Author: Anne Ewbank / Source: Atlas Obscura
Everyone knew that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was buried in St. Michael’s Church in Highgate, London. There was even a stone set in the church floor, engraved with the epitaph that Coleridge had written for himself. But no one was quite sure where exactly the influential poet and thinker’s body was actually placed.
Intrigued, retired parishioner Drew Clode recently went on a hunt for the poet’s remains in the church’s crypt. Appropriately, he found Coleridge’s coffin behind a brick wall inside what had once been a wine cellar. Four more coffins accompany Coleridge’s: that of his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandson.
The church stands on what once had been a mansion, Clode says, whose wine cellar was built in 1694. When Coleridge died in 1834, he was interred at the local Highgate School for two centuries. By 1961, Highgate School could no longer house the coffins of Coleridge and his family, and so they were transferred with pomp to St. Michael’s crypt. Over the years, however, knowledge of the reinterment and the crypt degenerated. “The crypt is an absolute ruin,” Clode says.
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