Toppling Tombstones – Should we follow the Scottish Example?

It was shocking to find such a thing in a cemetery, especially one so close to a playground. Back at the beginning of the summer, I visited Tremont Cemetery in Norristown Pennsylvania, with my friend Karen. She had never been here. It is an odd place (Sandy Street and Tremont Avenue) - off the beaten path, partly cared for, partly not. By current records, it is owned by the First Baptist Church of Norristown; according to the sign out front, the cemetery was established in 1846 and holds the remains of many Civil War soldiers. It’s a smallish place, a few acres- but actually twice as big as it appears at first glance. 

Mowed area of cemetery

Odd thing is that the front part is kept mowed, from the street back a couple hundred feet, and then it becomes woods – woods with tombstones and monuments. Nearby, in the center of the cemetery among the tall weeds, there are no grave markers. This is reputed to be an unmarked, two-acre mass grave used “in the late 1910s and 1920s after an influenza epidemic. There are believed to be 2000 bodies in the two-acre parcel of land,” according to an article in the Times Herald (of Montgomery County).   

Karen walking through center portion of Tremont Cemetery

I took Karen through the woods to see all the headstones amidst the gnarled tree branches, and we came upon something which I swear had not been there last time I visited. Just below the playground in a gully, it was propped up with a heavy tree branch.
 

Playground with path leading down into wooded section of Tremont Cemetery

This cemetery has evolved to a rather odd form of upkeep, due no doubt to the small Baptist congregation’s lack of funds and parishioners. The front third is kept up – grass mowed, all grave markers standing tall. The middle third, as you walk back further from Sandy Street), is all weeds – four feet tall in the summer. People shoot off fireworks here in the middle of the weeds (I saw the remnants on a prior visit). Rather stupid, since a spark could start quite a forest fire here. Venturing further, we progress into the heavily overgrown back third of the cemetery, sloping down into a gully with large trees interspersed among the headstones. Last time I was here, there was a millstone at the bottom of the gully, but now oddly, it is gone.

Teenagers have made this wooded area their meeting and cavorting place, it would appear. Empty beer cans and girls’ underwear can be seen here and there. Strange place for clandestine meetings, an abandoned cemetery. As a kid, I don’t think I would have been caught dead in such a place. But it continues to surprise me how many people have done such things in their youth. A playground sits at the top of the gully, a teenage couple on the swings on this particular day. After exploring the well-worn path into the depths of the old graveyard, Karen and I reversed our direction and climbed up the path. She was the first to see it – a giant marble slab propped up with a tree branch.

Ed lowers headstone (photo by Karen Schlechter)

Like so many other headstones here in the woods, this one had been lying flat for decades. I can only assume that someone wanted to read the inscription on the side facing the ground, so it had been lifted and propped up. You really couldn’t make out any of the inscription. What shocked me was that the stone was left like this! A trap, essentially, for a child to be hurt by. Did they not see the swing set a hundred feet away? A child would just need to walk down the hill into the woods into this trap – a thousand-pound weight ready to fall like those box traps where the box to catch the rabbit is held up by a stick.

Carrots and rabbit traps

Safety SHOULD be a major concern with regard to ill-kept old cemeteries. In Edinburgh, Scotland, derelict cemeteries have their wobbly old tombstones laid down by local government to prevent such tragedies.

From the Edinburgh Napier News (2009):

According to the council, since a fatal accident here in Edinburgh in 1982, and following a fatal accident in Yorkshire in 2000 involving a six year old child, a policy has been developed by the Council to have any “unsafe” headstones laid flat in case they fall on a child playing there…..

So with is in mind, I went over to the heavy marble headstone (two inches thick, three feet wide and five feet high), held it by the top and kicked away the tree branch. I lowered it toward me, back to its original position, as slowly as I could. Had to let it drop the last foot, it was just too heavy. Karen photographed me doing this (that's also Karen's photograph at the beginning of this blog). What a disaster that would have been had a child been playing around it.

Headstone in safer position

From the recent article "Gravestones laid flat in the Capital," in the newspaper, The Scotsman:

MORE than 8000 headstones in Edinburgh cemeteries have been laid flat by council workers following a major safety programme.

In a report to the executive of the city council, he said: "Memorials which have been tested are placed into three categories - require no further inspection for five years, require to be inspected again after 12 months, [or] are so dangerously unstable that they require to be made safe immediately, by laying them flat.

"Wherever possible, we will endeavour to ensure that all memorials no longer standing will be left correctly positioned with the inscription uppermost."

Recent tombstone accidents in the United States:

Tombstone falls on child

Lehi child dies after headstone falls on top of him

Recent proactive measures taken against such accidents in Scotland:

Gravestones laid flat in the Capital

Cemetery's unsafe headstones are toppled

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.