Officials in Montgomery, Alabama are fielding calls from concerned residents about what appeared to be a pile of Confederate headstones that were literally ditched along the roadside.

Local teen Owen Chandlee alerted WFSA after he said he was riding his bicycle in the woods near a Montgomery neighborhood when he came across a pile of what appeared to be tombstones with the names of Confederate soldiers and dates marking their lives scattered in a drainage ditch.

“I wanted to show them a cool place to hang out and we went back there and there were a bunch of headstones and we were really scared. We thought we were going to see a body or something,” Chandlee told the news site. “I didn’t really know what to think or what to do. I was scared honestly. They were scattered all over the place.”

The boy and his friends took pictures of the headstones and told Chandlee’s mother, who posted the photos on social media. Michelle Strinati her son found the headstones, many of them broken, on Confederate Memorial Day, an annual holiday celebrating southern heritage. The posts sparked speculation online that the stones ended up in the ditch as an act of vandalism because of other similar incidents that have occurred at Confederate gravesites throughout the south in recent years, she said.

“These headstones were placed in a location that obviously was not representing the soldiers properly,” Strinati said. “Everyone was concerned since it was a Confederate holiday and this is a Confederate month if someone was out there doing this maliciously.”

Others in the neighborhood also discovered the headstones and contacted the media and city officials, WTVA reports.

The attention prompted city officials to set the record straight.

Steve Jones, Montgomery’s director of general services, told WSFA that city workers found the headstones at an abandoned home about a year and a half ago and investigated their origin, only to discover they are not the real deal.

“All of the monument headstones were turned upside down, the name of the soldier facing down and the smooth side facing up. We noticed a couple were broken. I thought it was a little odd,” he said. “We got a crew out there unearthing all of them and flipping them over and that’s when we found that every one of them had a soldier’s name and date of birth and date of death.”

City officials conferred with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Confederate Soldiers of America and the organizations confirmed the names are real, but are not authentic. The actual graves for the solders, from Montgomery and other areas of Alabama, remain unmolested and properly marked, Jones said.

“These markers are probably duplicate markers that were made by a monument company, maybe some of them have flaws,” he said. “Someone somehow got ahold of some of these flawed, duplicate or scarred monuments and we’re finding that they’re coming to light now. We don’t think this was a case of robbery or desecration of graves, not at all.”

Instead, city workers are to blame.

Jones said the headstones were eventually lumped in with scrap concrete the city uses to control erosion, which is how they ended up in the ditch.

“They were destroyed as they were supposed to be earlier and we should not have this problem again,” he told the news site.