In May 2016, construction crews renovating a home in San Francisco’s Richmond District struck something buried beneath the garage floor. It was a tiny coffin made of lead and bronze, with a pair of glᴀss windows in the lid. Inside lay the preserved remains of a toddler girl.

She was dressed in white, with ankle-high shoes, and grasped purple flowers woven into her hair. A rosary and eucalyptus seeds had been carefully placed on her chest. She had been down there, forgotten, for nearly 140 years.

The home sat on the former location of the Odd Fellows Cemetery. The cemetery was closed around 1903, and all bodies were exhumed in the 1930s to make way for new residential neighborhoods. All of them, except her.

When the airтιԍнт casket was opened to retrieve samples for testing, the body began to rapidly decompose and had to be resealed. A race against time began to identify her.

After more than 1,000 hours of isotope, DNA and genealogy research, two highly likely candidates for her true idenтιтy were pinpointed. The mystery was finally solved: she was Edith Howard Cook, born November 28, 1873, the eldest daughter of two prominent San Francisco families.

Funeral records listed her cause of death as “marasmus,” a term used in the 1800s for severe undernourishment. A condition they determined from strands of her hair that, in 1876, would have been curable today.

Eerily, the homeowners, Ericka and John Karner, had heard unexplained footsteps in their home for years before the coffin was found. Workmen heard them too. Once the coffin was removed, the Karners say they have not heard the footsteps at all.