Mystery: The Boy in the Box

In the outskirts of northwest Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, there is a tragic mystery that still has not been solved. Right there in Ivy Hill Cemetery. As you are stepping inside, you cannot miss the grave. It is usually lined with small toys and stuffed animals. From the visitors to this resting area, and the reason is because to them this grave is special, it is sacred. In it lies the victim, a four to six year old boy whose identity still remains a mystery. The strange circumstances in which he was found, and the fact that nobody has figured out his name or where he came from, have given him, ironically a name. This is the story of the Boy in the Box. My name is Edwin, and here s a dartor. It was February twenty fifth, nineteen fifty seven, when a cardboard box was spotted by a boy who was checking his traps in a potter's field. Knowing well that the police would take them away, he didn't tell them about it. But then just a few days later, a college student went into the area and found a body inside a box. Both of them had been reluctant to tell the police what they had found, but after the college student heard about the disappearance of a four year old girl from New Jersey, he decided to speak up. It was another tragic story where Mary Jane Barker disappeared and her dead body was later discovered by her playmate in the closets of an empty house near her house a little over a week later. So he thought that this may have been her. He reluctantly decided to report what he had seen, but it was a boy, his body naked, cleaned up and had just gotten a haircut and had his nails trimmed. He was inside a cardboard box used to deliver a bassinette, the same model that was sold by J. C. Penny. The boy had clumps of hair clinging to his body, along with surgical scars on the ankles growing and another scar under the chin. The police opened an investigation and took his fingerprints, confident that his identity would soon be determined, but no useful information was ever found. Soon the news were spread by newspapers and flyers, and even included his images in the gas bills of the city. Nothing turned up. Several theories have developed over the years. The first one is that he had been bought, abused, and then killed. A woman known simply as Martha claimed that when she was a girl, her librarian mother bought the child and then made him sleep in their dirty basement. According to Martha, her mother had bought Jonathan, which was a name that was assigned to the boy, to subject them to sexual abuse. Claiming also that her mother had done the same to her, She then went to detail as to how the boy was killed. The boy vomited in the bathtub, angering the mother. She smashed him against the floor and killed him. Once he was dead, they went to get rid of the boy's body. In Philadelphia. Detectives found no evidence to prove this information, but the idea could also not be disproven. Another theory says that the boy in the box was an orphan who lived in a foster home and that he died due to a drowning accident. This came from Remington Bristow, a medical examiner from Philadelphia. A psychic told him that she thought that the boy had died while living in an old mansion that had turned into a foster home. The man investigated this theory himself and even found a similar bassinette just like the one that had been packed up in the cardboard box where the boy was found. It turns out many years later that a detective continued with this investigation and found that a woman had a son who died in an accident in nineteen fifty seven. However, after looking at Morgue records, they figured out that it could not have been the boy in the Box. Four years after his death, investigators had a new lead. Kenneth Dudley and his wife Irene to figure out if one of their ten children could have been the boy in the box. Their entire family would travel around the East Coast as the father searched for work as a carnival worker, and the connection was that one of their children had died as a result of neglect and malnutrition. The family did not bury their daughter, Carol Anne, in the cemetery, but rather wrapped her up in a blanket lefter in a wooded area in Virginia. After more investigations, they found out that seven of their ten children had died for the same reasons, none of them had been buried. However, they were able to determine that they had no other connections to the Boy in the Box because they were not around in the area in nineteen fifty seven, and the theories continue, with some saying that he had been raised as a girl, which would make it tougher to identify him. Other theories claimed that he was a Hungarian refugee, since many of them had arrived to America in the nineteen fifties. Theories also said that he could have been a boy who was kidnapp two years earlier. This was also investigated, and they found no links between that boy and the boy in the box. None of these explanations seemed to offer any answers, then why is the case still open? Remington Bristow, the investigator who thought that the boy had been an orphan living in a foster home, basically kept the story alive over the years. He died in nineteen ninety three, still believing that the Nicoletti family, the ones that were in charge of a foster home with over twenty children and just about one and a half miles away from where the body was found, had something to do with the boy. Eventually, they discovered that all of the children were accounted for and that there had no connection to the boy's fate. The case is still open, though it isn't being investigated unless something new comes up. But for some investigators, they simply cannot forget the case. The Boy in the Box had been buried in a potter's field when he was found, but in nineteen ninety eight his body was exhumed in order to extract DNA. The boy was reburied at the Ivy Hill Cemetery, where he rests on a donated large plot. His gravestone reads America's Unknown Child. Sixty five years is a long time to be searching for something, but investigators continue to be drawn in for the search the identity of this little boy. The race against time continues as the people who were adults at the time of the boy's death leave us and those who remember his pictures at the grocery stores forever Storing the image of his face can only do one thing, bring hope that the Boy in the Box is not forgotten, and that someday his will be found and his innocence will be honored properly. May he rest in peace. This episode of A Dark Memory was written and produced by me Edwin Kovarruyas. Check out my other shows Scary Story Podcast and True Scary Story for more content. What story do you want to hear about next? Send me a message over on a Dark memory dot com or find me on Instagram. Links are under description of this episode. Until next time, Thank you very much for listening.