no secondary passages. The Devlin family had locked themselves in that room, sat down to a meal together, and then simply remained there until death took them. But the condition of the remains suggested something worse.

The bones showed no signs of violence, no trauma, no indication of struggle. Toxicology tests on tissue samples found no poison. The positioning of the bodies indicated they had died in their chairs upright facing the table. And based on the fusion of skeletal positioning and the clothes fragments still clinging to some remains, they had sat there for weeks, perhaps months, slowly starving while the meal before them turned to dust.

The coroner as Sig Ned to the case was a man named Victor Ibara, a 30-year veteran who’d processed everything from industrial accidents to cold case exumations. He’d seen bodies in every state of decay, every form of death. But when he examined the Develin remains in the county morg, he requested a psychiatric evaluation for himself.

His supervisor denied it. Ibara completed the preliminary report and then took early retirement. He moved to New Mexico 3 months later and has never spoken publicly about what he found. But his report, partially leaked in 2022, contains details that were never meant to reach the public. The skeletal analysis revealed that the Delins had not died simultaneously.

Thomas had died first, likely in late March or early April of 1893. Catherine had survived at least two weeks longer. The children had died in sequence over a period of what forensic estimates suggested was 6 to 8 weeks. The youngest, Mary Catherine, had been the last to die sometime in late May or early June. They had starved to death.

But here’s what made no sense. The food on the table had never been touched. Every plate showed petrified portions still intact, still arranged. No one had eaten. The bread hadn’t been broken. The meat hadn’t been cut. They had sat before a meal and chosen not to eat it. Day after day, week after week, until their bodies consumed themselves, Ibara’s report contains one additional observation that he underlined three times in red ink.

The skeletal remains of young Mary Catherine, the 11-year-old girl who died last, showed evidence of movement even after the others had died. Her bones had been found in the chair. But trace analysis of the room’s dust patterns suggested she had moved around the table at some point. She had repositioned her father’s hands.

She had adjusted her mother’s head. She had straw, itened her siblings in their chairs, and then she had returned to her own seat and waited for whatever they were all waiting for. If you’re still watching, you’re already braver than most. Tell us in the comments. What would you have done if this was your bloodline? Would you want to know what they were waiting for? Or would you let the earth keep its secrets? The investigation should have ended there.

The remains should have been buried, blessed, and forgotten. But the dascese made a decision that even the state police questioned. They demanded the chamber be resealed without further excavation. The Pennsylvania State Police opened a formal investigation in October of 2019, not into how the Devs died, but into why the church had concealed their existence for over a century.

Detective Sarah Venamman was assigned as lead investigator. She subpoenaed church records dating back to 1890. What she found was a conspiracy of silence that reached higher than a small town parish. The bishop of the Altuna Johnstown Dascese in 1893 was a man named Bishop Tobias Molrron. His personal correspondence stored in sealed archives was finally opened under court order.

In a letter dated March 2008, 1893 addressed to the Vatican Secretary of State. Molrron wrote this. The Develin family has succumbed to a spiritual contamination that I lack the language to describe. Father Voss reports they have been in communion with something that presented itself as divine but bears the marks of the deceiver.

They have locked themselves away to complete a ritual they believe will grant them salvation. I have ordered the property sealed. We cannot intervene. We can only pray their sacrifice contains it. The word sacrifice appeared 17 times in Molrron’s correspondence over the following two months. He never explained what the Develins were sacrificing or to what, but in a letter dated May 9th, 1893.

He wrote, “Father Voss entered the property against my orders.” He reports hearing hymns sung in a language he did not recognize. He reports seeing candle light through the cracks in the foundation. He reports that when he called out to Thomas Develin, a child’s voice answered and said, “We are almost ready.

He has promised us passage if we wait until we are pure. Father Voss fled. I have forbidden anyone from approaching the site again. By May 30th, the singing had stopped. By June 4th, Father Voss reported no signs of life from the property. On June 7th, 1893, Bishop Molrron ordered the Develin home dismantled, the foundation filled with consecrated lime and soil, and a church built over the site.

In his final letter on the matter dated June 15th, he wrote, “We have intouned them in holy ground. We have placed the altar of Christ above their sin. Let the weight of 10,000 prayers press down upon whatever they invited into this world, and let no one ever speak the name Delin again.” Detective Venaman tried to access Vatican archives to trace the correspondence further.

Her request was denied. She appealed through diplomatic channels. She was removed from the case in January of 2020. The Delin remains were finally laid to rest in November of 2020 in unmarked graves at the edge of St. Matias Cemetery. No service was held. No family members came forward because none exist.

The Delin line ended in that room beneath the church with eight people waiting for something that either never came or came in a form no one wants to acknowledge. The chamber itself was filled with concrete and sealed permanently. The church floor was repaired, services resumed, and the dascese issued. A statement claiming the Devins had been victims of a tragic murder suicide influenced by religious mania and isolation.

The official narrative was clean, explainable, forgettable. But there are details that don’t fit the narrative. Details that were documented and then quietly removed from public record. The archaeological team found scratch marks on the inside of the chamber walls high up near the ceiling as if someone had been trying to claw their way upward.

They found children’s handprints pressed into the stone, dozens of them layered over each other, all reaching toward the locked door. And they found something else, something that Dr. Helena Marsh mentioned only once in a recorded interview before she stopped speaking to journalists entirely. Behind the empty eighth chair, scratched into the stone wall in letters so small they were almost invisible, was a message written in a child’s handwriting, probably Mary Catherine’s, in the final days before she died.

It read, “He came every night and sat with us. He wore Father’s face, but his eyes were wrong. He told us if we waited without eating, without speaking, without touching the food, we would be made clean enough to follow him.” Mama believed him. We all believed him, but I don’t think he’s coming back. I don’t think he was ever going to take us anywhere.

I think he just wanted to watch us disappear. The people of Granton don’t talk about the devel. The church doesn’t acknowledge what was found. And the earth has closed over that chamber like a wound that never wanted to heal. But sometimes on cold nights when the wind moves through the valley, people walking past St. Matias say they can hear something beneath the ground. Not hymns, not prayers, just the sound of a child’s voice asking a question no one wants to answer.