05/16/2025
"The Most Curious Tombstone in Canada." Found at Rushes Cemetery in Wellesley, Ontario.
For more than 100 years, visitors who saw the shared headstone of Henrietta and Susanna Bean remained stumped as to what the enigmatic crossword code engraved on the stone might say. They took grave rubbings and attempted to decipher the message only to come up blank. What was known was that in 1867, a man named Dr. Samuel Bean had erected the stone in secret for his two wives who had both died within a few years of one another. Bean had the two women buried side-by-side beneath the mysterious stone and, before he could share its meaning with anyone, met his own untimely end when he drowned after falling overboard a sailboat.
It wasnβt until a 94-year-old woman living in a nearby retirement home figured it out in the 1970s that anyone knew the answer to Dr. Beanβs puzzle. While weβll never know what inspired Dr. Bean to create such a perplexing engraving for his two brides, at least the mystery of the epitaph has now been solved. Iβve included the answer below but feel free to skip ahead if you would like to attempt to decipher the code yourself.
Beginning on the seventh character of the seventh row down and reading in a spiral or sometimes diagonal fashion, the inscription reads: βIn memoriam Henrietta, Ist wife of S. Bean, M.D. who died 27th Sep. 1865, aged 23 years, 2 months and 17 days and Susanna his 2nd wife who died 27th April, 1867, aged 26 years, 10 months and 15 days, 2 better wives 1 man never had, they were gifts from God but are now in Heaven. May God help me, S.B., to meet them there.β
