MSMS students begin research for 36th annual Tales from the Crypt
COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – It’s that time of year again. Students from the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science are getting research together for the 36th annual Tales from the Crypt.
This is a year-long research and performance project for the juniors of MSMS.
Students have been visiting Friendship Cemetery to help uncover the stories of Columbus’s past.
“William Faulkner says that the past is never dead. It’s not even past,” says MSMS History teacher Chuck Yarborough.
For more than three decades, students from the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science have helped frame Columbus’s part in that past for the present generation.
“With the help of archivists at the Columbus Lowndes Library, as well as the MSW Bula Culbertson Archives, the students were able to find new research subjects for the students to basically pursue,” Yarborough said. “Students do the detective work, and then it just becomes new and fresh because of their perspectives each year.”
Every year, students find new people to research, and that research takes them to their subjects’ final resting place, Friendship Cemetery.
Their instructors said it’s a unique way to do the important job of preserving this rich history.
“The world we inhabit was given to us by people who preceded us,” Yarborough said. “So we want students to recognize that that’s a truth and that the communities they love are the result of people who live lives kind of like theirs, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 50 years ago, people make contributions for their communities and communities build that way.”
The students said they are excited to dive into these stories.
“I picked somebody that has a will, and I want to find something like really exciting, like perhaps they were really, really rich and left something really cool behind,” said MSMS student Katie Chung.
“It’s good to learn from the past, and it’s a lot easier to learn from other people’s mistakes or from their lives than to have to live yourself and relive the same thing,” said MSMS student Dietrich Hedgpeth.
“There was one thing interesting about my grave because next to her is also another grave, but she doesn’t have any name, or it might be a he. And I also want to research about that person who he might have been or she might have been,” said MSMS student Amy Choi.
MSMS History teacher Chuck Yarborough said this project teaches students how communities are built by the people who came before us.
“I think it’s important to learn about our past so that we can learn from the people and what they’ve done and build upon that,” Chung said.
“My person is Frank E Perkins Jr., so even going into that, I knew he was named after someone. And when I went to his grave, I saw his whole family there. So I can’t wait to look into more of that,” Hedgpeth said.
“They impacted a community,” Choi said. “They impacted the economy and probably impacted for sure, like war veterans here, they impacted the United States. And we look through their lives, and it inspires me because, you know, a lot of us just live life and think that we have to do this, we have to do that. But we often miss that we’re also impacting other people’s lives and how even after we die, we’re probably going to still impact a lot of people in our paths or connect to a lot of other people.”
Overall, Yarborough said students will take away skills that will extend throughout their lives, and he hopes the public reflects on the sacrifices for local folk.
Students will bring their research to life at the Tales from the Crypt performances during Columbus’s Spring Pilgrimage, April 8, 10, 15, and 17 of 2026.
