Bog Street Cholera Cemetery

Even before the Smog, Bog Street was an unwelcoming place. It sat in the heart of Granstoke’s Old Town, a warren of crumbling buildings and narrow alleyways, where disease and poverty reigned. Far from the grand buildings of the New City, the Old Town was left to the poor and the desperate, and the rarified captains of industry gave the neighbourhood a wide berth. Even the Granstoke Constabulary spared the district all but the most cursory patrols, leaving it in the hands of various gangs - the Scuttlers, the High Rippers, and the Old Town Boys.

In the 1850’s, a wave of cholera deaths swept the nation, and nowhere was hit so hard as Granstoke’s Old Town. With no clean municipal water supply, the old towners got their water from pumps that drew from the same underground streams that carried the water from gutters and cesspools. The more people fell sick, the more the disease spread. Entire terraces fell to the disease, bodies piled in the streets, and corpse-finders only dared to take their carts with an armed escort. When the disease had burnt itself out, cemeteries were built to contain the massed dead. The parish records for the Bog Street Cemetery log 53 burials, though the true number may be much higher. It is a squat structure; a brick box around a pit piled high with bodies and covered over barely a foot deep. Not long after it was built, residents complained of the constant smell that rose from the burial ground and the ominous bowing of the brick revetments that held in the dead. Brownish corpse-liquor seeped between badly-laid bricks, and neighbourhood children would climb up to pick through the bones that jutted from the surface. 

For half a century, workers did what they could to reinforce the walls and stem the worst overflows, until the coming of the Smog. Now, it has been a decade since any official stepped foot on Bog Street, though K.E.R teams have reported both gang activity in the area and the presence of undead stemming from the burst banks of the charnel pit.