If You Zoom In On This Airport In Google Maps, You'll Get A Morbid Surprise

The airport is usually the last place you want to encounter any surprises. That goes double if you’re talking about surprises of the morbid variety, but that’s exactly what you’ll see if you ever fly into the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport, in Savannah, Georgia.

Thanks to a decision by the military during World War II, one of the runways serves as a makeshift graveyard.

If you have a keen eye and you’re flying in on runway 10, you’ll notice two concrete slabs that don’t look like they belong there.

Here’s a closeup, courtesy of Google Maps.

What you’re actually seeing here are two concrete grave markers. Before there was an airport, the land belonged to the Dotson family. As it was part of their homestead, the property also included a family cemetery with at least a dozen (and possibly up to 100) graves.

During World War II, the military took over what was once a small airport and expanded many of its runways. One of those extensions reached to where the family cemetery was located.

The military needed to pave over the cemetery to create an east-west runway.

Most of the bodies were unearthed and moved to different cemeteries, except for those of John, Catherine, and Richard Dotson, as well as the corpse of a man named Daniel Hueston.

To commemorate them, two concrete slabs were embedded into the pavement.

(via The Consumerist)

Well, it looks like my morbid curiosity is taking me to Georgia next! Who’s coming with me?