Police in eastern Pennsylvania have made a gruesome discovery — more than 100 skeletal remains buried on the property of a man they said robbed graves.
Jonathan Gerlach is charged with abuse of a corpse, criminal mischief and burglary, among other charges, WCAU reported. In all, he faces more than 500 charges, WPVI reported.
Investigators said that mausoleums and burial sites were broken into from November 2025 to Jan. 6 at Mount Moriah Cemetery. At least 26 graves were broken into over that period.
The cemetery is one of the country’s largest abandoned burial sites with an estimated 150,000 graves, WPVI reported. One of the notable people who had been buried there was seamstress and flag-maker Betsy Ross.
Police said they caught Gerlach desecrating a monument on Tuesday and then obtained a search warrant for his home in Ephrata, Lancaster County, WCAU reported. Police said that when he was arrested at the cemetery, he had a burlap bag that had the mummified remains of two children, three skulls and other bones, WGAL reported. He allegedly admitted to using a crowbar to break into several underground vaults.
More bones were found in his SUV parked near the cemetery, police said.
When police executed the search warrant at Gerlach’s home, they said they discovered 100 human skeletons at the house and eight more human remains inside a storage locker, police said. Some are hundreds of years old.
Some of the remains were full skeletons, others were skulls, bones and decaying torsos that were found in Gerlach’s basement, WGAL reported.
“There were so many that they were in various states,” Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse said. “Some of them were hanging, as it were. Some of them were pieced together, some were just skulls on a shelf.”
“Detectives walked into a horror movie come to life the other night guys,” Rouse said, according to WCAU. “This is an unbelievable scene that no one involved — from myself to the detectives to the medical examiners that are now trying to piece together what they are looking at, quite literally — none of them have ever seen anything like this before.”
“I grieve for those who are upset by this, who are going through it, who are trying to figure out if it is in fact their loved one or their child, because we found remains that we believe to be months-old infants among those that he had collected,” he said, according to WPVI.
Officials said that Gerlach’s phone had pinged at the cemetery six times from Oct. 31 to Dec. 24, WCAU reported.
Officials said the case is similar to one in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania and that they are investigating Gerlach’s social media to see if people were buying, selling or trading human remains.
Gerlach is being held on $1 million bail in Delaware County.
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