The Remeum

 Memorial, Tomb, & Resurrection Of An Urban Legend In Fairfax County, Virginia

Urban Legend- Definition: An apocryphal, secondhand story told as true and just plausible enough to be believed, about some horrific, embarrassing, ironic, or exasperating series of events that supposedly happened to a real person or persons.

In the Tuesday afternoon edition of the Washington Evening Star newspaper on March 27th, 1956, the paper's crime beat reporters dutifully wrote that the Fairfax County Police Department, had arrested eleven juvenile males the previous weekend and then charged them with breaking and entering, vandalism, and destruction of private property.

What made this particular crime noteworthy not only was that the owner of the property in question was a prominent & renowned Washingtonian, whose lineage traced back from one of colonial Virginia's founding families, but also the boys claimed that they were inspired by a recent lecture on the ancient tombs and crypts of the pharaohs in Egypt delivered in their high school history class at Mount Vernon High School, which was located approximately three miles north of the crime scene on U. S. Route One, a large mausoleum that was positioned a couple hundred yards southwest of the nearby burial grounds of the historic Pohick Episcopal Church, in Lorton, Virginia.

The police caught the boys as they were in the process of punching a hole in a wall of the inner coutyard's atrium that would have given them access into the tomb itself. It was this incident that would trigger the urban legend of the 'crypts,' that eventually plagued the rector(s) and vestrymen of the Pohick church, the tomb's owner, and the Fairfax County Police Department's Groveton- later Mt. Vernon, district substations for the next three decades.

Party at the Crypts

The tale of these crypts and their supposed secrets and mysteries they allegedly held, would be passed from one generation of young persons to another in the southern portion of Fairfax County, in particular, to succeeding classes of the four local county high schools closest in proximity to the church grounds and the mausoleum. It became a rite of passage of adolescence and a gathering spot for numerous illicit parties that oft times included underage drinking, sex, drugs, and teen hijinks. The phrase, 'Party at the Crypts'  worked its way into the lexicon of the local youth along with an ever growing catalog of supposed wild parties, nefarious deeds, tales of outlaw motorcycle gangs, and of course, the purported fabled contents of what its builder had simply termed, the Remeum.