The thing about this story that gets me is the utter ignorance of burial customs in Europe. Europe was and is very crowded. They don’t have the land to set aside huge swaths to bury people for perpetuity. Some sort of communal burial is a necessity, especially for those who had limited means. So a communal crypt would not be all that unusual. Something else that is common in Europe is charnel houses where the bones of the dead were collected. Corpses were only buried long enough to allow them to decompose. Then the bones were dug up and the grave used again.
These were incredibly poor people and they didn’t have the luxury of burying their dead in fancy caskets with perpetual care.
Do you know, even my pastor assumed this story was true until I pointed out all the documentation that showed what was really going on. So I wrote a "debunker" story for the parish newsletter. Now, that leaves 17,482 other parishes in the US alone where shamefaced, suffering people are still thinking "Is this true? Could it be true? It must be true, I saw it on TV."