The Haunted Grave

There’s a little cemetery in the Old Swedes’ Churchyard complex near my house in South Philly. It’s an odd little graveyard, one of the oldest in Philadelphia. Some of the slate stones dating from the 1700s are oldest standing headstones of any cemetery in the city. In fact one of the pair below, dated 1708, was placed just seven years after the city was founded in 1701. (The stones, by the way, are toward the rear of the church, and mark the graves of Church minister Andreas Sandel’s two infant sons.)

This place is a sea captains’ burial ground, first and foremost. The part of the city in which it is located (near Penn’s Landing) was one of the region’s original waterfront settlements way before William Penn arrived on these shores − 1637 to be exact. Among the early European settlers, many sea captains are buried here – from Captain George Ord the Revolutionary War gunrunner to Captain Peter Cruse, who in 1918 first brought rubber from South America (galoshes were the first product made from it, by the way!). In fact, the area surrounding Old Swedes' (including my little neighborhood, Pennsport), was known as a sea captains’ village. Many seafaring gentlemen lived here and were members of the Old Swede’s congregation, which is also known as Gloria Dei.

Daughter Olivia at gunrunner Captain George Ord's grave

Although the cemetery is quite small, generations of local people are buried here. Over three hundred years worth of people! From sea captains to scientists, revolutionary and civil war soldiers, artists, ministers and common folk. There are even current burials taking place here in 2012! There's a staggering amount of American history condensed in this little graveyard. A bronze plaque set in a nearby stone that tells us that 27 cannon were erected here in 1748 by "Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Associators" during "King George's War." This refers to the voluntary militia started by Franklin in 1747 to defend Philadelphia against river attack by French privateers and pirates, the "Associators" being the origin of our "National Guard."

Though separated by generations, I’ve always had the strange feeling that many of the people buried in this churchyard actually knew each other when they were alive. I never get that feeling in a modern cemetery. The inhabitants remind me of the dead townspeople in Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology (1915).

Flea market outside the Old Swedes' gate

True to its neighborhood and community feeling, Old Swedes’ has one of the best flea markets in Philly (all parishioners, no retail vendors!), which I attended with my three-year-old daughter this past Saturday. Tables are set up outside the old brick wall surrounding the complex, most of the way around the block. You can see some vendors through the gate in the photo above. Strolling around the cemetery afterwards prompted me to write this blog, having recalled an incident that occurred here last spring.

Couple strolling amidst the old stones as well as the new

They have the flea market twice a year, spring and fall. Back in May, 2012, I went to the flea by myself, then walked around the cemetery afterwards, shooting pictures of the old stones and monuments. There were a few visitors here and there, touring the old church, checking out the graves, buying food in the church hall. A young boy, maybe seven years old, came up to me as I was photographing some headstones alongside the church. I had never seen him before. He just walked right up to me and said, “Do you want to see the haunted grave?”

My young ghost guide

Do I want to see a haunted grave? I always want to see a haunted grave! So I followed him toward the back of the building. I really didn’t know there were headstones back there by the church's basement entrance. He stood there proudly pointing to the grave of  Catherine and Anthony Duche. I asked him, “Why do you think it’s haunted?” He replied, “It just is.” Can’t argue with that logic, now can you? He trotted away.

Fast forward to last weekend when I was back at Old Swedes’ with my  three-year-old daughter. Olivia actually went to summer camp here this past summer, so she’s used to running around the cemetery. We went to the back of the church so I could photograph the Duche grave in better light than was available last time I was here. Olivia climbed up the old brick battlement that separates the complex from the Delaware River as I kicked through the leaves and made some photographs. Turns out that Anthony Duche arrived in the region with William Penn, so he really is one of the city’s founding fathers.

So, as I’m writing this a few nights later, I have my daughter on my lap, with my laptop alongside me on the sofa. We’re watching “educational” cartoons on television. She often asks what I’m doing as I type away, and I tell her “I’m writing.” So just now, totally out of the blue, she says, “Are you writing about Captain Wiccan?” Where did THAT come from? To my knowledge, she’s never heard the word “wiccan.” I swear, kids can sense things.

Further Reading and Reference:

Gloria Dei Old Swedes Church website

The church's history: Gloria Dei (Old Swedes' Church) National Historic Site

Read more about the WPA poster shown at the top of this blog:  http://www.wdl.org/en/item/9570/

“This poster depicting the Old Swedes Church in Philadelphia was made for the Work Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Art Program in Pennsylvania. One of the New Deal programs launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to combat Depression-era unemployment, in 1936–43 the WPA supported the creation of more than 2,000 posters by well-known artists. These posters were used to promote local tourism and to publicize a variety of programs from art to safety.”

The Scarlet Letter

Walking through Boston, Massachusetts (which is easy to do since Boston is, relatively speaking, a very small city), I happened upon King’s Chapel Burying Ground. This is on Tremont Street, next to – you guessed it – King’s Chapel. The building is a quaint old stone church in the center of a densely populated area replete with commercial businesses, tourist attractions, parks, and skyscrapers. Very out of place here – you’d expect to find it out in the country. Which is what this area was, I’m sure, when the church was established in 1686. It's graveyard is Boston’s first and oldest. 

King’s Chapel Burying Ground is separated from the pedestrian sidewalk by a high fence, whose gate was locked at the time I was there in 2007. Not something that would normally thwart me from tip-toeing among the tombstones, but there were so many people around that it felt a bit uncool to do so. I made these photos through the bars.

King's Chapel is still an active (Unitarian) church, originally founded in 1686 as the first Anglican Church in New England during the reign of King James II. The original King's Chapel was a wooden church built here at the corner of Tremont and School Streets, where the stone church stands today. (Wikipedia tells us that) it was situated on the public burying ground because no resident would sell land for a non-Puritan church.

Mary Chilton, the first woman to step off the Mayflower ship is buried here, as is Joseph Tapping, whose stone (at left) shows a skeleton and Father Time battling over the eventuality of death. You can see the phrase "Fugit Hora" on the lower right of the stone  – Latin for "the hour is fleeting."

The graveyard has quite an assortment of ‘skull and crossbones’ type headstones, which are prevalent in New England. You really don’t see such carvings in this quantity anywhere else in the United States. Lest those of us who live outside New England feel slighted, we have far more Victorian garden cemeteries than they do! There are just not many angels or statue and monument-intensive cemeteries in New England, with the exception of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts (America’s first rural garden cemetery, patterned after Pere Lachaise in Paris).

Cherub head, Mt. Auburn Cemetery

Skull and crossbones

Over the course of about 200 years, the skull and crossbones as mourning art evolved into the cherub head with wings. Victorian sensibilities gradually softened the symbolism. Originally meant to portray mortality, the skull and crossbones had fearsome connotations, so fearsome that this once common symbol of death was adopted by many pirates in the early 1700s as the Jolly Roger. It became the symbolic flag of choice to strike fear in the hearts of pirates' victims.

And speaking of tombstone inscriptions…

 A few years after visiting Boston, while reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), I was surprised  to find out his inspiration for the novel came from a stone in King’s Chapel Burying Ground. Supposedly, there’s a headstone inscribed with a script letter “A” which certain people take to indicate 'adultery.' I took some liberties with the photo at the beginning of this article − this is a stone from a cemetery in Delaware.The real headstone was that of Elizabeth Pain, the model for Hawthorne’s adulterous Hester Prynne, which you see in the photo below. Pain's headstone has an engraved coat of arms in which the letter 'A' appears in the shield to the right of two lions.

Elizabeth Pain Headstone (ref.)

The Scarlet Letter is a classic American novel, but without a doubt, a tedious read. It’s a fictional story, set in mid-seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, which  tells of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an adulterous affair. She is made a public example by being jailed for the crime of adultery and is derided by the good Puritans of Boston. Struggling to maintain her dignity, she is forced to wear a prominent scarlet letter 'A' on her breast (a patch of cloth embroidered to all her clothing) for the rest of her life. Not only does she soldier her way through adversity, but she protects the father's identity by not divulging it. As a result, flawed Puritanical thinking puts all the blame on her. The story is as much social commentary as Hawthorne embarrasses us into realizing that morally, no one, especially the Puritan townspeople, is any better than his main character. This is especially evident when the reader learns the father is none other than the town's own esteemed young priest! Hawthorne succeeds in making the point that nothing is sacred, that we are all flawed - in other words, we are human. Not one of us is any better than the other.

King's Chapel Burying Ground is actually mentioned in the final paragraph of The Scarlet Letter:

So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial–ground beside which King’s Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tomb–stone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate—as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport—there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever–glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:— “ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES” - The Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne

Sam Bellamy's Jolly Roger flag (ref.)

Nathanial Hawthorne was actually a descendant of John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials. Nathaniel added the 'w' to his name to distance himself from the horrors and embarrassment of his familial past. (What a difference a letter can make.) We don’t hear John’s name nearly as often as we hear about that other holier-than-thou witch burner, Cotton Mather (which happens to also be the name of a great power pop band), who lived in Boston at the same time as John Hathorne. Mather, by the way, also presided over pirate trials, attempting to extract confessions and reform them as they awaited the hangman's noose. He was involved in the trial of Sam Bellamy’s crew, as a result of the wreck of the pirate ship Wydah off the coast of Boston in 1717. Different pirates used different flags, and Bellamy's flag, coincidentally, was the aforementioned Jolly Roger.

Even if you're not a huge fan of history, Boston is well worth a visit. They've got a great hockey team and more private ice cream parlors and doughnut shops per capita than any city in America! And with Mount Auburn Cemetery just a couple miles from the center of town, what's not to like? 

Further Reading: 

King's Chapel Website
King's Chapel Burying Ground
Expedition Wydah, by Barry Clifford

The Graves of Pirate Island

I learned about Petty’s Island from a photographer friend of mine. About a year ago, he told me about an abandoned graveyard on an island off the Camden (NJ) shoreline—at least that's what I THOUGHT he said. Of course I was up for such an adventure. Problem was, he didn’t know exactly where the island was or how to get to it. He suggested we might have to rent a rowboat. I was intrigued. After a few miscommunications (I don’t hear very well—too many KISS concerts as a teenager), I realized that Glenn, a Professor of Art History, was not talking about a cemetery, he was talking about a tugboat graveyard on the island! Alright, I’m still down with that—it has to do with death and dying.

So I began to wonder why, after living in Philadelphia for thirty years, I had never heard of this island. After talking about it with several people, including fisherman with whom I work, I realized that no one seemed to know about it! I became more intrigued. I pictured a small tree-covered expanse of land, closer to the Jersey side of the river, littered with scuttled rusty tugs and other nautical detritus. Glenn and I would row out to it in the mist, across the channel, cameras and adrenaline at the ready.

I did some research. Around the late 1700s, Petty’s Island was a — PIRATE HANGOUT! A robbers’ nest for seafaring criminals who either knew they were wanted by the authorities or did not expect to be welcomed by them with open arms. Since they could not set foot on the mainland, they would drop anchor on Petty’s Island, where they probably built the first gambling casinos and slots parlors (I would assume). Man, if I had a metal detector, I wouldn’t be looking for lost rings at the beach in Atlantic City, I’d be on this island! I mean, I kind o fancy meself a pirate anyway—I carry an old, wooden-handled iron hook with me when I go exploring in abandoned cemeteries (as my father used to say, it’s not the dead you need to fear—it’s the living). And I’ve been known to enjoy the odd pirate cruise, which is a fine way to meet comely wenches (see "Philly Pirate Cruise" link below).

And just so you don’t think Petty’s Island is just ANY old pirate island, here’s its pedigree:

[Petty’s Island] is thought to be the place where Captain Blackbeard docked his ship when visiting Philadelphia. The island was a hotbed for gambling and dueling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and acquired a reputation for lawlessness and danger; adding to this danger was the large number of shipwrecks which occurred around the island, some of which are still visible at low tide.  —Wikipedia

Cap'n Ed

Okay, so now I really wanted to explore this island! But where exactly was it? At one point I told Glenn of a small nautical map and chart shop near the river—The Pilothouse. One day I stopped in to ask some questions. Pirate books lined the windows—“Terror on the High Seas,” “Scallywags of the Caribbean,” that sort of thing. I was feeling the total swashbuckler when I entered the empty store. A little old man (no eye patch) came out of the back and asked if he could help me. I said, yes, and that I might be looking for a map, or some information. “Someone told me there was this island off Camden with an old ship's graveyard…” I swear he responded in near-hushed tones: “Aye, sounds like ye be speakin’ o’ Petty’s Island!”

“So I guess you’ve… been there?” I asked, hesitantly. He said no, but he knew people who had (and lived to tell about it, I hoped.) I asked if he could show me there the island is on one of his maps. He went over to a rack of rolled up charts, chose one carefully, and brought it back to the counter. He unrolled it, weighed the edges down, and began tracing the Delaware River with his finger from Wilmington north. While doing so, I asked, “Do you know how people can get to the island?” To which he replied, “Well, there’s a bridge. You can drive over.” What? Oh. My grandiose piratical fantasy fizzled out.

Then his fingertip lands on the part of the map depicting Petty’s Island. It’s the size of Texas. It’s no small, tree-covered island at all! No wonder no one knows its there—if you look across the Delaware River at Camden from the Philadelphia side, the coast line you see is actually the freaking ISLAND, It’s that big! (Between 300 and 400 acres, by some accounts, just under the Jersey side of the Ben Franklin Bridge.) Another fantasy dashed. The island is separated from Camden by a narrow river channel. To add insult to injury, the mapseller THEN adds, “I think it’s owned by CITGO, they have an oil refinery there.” Turns out the island is actually owned by the Venezuelan government (!), which in turn owns CITGO. Whaaatt…?

The Island
Hugo Chavez owns it. New Jersey controls it. Developers and environmentalists covet it. And one brazen trespasser wants us to pay homage to its forgotten king. Welcome to Petty's Island, a fin-shaped slice of strange, in the middle of the Delaware River.

—Otterbein, Philadelphia City Paper, Jan. 26, 2010

Glenn had not played me for a fool. He just had the same limited information as everyone else. Perhaps he had come across the newspaper article cited above. This article refers to a Northeast Philadelphia cemetery in which descendants of the island’s “King,” Ralston Laird, are buried. Not content with simply referencing Otterbein’s account, I went to the Knights of Pythias Cemetery in North Philly (near Juniata Park) to find and photograph the stone myself. This cemetery, like some others in the Philadelphia area, was at some point left to ruin (which brings to mind homeboy Ben Franklin’s quote: "Show me your cemeteries, and I'll tell you what kind of people you have"). Happily though, this particular cemetery in which we find the Laird family plot, seems to be undergoing restoration. About a third of the grounds is still an overgrown forest, with an oddly imposing twenty-foot-high bamboo glade enveloping dozens of headstones smack dab in the middle of the woods! This certainly gave a more tropical feel to my pirate adventure.

Laird was one of the final inhabitants of Petty’s Island, having died in 1911. He’d immigrated from Ireland to Philadelphia in the 1850s, but due to persecution of the Irish, he adopted Petty’s Island as his home. During the 52 years he lived there, he welcomed other immigrants who were having difficulty adjusting to their new world. A community was built, people fished, farmed, and lived with minimal taxation. After Laird’s death, the island appears to have been purchased by the Venezuelan government, and used as an oil refinery/holding facility for its national petroleum company, CITGO.

The island’s history is brief. Originally purchased from the Lenni Lenape Indians in 1678 by Elizabeth Kinsey (a Quaker who had fled persecution in England), it was later sold to William Penn (in 1681). John Petty bought it in 1732. The island’s pirate era may have coincided with its period as a slave trading depot, in the late 1600 to early 1700s.

Petty's Island, showing access road from Camden

During an excursion to Camden in search of the nearby abandoned Johnson Cemetery (see link BELOW), I found the access road to the bridge to Petty’s Island to be gated and guarded by CITGO personnel. After a few phone calls, I was told that it was private property and that no one was allowed on the island save employees. I don't know about you, but that sounds like an invitation to me!



Further Reading:

"The Island" in Philadelphia City Paper
The Fight to Save Petty’s Island
The Film, “Petty's Island: A Sacred Part of America’s Story” 
Philly Pirate Cruise
Links to Abandoned Johnson Cemetery blogs: (1) and (2)

Pirate Graves!

Okay, so after not being able to find the blasted pirate grave everyone photographs in Tampa's (Florida), oldest cemetery, "Oaklawn," this past weekend, I head over to the Italian Club Cemetery in Ybor City. It promises more white marble than any of the other possible local choices. Ybor is slightly east of Tampa and is more residential and industrial than Tampa. Like most interesting cemeteries, The Italian Club Cemetery is in a kind of run down section of town. Great BBQ place nearby, tho--"Nephew's Auto Detailing and BBQ."

Driving over here with the air conditioning on my rental car, I was not prepared for the heat-- 96 degrees with 85% relative humidity, which made the "Real Feel" temperature 104 degrees! With the clear sky, I was sunburned within 15 minutes! Crazy weather--the forecast for later that evening: "Gusty winds 35 to 45 mph will occur. Frequent lightning is expected. To be safe go indoors immediately. If caught outside... find a low spot... and stay away from tall objects." Good thing there are no tall obelisk grave monuments hereabouts.

The Italian Club Cemetery is similar in layout to The Italian Cemetery in Colma, CA, (tho smaller) which is to say unlike any other Italian cemeteries I've ever seen. The photo at right shows the neat and orderly, ultra planned rows of glossy marble slabs with their intricate headstones. Beautifully detailed mausoleums border this extremely well-preserved cemetery. The unusual thing about many of the memorials here (and what differentiates it from the cemetery in Colma) is the plentiful mosaic tile inlaid into the tombs and headstones (note top photo). Apparently this is unique to Tampa cemeteries. Very beautiful, and certainly gives one a feeling of celebrating life. That is, until you kneel on one baking in the sun with your bare knees! At that point you end up inventing new curse words and alarming the passersby.

To be truthful, there are no passersby. No resident in his right mind seems to venture outdoors here in the summer. You see very few pedestrians in Tampa and Ybor City. In this weather, people leave their air-conditioned homes (no matter how humble), get into their air-conditioned cars, shop in air-conditioned stores, then return home. Here's a picture of me recuperating in my air-conditioned rental car after half an hour in the cemetery. Great art comes from great pain! After cooling down a bit, I tooled over to Nephew's BBQ and had this delicious smoked sausage dinner for only $5!

While there were no large cemetery angels here for me to photograph, I was intrigued by the multi-colored tile inlays. Each tile is about a square inch. The ornamentation was supposedly the invention of Sicilian immigrant Francesco Constantino, founder of the Constantino Monument Co. in 1906.

The family story is that Francesco had decorated many Ybor homes and gardens with his mosaic tiles. After a child's death, a client asked him to fashion a pretty tile gravestone. More soon followed. To read more about this and other actual historic information on the Italian Club Cemetery (as oppposed to my subjective ramblings), do click here.

Cemetery Book Recommendation!