SHREWSBURY —  A flat granite stone engraved with the name Elizabeth Campbell marks a spot in Hillside West Cemetery on the grounds of the Glavin Regional Center in Shrewsbury.

During a rehabilitation of the cemetery about a decade ago, Robert Johnson, the assistant facilities director, placed the stone there over what he thought was an empty grave. Somewhere in that graveyard Elizabeth Campbell is buried, but records never indicated where. The records did show that the spot where Mr. Johnson placed the stone was empty — or so he thought.

But last week, a ground-penetrating radar scan of the area revealed something is buried on the site, and Shelly Finn of North Brookfield thinks she knows what.

“It's her,” she said excitedly as Allen Gontz from University of Massachusetts at Boston's Environmental Earth & Ocean Sciences department pointed out irregularities on a screen.

The “her” Ms. Finn referred to is Elizabeth R. Hill, who once lived in North Brookfield. She's been dead since 1920, buried on the grounds of the former Worcester Lunatic Asylum, where she was twice sent by local officials, who, she claimed in two books she wrote, found her too outspoken against the railroad. She died at age 95.

Ms. Finn said she has reason to believe the wrong name, Elizabeth Campbell, is on the gravestone where she thinks Elizabeth Hill is buried.

Earlier this year, Ms. Finn and five others began searching for Mrs. Hill's remains so they could return them to North Brookfield for burial near her children in Walnut Grove Cemetery. It is what Elizabeth Hill wanted.

The search began after one of the women gave a presentation about Elizabeth Hill.

Mrs. Hill wrote about how she'd been mistreated by the town. She passionately chronicled the burning of her barn and how upset she became when her land was to be breached by the railroad, which she argued was being built to benefit only the Batcheller Shoe Co. She wrote of the trouble she got into when she trimmed branches near the graves of four of her five sons.

The ground-penetrating radar sends waves into the soil and receives back images that to the untrained eye appear to be nothing more than fuzzy blobs. After a few hours of laying out grids and dragging the device over the ground several times, folks gathered around a computer screen and waited for Mr. Gontz to explain what he saw.

There were upside down V shapes and other markings on the screen that meant something was underground.

“It's a suggestion of the fact that this is not an empty grave shaft,” he said, and Ms. Finn smiled. “The layers show a disturbance.”

Something had been buried there.

And while he cannot say what, knowing there is something is enough to move the project forward.

Ms. Finn is confident that she's found Elizabeth Hill. A handwritten note she stumbled across during her search noted that she'd been placed in the grave after the body that had been there a few months was disinterred. There were no regular records of it but she's feeling quite sure.

The next step will be to dig at the site, which Ms. Finn, Patty Duggan, Donna Gauthier, Paulette Adams and Megan Halloran of the Elizabeth R. Hill Committee hope can be done in July.

Mr. Gontz said he will provide specific GPS locations to guide the digging crew to the precise spot among the 200 or so graves.

The committee is working with a funeral director, and if the remains are found, they plan to host a lavish funeral and re-interment in North Brookfield, perhaps in September.

Mrs. Hill's great-great-granddaughter, Ruth A. Widau of Indiana, would like to attend, and the women figure there will be plenty of people there who want to celebrate a wrong made right.