Moving Caribbean Coffins (etc.) in a Ripley's Believe It or Not Book

[Extollager]

Recently I watched an American Experience TV program about Robert Ripley, whose Believe It or Not! cartoons used to appear in newspapers and were collected in paperback books in the 1960s.

I have a faint memory from that time of a book about coffins in some Caribbean locale (Martinique? Haiti?) that were said to move around. [EDIT: Baylor notified me with the suggestion that I'm remembering something about the Chase family crypt on Barbados.] My hunch now is that, if the account wasn't a fabrication or a hoax, the coffins were in mausolea built on land near sea-level, which flooded sometimes from water that seeped inside, upon which occasions the coffins floated, being found away from their earlier places of rest some time later when the building was opened.

But I'm wondering if anyone remembers such an account and can verify it. I don't remember that it ever greatly creeped me out, but it does seem to have lingered in my memory for nearly fifty years. It would be interesting to run it down.

Also, I thought this thread might be an appropriate place for some readers to comment if, when they were kids, their appetites for the unusual, the puzzling, the weird were stimulated by "true accounts" as well as by material published as fiction. I'm specially thinking of material published in books and magazines. My impression is that such things weren't common on TV until well into the 1970s -- although Ripley did have a TV program at some time.

 

[Toby Frost]

As a child I used to have several books with titles like "Mysteries of the Unexplained". Stories about hauntings and alien abductions interested and occasionally frightened me. I remember the cover picture of a children's book about the Loch Ness monster that I found absolutely terrifying. As I've got older, that interest has moved more towards strange stories that don't involve the supernatural. Oddly, given that I know absolutely nothing about sailing and I'm not greatly interested by it, they've involved nautical mysteries. Stories of ghost ships like the Joyita and the Kaz II still intrigue me, although I know that the answers will almost certainly not match the mystery.

Some unexplained disappearances and appearances interest me too, as well as urban legends. I don't find any other true crime of interest, though. Stories about the Kray Twins and the like just strike me as squalid and a bit sad.

 

[J Riff]

Charles Fort and the Fortean way; he was a precurser to Ripley, wunnee? We used to marvel at this stuff, and wonder how much of it was true. I've seen some unbelievable stuff, but no recent rain of frogs or anything dramatic, not here in modern times where miracles end up on yoTube as if it's nuthin'. The coffins... geee I think I read that one too. There was a run of PBs, used to have a raft of them but don't see them around anymore.

 

[Venusian Broon]

@Extollager I'm pretty sure the Fortean Times had a big article on this...but my FT's are all paper and impossible to search! From memory I think they suggested that it was an urban myth that got into (quite early) print.

I found this, from 1833 apparently:

Transatlantic Sketches, Comprising Visits to the Most Interesting Scenes in North and South America, and the West Indies

By the Ripley's got hold of the story it was already a century old!

(this came from the links in the wikipedia entry on the Chase Vault - Chase Vault - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, in case you want to dig up the other links)