Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery also Friends of Accident Victims

At 8 a.m. on a recent Saturday morning (July 13, 2013), the volunteer group Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery was setting up for a restoration event and cleanup day. Half of Mount Moriah is in Yeadon, on the north side of Cobbs Creek Parkway, while the other half is in Philadelphia. The day’s work was to focus on the Yeadon side, near 62^nd Street and the parkway. 

Friends Board member helping accident victim

At about 8:30, an automobile accident involving two vehicles occurred directly in front of the cemetery entrance (see map). A small SUV and a Chevy Malibu traveling in opposite directions collided in front of the volunteers who were setting up their registration table. The volunteers ran out into the street, stopped traffic, and began to help the victims. Cobbs Creek Parkway is a busy road and it curves at the cemetery entrance - the scene of frequent accidents (evidenced by the mangled guardrails). Four members of the Friends group controlled traffic in both directions for over an hour, preventing further problems (you can pick some of us out in these photos as we're wearing yellow shirts).

Other members of the Friends helped the injured drivers (neither vehicle carried passengers). Police and Rescue were called via 911 and ambulances arrived. When it was determined that both drivers were conscious, and only banged up a bit, the Friends group set up orange road cones around the wreckage and began clearing debris off the road. (I actually walked up the parkway a bit to where the water company was doing some work and asked to borrow four of their cones.) Friends’ Board members brought water and chairs out to the accident site for the drivers of the vehicles. One woman crawled around both deployed airbags and out of her car, which was smashed against the guardrails. The other woman could not get out of her SUV and had to wait until rescue workers helped her out and onto a gurney.

Friends' registration table at Mount Moriah Cemetery entrance

Interesting how this situation unfolded. Almost immediately after I placed the call to 911, three renegade, wreck-chasing tow trucks arrived on the scene. As police did not arrive until I called them a second time (an hour after the collision occurred), the renegades hung around all that time. One of them even refused to move his vehicle so we could see the backed-up southbound traffic we were trying to direct. I explained this to him and he said, “Maybe that’ll cause another accident.”

(Watch the ABCNews video: The Troubled Past of Wreck Chasers)

And other accidents certainly may have occurred if the Friends had not been there to help. This area of Cobbs Creek Parkway is non-residential and so there would have been no one around but other drivers to help. I mentioned earlier that I had to call 911 a second time to request the police. This was odd, so 911-administrators take note: When I placed the original call to report the accident, the 911 person asked if there were people injured. I said ‘’yes.” So she asked if I wanted the “police” or “rescue.” I said, “Well, I guess I want ‘rescue.’” So that’s who showed up. Apparently, if you ALSO want police in such a situation, you need to be that specific!

The north and southbound parkway drivers were for the most part patient with the situation. There were however, a few jackwagons who yelled curses at us and tried to drive around the wreckage. Luckily, there were only two vehicles involved in the collision, which was amazing given the volume of high speed traffic in the area. Both vehicles (one which appeared to be totaled) spun out in the northbound lane, so this left the southbound lane available to shuttle traffic through in one direction at a time.  

Friends Board member helping visitors find ancestors' grave

After the two drivers were taken away to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, family members began to arrive. Friends volunteers communicated information to them and helped calm them down. About two hours of this, the ten members of the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery returned to their main objective for the day – cutting grass and organizing the volunteer effort for cleanup. The remainder of the day was spent doing this as well as helping visiting families find graves of their ancestors.

Learn more about how you can help preserve Mount Moriah Cemetery and the surrounding neighborhoods on our website.

One way to help if you're not physically able to attend a restoration event (schedule on our website), is to go onto the "How to Help" page on on the site and buy one of these cool fund-raising t-shirts like the one I'm wearing in the photo at left! 

Tee shirts are $16 for sizes Small to X-Large, 2X – $17.50, 3X – $19.00

Please contact us at info@fommc.org to order.
Checks for tee shirts can be made payable to the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery and sent to

P.O. Box 5321, Philadelphia, Pa 19142

Wintering at Philadelphia's Mt. Moriah Cemetery

I sit in the heated sidewalk enclosure of Tony Luke’s cheese steak shop in deep South Philly, eating what may be the second best breakfast sandwich I ever had. (The first one by the way, also came from Tony Luke’s.) I’m watching the UPS trucks and car haulers take off for their morning runs as I sit inside the warm seating area.

St. Alban's Court

Cold outside, this early winter day, and supposed to get colder and windy. Perfect for an abandoned cemetery run – a hike through the wilderness that is Mount Moriah Cemetery. I pick up my friend Bob, who appropriately lives on St. Alban’s Court in West Philadelphia, where they filmed the movie, The Sixth Sense. Together we’re off to see dead things.

We park at the cemetery’s Cobb’s Creek Parkway entrance, which has been barricaded with concrete highway dividers. Before we begin our exploration around the abandoned mausoleums, I weapon up and load my cameras. This is only Bob’s second time here, so he’s not fully aware of all the things of which to be afraid. I had been told that the city pound confiscated all the wild dogs, but I took my iron ice hook just in case.

Mausoleum Ridge, Mt. Moriah in winter

Summer view of Mausoleum Ridge

As we clambered around inside the circle of mausoleums, I was surprised to see things I’d never seen here before. It’s almost as though the foliage has died a fuller death than usual − in summer, you can hardly see anything for the wildly overgrown bushes and trees, vines and pickers. The pickers and vicious thornage are REALLY what keep you from accessing any of the quaint old headstones and even the grand memorials.

It’s still a wilderness here, even though the city and volunteers spent the entire summer cleaning up portions of the place. Most of the effort had been spent on the Kingsessing Avenue side of Mt. Moriah, with its hundreds of relatively new Muslim graves and its tumble-down gatehouse. So I was surprised to see an entire section (above, Sect. 127, perhaps – see map) on the Cobb’s Creek side cleared of brush and looking the way a cemetery SHOULD look. Not only that, but we found a beautifully cared for family plot nearby, trimmed nicely with Christmas decorations at the top of the hill. This, in the midst of thousands of other graves covered with dead weeds and fallen trees.

As we make our way through the dense underbrush toward the giant rusting hulk of an iron memorial fountain, Bob tells me about growing up in a house surrounded by nine cemeteries. He’s comfortable around (and in) them, but his friends were afraid to go to his house. He’s also used to the dangers of abandoned cemeteries, as he has researched, explored, and photographed many of them in Edinburgh, Scotland. Apparently, many Scottish cemeteries are in the same deplorable condition as Mt. Moriah.

Climbing out of the tangles of vines and dead trees, we entered a clearing, and heard the dogs. Then we saw them. A small pack – three maybe. I tried to photograph them, but when I put the camera up to my eye, they darted into the high dead thicket. The barking continues as vehemently as ever. We head off in the opposite direction and talk about how stun guns and mace are illegal to buy or carry in the city of Philadelphia (though you can buy them in neighboring counties).

Winter is strange here at Mt. Moriah, with all the foliage gone – it’s almost as though you’re looking at the skeletal remains of the cemetery itself. There are hundreds of acres of dense woods shrouding massive marble and granite monuments, but the dirt roads are now walkable after the summer’s big clean-up. These roads weren’t made for giant garbage trucks, however, so the granite coping around some family plots has been scraped and broken. At least one tall granite monument is knocked over. The price of progress – at least all the piles of trash, building materials, and old tires are gone. (Just so you know, it wasn’t the barricades that stopped the illegal dumping – it actually stopped BEFORE the city locked the place down. All thanks to the zeal of one nearby resident who shall remain nameless).

People look at my photos and assume the cemetery is out in the boonies somewhere. Well no, I say, its in a densely populated, yet run down area of Southwest Philadelphia. Its size is estimated to be between 300 and 400 acres – most of which is an overgrown wilderness. A forest filled with all the grandeur of a Victorian cemetery, from the lowliest sweetly sleeping tombstone to massively ornate marble and granite monuments erected for the purpose of remembering God knows who, at this point. Bob points out that with all the negative publicity Mt. Moriah has achieved, those buried here are now remembered for a completely different reason.

Pet carrier, headstones in background

This is only Bob’s second visit to Mt. Moriah. I’ve been here so many times that nothing seems to surprise me. The more you learn about a thing, the less you pay attention, I suppose. For instance, the pet carrier we walked past. I though nothing of it, just Mount Moriah weirdness. Bob, however, deduced that someone had let their small animal loose in the wild, to fend for itself or get eaten by a coyote. He must have a sixth sense about such things. I thought of the small lame dog I saw here once, dragging itself through the weeds. But why leave the carrier here, with the door open? Because the person didn’t want to be seen leaving with an empty animal carrier. Ah.

We spend a few hours first on the Cobb’s Creek side, then make our way over to the Kingsessing Avenue side. I’ve been here so many times I’ve lost my early, wide-eyed reaction to this overgrown wrecked hull of a cemetery.  Still, I’m surprised at the piles of deer droppings here and there. You’d think with the dense woods, this place would be lousy with deer, but I’ve never seen one.

Most of the picker bushes at Mt. Moriah are dead for the season. Those that survive, however, can tear through armor. They are the worst here in the Circle of St. John as we try to navigate around the central marble monument to the Masonic Grand Tyler. It‘s shocking that someone went to the trouble to get all the way in here just to spray paint the monuments. It does seem to be a popular destination – empty beer cans abound and I find a burned American flag on the ground.

We talk about how to restore this place, on a piecemeal basis. When you think hundreds of acres of overgrown woodland, it does seem rather impossible. The place looks more like an improbable act of will than a result of simple neglect. So why aren’t movies being filmed in here? Certainly it would be very difficult to build something like this as a Hollywood movie set. Maybe film producers would think the viewing public would never believe such a place could exist. Why did Philadelphia allow this to happen to an historic landmark? Whatwould the Eiffel Tower look like today if it were in Philadelphia instead of Paris?

More dogs circle us. Great – we’ve got them on both sides. (Why is it that wild animals never attack people you WANT them to attack?) I kind of wanted to move further back to where dense trees hid some quite ornate dynasty plots, but Bob indicated that there were more dogs coming from that direction. I fondle the hook in my large coat pocket, enjoying the menacing power it gives me whenever I touch it. Then it occurs to me that one hook might not be adequate protection if TWO of us are attacked by several dogs. I blithely asked him what he would rather do. He said, we should probably head in the direction of the gatehouse (away from the dogs). I said, well, yeah, that would be the sensible thing to do, but what do you want to do? He was a bit uncomfortable with the proposition so we moved out of harm’s way.

I had this notion of an action hero called “The Hook,” who sits down with Bob at this point and says, “Now listen – this is CEMETERY photography we’re about here,” as our hero, without turning, takes a mighty swipe at a vicious dog leaping through the air toward them. The hook connects, the dog cries and runs off.

We walked toward the back of the crumbling gatehouse, really nothing more than a façade of crumbling brownstone, at this point; the clinging vines actually holding what’s left of the structure together. I spent a few minutes photographing the statue of Father Time behind it while Bob investigated the ruins of the gatehouse. “Looks like they’ve cleaned this place up a bit,” he said, noting the absence of broken tombstones, piles of old tires, and assorted garbage.

A few minutes later he came walking toward me and I asked him if he wanted to go around to photograph the front of the gatehouse. He said, “I don’t think so − someone has taken up residence in there.” Yikes. Bet that guy hasn’t had a Tony Luke’s breakfast sandwich in a while. So we headed off back in the direction of my car, a good twenty-minute walk across the cemetery. The weather turned windy and colder as I thought about Philadelphia’s upcoming Homicide Parade, meant to lament the city’s Big 300 murder rate for 2011. Yay.

Gatehouse at Kingsessing Ave., Mt. Moriah Cemetery

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Bob Reinhardt, Tom Bera, and Donna for their inspiration in helping me write this article.