Scary Cemetery Stories

October is always a good time to write scary stories. Truth is, with all the time I spend in cemeteries, I don’t have many scary experiences. Probably the scariest one of all was last weekend when a thousand-pound headstone fell on someone. She got away with just a broken ankle. Hell, that thing would have crushed her if she had not jumped far enough out of the way. As she walked around it, she felt a vibration, and down it came.

Many people think of scary stories when they think of cemeteries, mainly because that is what the media feeds us. Working in cemeteries, volunteering to help restore them, raising money to keep them going – these activities bring you back to the reality that a cemetery is just a piece of land. Or is it?

Every once in a while, I hear a scary cemetery story, told by some seemingly sane person, even a close friend. As a result, it brings me right back to wonder about the whole idea! It was a nun they say invented barbed wire, Henry James tells us in his novel, Ulysses.

 

So I do hear my share of scary stories, and I thought I’d share a few with you. Here’s one: I was part of a photography workshop in a cemetery recently and a gentleman in his sixties told me that when he and his sister were young, maybe four and five years old, their nanny would sometimes dress the two children in white “Holy Communion” type outfits and lead them to the cemetery next door. This was in the mid-1950s. The nanny would have him and his sister lie down on graves “like little angels” and take pictures of them! Wait! It gets better! He STILL has the pictures!

Here’s another one: It’s not unusual to find dolls and toys propped up against a child’s headstone. Sad, surely. But this toy story has an odd twist. In a Philadelphia cemetery stands a large granite monument with a few names inscribed on it. You wouldn’t even look twice, it looks so average. I was walking past it with a friend of mine who said, “There’s the famous Currie monument.” I asked what she meant. She said a psychic had been through the cemetery and stopped at this monument, saying she sensed a “protector.” Supposedly the spirits of children surrounded this man’s grave. The reason? “He protects them from all the evil in this place.” She told me people put toys behind the monument for the children. I looked behind it and saw a toy truck and a doll.

Graveyard dolls

Speaking of dolls, they themselves are creepy enough, but finding one in a cemetery just adds to their creepiness. I’ve found voodoo dolls and this thing you see here, sort of a mammy doll (also at the top of this article) with a small pillow sewn to her back. The dolls that a friend of mine found once, though, were more disturbing. Knowing a particular cemetery quite well, he noticed something sticking up out of the ground in front of a headstone.

He went to investigate, and found a freshly covered hole, with a doll’s feet sticking out of the ground! He dug around it a bit and was shocked to find two naked Barbies tied together, facing each other, with shards of broken glass between them! Most likely some voodoo or Santeria spell. (Based on a five minute search of the Internet, here’s my analysis: a spell to break lovers apart. Perhaps some interloper trying to separate a couple of lesboterians? Or maybe worse.)

I leave you with yet another doll story, creepy, yet funny in its own way. A woman I know had spent her childhood living near a cemetery. She and her friends learned to ride their bikes there, played there, walked through it to get to school. One of their pastimes was to go into the cemetery at night and hang their Barbies from the tree behind the old crematory, "just to see if they would still be there in the morning." They always were.

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.

Atlantic City Cemetery

Its summer, and everyone goes to the shore. At least that’s what those of us on the east coast typically do. And Atlantic City, New Jersey is one of the popular destinations. What people don’t realize until they visit AC is that it isn’t all beaches and glitzy casinos – that’s just the actual boardwalk area. The rest of the city is really just a shanty town, like Hollywood, California. Kind of run down, with cheesy bars, pawn shops, and cheap motels. Just like me to go for the seamy underside of things, isn't it?

And speaking of Hollywood, the first time I was there, I was walking near Hollywood and Vine when I heard a man calling out, "Ten ninety-five! Fresh cut today!" I turned the corner to see him standing there selling mechanical severed hands that were slowly crawling around the sidewalk! But I digress.

 

Casino-intensive beach area of Atlantic City, NJ (ref.)



Atlantic City is like any other large town - its got laundromats, supermarkets, and ...cemeteries. People certainly don’t associate this beach resort with cemeteries, but such things are a part of life, right? Though you won't find it listed in the tour guide, a two hundred year old city (est. 1854), must have one. Established in 1865, its respectable Victorian-era, non-sectarian cemetery is rather off the beaten path. It’s actually on the mainland (AC itself is on Absecon Island), outside the main city area - in Pleasantville, NJ, to be specific (see map). The two-block long by two-block wide cemetery is nestled between the AC Expressway and the Black Horse Pike (Route 40). I was there back in 2005 and it is definitely worth a visit.

Though I didn't realize it at the time, this short visit to the AC Cemetery provided me with several jumping-off spots for what became related interests of mine – voodoo dolls, mausoleum stained glass, and fraternal organizations in cemeteries. Perhaps it was this Ganesh I came across which removed certain artistic obstacles for me, took the blinders from my eyes, as it were.

Jersey cemeteries - maybe not oddly -  are the only places I’ve ever personally seen dolls, dead chickens, candles, and other ritualistic voodoo-type accouterments. So here's a photo of the doll I came across in the AC Cemetery. You can't see it up close, but the fabric is printed with moons and stars. People do tend jump to the worst conclusion when they see such things, which is not necessarily warranted. We fear what we don’t understand. And I for one, didn’t understand the severed hands sticking up all over the cemetery (top photo). They freaked me out.

 

A ritual evocation of the Voodoo gods and spirits of the dead can be for good purposes as well as for evil. We’re just used to what we see on television, when we really know nothing about any of the various African-derived religions like Santeria and Vodun. However, with Western culture based heavily on movies and television (used to be the other way around), it’s easy to see how peoples’ imaginations can run wild.

It amuses me to see people’s reactions to such things. As I was walking through a cemetery in Camden, NJ back around 1997, I saw a dead chicken on a grave and mentioned this idly to my fifteen-year-old daughter as we walked by. She thought I was joking and physically JUMPED back when she actually saw it! If you search the Web for “Voodoo dolls in cemetery,” you’ll find lots of sensationalistic accounts. Headlines like, "Scouts Find Voodoo Dolls at St. Petersburg Cemetery" are sure to sell papers. This particular one in fact, is quite amusing:

"They looked nothing like dolls," said Bryan McDonough, 12. "They were kind of like ugly creatures that would eat you alive," added his 10-year-old brother, Kevin, a Webelos Cub Scout. - St. Petersburg Times, 2008

Even better than newspaper headlines are the dramatic-to-the-point-of-ridiculous television news stories, like this one from ABC, “Voodoo Dolls Found at Gravesite,” an account of jars of voodoo items found buried under a guy’s headstone in Houston, Texas.

Another item of interest I found and photographed in Atlantic City Cemetery is this broken stained glass window. The place has a smattering of mausoleums on one side. Up to that point in time, I’d never given mausoleums in general much notice. I knew they had stained glass windows and ornate metal doors, but I saw nothing photo-worthy in them. Call it a flaw in my personality. Enter the Ganesh. I guess what drew me to this particular structure was the unusual fact that the stained glass window was on the FRONT of the building, rather than the back, and its glass was smashed, its leading mangled. I guess I’m drawn to the forlorn and damaged more so than to the pretty and preserved. This came to be the beginning of my interest in stained glass mausoleum windows (many of which you can see in my "Mausoleum Stained Glass" album on my Facebook site, Ed Snyder’s StoneAngels Photography). I even wrote a blog about Photographing Mausoleum Stained Glass back in March, 2011.

Oh and the severed hands sticking up all over the cemetery? I found one that still had the Odd Fellows symbol on it - the interlocking rings at the fingertips with the letters "FLT." Mystery solved. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but I later looked it up, which is one of the most interesting things about Cemetery Travel - unravelling these little mysteries that confront you. "FLT" stands for Friendship, Love, and Truth, one of the symbols used by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a benevolent and social society (fraternal organization) which had its origin in England in the 1700s. The local lodge number is written on the palm in this photo.

So for me, the hour-long stopover at Atlantic City Cemetery with my ex-girlfriend was productive, informative, and inspiring. We later went surfing. Feels weird to have written that now, years later, as my two-year-old daughter falls asleep in my arms. Memory surely is not a simple recollection of the facts, is it now? Noted author Brillat-Savarin (see his book below, The Physiology of Taste, 1825) believed that one’s personal experience becomes wrapped up in, and affects how one remembers certain "facts." Remembering is, in part, reliving the situation. Its more than just, "Here's a picture of a voodoo doll I once found." A seemingly short visit to a cemetery can remind you of who you were, and help you to see your present life more clearly.

 For Further Reading:

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