Desecration at Mount Moriah

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
In late 2025, police were tipped off that someone was damaging mausoleums and crypts inside Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. What they found was beyond what they originally suspected.

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Picture posted by Gerlach on his facebook page

Mount Moriah Cemetery opened in 1855, and covers nearly 200 acres with approximately 200,000 burials. In 2011, it was abandoned and Friends of Mount Moriah took over the restoration of the property which had been neglected for many years. It is the considered the largest abandoned burial ground in the United States.

It is situated on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and is the resting place of  Civil War soldiers, and former Philadelphia mayor Samuel Miles was interred in 1805. He was an American Revolutionary War general and statesman. The founder of Brown University is also buried here, as well as Betsy Ross, the Philadelphia seamstress credited with sewing the first US flag.

In January, 2026 police spied bones and skulls in the back seat of a Toyota Rav 4 parked near the cemetery. By then about 26 mausoleums and vaults had been broken into, so they had good reason to suspect they had found the culprit. They had received an online tip that urged them to look into whether Gerlach was connected to one mausoleum robbery in particular.

The car belonged to Jonathan Christian Gerlach, age 34. He was arrested as he returned to the car with a crowbar, and a burlap bag in which officers found the mummified remains of two small children, three skulls and other bones.

The investigation led to Gerlach's home and KO Storage at 851 E. Main St. Ephrata Township where he rented a unit. Most of the remains were in the basement, and more than 100 human skulls, long bones, mummified hands and feet, two decomposing torsos and other skeletal items were found. Jewelry was recovered, and one set of remains still had a pacemaker attached.

Gerlach targeted sealed underground vaults and mausoleums, which contained older burials.

One of Gerlach's neighbors who was interviewed by a local station recalled seeing numerous flies latched onto windows in the garage which had the blinds drawn.

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The entrance to Mt. Moriah Cemetery c.19th-century

According to Delaware County D.A.: "They were in various states. Some of them were hanging, as it were. Some of them were pieced together, some were just skulls on a shelf."

The remains have been catalogued and secured inside the coroner's office. Coroner Stephen Diamantoni said his offices will not attempt to identify the remains, since they were mixed up so thoroughly. It's unknown where they were originally taken from, and some of them are in advanced state of decay and are believed to be hundreds of years old.

It's alleged that Gerlach may have been selling the remains online and traveled as far away as Chicago to broker the sale of a human skull. 

This is reminiscent of the case involving a manager from Harvard Medical School who was caught selling donated body parts. Several persons in the network of buying and selling the remains were convicted in 2025.

Gerlach was charged with 100 counts each of abuse of a corpse and receiving stolen property, along with multiple counts of desecrating a public monument, desecrating a venerated object, desecrating a historic burial place, burglary, trespassing and theft. He is jailed on $1 million bond. 

A week after Gerlach's arrest, police were investigating his connection to the theft of two graves from Good Shepherd Memorial Cemetery in Luzerne County, where evidence was found near empty crypts. This cemetery like Mount Moriah is abandoned.

A resident who does voluntary clean up of the grounds, found two coffins that had been damaged and emptied out.

Close by two empty energy drink cans and cigarette butts were found and are being tested for a DNA match to Gerlach.

A local funeral director started to see missing plaques from some of the crypts, and one of the crypts had a line of bricks hammered out to see if a body was inside. 

There were 79 people originally buries at Good Shepherd, 32 remained and now there are 30.

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