In 1954, two youths aged 16 and 21, broke into the mausoleum and, in a misplaced “spirit of adventure” opened the walnut coffin of a nine-year-old member of the Eden family who had been dead for 100 years. They then prised open the lead inner shell and when an “almost perfectly preserved body emerged”, they fled in terror, and pleaded guilty to removing a corpse from a grave in a burial ground. in 1984 after further vandalism the family had decided enough was enough, and the mausoleum was instructed to be demolished and the Edens were returned to St Helens. You could argue this was the moment when the descendants of the family truly wiped their hands of Windlestone.