Who is Miranda? Mystery of the young blonde girl who has lain perfectly preserved and still clutching a red rose inside a tiny coffin for 145 years beneath a San Francisco home

The red rose is still visible between the hands of a young girl buried 145 years ago in a coffin that was recently discovered underneath a San Francisco house.

Construction workers were remodeling Ericka Karner’s childhood home in the Richmond District when they hit the lead and bronze coffin buried underneath the concrete garage.

The three-foot casket’s two windows revealed the perfectly preserved skin and long blonde hair of the girl, who is believed to have died when she was three years old.

Construction workers found this 145-year-old lead and bronze coffin of a young blonde girl buried under a San Francisco home they were remodeling earlier this month

A young girl found buried in a casket in San Francisco’s Lone Mountain neighborhood a year ago has been identified, a team of researchers
announced today.

The girl, who was nicknamed “Miranda Eve” by the researchers, has been identified as Edith Howard Cook, who died on Oct. 13, 1876 at the age of two.

Edith, the second child of Horatio Nelson and Edith Scooffy Cook, is listed as having died of “marasmus,” a term used to describe severe undernourishment and wasting.

Researchers today said the wasting could have been caused by a number of things but was most likely linked to an infectious disease.

The young girl in a tightly sealed metal casket was unearthed last May in the backyard of the home of John and Ericka Karner by a contractor doing remodeling work.

Edith was reburied at Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma last June, but a team of researchers set about identifying her.

The area where the Karners’ home was built was known to have been part of the Odd Fellows Cemetery, which accepted burials from 1865 until around 1902.

Most of the bodies in the cemetery were exhumed and transferred to Greenlawn in the early 1930s, but Edith was left behind for unknown reasons.

Researchers were able to tentatively identify her through a search
of cemetery records and then confirmed the identification through a DNA match with a living relative, Peter Cook.

Peter Cook, a Bay Area resident, is Edith’s grand-nephew and the direct descendant of her older brother, Milton H. Cook.