What's Buried in that Graveyard?

I mean, besides the obvious stuff. I was rather shocked to find out from a cemetery grounds keeper friend of mine some of the things that he and his workers find on the grounds. Now, I’m not talking about some abandoned graveyard out in the woods, but rather a nice well-kept, city cemetery. The cemetery in question is large enough that visitors can easily drive a little way and be out of sight of the people in the office.

When you or I walk through the occasional cemetery, we’re not inclined to notice something that was not there yesterday – a small mound of dirt, an item sticking out of the ground. But people whose job it is to care for the monuments, the stones, and the grounds DO notice such things. And they’ll typically remove them.

Voodoo doll, Atlantic City Cemetery

The typical voodoo dolls are found, to be sure, along with the dead chickens. I’ve seen these too, but there are creepier things. One time my friend saw something sticking up a bit out of the ground near a grave. Upon investigation, he pulled out a three by ten-inch parcel wrapped in a scarf. He was curious, so he unwrapped it. Inside were two face-to-face Barbie-type dolls, naked, with coins and pieces of broken mirror between them.  One had a pin stuck in her.   

Another time, he found a plastic shopping bag full of dead headless chickens – in full feather − with a note tied on saying “Neptune.” He assumed this was done by one of these whackos whose job it is to warn us about space aliens – until he read in the newspaper the following week about Yvon Neptune, Haiti’s imprisoned Prime Minister. Probably had to do with that governments’ (2004) crackdown on voodoo priestesses (I’m not making this up!).

Snake Handle, compliments of Angela Dellutri Photography

Then of course there was the jar of dead snakes he found, swishing around in some liquid, the large jar just sitting on a headstone. All of this stuff, obviously related to voodoo spells, curses and conjures. According to PlanetVoodoo.com, "Snakes are a common subject in the realm of hoodoo and folk magic. Their uses range the gamut from good luck to retribution, and the omens assigned to them as equally as varied." Now keep in mind, this was not in New Orleans, it was in Philadelphia. Whatever the locale, a graveyard is a popular place for voodoo practitioners to enlist the aid of spirits (of the dead) to help with spells. (Check out this video posted by one intrepid cemetery explorer, and see what he found in a cemetery in New York City!)

Even more disturbing than finding snakes in a jar must  have been when the cemetery groundskeeper at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, California found the human hearts in a jar in 2010. (You can read about that in more detail in one of my previous blogs, "Human Hearts Found in Jars in Cemetery.")

"Police opened up one jar and found a human heart with the photo of a young man and woman pinned to it. Nearby was a second jar with the same contents, but bearing a photo of a different young man and woman. Officers also found partially burned cigars and candles…"

-The Oakland Tribune, 10/22/2010

Though I’ve never personally found snakes or hearts in jars, I started thinking about the weird stuff I have come across in fifteen years of cemetery travel, and wondered what other people had found. So I began a Facebook Group called “Unusual Cemetery Objects,” and encouraged people to post their findings. I was kind of hoping to tap into the experience of the cemetery groundskeeper, but so far, they are a shy bunch. I assume this is partly because cemetery managers would rather not make it known to the general public that jars of snakes had been found buried on the grounds. Still I encourage those people to add such findings to the comments at the end of this blog – if you’d rather maintain anonymity, email me and I will add your comments.

So this blog’s title phrase “buried in a graveyard” can also refer to found objects only figuratively buried, i.e. hidden from the public eye. When I asked people about the “Unusual Cemetery Objects,” they’d found, I did get some unexpected responses. While people certainly photograph odd-looking monuments and casket vaults, they typically don’t photograph the surprising things they come upon, like homeless people or nude model shoots (both of which are fairly common).

Here is a list of a few things people posted on my Facebook Group page, “Unusual Cemetery Objects:”

•          stack of blankets and a comforter in a bricked in plot (homeless people apparently camped there)
•          bullet holes in ceramic death portraits
•          helium balloons tied to headstones in Scotland
•         a dead body … came across police investigating the body of a dead prostitute
•          a music video shoot with model and fog machine  [popular with the Goth set – ed.]
•         a casket key         skeleton gloves in a trash can
•         a headstone where a local serial killer scratched his name on the back
•         grass that won’t grow on a plot
•          the top of a skull in a pit in Pere Lachaise
•         goat’s head
•          Someone ELSE putting flowers on YOUR loved one’s grave!

That last one might just be the most unnerving! Which goes to show that there’s a world of life in cemeteries that we don’t normally see.

Headstones appear inside fallen tree!

When I read one person’s comment about the skull at Pere Lachaise, I was reminded of the human teeth I found in the Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans. I scooped up a handful of the gravelly walkway material because I thought it looked like broken up seashells, which it was, mostly, but there were also a half dozen teeth in my hand! (Once you learn about the above-ground burial techniques common in the area, you realize this is not unusual. But still ….)

Stuffed lynx (or perhaps an ocelot?) with garden furniture inside mausoleum!

Dead fox, Mt. Moriah Cemetery, Phila.

I’ve seen animals in cemeteries, live and dead. And bones. Bones are a strange thing to find in a graveyard, which is kind of funny and ironic when you think about it. I once found a pile of animal bones in the shape of the skeletons of the animals, probably wild dogs. They laid there along with three skulls of roughly the same size. They either fought each other to the death or this was the ancient wild pit bull burial ground.

Who knows what evil lurks?

One of the oddest things I ever saw in a graveyard was a freshly-dug, two-foot-square cement-filled hole, with a dog's footprints in the cement! This was among other graves in an abandoned cemetery. Kind of reminded me of an old, hand-painted plywood sign that used to be on the fence at Evergreen Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey, which said, "No unauthorized burials permitted."

But really, what’s the worst possible thing you can find in a graveyard? Yeah, the hearts in a jar was pretty gruesome, but compared to the horrible things living people do to each other, it’s nothing.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Angela Dellutri for the use of her Snake Door Handle photograph.

Cemetery Trees

No one would argue that the gnarly old cemetery tree adds a creepy ambiance to any graveyard photograph. I’ve used this to great effect myself, but never actually paid much attention to the tree, other than as a compositional element. I'd simply been using the tree for my own purposes! What I don’t know about plants and trees could fill volumes. Having lived all my life in the Northeast part of the U.S., I can tell the difference between pine trees and roses, but that’s about it.


Due to my photographic cemetery excursions, however, I've  learned a bit more about trees and plants. I believe it all began when I came home from a cemetery after tramping through a patch of fallen ginkgo berries (which are actually seeds, and look like large grapes, right). Ginkgo biloba (its scientific species) extract is reputedly a memory-enhancer. I can vouch for this--my family vividly remembers the day I came home with the berries on my shoes -- they smell like dog doo. 

What actually prompted me to write this blog was seeing the current crop of dropped fruit from an osage orange tree in St. Peter’s Church Cemetery in Philadelphia. The monstrous citrus-y fruits litter the cemetery in the Fall, like so many chestnuts! Inedible to humans, these “hedge apples” as they’re sometimes called, inspire a manic nut orgy among the local squirrels. The two-pound (!) fruits drop and smash on the tombstones and litter the cemetery during the months of October and November. This type tree is not native to Pennsylvania, but Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas. 

Nineteenth century landscapers and architects who designed America’s rural “garden” cemeteries wanted them to be fabulous arboretums as well as sculpture gardens (these cemeteries are no longer rural, as their cities have grown around them). The first two in the U.S., Mount Auburn in Cambridge Massachusetts and Laurel Hill in Philadelphia, have more than their fair share of exotic plants and trees.

When I say exotic, I don’t mean the cultivated marijuana crop I stumbled upon in an abandoned cemetery, but rather LEGAL botanical curiosities that are not native to the geographic region in which the cemetery resides. The cemetery designers wanted these new memorial parks to be pleasant and interesting places that would help dispel the gloom of death. Exit the skull and crossbones, enter the pretty angel statues. Ornamental plants and trees that could be expected to thrive in the cemetery were imported from distant lands—geographic regions of the world with similar climate.

Places of splendid horticulture and statuary were wildly popular with the Victorian public, so much so that cemeteries like Laurel Hill in Philadelphia had to issue admission tickets and install a turnstile for horse-drawn carriages to regulate the amount of traffic through the cemetery! Laurel Hill has its share of unusual (to this area) plants, e.g. wild yuccas (at left), gigantic holly trees with bright red berries, and the most enormous ginkgo tree I’ve ever seen (below right). Native to China, ginkgos were brought to Europe in 1690. You would think this hearty tree would grow just about anywhere, as ginkgos were about the only living thing to survive the 1945 atom bomb explosion in Hiroshima, Japan. However, people might be selective about where they plant them because of their odiferous fruits.

The American garden cemeteries were of course copied from the original designs by the English and French, who created Kensal Green, Highgate, and Pere Lachaise in Victorian Times. This was the era, in fact, when “botanical science” was quite popular and fashionable--a pastime in which male cemetery planners saw fit to partake. Prior to that, botany was viewed as mainly a female activity (as it didn't involve such manly endeavors as killing animals or people). To this end, early landscapers of garden cemeteries were apt to intend a cemetery’s botanical garden to be as much an educational attraction as a picturesque design element. Labeling plants and trees with their common and scientific names, for instance, was common in such early garden cemeteries as Mt. Auburn. 

The Victorian cemetery was the precursor to the public park as well as the art museum, as such things did not exist at the time. The intent was a getaway from the noisy city, where people could stroll, picnic, and enjoy the fresh air in an idyllic sculpture garden. I was reminded of this yesterday while I was photographing the colorful Fall foliage at The Woodlands Cemetery in West Philadelphia. A couple and their little girl were frolicking on the grounds playing hide-and-seek among the monuments! 

"For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen; Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green." -- G. K. Chesterton, 1914