"On the Road" with Jack Kerouac and The Cemetery Traveler

Its fitting that The Cemetery Traveler would visit the grave of Jack Kerouac, pop culture's most famous traveler. I was driving through New England a few years back and made it a point to stop to see his grave, at the Edson City Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Known mainly for his epic travel adventure, "On the Road," Kerouac epitomized wanderlust for an entire generation. He continues to do so now, years after his death. You simply cannot read "On the Road" without wanting to just drive recklessly off into the sunset in search of Meaning. I read it, and bought a convertible. 

So why would I want to visit his grave? Why would anyone want to visit a celebrity's grave? Some of us do this because it enables us to get closer to the person than we could possibly have gotten in real life. For me, I think it was to get closer to the spirit of Kerouac's writing (which was a maddening stream of consciousness style further popularized a decade later by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Kerouac isn't exactly a role model for me, its just that his writing touched a nerve: "Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me."

I think I was driving back from a ski trip in New Hampshire, when I decided to stop in Lowell. Lowell is a mill town, the nation's textile epicenter during the American Industrial Revolution. A workingman's town, and Kerouac's hometown. He was born there in 1922--Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. He was French-Canadian, his parents had immigrated from Quebec, Canada. You'll notice the stone says "Jean," not Jack.

Edson City Cemetery is a relatively large, yet flat and plain looking cemetery. The woman at the gatehouse is happily prepared to give you a map showing how to get to the grave (it is arguably Lowell's most popular tourist attraction). Otherwise it would be rather difficult to find as the grave marker is flush with the ground. Let me rephrase that - its actually easy to find if you just take note of the several cars lined up waiting near the grave. This was the oddest thing! No one would bother you as you paid your respects, lit your candle, or left your token offering. As you drove away, the next car would drive up almost religiously, people would get out, walk to the grave, and spend some quiet moments. What were they reflecting on, I wondered? And why such reverence?

I've visited the grave sites of dozens of celebrities (in their own right) and have never encountered another live visitor! Not that I really expected anyone to be hanging out near mathematician Kurt Godel's grave in Princeton (yeah, I'm a fan), but wouldn't you expect to see at least a few people at Rudolph Valentino's grave in Hollywood? I mean, even given the fact that the Hollywood Grave Line Tours will not allow people to get out and walk around...

Statue near Kerouac's grave

So these people still line up to visit Kerouac's grave, decades after his death. Why? Are they, like On the Road's characters Sal and Dean, actually on a spiritual quest? Why such reverence? Kerouac's friend Jim Holmes said,"though the characters rushed back and forth across the country at the slightest pretext, gathering kicks along the way, their real journey was inward; and if they seemed to trespass most boundaries, legal and moral, it was only in the hope of finding a belief on the other side."

Maybe that's part of the reason I tear off at the drop of a hat in search of new cemeteries to photograph. The creative process of photography has always helped me deal with the world, with personal issues, and even to judge myself (in retrospect, psychiatry would've been cheaper). However, I believe that spending time in cemeteries has helped me search for, and sometimes find, meaning in an otherwise entropic world. Seeing others find meaning in my work has been an unexpected gift. 

Read about Hollywood's bizarre Grave Line Tours
Visit Lowell, Massachusetts

Purchase On the Road and change your life for a mere ten bucks!

Weird New Jersey

"From "Weird Pennsylvania," p. 240

There are a lot of weird things about New Jersey, but what comes to my mind first and foremost are the roadside "attractions." You just don't see as many hubcap pyramids, giant fiberglas people, or googie custard stands in any other state in the Union. Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran recognized this back in 1994 when they began publishing Weird N.J. magazine, a bimonthly offering that served as "Your Travel Guide to New Jersey's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets," to document the never-ending supply of weirdness in their home state.

For those who've never partaken of the Weird N.J. world, the periodical depends in part on contributions from readers. People send in stories and photos related to such weirdness as abandoned mental hospitals, cemeteries, and New Jersey's version of Sasquatch, the 'Jersey Devil." Urban explorers investigate haunted houses, legends, and deserted military bases, often trespassing for the thrill and the photographic "evidence." I contributed a photo essay which was published in the Oct. 2004 issue called "The Parkway as Road to the Necropolis" (view it on the link below), based on my experience photographing in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in East Orange, New Jersey.

The Marks typically answered their own mail back then and were very polite and

friendly to deal with. You kind of felt part of the club if they published your piece! Over time, Weird N.J. grew into a series of books based on the Weirdness of each individual state in the Union, then finally the "Weird U.S"  summary book. This spawned the hit television series of the same name on The History Channel (2004-5), "Weird U.S. -- Real Tales of the Bizarre." The series is a travelogue, as the Marks visit various weird locations around America.

"Weird Pennsylvania," p. 241

Actually, the name of this article should be "Weird Pennsylvania," as that book is really the topic of this blog. Published in 2005, Weird Pennsylvania included two of my photographs in the "Cemetery Safari" section, both taken on a rainy day at Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh. They are the angel at top and the statue of the reclining child here. I was thrilled, of course, and immediately checked the photo credit page in the back of the book to find my name. Not there! I was more bummed out than pissed off, and I wrote the Marks to note this omission. They were very apologetic, sent me a free autographed hardbound copy of the book and promised to correct the error in the next printing. Realistically, I didn't ever expect this to happen, as I'm sure they had more important things to do.

I forgot about the situation until the summer of 2009, when my wife and I were vacationing on the north Jersey coast. We stopped into a store called "Paranormal Books and Curiosities" in Asbury Park. Among the great selection of books, Jill found a newly printed paperback copy of Weird Pennsylvania. Ever the astute observer, she showed me that my name was listed in the photo credits at the back of the book! Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran are real standup kinda guys! True to their word, which made me even bigger fans of theirs than I was before!

Some related links you might find interesting:

Ed's "Parkway as Road to the Necropolis" article on his StoneAngels Website

Weird N.J. website

Weird N.J. on Facebook

Weird U.S. on the History Channel

"Paranormal Books and Curiosities" in Asbury Park, N.J.

Trapped in a Cemetery!

Whenever I photograph in a cemetery, I pay attention to an important sign at the entrance--the one that tells me when "Closing Time" is. Minor detail, but neglecting this has gotten me into some tough scrapes. Not that I'm scared of being locked in a cemetery--walking by a dialysis clinic should be more frightening, you know? All those people on the other side of that wall will probably be dead in a month.

Ignoring the possibility of being attacked by the living dead, getting yourself locked in a cemetery poses a certain inconvenience--especially if you're locked in with your car. At least as a pedestrian, you can climb over the wall...before they release the dogs, that is. Who am I kidding? I don't want to be locked in a cemetery under any circumstances!

Back around 2005, I was photographing in the Woodlands Cemetery in West Philadelphia. This is an oasis of 250 wooded acres surrounded by city, The University of Pennsylvania, mostly. Its a quietly creepy kind of place, with the sculpted hills blocking out  most of the city noise. In his book, "Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries," author Tom Keels quotes an early advertisement for the Woodlands:

"...the decaying bodies of the dead may securely moulder into kindred dust, with an abundant vegetation and free winds to absorb and dissipate all noxious effluvia."

Poetic, don't you think? Certainly not a place you want to get locked up in. Anyway, I vaguely glanced at the closing time sign on the entrance gate when I drove in--4:30 p.m. I spent a few hours shooting, when I noticed an old pickup truck drive by, heading toward the maintenance garage. I glanced at my watch. Hmmm. 4:20 p.m.. Best pack up my gear. I drove to the entrance and, to my horror, the gate was chained shut! My first inclination was to panic. Which I did, quite effortlessly, as I recall, but then remembered the pickup truck. I drove at amazing speed toward the maintenance garage and found a man sitting in the driver's seat of the idling truck. I drove up alongside him and asked as casually as I could if he could let me out. He looked at me and with the few teeth he had, laughed and said, "That's the only way to get you people out of here!" He did let me out.

As I quickly exited the cemetery, I noticed this decoration on the main gate--an hourglass with wings! Time flies, get it? What better symbol to remind one of closing time! Needless to say, I now pay closer attention to closing times.

Obviously its more than inconvenience that makes us prefer to not be locked in a cemetery. We're taught at a young age that there are no such thing as monsters. It can't simply be fear of mortality. What then strikes fear in our hearts? The possibilities are only limited by our imagination....

A friend of mine once worked in a cemetery and told me that she didn't believe there were any 'bad' spirits haunting cemeteries. If a person happened to die a horrible death, the person's ghost would hang around the place where the death occurred, not the body's final resting place. We laugh at comments like this with much bravado sometimes, either due to ignorance or because we're secretly afraid. Sometimes we think we're above all that "superstitious nonsense." I often recall something I heard a mother tell her 3-year-old daughter at a gallery opening in Manhattan for an exhibit of nineteenth century "spiritualist" photography. It was a telling comment on how our views and beliefs change over time. She gestured around the room at all the hanging photographs and said, "This was all before people knew any better."

Pit Bulls, Deer Ticks, and Poison Ivy – The Allure of the Abandoned Cemetery

Last weekend (August 28, 2010), my friend Frank and I explored Mt. Moriah Cemetery (est. 1855) in West Philadelphia. Though I’d been there innumerable times, it’s been years since I’d explored the central monument area, which is way overgrown with trees, cascading picker vines, and poison ivy. Essentially, it’s a forest, only with tombstones in it!

Frank had heard stories about the cemetery being wild and untamed. He asked me if he should bring a weapon. A weapon? Well maybe boots and long pants (even in this heat) because of the deer ticks. Truth be told, Mt. Moriah is in a run down, burned-out section of town (where all the best cemeteries usually are), and I agreed we should at least bring baseball bats. However, he was referring to the “family of wild pit bulls” he heard lived in the cemetery! I had my doubts.

I figured if there was a family of pit bulls, they’d be living in some shelter, e.g. the crumbling brownstone gatehouse. So we decided that should be our first stop! Upon arriving, we explored but only found sordid bedding littered with condom wrappers, and … piles of tombstones. Tombstones? Some from the late 1800s, some from 2006. Why? In looking at Mt. Moriah’s website (listed below), it appears that stones get moved and disappear. A genealogist’s nightmare. They also say if you’re planning to visit the cemetery, “It may be worth a trip, but be prepared for confusion, frustration and disappointment.” Hmmm. Now that’s enticing.

We actually found some interesting things in the open and trimmed newer section of the cemetery (on Kingsessing Ave.), like this marble monument to the General who commanded the Monitor, the Civil War submarine that engaged the Merrimac in the famous battle of the ironclads. Quite a find, certainly not disappointing! We also peeked into the chained-up mausoleum nearby and were surprised to see a shattered marble crypt door allowing a rare voyeuristic view of the 100-year-old wooden casket inside.

We decided to drive as far as we could into the main section of the cemetery, where the tops of very elaborate, expensive, and graffittied monuments peek out of the brush. Some of the original weed-covered roads are still used by people to deliver old sofas and tires to their final resting place, so they are somewhat drivable (a jeep would be your vehicle of choice here). The monument you see in the photo at left is in the center of the forest, and commemorates an 1862 Masonic “Grand Tyler.” Its column must be 40 feet high and 6 feet thick at the base, topped with the largest marble compass I’ve ever seen. After hacking our way to the base of it, Frank astutely pointed out that I was standing knee-deep in poison ivy! We made our way out of the thicket and back to the car. In one area thick with flesh-ripping thorned vines, I bent down to duck under and some critter darted away from me through the underbrush.

Back to the car--driving through this jungle, straddling washed-out craters in the road and avoiding being whipped in the face by tree branches was like being on one of those Disney rides or Universal Studios—you half expect a velociraptor to poke its head out of the thicket! Which is about when we saw the pit bulls…!

Two large brown puppies went scampering off down a path near the monument you see at left. We had stopped here earlier to photograph it, but hadn’t noticed the dogs—of course we were looking up at the time …. Gee, let’s get out now and see how protective the mother is…! No really, at that point, I wished the convertible top of my car went up a bit faster. We decided to bravely drive away.

My car in middle of the cemetery!

At one point on a side road, or path, really, we dead-ended at a pile of lumber and other rubbish (Here’s my car at that point). As I backed the car out for about ten minutes to get to a different side-road so we could turn around without getting lost, it became apparent to me that Saabs are just not good off-road vehicles. Well, their website did say to be prepared for confusion and frustration.... With a sigh of relief, we found our way out of the woods into a clearing, and then back to familiar territory-- the pile of unused concrete crypts near the gatehouse. We were certainly not disappointed that the mama pit bull decided to keep a low profile that day.

Is Mt. Moriah a sad commentary on our city or a wondrous attraction for the urban explorer of abandoned places? I can’t be judgmental as to the former and am sorry that the cemetery has been allowed to devolve to this sad state. However, it allows one to contemplate the detritus of human endeavor. We erect monuments to the deceased (often ourselves) for a purpose, but attempts to preserve memories can sometimes be undermined. Vandals, time, and weather erode efforts at immortality and the corruption of the cemetery seems to affirm, rather than deny the decay down below. Seeing it in this condition, you feel you are witnessing the final disappearance of the spirits of the interred.

Mount Moriah Website

Ceramic Death Portraits

Photograph by Tim Snyder

I've always had a mental block about when exactly my mother's birthday is. August....something. Six years ago today, I got a helpful hint--my dad died around her birthday--August 16th, to be exact. A week before her birthday. I always thought that was unfair of him. But he had ways of making his presence felt, even after death!

He was always critical of the apparent negligence my brother Tim showed toward his cars. Filling them with junk, never washing them, etc. If Tim's cars were children, they would have been removed from his custody by some state agency. On our way out of the funeral home after picking up my dad's "cremains," my mom, my brother, and I found a huge pool of oil under Tim's car. The engine block had cracked. Car was totalled. I think that was dad's last hurrah. As if he were saying, "See?! I told you this would happen if you didn't take better care of that car!"

Anyway, I told you that story to tell you this one. In my Cemetery Travels, I've come across many photo-sensitized tiles--porcelain death portraits--on headstones. You see these mostly in Italian cemeteries, on headstones dated between 1880 and 1930. I convinced my brother and sister to split the cost of one of these so we could put it on Dad's headstone. Well, not exactly his headstone....

His mother's ashes are buried at the stolen tombstone of her parents in a small rural cemetery around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (names witheld to protect me). As the story goes, when my great-grandparents died, one of their grandchildren (my father's uncle) stole a brand new fancy large granite tombstone from down south somewhere. He brought it north and had a stonecarver engrave it. That's just how we roll.

Cremation was my father's request. He would snarl, "I don't want worms eating me!" So we honored his wishes and had his body cremated. We decided to illegally bury the ashes at the site where his grandparents were buried. I say illegally, because you're not supposed to just go bury human remains any old where. Plus, the cemetery would much rather sell you a plot of ground in which to do this. Since we were sort of secretly burying his ashes, I thought there should be some marker for future generations. I thought it would be fitting to at least mark the place with one of these ceramic memorial photographs.

Turns out you can still have these things made (color or black and white photo). A hundred years ago photographs were actually etched into ceramic, or porcelain, and kiln-fired. Today, they can be made the same way, or they can be laser-etched, or simply have a slot into which you slip the photo. We opted for the more permanent design (kiln-fired), which cost about $300. The piece (color image, above), is usually a 5-inch oval, and comes with double-backed sticky tape so you can just stick it to the headstone. We also opted to use a photo of my dad which my daughter took near the end of his life. I thought it made sense to remember him as he was when he "left," as my Mom puts it. That happened to be August 16, the day I'm writing this. Contemporary American photographer George Krause, in his book, "A Retrospective," (Rice University Press, 1991) says that he believes such photographs are "selected by relatives of the deceased for definite reasons, each one mirroring an attitude..." Without a doubt, the photograph we chose for my father mirrors an attitude!

Ceramic Photo Printing
(from "Photographic Facts and Formulas" by Wall and Jourdan,  Prentice-Hall 1976)

There are 4 basic methods of making ceramic or porcelain death portraits, and all of them start with a specially manufactured enamel plaque. The enamel is a soft vitreous ceramic on a copper base. The four methods given are:

1 ) Substitution process -- where a platinum, palladium, gold or other metallic print is made on the enamel.
2 ) Powder process -- based on the facts that colloids lose their tackiness on exposure to light in contact with a bicromate. It is rarely used for paper prints, and its chief application has been for the preparation of reversed and duplicate negatives for photomechanical work, or for making ceramic enamels. For the latter process the image was produced on collodionized glass, to facilitate stripping, and the image transfered to the enamel plaques.
3 )Carbro or carbon printing on the enamel.
4 ) Transfer of a processed colloidal or albumen emulsion onto the enamel surface.

    After any of these processes, the image is coated with a low-temperature transparent glaze, and the plaqued is then fired.


Link to EngravingStation.com, the company we used to have Dad's ceramic photo made.
Link to George Krause's series of headstone portraits, "Qui Riposa."
Link to George Krause's book, "A Retrospective," which features his cemetery photography.

Lock Me in the Cemetery Vault

Sometime in the early 2000s, I went to Historic Laurel Hill Cemetery in Phila, PA to shoot a roll of Infrared Ektachrome film (which is no longer made). It was a bright sunny day in the summer, and the photograph you see here was one of the ones I made that day. The Warner Memorial is a dramatic life-sized (assuming granite cemetery beings are the same size as us) statue depicting the Angel of Death lifting the coffin lid and releasing the soul of the deceased to the heavens.

I shot a few frames and then my camera jammed. What to do? No darkroom nearby. No changing bag, either (all you digital newbies are probably wondering what that is...). See, you can't just open the back of a film SLR without exposing the film to light (which ruins it). In some cases with regular film, you can shut yourself up in a closet or bathroom with the lights out and unjam your film. Infrared is different. This film has to be loaded and unloaded in pitch darkness. So where in a cemetery could I find such a place?

Assuming they had a bathroom, I went into the gatehouse to ask. The gentleman behind the desk directed me to the second floor, where there was a nice clean bathroom with bright sunlight coming in the shadeless window. Rats. Now what? I went downstairs and asked if there was somewhere I could open my camera in total darkness. He offered to lock me in the vault! Now, the vault he referred to was not a burial vault, but a walk-in security vault much like the more modern bank vault you see here. It was where they stored important papers, historic documents, and all their burial records since 1835. I didn't know this guy, no one knew I was here, and he's offering to lock me in the vault... Kind of like someone offering you a vegan donut--I felt strongly both ways. But of course I said "ok," being driven to produce quality photographs at any cost.

In retrospect, I remember it being a tough decision, but one I had to make on the spot. Was I willing to suffer this much for my art? The risk of death at the hands of a madman just so I wouldn't waste a $25 roll of film? Sure I had mixed feelings--like watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your favorite car. But after many years, I had figured out how to get the best pictorial effects with infrared Ektachrome (ISO 100, orange filter, bright sunny day with lots of folliage, and slight underexposure due to its contrasty nature) and I wasn't going to waste the opportunity. This sunny day offered the best conditions for success!

So I allowed a perfect stranger to lock me in the unlit vault and close the door. I nervously asked him to give me 10 minutes. I managed to unjam the film, which, upon my release, allowed a very productive day of shooting. Sometimes you just have to trust people! Over the years, we became good friends, as I have with many people who work at Laurel Hill. Unfortunately, my relationship with infrared film ended, as it is no longer being produced by Kodak. Neither is their SO-283 satellite tracking film, which was a great choice for shooting celestial beings like cemetery angels. Just kidding. Wanted to see if you were still paying attention.

As an aside, an even stranger thing occurred around 2005 with regard to this vault. Two armed men came into the gatehouse near closing time and demanded that the vault be opened. When the cemetery director tried to explain that there was nothing of immediate monetary value inside, they pistol-whipped him until he opened it! On finding no cash, gold, or jewels, they left. They'd obviously heard the cemetery had a bank-type vault and mistakenly assumed it was full of money.

Click here for more info on infrared photgraphy.

"I See Dead People"

One of the most unsettling experiences I've ever had occurred a few days after seeing "The Sixth Sense" in the theater when it was first released (August 1999). The movie affected me in a disturbing way. Like so many other people, I was shocked  by the ending. I really don't like horror movies, and the ending really turned it into a horror movie for me. Not in the sense that I could no longer enter a darkened room without someone chanting from the Bible, but I was just rattled -- I wasn't the same for days afterward. Maybe I was open to suggestion.

I'd just begun my quest to photograph cemetery statues, and the one you see here was one of the first ones I photographed (at Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, a western suburb of Philadelphia), a few days before seeing the movie. I assumed all cemetery statues were pretty and angelic until I began creeping around graveyards and finding sculptures like this.

Our story begins one Saturday in Philadelphia, after I picked my daughter up from University of the Arts where she was taking  a photography class. This was a few days after I'd seen The Sixth Sense (which was filmed in Philadelphia, by the way, a few blocks from UArts, at St. Alban's Court near Grays Ferry Avenue). I drove toward Rittenhouse Square on Walnut Street and asked her if she wanted to jump out and get us a couple Frappuccinos at Starbucks. I told her I'd circle the block while she did that as there was nowhere to park.

On making my first left onto 17th Street, I hit a traffic jam. Instantly, I thought of that scene from the movie where the mom and boy are in the car, waiting in a traffic jam, and the bloody dead woman from the bicycle accident comes up to the boy's window. It was a bright sunny day and as I looked to my left down Chancellor Street, I saw a guy on a ladder painting a transom above a shop doorway, heard some music coming from somewhere, and a silver late-80s Volvo stopped in the middle of street. Relatively banal city scene. Now Chancellor is a small street, not really much of a thoroughfare, so, seeing a car stopped in the street is not unusual. What was unusual, though, was that the driver's door was open, and an old man was lying half in the driver's seat, having fallen onto the street with his head in a pool of blood.

I remember the blood vividly as it ran from the pool to a storm drain in the street. An old woman was standing in the street on the other side of the open door, looking down at the man. Just standing there. It was one of those things that is so unusual, it just doesn't register. I looked around for the camera crews and the Klieg lights--there weren't any. Why were no pedestrians or people waiting in cars going over to help? The guy painting on the ladder certainly must've seen or heard this happen. But...what happened? No one was gawking, or pretending not to notice. I was about to call 911 on my cell phone when it occurred to me that I might be the only one seeing this. As traffic began to move, I was jarred back to reality by honking horns behind me, and slowly drove away.

There was nothing in the papers the next day or on the news about any incident occurring here that day. Aside from a few close friends (who I trust with my sanity), I've told no one about my experience. Perhaps an inquisitive reader might want to check the police report archives to see if such a thing may have happened on this site, prior to my seeing it? Or...after I saw it, maybe?

Years later (2009 to be exact) I purchased a wooden file cabinet from a local thrift shop. It, along with a shop full of furniture, decorative plants, and what appeared to be movie props had belonged to Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan. Supposedly, he redecorated his home (outside Philadelphia) and donated all these items to the thrift shop. I guess I have to wait til the end to see if it really is a file cabinet....