Lincoln, Kan. ? Since 1990, Lee Modrow has combed Lincoln Cemetery and, using divining rods, claims to have found 250 unmarked graves. Another 200 remain.

“I’m more at peace out here than I am in town,” said Modrow, 78, as he walked among the monuments. He knows the cemetery well, having served as a funeral setup man from 1963 to 1992, when he worked for Hall Furniture and Mortuary, Lincoln.

But burial records are sketchy, especially in the older parts of Lincoln Cemetery, which opened in 1877.

“All we had was a book that said who bought the lot,” Modrow said.

A plumber friend introduced him to divining rods and the 5,000-year-old practice that’s also called dowsing or witching.

Holding two 36-inch welding rods with handles bent at one end, he claims that each time he walks over a grave, the rods swing outward. At the grave of a child, he said, only one of the rods will swing out. The rods will swing one way for a man and the other for a woman, he claims.

“You can feel the pull of the rod when you go over the body,” he said.

His explanation: That the rods react to the magnetic field and minerals in the bones of corpses.

Doubts

All this is doubted by Randy Thies, an archaeologist for the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka. For years, he has specialized in prehistoric and historic burials and has had a keen interest in the claims of diviners.

The problem, Thies said, is that diviners don’t dig “to find out if they’ve actually found anything.”

It’s easy to believe that bodies are buried in cemeteries, he said.

But divining has its supporters, too. Tracee Hamilton, a Lincoln native and a deputy sports editor at The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., said she has catalogued and transcribed more than 100 years of obituaries from Lincoln County newspapers.

Most often, Hamilton said, “I dig up obits and send them to Lee, and he does the research.”

She credits him with having found the graves of her ancestors in Lincoln Cemetery.

“I can’t explain it. Lee has theories. There’s some sort of energy in certain people’s bodies,” Hamilton said.

Charlie Palmquist, 82, Lindsborg, said his divining skills have led him to a number of underground water veins, where domestic and irrigation wells were dug. And he used his witching ability to find graves at the Fremont Church Cemetery in northwestern McPherson County.

“There were a lot of graves out there that didn’t have markers, and they didn’t know where they were,” Palmquist said. “The rods would cross when you came to an unmarked body.”

Not for everyone

Health concerns have prevented Palmquist, a retired farmer and rancher, from dowsing for the past five years.

Not everyone can do it.

“It’s in your system. Don’t ask me how it works,” he said. “My dad could do it, and I could do it, but my kids and wife can’t.”

Modrow is trying to find all of the unmarked graves in the Lincoln Cemetery.

Thies, of the Kansas State Historical Society, said he often has sought to validate the practice. In 2004, he accompanied Modrow to the site of an 1869 massacre by Cheyenne Indians of a pioneer family west of Lincoln, but digging at the spot where Modrow and other diviners claimed a body was buried found nothing. Further, Thies said, it appeared that the soil never had been disturbed.

Thies said that of the 63 purported grave sites found by various witchers that he has checked out, all produced negative results.

“I’m willing to be disproved on that,” he said of his skepticism. “That’s why I keep going out, trying to check these things. My position is that it doesn’t work.”