Here's something that doesn't happen every day...

From the Daily News:

The 153-year-old tombstone of famed abolitionist Wilson Rantus has mysteriously turned up in the backyard of a Queens College professor’s home, The News has learned.

Allan and Elaine Ludman returned from Peru last month to find the 200-pound marble slab in the backyard of their Flushing home — more than 150 years after the headstone was planted at Rantus’ one-time family estate a mile away.

“This is a piece of history that has to be preserved,” said Allan Ludman, a professor at the school’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science, who said he was puzzled why someone hauled the headstone over his 4-foot fence.

Rantus was buried in a family plot near Queens College until 1952, when his remains were moved to Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn after descendants sold the property.

Evergreens historian Donato Daddario said Rantus and his family appear to be buried in an unmarked grave at the cemetery, but on Monday that plot had not been identified.

The Ludmans have been keeping the stone secure in their home while seeking out historians to help them restore it and return the slab to a proper, dignified burial site.

The return of Houdini

From the NY Times:

Four busts of Houdini atop the central pedestal of his family plot in the Machpelah Cemetery in Queens were smashed or stolen between 1975 and 1993. That was when the Society of American Magicians, of which Houdini was president at the time of his death in 1926, gave up trying to replace it.

After that, except for the annual observance of Houdini’s death, when a bust would be set there temporarily, the pedestal stood empty. The allegorical figure in the monument seemed to be grieving over its abandonment.

But look again. He’s back.

On Sept. 27, in a caper worthy of the intrigue-filled saga of the Houdini-Weiss family burial plot, self-styled commandos from the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pa., took it upon themselves to install a reproduction of the bust, in what they hope will be durable statuary cement.