On Monday, workers building condos at 1465 Columbia Road NW exhumed an iron coffin sculpted like a human body, with a glass faceplate and strange markings on its chest. After a priest gave the ostensibly pre–Civil War artifact his blessing, the men hauled it inside their unfinished building and secured the entranceway with a large padlock. “It might be worth something to somebody,” explained DBT Development Group Operations Manager Randy Boyd, adding that the most exciting thing he’d dug up previously was a boiler. Sure enough, that night, somebody broke through the locked door and smashed open the sarcophagus’s head. In the morning, workers found themselves facing a well-preserved blond mummy of indeterminate sex, which they then hustled to an undisclosed location. “It’s kind of a little bit depressing,” Boyd says, “that people don’t have no respect…you know?” —John Metcalfe