Gravediggers in Groveport got a shock when they opened the earth to bury a woman, only to find a century-old body already in her cemetery plot.

It was mortifying, village officials said. They tried the next plot but again found an occupied grave.

"It was terribly embarrassing to us," Groveport Village Councilman Edgar Rarey said. "We desperately tried to relocate them in that area, but we had to move the family to a new plot. We don't want this situation again."

To prevent surprises such as the long-buried bodies they found two years ago, the village had planned to use ground-penetrating radar this spring to map what lies within the village-run cemetery without disturbing the dead.

Town legend has it that families buried their loved ones without markers during an 1830s cholera epidemic, and an incomplete collection of maps from the 1970s has the village uncertain which plots are vacant in the old portion of the burial grounds.

But budget cuts might force the village to live with the uncertainty for another year.

"Unfortunately, the cemetery is not something folks focus on the same way as the parks," said Carla Cramer of the Groveport Heritage Society. "I don't think fundraising would work."

The project would have cost about $18,000, but the budget for the cemetery has been cut from $45,000 to $11,000 for the year.

The village might be able to hire a company to scan part of the cemetery in the fall if the economy picks up, but for now the plan is on hold, Finance Director Ken Salak said.

"We've gone the last 100 years without knowing where they are," he said. "We can wait another year."

But Rarey, who sits on the cemetery committee, said the scan should continue to be a priority.

"We're in the dark," he said. "This is something that's long overdue so that we can bury people without disturbing those who have been long-interred."

The village Public Works Department maintains the cemetery and had planned to hire a company in May, Public Works Superintendent Dennis Moore said. He said a scan could also help the village identify open plots that could be sold.

Virtual Underground, based in Atlanta, uses a 14-antenna radar system that can find coffins in a cemetery or a pipe under a construction site, co-founder Tony DeRubeis said.

It doesn't outline bones, he said, but when an old coffin has deteriorated, the signals that rebound off once-shoveled dirt are still different from waves off denser soil.

The scan would have been one of several cemetery improvements, such as shoring up monuments and scrubbing mold off older stones.

The village is constructing a small memorial this spring for the unmarked graves, whether they're located or not, Rarey said. A plaque will be affixed to a rock from the canal, which legend says carried disease into Groveport from Canal Winchester.

Cramer said that, out of fear of what their neighbors would say upon discovering that someone had died of a highly contagious disease, villagers would wait until night and bury bodies by lamplight.

Grass grew over the unmarked graves, and some parcels were later sold for family plots, although Salak said the village has a good sense of where the "cholera section" lies.

egibson@dispatch.com