Amanda Nelson was walking her dogs along the Light Rail tracks in Cockeysville when she spotted something unusual among the scrubby weeds.

It was a white wooden rectangular box, about the length of a person, with four thick metal rings that enabled it to be carried.

In other words, a casket.

Nelson, who was killing time while her daughter attended a class at a nearby dance studio, bent closer. The casket was adorned with raised wooden symbols: a golden sun, a silver lamb, a pair of gold keys and a crest with five blue diamonds.

The 55-year-old Evergreen resident emailed The Baltimore Banner shortly after stumbling upon the mysterious object in late May.

“I would like to propose that the Baltimore Banner start a weekly or daily column titled, ‘WTF is this???’ and I would like to make the inaugural contribution,” she wrote.

The casket was still parked in the greenery along Railroad Avenue near the western end of Church Lane when a Baltimore Banner reporter visited this week.

Although one side of the casket’s thick wooden walls had been shattered, the symbols were still clearly visible, as were the four metal rings. The casket, which has a heavy lid and working hinges, seems less like something in which to bury an actual body and more like a prop.

Perhaps one used by a magician?

“It definitely looks like a magical thing,” said magician Adam Stone when a reporter sent him photos of the casket. But not his magical thing.

Stone, who lives a few miles away in Cockeysville, said the symbols painted on the casket portend good luck. But he pointed out that the weight of the casket— it’s made of solid wood about an inch thick— would be unwieldy for a magician.

“Typically the props get built for travel,” he said.

Could it have been used by a fraternal organization in some sort of rite?

“Too ornate for Odd Fellows in my opinion,” Ella Reid Watt, Grand Secretary of the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows Grand Lodge of Maryland, said in a text message. “Looks showmanlike. I can ask others but I think it was more created for theatrics.”

Representatives from the Grand Lodge of the Masons did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Watt said she did not think it looked like something the Masons would use, either.

Or could it be trash that was refused at the nearby Central Acceptance Facility, aka the Cockeysville dump?

“We don’t have a policy about disposing of an empty casket,” Ronald Snyder, a spokesman for the county public works department, wrote in an email.

Snyder noted that if someone arrived at the dump with a casket, workers would check that it was not occupied. “But, generally speaking a casket would be treated like any furniture,” he wrote.

The Cockeysville casket is at least the third receptacle for the dead to surface in Maryland in recent memory.

A casket, a real one with “white satin bedding and a bible”, appeared by the side of a road in Upper Marlboro a few weeks ago. Residents of a Washington, D.C. apartment told a local news station that the same casket had apparently been discovered in a vacant apartment a few weeks earlier, but it was unclear how it had gotten there.

And in July 2022, a woman walking her dogs discovered a wooden coffin on the banks of Stony Run in North Baltimore’s Wyman Park neighborhood. A metal plaque on the coffin read “Mathilda Lorenz; Died July 26, 1882; Aged 18 years, 2 months and 1 day.”

Citizen sleuths quickly determined that the coffin included parts and hardware manufactured long after 1882.

Although the origins of the coffin were never determined, its fate was: Artist Ashley Kidner took the coffin from the woods and turned it into a work of art calling attention to the plight of migratory chimney swifts.

Unlike the coffin of Mathilda Lorenz, the Church Lane casket did appear near a cemetery. Just a few yards away lies the burial place of the founders of Cockeysville, the Cockey family, along with the bodies of scores of people they enslaved.

The time-battered stones jut out among tufts of chicory and Queen Anne’s lace in a small cemetery sandwiched between a Thai martial arts academy and a private home.

The bodies had rested near Padonia Road, on what had been the grounds of the Cockey family estate, Taylors’ Hall, until 1997 when they were dug up and reinterred the current location to make way for a Bob Evans. The restaurant has since been demolished and a full-service car wash has taken its place.

Farther east on Church Lane sits the cemetery for St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, the final resting place of many of the Irish immigrants who worked in Cockeysville’s quarries. Many of the headstones from the 1800s note the county in Ireland in which the deceased was born.

But, of course, the mystery casket by the Light Rail tracks does not appear to have emerged from a grave. Perhaps this story will lead to some answers.

In the meantime, Nelson, the woman who stumbled upon the casket in the first place, remains fascinated by the fact that an end broke off since she found it.

“The question is,” she wrote in an email. “Did someone break it from the outside or the inside….?”