The "White Light" and the Atlantis Society

I’ve long been fascinated with the idea of burial at sea – the ocean as your final destination. The act has many romantic and historical connotations. Every once in a while the “Cemetery Traveler” in me will investigate such a service. Apparently, they exist along the east and west coasts of the United States. One such burial at sea operation is The Atlantis Society, on Lido Island of Newport Beach, California.

Atlantis, the (presumed) mythical “lost continent” that sunk into the sea, is presumably where the Atlantis Society got its name. The name itself conjures up Western Society’s profound fascination with the “lost civilization,” the powerful and advanced kingdom that sank, supposedly, into the ocean over the course of a night and a day, around 9,600 B.C. (ref.)

Newport Beach, California, as seen from across the bay on Lido Isle

I was in Newport Beach this past summer and decided to pay a visit to the “White Light,” the yacht used by the Atlantis Society for ocean burials. “White Light,” of course, is a perfect name for the ship that takes you on your final voyage. People who have had near-death experiences sometimes describe seeing a white light and feeling profound calm, which we assume is God, or heaven, or whatever you believe is supposed to greet you in the afterlife. So whatever you believe the “white light” to be – the Heavenly Presence or a neurological REM intrusion (a sensory mix-up as the brain wakes up) – you must admit that it’s a great name for a boat.

White Light, the boat, is typically docked at the far end of the pier at the Lido Village Marina. Lido is a small island off the shore of Newport Beach. To get there you simply drive through the astounding wealth that is Newport Beach – south on Newport Blvd. (California 55 Freeway), to the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). Cross the PCH (California 1) and turn left at Via Lido (first light across the bridge). You’re now on the tiny island of Lido.

If you know the catchy 1976 Boz Scaggs song, “Lido Shuffle” (here’s a link to it), it will be going through your head as you drive past the palm trees and surfers on the bay. The song, by the way, has nothing to do with Lido Island. However, the lyrics totally describe this extremely affluent area of southern California:

"Lido, oh, oh, oh

He's for the money, he's for the show ..."

I drove across the bridge and made a left onto Via Lido, as the Atlantis Society’s website instructs me to do, then I made a quick left into the public parking structure. The stores and shops along the dock were under construction during my visit, so it was a bit of a challenge finding my way to the bay side where the marina is. Once there, you walk about a city block’s distance to the end of the dock where the “White Light” sign is hung. From a bit away, I saw a fellow hunched down on the deck of a yacht doing some work, and thought this might be the vessel in question.

The "White Light" from the Atlantis Society website

"White Light is a 67 foot LOA Chris Craft Commander, coast guard licensed and certified to carry up to 49 passengers to sea. Roomy, tastefully appointed and fully stabilized, White Light provides the perfect platform for your memorial service. Alcohol can be available upon request as we have a fully licensed and stocked bar." - Atlantis Society website

Unfortunately, the yacht I saw being worked on was the one in the slip NEXT to the empty slip where the White Light should have been. Perhaps it was out performing a burial service. (Burial at sea, as you can see from the AtlantisSociety website, is specifically the “scattering of ashes at sea,” not a full body burial.) I called the phone number on the sign with my cell phone and the gentleman at the other end of the line confirmed my suspicion – the captain had the ship out at sea performing a burial. He would not be back for two hours.

The Service:

"Families choosing to witness the scattering of ashes service will board the vessel at our dock in either Southern California or Washington state. From the berth, the yacht will proceed to a pre-established latitude and longitude."

"Once at that destination, a service is conducted by the Captain or Chaplain as requested followed by a flower toss and our Circle of Tribute. The vessel then cruises back to the dock.

Included in our service are coffee sodas and juices as well as roses for all the guests. Included, upon request, a commemorative certificate which includes the date and location of the final resting place will be mailed to the family." - Atlantis Society website

Should I come back in two hours to see the White Light? Who would disembark? How long would that take? Would that be too voyeuristic on my part? I decided not to wait but rather imagined myself a mourner seated on the “White Light” bench waiting to set out on that last voyage. I wondered what the neighboring yacht owners thought about this – was it like having a cemetery next to your house? The sun was shining, eighty degrees and no humidity - a beautiful day. A young boy was paddling a surfboard across the bay. Calm. I wondered if the mourners on the White Light were dressed in black? How could they even be sad in southern California?

A few years ago I visited with a man who does burials at sea (see link to my blog, "Burials at Sea") and was told that he does not go out to perform the service when the seas are not calm. I imagined all sorts of reasons why, such as safety and comfort to the passengers. What I did not realize until my visit to the Lido Village marina, was that a calm sea in the sunshine is more likely to result in a happy fond farewell. Scattering ashes of the departed by loved ones aboard the White Light should be a focused event, a ritual of closure, maybe even a celebration of life, unmarked by distracting rough seas or bad weather.

The Cost:
Every once in a while one of my Cemetery Travels doesn’t quite end up where I expected. This one ended up mostly in my imagination. Except for the fact that after my return to Philadelphia, I inquired about the price for a burial at sea, performed by the Atlantis Society. For up to six guests the fee is $850.00 and for over six and up to forty-nine the price goes to $985.00. Both are a two-hour service with beverages, roses and a small memorial service.

As I left the dock I walked past a small book shop called Lido Village Books beneath the parking garage. I cannot resist a book shop, especially a non-corporate, non-chainstore operation. Had a nice chat with the proprietor and bought a copy of Stephen King’s autobiographical book, On Writing. King most certainly has thought about the white light and near-death experiences. Regardless, one must admit that “White Light” is a great name for the boat that takes you on your final voyage!

References and Further Reading:

Atlantis Society’s website
Discovery video on seeing "white light" in a near death experience
Things to do on Lido Isle

"Burials at Sea"  Cemetery Traveler blog posting

Beyond the Grave

Around 2008 some friends and I walked a moonlight mile through Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. We started out around 10 p.m. with flashlights. Usually when I do such things, its with photography in mind. However, two of my friends, brothers, were interested more in the spiritual side of things. Neither had ever been in a graveyard at night, though both were believers in the paranormal − which is essentially why we were there – we figured they were ghost magnets.  They weren’t frightened − after all, as children, the brothers would play over a friend’s house, which was a funeral home. They would sneak down the steps on one side of the house, run past the body being embalmed on the table, and up the front stairs back to the land of the living.

'Robert' doll (ref.)

One of the brothers, Phil, has seen and heard things throughout his life, things that convinced him of the existence of the supernatural. So we had high hopes of something untoward happening. About five years before, he had a terrifying experience with a doll he bought over the Internet. No, not that kind of doll, get your mind out of the gutter. This was an evil curse doll like the famed 'Robert' doll from Key West, Florida. (Part of the Robert story where he’s supposedly running through the house reminds me of the Karen Black Trilogy of Terror TV movie, which is not something you want to watch if you have insomnia – you may never sleep again.)

Phil’s doll was actually a stuffed rabbit, which came with a curse. Phil has experienced inexplicable phenomena – voices, footsteps, pictures out of place on the wall – so why he would buy a cursed doll is beyond me. However, when you know people personally who have had such experiences (and you know they’re reasonably sane), you tend to believe them – more so than you would strangers. As we walked through the graveyard, I think we all fully expected something creepy to happen, if only because Phil was open to such things.

Let me mention a couple things about Phil’s rabbit. He bought it knowing full well that prior owners had either had crippling relationship issues or debilitating spinal problems. Within a few months of purchasing the doll, his brother Don’s decade-long relationship with his girlfriend ended and Phil was hospitalized with back problems. After the cancerous tumor was removed some months later, he threw the rabbit down the basement of the old mom-and-pop store where he worked. I asked why he disposed of it there, of all places – why not burn it? Or sell it on eBay? He seemed to think it would cause no trouble down there. And apparently, it hasn’t. Its still there, five years later.

Okay, let’s lighten this up a bit – all true, but a bit too Stephen Kingy. Even I’m getting the heebie-jeebies. Consider the time I was on a plane trip somewhere, and couldn’t help noticing the huge diamond ring the old woman next to me was wearing. After an hour of wondering, I finally had to ask her, “Is that diamond real?” She replied, “Yes, it’s the famous Plotnick diamond.” I apologized that I had never heard of it and she added, “Oh, yes, and it comes with a curse.” I said, “Really? What’s the curse?” She replied, “Mr. Plotnick.”

Ed's ghost behind Receiving Vault

Walking through Laurel Hill that night, we used our flashlights to visit certain statues where ghosthunters had recorded voices. I think if we had come upon a doll or stuffed animal as people sometimes leave at graves, we would have been totally creeped out, but we found none. We also heard no voices. My photographer friend Paul and I did make some photographs that evening, and even did a little experimenting with “light painting,” i.e. making photographs in the dark while selectively illuminating the subject (in our case, cemetery monuments) with a flashlight. No orbs appeared on the photos, however, and all our gear operated just fine.

After several hours of nervous exploration around the cemetery, we (maybe to our relief) experienced nothing ghostly. I did, however, lose my freaking cell phone! We spent the last hour retracing our steps, but couldn’t find it. How it found its way out of the locked holster is beyond me. Almost as if something reached up and grabbed it off my belt. Don kept dialing the number, hoping we’d hear it ring, but without success. We even went and asked the talking statues if they could direct us to it, but they were silent on the subject. So other than losing my cell phone, the escapade was uneventful – at least up to that point.

A few days later someone found my phone. Don had a message on his phone from a woman who had found my phone. When he told me, I joked with him about receiving a 'message from beyond the grave.' Then I started to muse about that possibility. I called the number she left, reached her, and introduced myself. She said she would drop it off at the Laurel Hill office for me. I thanked her profusely and without thinking, asked her how she had found my phone. I asked, “Were you just walking through the cemetery?” She said, “No, it was on my son’s grave.” Sometimes I forget that not everyone visits a cemetery for fun. Quite resourcefully, the woman had examined the last few calls to my phone (from Don, as he had called it repeatedly that night in the graveyard).

The other strange occurrence happened a few nights later, when my photographer friend Paul called me about 11 pm. I was asleep and didn’t hear the call. Next morning I noticed there was a message and played it back. Paul sounded terrified. He was making photographs in the same area of the cemetery we explored earlier in the week. He had set up his camera on a tripod to make long, time-exposure photos and when he looked through the viewfinder, he saw a shadow move past the front of the camera. When he looked up, there was nothing there. Thinking he imagined it, he got ready to take the photograph, looked through the viewfinder, and saw it again! As if a person walked in front of his camera! This is when he got really rattled and phoned me.

I imagine he felt a bit vulnerable as he knew he had a quarter mile to walk through the cemetery to get out! The only other exit was down the embankment to the river. We never heard from Paul after that. His camera was found the next day by the groundskeepers, still locked to the tripod. I’m making this up, of course − Paul was perfectly fine, albeit a bit spooked as he had no explanation for the moving shadows in his viewfinder. I think that secretly, all of us wondered if the rabbit had something to do with it. More power to Paul for being in a graveyard alone near midnight. I wouldn’t be caught dead doing that.

After I showed Phil's brother Don the draft of this story, he offered to take me down the basement of the old store to see the rabbit. Actually he told me I had to take the rabbit if I wanted to use his and Phil’s real names. So I changed them. The rest of the story is true.

Further Reading and Viewing:

Read about 'Robert'
Karen Black Trilogy of Terror TV movie clip

Christmas in the Cemetery

“Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver..’        - from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (1954) by Dylan Thomas

Know what Christmas and photographing cemetery statuary have in common? No? …. Well neither do I. But suddenly, its Christmas, and I feel the need to connect the two. Sure, I could use Angels as the crossover vehicle, but that would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Christmas decorations in cemeteries are generally sad and depressing--I needed something edgier.

I was talking with my Mom recently and I guess because it’s close to Christmas she launched into a story about how much she enjoyed taffy pulls and plum pudding as a child at her grandmother’s house. Her grandparents were Welsh coal miners and celebrated Christmas in traditional ways, playing dominoes and Chinese Checkers, enjoying family. I never knew them, unfortunately--they all died off before and during my early childhood. I picture her as one of the children in Dylan Thomas’ poem, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales.’

“For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine.”

Perhaps the connection between cemeteries and Christmas is that the people in my mother’s story, as well as in Thomas’ poem, are long dead. Friends have died as well—kids I knew and played pond hockey with—fell through the ice and drowned, as Thomas writes, "small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned…”

Not having any particular talent for marrying an assortment of disparate topics together in any sort of cogent narrative, I decided to temporarily shelve this blog. While I usually wear my limitations with pride, I believe, like Keats, that if writing doesn’t come as naturally as leaves to a tree, it ought not to come at all. So instead of forcing myself to continue, I’ll put it aside until the ending ceases to elude me.

There, I’m back. That didn’t take long, now did it? Like writer’s block for Stephen King. To get the incubus of this story off my chest, I drove out to my favorite abandoned cemetery and realized that what I REALLY want for Christmas is snow! I want to see the tombstones and mausoleums in this godforsaken overgrown forest of a cemetery, “in the muffling silence of eternal snows.” What a wonderful decoration that would be!

Snow, a metaphor for purity, always adds a layer of beguiling beauty over the ground, like pancake makeup on the face of a grimy old clown. Such a pall would cover the dumped loads of building materials, the old mattresses and church pews. It may add some adventure as you step through the snow only to smash through some discarded stained glass window or bag of garbage. But all this can only add to the experience. Snow is magical and theatrical at the same time--it would cap and clothe the broken limbed cemetery angels and hide our indiscretions.

“It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. …snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees.”

Me, climbing over a tombstone, desecrated by wreck of a torched car 

In such a winter wonderland, the abandoned cemetery may not seem such a sad place. Like a veil hiding the sins of stolen cars and illegal burials, the snow would make everything sordid appear normal and clean. The feral cats and wild pit bulls will either adapt, or die. The cats turning into polar felines gliding through the drifts, like the ones Thomas describes as he waits to snowball them. One wonders where the feral pit bulls have gone for the winter? Maybe the turkey vultures got them.

I write this as an old friend emails me and tells me he’s having brain surgery in two days, and may not make it. Back yonder, I wasn’t sure how to end this story. Be careful what you wish for. The regret I have is not seeing him as often as I should have, like the regret of not having made the effort to save an abandoned cemetery. Ironic in that the purpose of a cemetery is to help us remember people. When we desert a cemetery, we desert our own history. Do we fear the ghosts of our past so much? Our society is not as apt to pave a cemetery as it is to raze an historic building. The result is that in many cases, the cemetery is simply abandoned. Better that it be forgotten than lost, however, because then there is still hope for recovery.

That’s when it occurred to me—what better way to bring attention to urban blight in need of healing than to light up this old forgotten dump of a cemetery with Christmas Lights! A cause célèbre! If I had the wherewithal, I’d buy a diesel generator, tow it here, and use it to power thousands of big old-fashioned lights that I would string from the peaks and eaves of the old mausoleums!

Wait, I know what you’re thinking—that I’m writing this on my day pass from the asylum. But think of it! With snow falling, standing in the center of a circle of decrepit old tombs, faux dwellings illuminated by joyous lights strung from one to the other, like so many South Philly rowhomes! The mausoleums built on the high ridge are about the only structures you can see from the parkway--imagine the drivers slowing down to look! Imagine this circle of mournfully extravagant, blocked up and grafittied memorials awash in falling snow—a funereal snowglobe of emotion that would draw everyone’s attention to mortality, and possibly encourage us to respectfully treat each other as equals, or as Dickens put it, "fellow passengers to the grave."

Christmas lights on Mausoleum Ridge

This Christmas I think of all the familiar voices that have fallen silent in my life, whose lives have vanished and become no more than a dream. This once-grand Victorian cemetery that boasted inhabitants of consequence, now rots in peace. Its residents no more heeded than angels with broken wings. Maybe the Jews have the right idea, avoiding “guardian angels” in their funerary art. A cracked angel is a forlorn sight, and makes one even more sullen when seen in the midst of such squalor. I once asked a Jewish friend of mine why there are no angels in Jewish cemeteries. She humorously answered, “They would interfere with our suffering.”

I’ve just seen the weather report—it’s supposed to snow on Christmas! I’ll dream about abandoned mausoleums strung with Christmas lights, to illuminate the memory of people we’ve lost and people we’ve forgotten. To quote Dylan Thomas, “I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.“ Merry Christmas, everyone.



Notes and Links of Interest:

“A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas
Read more by Dylan Thomas
Lose yourself in the musical imagery of John Cale’s version of Thomas' poem:














Photo of me and the torched, stolen car taken by Frank Rausch.