By Zack Sampson, News Correspondent
Updated: 8:45 pm, December 16
A cardboard box containing two possibly human skulls was found at 760 Huntington Ave. Wednesday afternoon in Mission Hill, Boston Police Department (BPD) officials said.
Construction workers found the box in the basement of the building and put it outside on the curb, where Alden Ladd, a junior biochemistry major at Northeastern, said he saw the skulls.
“I was just like walking down the street and looked over and there was literally a box on the side of the sidewalk that just had two skulls in it,” Ladd said.
He soon notified authorities and waited for police to arrive.
“I walked like two blocks and finally I was just like, I gotta call the cops, like it was just too weird,” Ladd said.
Paul Hamblin, a student at Bunker Hill Community College, said he walked by the box containing the skulls at about 1:10 p.m., before police responded to the scene.
“I was walking by, and on the side of the road, right next to Carmen’s Beauty Salon, I had seen two skulls in a box,” Hamblin said. “I thought they were fake at first. I really did. I thought there was no way that there could be two human skulls. I saw the teeth and … I just had to go back and take a pic.”
According to a Boston Globe report, the construction workers put the skulls out on the sidewalk after finding them while working in the basement of the tenement, though Ladd said he is skeptical of this account.
“If you come across a box of skulls in a basement, are you really just going to bring them out and put them on the sidewalk? It just seems weird to me,” Ladd said.
Hamblin also said that he stopped and looked because of the seemingly intentional placement of the remains.
“They were propped up in a box. The box was not lying down flat,” Hamblin said.
After examining the scene, BPD officials removed the box containing the skulls and impounded a dumpster from the lot behind the building.
Ladd said he did not know about the source of the skulls, but believed that they were human and not from a medical center.
“The only thing I could possibly think is that either they’re from a murder or they’re from someone straight up digging up a grave because they were like old and decaying … there is absolutely no way that they were like stolen from a medical center,” said Ladd.
He also said that, as a resident on Mission Hill, he walks by the spot daily, and discovering the box was certainly a surprise.
“Frankly, I’ve never had any trouble on Mission Hill at all … but I mean it is, like really messed up. You know, something like this happens it kind of makes you wonder, what’s really going on here,” said Ladd.
Still, he said the skulls did not make him fearful of living in the area.
“It’s a little bit unsettling,” Ladd said, “ but I don’t necessarily feel like this is the make or break thing.”
