Locked in the Cemetery!

Over the years I’ve been locked in cemeteries, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (!). It has come to my attention that this has happened to other people as well. Intrigued, I am, so I want to gather these stories of other peoples’ experiences and publish them here. So please email me your stories, long or short, if you would like to be included in upcoming blog posts. We can publish names and dates if you wish, or you can remain anonymous. 

So please share! Send your stories my way to be included in future blog posts:

mourningarts@yahoo.com or Ed.stoneangels@gmail.com

One of my accidental lock-ins that I’ve already written about on The Cemetery Traveler is titled (drum roll please) … “Locked in and Climbing Out” and is about a situation my brother and I found ourselves in back in the early 2000s. This occurred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. I lived in Philadelphia at the time (still do), so the public transit trek to the Bronx was no small feat. We ended up not paying attention to the “Gates Close at 4 pm” sign and got locked in. We climbed out over the fence, which was no small feat for him. You can read the entire account here.

The second time I was locked in a cemetery was Woodlawn, a couple months later, this time on purpose. I wanted to photograph certain statues as the night closes in, as the shadows flee. I was by myself and certainly didn’t expect to have my first unexplainable paranormal experience. I’d always felt that if I didn’t believe in them, they wouldn’t try to get me. Oh well. Always leave a crack in the shutters so you know when daylight comes, as poet Edward Hirsch says. You can read about my chilling experience here: "Voices in the Cemetery." 

So of course I would love to hear about your scary experiences, but I’m interested in everything that broadens this horizon. The surprised feeling you get when you realize you’ve been locked inside a cemetery is strangely akin to being buried alive – or worse yet, public speaking. Panic ensues. The situation is worse, or course, when your car is locked inside with you! 

Around 2020 in the Philadelphia area, I’d noticed that cemeteries were beginning to take a kinder, gentler approach to handling idiots (like me) who found themselves accidentally locked in a cemetery. The sign at left is incredibly helpful, but what about the in the pre-cell phone era? West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, PA, installed a sign on the inside of its front gate that read something like, “If locked in, honk horn.” I guess this is great if you have your car, but if you don’t, you’re stuck inside where the zombies will eat you. I’d assumed that the horn thing was cleverly rigged up to an automatic gate-opener device, but it turns out that is not the case. A friend who worked there told me that the funeral director on-call would receive a notification that a car horn beeped, and they would then have to drive to the cemetery to open the gate. Can’t imagine the on-call person was thrilled with that task.

In the winter of 2020, I was heading toward the exit gate at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, PA, during a wicked snowstorm (yes, I was in the cemetery photographing snow as it accumulated on the monuments). Closing time was 4 pm, so at 3:30, I drove toward the entrance hoping they didn’t close early. Through the steadily falling snow, I’m watching the guy close one of the two gates! I pulled up to him and asked if they were closing early. He said yes. I said, “What would I have done if I came here at 4 pm and found the gate locked?” He said, “Just call 911 – the Police have a key.” Huh. That would never have occurred to me. Good to know!

Prior to cell phones, I'm guessing more people got locked in cemeteries. I posted requests for these stories on social media back around Halloween 2025 and then during a street party near my house, one of my neighbors came up to me and said, “Hey, I have a cemetery story for you.”

She proceeds to tell me that back in college (I’m guessing around 2005), she and a classmate were accidentally locked in a cemetery. They had to climb out over the fence. I asked where this was. To my utter surprise, she said Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx – the very same one that I had been locked in! (Alright, maybe I should narrow my sights here and focus just on people who have been locked in this particular cemetery!) She said as part of an English Literature project, they thought it would be cool to visit writer Herman Melville’s grave. They ended up getting locked in accidentally. When I asked her how they got out, I did expect a surprise ending, but, she said matter-of-factly,“We climbed over the gate.” Oh. No scary experiences, nothing? Nope. I did mention to her that if it was the rear, Jerome Avenue gate, it was the same one my brother and I climbed over. Not an insignificant feat, I might add, as the gate is probably twelve feet high.

I suppose what got me thinking about collecting these stories is the 911 call a friend of mine made this past summer from a cemetery in New Hampshire. She found herself locked in at dusk (but, she swears, the gate had been closed PRIOR to the posted closing time!). She had the extra juicy experience of being locked in with her car! At night! I’m not sure how much she panicked (knowing her, probably not much), but she had the presence of mind to call 911. They dispatched …. a fire engine! With flashing lights and everything! One would assume that she explained to the 911 dispatcher that she was locked in a cemetery, not on fire. Regardless, the firemen got out of the truck with bolt cutters and cut the chain that locked the gate! 

Then there was the woman who sent me this story. She called an Uber to pick her up outside New Orleans’ Metairie Cemetery. Not unusual for NOLA, since its cemeteries are one of its biggest tourist attractions. However, she didn’t realize the gates were closed and she was locked in until AFTER she called the Uber. The driver pulled up as she threw herself over the spiked fence and landed in the decorative fountain! The driver never said a word, because one can only assume, Elizabeth says, that it's because “New Orleans is one of the few places in the world where picking up an Uber rider knee deep in a cemetery fountain they just jumped over a fence into, doesn't even rank on the strangest things” they've seen.

Imagine climbing over these spikes at Cathedral Cemetery in Philadelphia!

So, these are just a few examples of what I’ve heard so far. I’m not necessarily looking for dramatic stories, but I am looking for wider fields of fancy, as they say in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. What I’d like to focus on is how you felt when you were locked in. I know how I've felt!

So please share! Thank you!

Send your stories my way to be included in future blog posts:

mourningarts@yahoo.com or Ed.stoneangels@gmail.com

I’ll leave you with something a groundskeeper once said to me as it was nearing closing time at Baltimore’s Greenmount Cemetery. I was photographing on the grounds and this guy pulls up in a pickup truck. He says, “Gates are closing in fifteen minutes.” I don’t know what prompted me to say, “Then what happens?” Without a pause, he says, “Then we release the dogs.” Good enough for me.

"Tell Me They're Not Zombies...."

Somewhere in 2009, my friend Frank, who works for Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, invited me to do some night shooting with him. Now, I would never pass up an opportunity to be in a cemetery at night--as long as I wasn't alone!

I met Frank on the appointed day at the solemn hour of 10 pm at the cemetery. He unlocked the gate and I entered. We'd planned on Harvest-moon lighting, but there were some drifting clouds which occasionally plunged us into near-darkness. Even by moonlight, its kind of dangerous to step off the roads or paths for a number of reasons--you could fall into a sunken grave or trip over a knee-high tombstone. I've experienced the latter and I must say, its neither good for one's knees nor one's camera equipment.

The celestial light was amazingly eerie, and Frank took great advantage of it with his new Nikon DSLR (which seems to respond to color in a much livlier fashion that my Canon DSLR). The image you see here of the monuments silouetted against the night sky is one of the few useable ones I made. While composing the scene, Frank ambled off to find other scenes to photograph, leaving me alone. I'm a big boy, I can do this. So what if the cemetery exit is a quarter mile away. Just concentrate on my work....nothing to be afraid of--except maybe the five silhouettes of people walking slowly, very slowly, in single-file across the cemetery ridge about a hundred yards away. Gulp.

Frank had locked the main gate behind me after I'd arrived--no one else could've gotten in. I called Frank on his cell phone and asked where he was; he said "Off to your right down by the mausoleums." I told him to come back. He came up alongside me a few minutes later, and with the slowly moving figures outlined against the moonlight, I said to him, "Just tell me they're not zombies."

This photo must have been what I looked like when I saw them! Frank laughed and said "They're ghost hunters, people from the South Jersey Paranormal Research group! They've been here a few hours." He never mentioned there was anyone else on the grounds--I could've killed him. After I got over this business of having the bejesus scared out of me, it occurred to me that we should  scare the bejesus out of the ghosthunters! I mean, their sophisticated video and audio recording devices are not tuned to detect live people, right? Not being cruel, we decided just to go and meet up with them.

The South Jersey Paranormal Research group amounted to about five members, all of whom had devices of some sort to sense and document paranormal activity. They told us about the energy they measured in various areas of the cemetery and the audio recordings of "human" voices they made. A very serious group of people, who have made their findings available to anyone with an open mind about such things. They had visited Laurel Hill prior to us meeting them that night, and you can go to their site and see what they found in 2007. Apparently, this particular cemetery is rife with spiritual activity: http://www.sjpr.org/index.php?page=2&cs=1&art=48

So we never came upon any actual zombies, but we did learn a bit about a different kind of fascination some people have with cemeteries. If you're afraid of going into a cemetery at night, the whole 'scarey ghost' thing can handily be put in perspective with a comment a friend of mine once made. She worked for a cemetery and believed that if a person died under some horrible circumstance, the unruly spirit must hang around the particular site of demise--not the cemetery in which the person's body was laid to rest. Someday maybe I'll believe that, but my imagination still paints too vivid a picture of werewolves with chainsaws for me to venture into any cemetery alone at night!

Cemetery Book Recommendation!