Chase Vault

In the churchyard of Christ Church Parish Church, on a hill above the fishing town of Oistins on the south coast of Barbados, is a small vault cut partly into the coral rock and lined with brick. It was probably built in the 1720s for a planter, James Elliot, who was never buried in it. In 1807 it received its first known occupant, Thomasina Goddard, and soon afterwards it was bought by Colonel Thomas Chase, a wealthy planter. His infant daughter Mary Ann Maria was laid there in 1808, his daughter Dorcas in 1812, and Chase himself a month or so later.

According to the story, when the vault was opened for Thomas Chase’s funeral in 1812, the lead coffins inside – so heavy that several men were needed to lift each one – were found thrown about. They were put back in order and the vault sealed. In 1816, and again at each later burial, the same disorder was found. Finally, in 1819, the island’s governor, Lord Combermere, is said to have attended a burial, had sand scattered on the floor to catch footprints and the entrance sealed with cement and official seals. When the vault was opened in 1820, the seals were intact, the sand undisturbed – and the coffins strewn about once more. The family removed them for separate burial, and the vault has stood empty ever since.

It is a wonderful story, but it rests on very weak foundations. The deaths and burials are real and appear in the parish register, but no church record, newspaper or letter from 1812–1820 mentions disturbed coffins. The first published account appeared only in 1833, in James Alexander’s Transatlantic Sketches, without a source; later versions attributed to Lord Combermere, to the planter Nathan Lucas and to the rector Thomas Orderson differ in dates and details, and Lucas’s supposed eyewitness report has never been found. The folklorist Andrew Lang, writing in 1907, could find no contemporary confirmation.

Sceptics have proposed explanations from flooding to earthquakes to a Masonic allegory: the investigator Joe Nickell argued in 1982 that the tale is laden with Masonic symbolism, while Benjamin Radford, who inspected the vault in 2019, found the original brick walls unmarked by any heavy coffins crashing into them and concluded that the Chase Vault is exactly what it appears to be – a legend. Remarkably similar moving-coffin stories are told of a vault in Ösel (Saaremaa), Estonia, and of an earlier Barbados vault belonging to the Williams family.

Today the empty vault, its entrance open to the sky, is a minor stop on island tours. It is also a reminder of the plantation society of 19th-century Barbados, in which the Chase family’s wealth was built on slavery – a context the ghost story rarely mentions.

Heavy lead coffins found displaced and overturned whenever the sealed vault was reopened, with no sign of entry – a ‘poltergeist’ effect that left no witnesses to the movement itself. No modern activity is reported; the vault has been empty since 1820.

The Chase Vault in the churchyard of Christ Church Parish Church, Oistins, close to the church on the hilltop. The disturbances were said to be discovered only on the days the vault was opened for burials.

The Chase Vault is one of the classic ‘unexplained mysteries’ of the 19th century, retold in countless anthologies of the strange, and examined by sceptics from Andrew Lang to the Skeptoid podcast and Skeptical Inquirer. It is a well-known stop for visitors to Christ Church parish.