The bone on Bodine Street

It was late when Mary Ann heard the digging sounds.

They were coming from Bodine Street, a brick-paved alley dating back to the early 18th century that runs beside her home in Queen Village. It's also the street I live on.

That night last week, a Philadelphia Gas Works employee shouted up to Mary Ann about a small gas leak.

In the morning, Mary Ann went for an update. Mary Ann is like the block mother.

A PGW worker, standing up to his head in a freshly dug hole in our street, handed something up to another worker, who then tried to hand it to Mary Ann.

"You might want this," he told her. "It's a bone and we believe it to be human."

It was about six inches long, hollow, stained the color of soil.

"What am I going to do with it?" asked Mary Ann, recoiling.

(It's obviously not PGW policy to hand off possible human remains to the nearest neighbor, PGW spokesman Barry O'Sullivan said Friday, adding, "Clearly, our guys should have called police.")

Mary Ann didn't want to touch it. But in good conscience she couldn't leave it. This could be from a 200-year-old person, she thought. Or part of a burial ground. The PGW guys wrapped it in paper towels for her.

"Oh, dear God," she said, taking it from them.

She dialed the city - and got transferred from department to department.

It was late on a Friday. She wasn't getting any answers. She lay the bone atop some bricks in the yard. It wasn't going in her house. It could be connected to something she didn't want a part of - some restless spirit. She's had enough of that in her life.

Mary Ann has a firm belief in the supernatural.

"Since I was a child, I just had a real strong connection," said Mary Ann, 64, a gracious woman who helps make the block such a wonderful place to live.

These situations find her, she said.

Like the time with the African tribal dolls. She was living in the suburbs. She and her then-husband bought a carved-wood doll while antique-shopping in Jim Thorpe. On the shelf, there was a male doll and a female doll. Mary Ann chose the male.

On the way home, with the doll wrapped up in the trunk, they had to swerve when the fender of the car in front of them suddenly fell off.

The next morning, when she pulled the blinds on her bay window, it was covered with hundreds of black flies - "like out of a horror movie," she said.

When her husband ran for a broom, he found the utility room flooded, even though nothing was leaking.

That night it stormed. The power went out.

The next morning, Mary Ann called the shop owner. He didn't seem surprised. The doll was a burial doll, he said, part of a pair. You're not supposed to split them up.

The thing was in the mail back to the shop that day.

Mary Ann bought the house on Bodine from a friend whose mother was a medium.

"There's lots of spirits in this house," the medium told her.

And now there was a bone in the yard. On Saturday, a screeching black bird appeared in her yard. A bad sign.

On Monday morning, the water in the bathroom backed up when she turned the spigot, and the water in the toilet tank bubbled.

"That's it," she said. She wasn't taking any chances. She called the cops to come get the bone. They took it to the Medical Examiner's Office.

Thursday, a Health Department spokesman told me the bone was "non-human" but would not elaborate.

I showed photos of the bone found in our street to Janet Monge, the curator who oversees the anthropology section of the Penn Museum.

She had an answer.

It is the metacarpal bone of a cow.

It has likely been in the earth beneath Bodine Street for a very long time, she said, possibly even a few centuries.

"A cow?" Mary Ann said when I told her. She said she was relieved.

"I still feel bad a cow died there, but I feel a whole lot better it wasn't a human."

So do I.