YOUNGSVILLE - Weak, feverish, hours from death, young state Sen. William A. Jeffreys begged his family not to bury him in the cold, wet clay.

He pleaded from his sickbed for a sturdy grave, a resting place carved inside a 20-foot boulder on his family’s Franklin County farm.

Jeffreys got his wish. And in 1846, almost a year after his death at 28, a Scottish sculptor finished chiseling out his rocky crypt.

For more than a century, the legislator’s grave drew curious climbers and even vandals who broke the marble gravestone at the boulder’s peak. A state historic marker led them there, posted on U.S. 401, bearing an irresistible title: Unique Tomb.

But now Jeffreys’ grave has returned to the solitude of the woods. The historic marker has been removed, making the strange grave impossible to pinpoint without rooting around on private property.

Jeffreys was a first-term senator with no legislative achievement, and he couldn’t have guessed that entombing himself inside a boulder would attract hooligans a century later.

The only reason he merited a highway sign in the first place was an ancestor who worked at the N.C. Office of Archives and History and who nudged his name into distinction in 1942.

Jeffreys likely wouldn’t qualify for a marker today, said Ansley Wegner, a researcher with Archives and History. Being buried in a rock doesn’t really rise to statewide significance.

Since at least 1970, the state has wrestled with whether to pluck up the troublesome sign. Often, concerned motorists and Franklin County history buffs wrote to ask that Jeffreys’ rock-tomb be spared from all the attention.

What finally pushed the state to act was word that the property’s owners were sick of the trespassers. So in 2008, down came the sign.

But news of Jeffreys’ sign coming down is still disturbing fans of the macabre.

I couldn’t find the owners myself, and I couldn’t go poking around in somebody else’s woods when they clearly don’t want me there.

But maybe Jeffreys is best left alone. His legend grows taller when he’s out of sight. After his burial, rumors rose in Franklin County alleging his family stored his body in a cask of brandy while they prepared the grave, then celebrated by drinking it once the young senator was interred.

It isn’t true. But it’s fun to believe, and if people can’t see things for themselves, they tend to invent stories. Like the ghost that haunts Jeffreys’ boulder. And his casket, which is made out of hard candy. And the chest full of doubloons resting on his chest.

Remember: No Trespassing.