Are cemeteries haunted by the dead or the living? Do marble angels watch
over the souls who search among silvery tombstones for names, dates and stone
flowers?
Call them grave hunters, genealogists or historians, gravers, tombstone tenders,
stone strollers or death hags. Just don’t call them morbid. Or ghouls.
Or heaven forbid, necrophiliacs.
Technically they are called taphophiles - people who love cemeteries
and funerals. And they are just like you and me. They could even be your neighbors.
Fascination with death and dying has been part of the human psyche since early
man and a cemetery, old or new, is a peaceful place to contemplate our small
place in the universe.
With Web sites devoted to who, where and when someone died, finding famous
graves seems to be a growing hobby. Yahoo forums are there to discuss the finer
points of grave hunting, and people make special vacation plans to visit their
idols, whether movie stars or past presidents.
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there,
I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on the ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there, I did not die.
.... Mary Frye
Cemeteries like Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City are open to public exploration
and even offer guides to where celebrity residents are buried. Others, like Forest
Lawn in Glendale, won’t answer questions about who is buried where, and
many areas are off limits to the public.
Mark Masik’s “Hollywood Remains to Be Seen” is the definitive
guide to the final resting places of Hollywood’s elite. Detailed walking
tours lead you to the graves of hundreds of stars. Just don’t have the
book visible when you visit Forest Lawn - a female employee at the Great
Mausoleum was seen confiscating a visitor’s celebrity grave reference
book.
The many Internet sites that foster the growing hobby of driving back roads
and searching out the dead include Steve Goldstein’s “Beneath Los
Angeles” - an irreverent look at “the famous, the infamous
and the just plain dead.”
“Hollywood Forever is one of the ‘friendly’ cemeteries
that have no problem with us taking pictures or wandering the grounds,” Goldstein
says. “They celebrate the fact that there are famous folks buried on their
grounds. They even provide helpful maps of the stars’ graves, which used
to be free for the asking, but now I think they sell it.
“Other cemeteries that fall into the ‘friendly’ category
include Hillside and Holy Cross in Culver City, San Fernando Mission in Granada
Hills, Home of Peace in Boyle Heights, and Angelus-Rosedale in downtown LA, which
puts on an annual ‘Living History Tour’ with volunteer actors portraying
historic figures at graveside and recounting their life stories.”
Goldstein’s favorite grave is that of Douglas Fairbanks.
“In the days of neglect at Hollywood Memorial, when his rather impressive
monument was covered in moss, I would stand there and picture Charlie Chaplin
visiting the grave of his best friend,” he says.
“To go inside a mausoleum that holds Valentino since 1926 is spine
tingling.”
Burbank’s Dawn Wirth, a member of Hollywood Underground, has been going
to famous gravesites since 1977. “I visit the famous, because some of
them seem forgotten, like Buster Keaton, whom I visit a lot,” said Wirth. “My
friend Shannon Cole and I go to Hollywood Forever to clean the headstones, and
Forest Lawn to clean Buster’s.”
My wife and I walk in cemeteries. The main and odd
reason is that we like to read the names. There are many interesting names that
were common in the past but seldom used today. It's an interesting study.
One can also place the history of a community within the global timeline
of the cemeteries lifetime. Almost invariably, for instance, one sees many stones
dated 1918, sometimes whole families, due to the flu epidemic of the time.
Scott and Susan Daniels, Dover, OH
Each graver has their own special graving kit containing what they think they
will need for a day of “graving.” (see sidebar)
Marlene Soffera, senior pastor at Victor Valley Church of God in California's
Victor Valley, visits the cities of the dead for different reasons.
Though she often visits to conduct a funeral, other times she collect epitaphs. “You
can learn a lot about life hanging around dead people,” she said. “You
can tell so much about people based on what their epitaph says.
“If it is an upbeat person, who had a positive outlook with hope for
the future, you can see that in their epitaphs. On the negative side, you can
also see sarcasm, cynicism or a ‘woe is me’ outlook.”
Some folks, like Joe Doyle of Victorville, Calif. visit graveyards planning
for the inevitable while checking out his future neighbors.
“When I first arrived in California, my friends and I visited a slew
of cemeteries looking for famous people,” said Doyle. “I have a
spot picked out and paid for in Westwood Cemetery where Marilyn Monroe, Natalie
Wood and Elizabeth Taylor’s parents are buried. The plot is all paid for
and ready to move into when my time expires.”
Doyle’s graveyard neighbors are Burt Lancaster and Eve Arden. “Marilyn’s
crypt is in sight of my spot where I will have my cremated remains rested,” added
Doyle.
Visiting cemeteries turned into a business for Jim Tipton, who created Find
A Grave.com (FAG) in 1995. He started the company after realizing there was no
central source for celebrity burial site information on the Web.
My husband Richard and I visit graveyards whenever we go on vacation
to PA and NY. We have walked many cemeteries in both states. We are genealogists
and can hardly go by a cemetery without looking over at it. Some of the stones
are quite elaborate and some are quite pitiful, but all are interesting. We take
pictures of all our ancestors gravestones, and are saving our money to replace
a few broken ones.
Jakki Lutz, Victorville
The site started out with his meagre 20-30 grave sites, he said. “People
wrote e-mails and told me who I was missing, like Elvis and Jim Morrison, and
I would add the names one at a time,” said Tipton.
Today FAG boasts more than 300,000 members, and 15,000 names of the deceased
are submitted every day. And FAG is no longer just about famous names.
“Our lists are growing faster than the U.S. death rate,” he
said. “Our goal is to have a list of where everyone who died in the U.S.
is buried. We are actually making progress!”
Tipton says his favorite grave is still that of Al Capone “because
it was my first long-distance pilgrimage to find a grave.”
“I wasn’t a big fan of Capone or his life, but I liked Mafia
movies and figured he was buried somewhere,” said Tipton.
I live in the Sycamore Rock area of Apple Valley just a few blocks away
from the Sunset Hills cemetery. My husband and I and our two young children frequently
take walks through the Sunset Hills cemetery. Sure we visit the grave sites of
friends but we also enjoy seeing the sunsets from “above the valley” ...
We have taken visitors from out of town to see the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans
grave sites, the elegant ponds, rock sculptures, the rolling hills, and the beautiful
views. We have spent many hours wandering and visiting the grave sites of people
we never met wondering who they were and remembering our friends.
Kim Walker, Apple Valley Resident
Books led Tipton to where Capone’s name is etched in stone. He thought, “Whoa.
I am standing where Al Capone ended up.” (Capone was originally buried
at Mt. Olivet in Chicago, but the family became tired of all the sightseers and
vandalism of the monument and moved Capone’s remains to Mt. Carmel. People
soon found the simpler memorial and left odd mementos of respect: a cigar, bottles
of beer, even a toy gun.)
Making burial information available to others is important to Tipton, and
implementing the photo request process on Find A Grave has been one of his meaningful
milestones.
“The photo request system is one of my most-liked features I have added
to FAG,” he said laughing. “Sometimes, within hours of a request,
a person on the other side of the country goes out to find the gravestone, photographs
that stone, uploads it and you can see it.”
Seeing that gravestone is a tangible link to recent relatives or long-dead
ancestors. You may know they are part of your family intellectually, but seeing
their actual gravesite makes them more real, he said. The family roots bind more
tightly.
Hesperia’s Joe Canfield finds visiting some cemeteries humbling.
“I was at Arlington National Cemetery a few years back, and due to
the sheer size of it, I just picked a name - Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian
who was one of the guys who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, in the famous photo
by Joe Rosenthal.
“After about a half-mile walk I found it, and after I spent a few minutes
with him, I decided I would have to spend a lot more time at Arlington the next
time I went,” he said. “I also paid my respects to Audie Murphy,
JFK and Tomb of the Unknown.
“Arlington is a very emotional and humbling experience, but made me
feel a connection with history. I believe all Americans should spend a day there.”
The well-prepared gravers’ kit (or what to take with you when you go
graving)
My husband and I are avid genealogists. We love visiting all kinds of
cemeteries and photographing the gravestones of our ancestors. When we plan vacations,
we always plan on visiting cemeteries. It is one highlights of our trip. One
of the most interesting cemeteries that we have ever visited is in the backwoods
of North Carolina. It is an old and abandoned cemetery which was once located
on a plantation.
Craig and Mary Anne Stephens
BOOKS ON FAMOUS BURIALS
-
The Stars of Hollywood Forever - Tony Luke Scott
-
Celebrities in Los Angeles Cemeteries - Allan R. Ellenberger
-
The Hollywood Book
of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie
and TV Idols - James Robert Parish
-
Where the Bodies Are: Final Visits to the Rich, Famous, & Interesting - Patricia Brooks
- Dishing Hollywood: The Real Scoop on Tinseltown's Most
Notorious Scandals - Laurie Jacobson
- Cemetery Research - covers everything from cemetery
and death-related terminology to clues offered by headstone art, and cemeteries'
role in our culture and history. - Sharon DeBartolo Carmack
-
Death in Paradise - An illustrated history of the Los Angeles
County Coroner's Office - Offers an inside look at the the most celebrated deaths
of the century. In paperback.
From the Cutting Edge Office Supplies Collection
You never know what you may learn in a cemetery.
Norma (Gossard) Nikkel, Victorville
GRAVE HUNTING WEB LINKS
Find A Grave - find the graves of the famous and not famous.
www.findagrave.com
Beneath Los Angeles
www.beneathlosangeles.com/
Hollywood Underground - the burial sites of Hollywood's most
famous stars, moguls and eccentrics.
www.hollywood-underground.com/index.htm
Cemetery Transcription Library
http://interment.net/Default.htm
Death and Dying in the 18th and 19th Centuries
www.memorialhall.mass.edu/classroom/curriculum_8th/lesson1/bkgdessay.html
Univeristy of York, Cemetery Research Group
www.york.ac.uk/inst/chp/crg/index.htm
City of the Silent
www.alsirat.com/silence/
Tomb With A View's Guide to Dying
http://members.aol.com/TombView/symbol2.html
The Association for Gravestone Studies
www.gravestonestudies.org/
Find A Death - death, scandle, intrigue, home of the Death Hags, a
bit on the morbid side, but an interesting site with lots of books available
http://findadeath.com/
The Farber Gravestone Collection from the American Antiquarian Society - thousands
of cemetery images
www.davidrumsey.com/farber/view.html
Dearly Departed: The Tragical History Tour - tour Los Angeles most
famous death sites
www.dearlydepartedtours.com/DDT/index.html
Los Angeles Coroner's shop - "Skeletons in the Closet,
For those of us with dubious distinctive taste." One has to see the stuff
for sale!
www.lacoroner.com/
Celebrity death certificates
www.celebritydeathcertificates.com
The Literary Cemetery
www.theliterarycemetery.co.uk
