GEORGE TOWN, Grand Cayman – The dead rose from their graves in the East End cemetery during the dark, wee hours of Sunday morning, Sept. 12.

Hurricane Ivan’s 155-mph sustained winds – 200-mph gusts clocked at the airport – and an 8-foot wall of the Caribbean Sea sucked concrete vaults out of the sandy ground and ripped off thick concrete slabs as if they were shingles on a roof.

Caskets were flung from their resting places 6 feet underground, and skeletons came to life, flying on Ivan’s winds in a macabre dance.

Richard Christian, born in 1874 and long dead, rested in peace in the cemetery since 1936 until Ivan roared through East End. Eighteen days after the storm, Christian’s whereabouts was still unknown. Perhaps his bones were some of those collected in black garbage bags by police the next day, and put back into the ground. Or perhaps the worker wearing a mask, the one who was driving the bulldozer that dug out a huge pit for cemetery debris, scooped up Christian.

Who knows what Ivan did with him. And the others.

The monster hurricane left behind Christian’s tombstone, tossed haphazardly in the sand with a dozen other grave markers and empty concrete vaults, some shattered to pieces by brutal winds. An open metal casket, lined in white cloth with dark brown stains, its strong metal sides dented like an old jalopy, was empty, its occupant apparently joining Christian in a wild ride.

Carlton Townsend saw it all from the house on a ridge. “It was terrible. (I saw) caskets in the middle of the road,” said the muscular 32-year-old landscaper, not afraid of much, except perhaps dead people flying through the air.

It’s not right to disturb the dead, he said. Not that he had seen any “duppies” (ghosts), but he looked worried.

His neighbor, Glarman Grant, 64, scratched his big, bare belly and laughed. “You can’t hurt the dead,” he said. “No, mon, the dead don’t hurt.”

It’s the living Grant worries about. He wonders how he will fix the concrete block home he has lived in for 35 years.

Six feet of sea filled his house – wind and saltwater exploding through doors and windows. His dog, Bush, survived the storm atop the refrigerator, where heremained until Grant came home from a relative’s house the next day.

“I still can’t believe it,” Grant said, point to damaged homes.

The villages are, for the present, ghost towns, inhabited only by a few tough islanders, and perhaps a few duppies.

Hurricane Ivan is the only major hurricane to hit the tourist and banking island of Grand Cayman in modern history.

It killed one person, and maybe two. Percival Sinclair Brown left a shelter during heavy winds, was badly injured and died at the hospital. The second man left his house to check on his boat during the hurricane and hasn’t been seen since. A third man died of a heart attack shortly after the storm.

But the material damage wrought by Ivan is vast: 95 percent of all buildings on Grand Cayman were damaged, with 10 percent to 15 percent damaged beyond repair, said Susan Watler, spokeswoman for Government Information Services. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt to move boxes back into her office, her face grew grim as she distilled tragedy into numbers.

In the Breakers community, 80 percent of the homes were destroyed. In East End, at least 50 percent of the houses are gone, perhaps forever.

No big hotels were destroyed, but 30 percent had major damage and 60 percent had minor damage. Somehow, 10 percent emerged unscathed.