John Bowman sat inside his mansion as evening fell and the light between the Vermont hills faded into dusk as he had done hundreds of times before. He had finished his dinner early and the servants had all gone their respective ways, back to their own homes in the village. He was alone in the house. As the light dimmed and the colors began to disappear, he couldn’t help but look out his parlor window toward the cemetery across the road. He lingered there for a long while, wondering, thinking…feeling. Would it happen tonight? Please, God, he thought, let it be tonight.As he wondered, the light of day finally shed its last rays and vanished. He was in the night country now. The moon was playing hide and go seek with the clouds, dark as pitch one moment and in the next, the entire countryside was awash with lunar light. How many times had he sat here, looking out where they lay? Had it really been years? So long to wait for a single, simple thing. The pain in his heart was as fresh as the day it happened for each of them, first his little baby daughter, then his 22 year old daughter Ella, cut down by sickness in the prime of life, followed only a year later by his beloved wife, Jennie. With her passing, a large part of him died, too. They had meant everything to him: they had been his world. Now, all he had were his memories and a belief in something extraordinary, something he held close to his heart like a treasure, telling no one. There, the moon had cast its light upon world again. He squinted his eyes to get a better view of the mausoleum steps atop the little rise next to the road. What was that? Was that…could it be…a man kneeling in front of the mausoleum that held the remains of this wife and children? Yes, it was the form of a man, stone still and kneeling, looking longingly into the locked space within holding a key in his hand. Of course it was a man. John Bowman knew him well. In fact, he had seen that same man kneeling there, seeking entrance into the house of the dead, every night for years, summer, winter, rain or snow. He looked one more time out of the window and then turned back into his parlor and with a wave of fatigue,blew out the lamp. Of course there was the form of a man kneeling out there in the pale moonlight, he thought as he made his way up the stairs to his bedroom. He thought to himself, ‘That solitary mourner, ghostly white and completely motionless, who never seems to leave the family alone in the cold fastness of stone is…after all, me.’ Cuttingsville, Vermont is part of the slightly larger town of Shrewsbury,on Route 103. Like many New England towns, there isn’t much of note, nothing out of the ordinary that would catch your eye except for the Laurel Glen Cemetery and the stately Victorian mansion known as Laurel Hall directly across the road. You might drive by and give it a double-take: have you just seen a ghost in mid-daylight, lingering in front of the Bowman Mausoleum? No, you haven’t. What you have seen is a fine marble sculpture of John Bowman himself kneeling in front of the doorway to the family tomb. He is clutching a key in one hand and a flowered wreath in the other. The little stone structure seems quite out of place amid the other simpler stones erected in the modest cemetery. Designed and completed in 1880 by noted New York architect G.B. Croff, the Bowman Mausoleum may be the most heart-rending and expensive example of a belief in life beyond death ever constructed in New England. The story begins when fifteen year old John Bowman learns a trade. He apprentices out as a worker in a tannery in Rutland and then moves to Ne