Toy Story … in an Abandoned Cemetery

This is my gratuitous Valentine’s Day post – you’ll just have to bear with me. Valentine’s Day is not the subject of the post, but apparently, there is some love involved. Tough love, maybe? You only hurt the ones you love? Again, bear with me (nyuk nyuk). If you’ve ever walked through a cemetery, you’ve probably seen stuffed toy animals on graves. Usually childrens’ graves. A common practice, leaving such an offering, a remembrance, perhaps. But in abandoned cemeteries? 

Abandoned cemeteries are a form of dystopia, to be sure. The environment – meaning nature – is usually in the process of destroying what humans built. For the past twenty years a Victorian-era cemetery in Philadelphia has been in a sad state of disrepair, only accessible to those who the owner or caretaker allows in. Many wonder how it got this way, but the real question on everyone’s mind is:

Why are there so many toy stuffed animals lying about throughout Mount Vernon Cemetery? 

There are no visitors to place them on graves in loving memory of the deceased. There are no visitors. There is no visitor access. You can almost picture some hideous beast living in its burrow, periodically feasting on stuffed animals. The ones you see here, matted down with weeds and rain, well, don’t really belong here, do they? The trapped, partially dismembered clown fish above has a look of fear in its eye. Stuffed Animal Dystopia.

Its almost as if some beast killed them with its poisonous saliva and secreted a fluid to trap them in weeds until it later required a snack. Much like an insect that gets caught in a spider’s web. Perhaps this is simply attribution bias on my part. Perhaps not. One poor toy was in the process of being dragged into the beast’s lair as I stumbled upon the massacre scene. You can just hear Jennifer Lawrence singing, “The Hanging Tree,” right?

Into the lair of the beast ....

Do the toys get thrown over the fence by the caretakers of the active cemetery next door, as they clear graves prior to mowing? Then something, or some things, retrieve the toys and drag them through the fence into the abandoned graveyard. The mind wanders to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book ..and the toys Bod may have left lying around the cemetery in his formative years.

A fox, perhaps, requires such playthings? That, apparently, is the general thought if you read the Instagram posts by the volunteers now caring for the cemetery.

So, first off, Mount Vernon Cemetery in Philadelphia is no longer abandoned. Technically, it never was. It was simply ignored by its owner - for about twenty years. It is currently being maintained by many dedicated volunteers. There are regularly scheduled cleanup days and occasional tours, but access is closely controlled. Here’s a photo of my friend Kim posing with some bears during a recent tour.

Mount Peace Cemetery, next door, has always been well-cared for. It seems likely that somehow, these small grave decorations travel from there into unkempt Mount Vernon next door. Perhaps the wild foxes that prowl the wooded grounds of Mount Vernon steal these objects from Mount Peace in the night - they snitch Winnie-the-Pooh from a defenseless grave, and abscond through some hole in the cyclone fence into the wild next door. But to what end?

Mount Vernon’s twenty-seven acres is probably twenty percent cut back at this point, with nature having a twenty-year lead on the humans trying to tame the bush. So there are plenty of hiding places for fox, deer, and so on. I’ve seen small herds of white-tails leaping through the underbrush. Sometimes you’ll even see shredded toys, along with …. bones?

So, do the red foxes drag the stuffed critters into their burrows for padding? Groundhogs do this – but with them, its usually the flags from the little flagpoles people stick on graves. But then, why are they scattered all over the grounds? That’s like saying if humans are descended from apes, then why are there still apes?

What I don’t know about the housekeeping habits of small woodland creatures could fill volumes. Perhaps instead, UFOs are involved. Whatever the case may be, if you find yourself walking through a more-or-less abandoned cemetery alone and you round a bend to find this Ted smiling at you in the middle of the road, your brain does not race for a logical explanation. Your brain screams.

 

Death - A Love Story

For this month of February, I present to you a labor of love that has totally moved people – literally so. I recently met a woman who, as a volunteer, participated in the excavation and moving of about 250 bodies from a cemetery. Her great-grandparents were among the exhumed.

Occasionally in my Cemetery Travels, I’ll come across a situation that is just too weird for words, but it doesn’t stop me from trying. This is one such situation. I don’t profess to find answers to life’s little mysteries – I just present them to you. If you find a way to wrap them in a neat package of understanding, all the better.

The woman in question was working with a group of archeologists who were carefully and respectfully removing bodies as part of a cemetery renovation. The bodies were reinterred on the other side of the cemetery. If the coffins and concrete crypts were intact, these were moved. If not, the bones and other remains and artifacts (clothing, jewelry, etc.) were boxed and buried in large concrete vaults. Along with gravestones and other markers, all this was moved to the other side of the cemetery.

Probably the most astonishing things she showed me were video still images of her interaction with her great grandparents’ remains. It was unclear whether she was as intimately involved with any other exhumations. She had an image of her grandfather’s skeleton lying inside his mostly-disintegrated wooden coffin. The photograph was taken from above, looking down into the grave. Either the coffin lid had disintegrated or was removed, and one could see his skeletal torso, head, and shoulders as he lied face up grinning at his new fans. She had another image of her holding his skull. 

At the time I thought it was awfully weird and now I wonder if I could ever do such a thing. Obviously, one must become somewhat detached from the familial relationship. Her experience was certainly a labor of love, one she felt needed to be done. I didn’t think to ask if she knew them while they were alive. I certainly appreciate her candor and possible need for personal involvement, but the whole scenario is rather odd. I don’t know that I’ve ever run across anything  like it in my fifteen years of Cemetery Travels.

Animal bones found in a cemetery

Finding bones in a cemetery is always a startling thing - even though you know full well you're standing on a field of bones. Most likely, however, the ones you find are the non-human kind. The photo at left is my friend Patricia holding bones of two animals found together in an abandoned cemetery. Some people even go looking for such things! I once met a woman met who makes jewelry out of tiny animal bones she finds in the woods behind an old cemetery. Apparently when owls gobble up tiny animals, they regurgitate a ball of indigestible waste (an “owl pellet”) which is comprised of the bones of their prey. (Who knew?) She hunts for these little crusty balls of regurgitated animal bits, picks them apart, and uses the bones to make lovely earrings, pendants, and necklaces.

But I stray from my story; back to the cemetery excavation. The cemetery volunteer woman had photos of coffins and vaults in various states of being unearthed. Caskets sticking out of a wall of dirt is just an odd thing to see – it’s as if you're looking at a cross-section of the cemetery ground cut about twelve feet down, the ground a honeycomb of coffins. Then she showed me photos of herself holding a section of her great-grandmother’s spinal column. Several vertebrae were fused, so she hypothesized that her ancestor had a spine problem when she was alive. 

Alive. It’s really a lot different than being a box of bones, isn’t it? Our volunteer’s love story makes me wonder how you can bring yourself to touch your ancestors’ bones - especially if you had known them when they were alive. I have to admire her strength. 

Would I have kept my great-grandmother’s wedding ring after slipping it off her boney white finger instead of re-burying the ring with the rest of her skeletal remains? I really don’t know. Would you? It seems like such a simple question, but really it’s a very, very deep one - a Valentine's Day question of love, commitment, and respect.

On my way home, my car stereo was playing a song by the band Bright Eyes, called, “We are Nowhere, and Its Now.” The haunting, halting lyrics went:

“I haven't been gone very long but it feels like a lifetime ...  
Stars that clear have been dead for years, but the idea lives on.”

Human Hearts Found in Jars in Cemetery

No one ever accused me of being a man of few words. I mean, given a topic, I can empty the dictionary at it. So the point of this blog is that I recently saw a news story about human hearts being found in jars buried in a cemetery in California. Having been to this particular cemetery two years ago, the story brought to mind a few anxieties and musings I thought I’d share with you. We all kind of assume it’s just bodies that are buried in graveyards, you know? Somehow the idea of body parts down there skeeves me out.

The jar story gave me the weird feeling that maybe I walked right over them, which is different from finding voodoo dolls or sacrificed chickens, which I have stumbled across in various graveyards. These objects are just evidence of nocturnal rituals, not body parts. The parts found recently were human hearts in jars--with photographs of young couples pinned to them! What’s up THAT? The specific location was Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, CA (see news video link below for story). A cemetery maintenance worker noticed the jars sticking half way out of the ground. Homicide was ruled out, but not necessarily religious ritual.

"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

I remember Holy Cross vividly—it was the final cemetery I hit at the end of a maddening two-day photographic frenzy through the cemeteries of Colma in 2009. The oldest (1887) and largest of the town's cemeteries, it was a fabulous place, with unusual mausoleums and an amazing columbarium. I made the photograph at left of the beautiful marble angel perched atop the gatehouse. If you’re a cemetery photographer, Colma shouldn’t be missed. A city just south of San Francisco where the dead inhabitants outnumber the live ones—1.5 million to 1600, the town's 17 cemeteries comprise approximately 73% of the town's land area! And they call New Orleans the "City of the Dead!"

So did I walk over the hearts in jars when I was there? It freaks me out to think I may have. While it was probably just some practical joke by misguided med students (the hearts had traces of formaldehyde in them), it does conjure up the notion of romantic parting. Romeo and Juliet, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, that sort of thing. Wait-- Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe? In case you didn’t know, baseball great Joe DiMaggio is buried here at Holy Cross. Although he and Marilyn divorced in 1954, his love for her didn’t die when she did. For 20 years, he had a roses placed daily in the vase alongside her crypt at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles. It gave me chills to see one of the roses when I visited in the early 1990s. "Marilyn had asked him for roses – she wanted him to leave roses just as William Powell had for Jean Harlow after her untimely death in 1927. It’s funny the things people say, and the things people remember." (from Marilyn & Joe – The Longest Goodbye).


As for hearts entwined, the practice of removing the heart and burying it apart from the rest of the body was really not that unusual in Victorian times (1837 – 1901), a period when the romanticism of Valentine’s Day reached its peak. To officially have one’s body buried in the family plot and one’s heart buried with the spouse satisfied both allegiances with proper Victorian propriety.

I have a friend who used to work at a cemetery and one time he was asked to compare the burial records of a particular family crypt with the actual spaces available.  Apparently, there was a planned burial and the cemetery needed to make sure there was room. So he went down into the underground mausoleum, counted the used and unused crypts, noting the plaques on their covers. Next he went through that family’s interment records. As he read through the death certificates and compared them to the crypt numbers, he came upon something unusual (to him at the time). The notations read something like (and I’m making these names up):  “Crypt 1 - Jacob Smith, 1873,” “Crypt 2 - Lucretia Smith, 1889.” The next one said something like “Crypt 3 – Randolph P.  Smith, 1875; the heart of Marietta Smith, 1878.” The records indicated that Marietta's heart was buried with her husband’s body in his family tomb, while her body was buried in her family’s burial place.

So were the Holy Cross hearts actually a statement of romantic love? It will be interesting to see what the police turn up. Fascinating fact does sometimes make fiction unnecessary, you know?

News video link to original story
Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery website
Marilyn & Joe – The Longest Goodbye