From a letter to Dear Abby:
My husband and I were told that a family headstone has been purchased, and our share is $2,000 - each. This was never discussed among the family members. The cemetery is located out of state.
We have been told we are no longer welcome to attend the family reunion this summer unless we fork over the $4,000 and agree to have our names placed on the headstone. [Link]
Each year (usually around Valentine's Day) elementary-school students in Haverhill, Mass., pass on a message from a former pupil.
Yesterday morning the students descended on the historic Walnut Cemetery and remembered schoolboy emotions that ran through the heart of Haverhill's favorite son, John Greenleaf Whittier, when he was around their age.
It has become a tradition in Haverhill with local students gathering around the gravestone of Lydia Ayer to recite a poem by Whittier recalling his childhood sweetheart and a moment following a school spelling bee when she confesses, "I'm sorry that I spelt the word: I hate to go above you, because — the brown eyes lower fell — because, you see, I love you!" [Link]
Part of Lilian Walters' headstone was found by her daughters to have been recycled.
The marble base had once been a gravestone to 'Gertrude' with the words, 'dearly loved wife of Albert Birkinshaw died Sep 2 1952 aged 41 years'. [Link]
Could this have happened both in Yorkshire and in Tasmania?
The headmistress of a school in Yorkshire had asked for the inscription “She was Thine”. Unfortunately the e was omitted from Thine, so the inscription read “She was Thin”. The stonemason’s apprentice was blamed for this error. He was told to go and put the missing “E” on the gravestone. This he did, and being a Yorkshireman he put the “E” at the beginning of the inscription with the result that the stone epitaph then read; “E, She was Thin”. [Link]But wait, maybe it happened in America:
A small headstone in the western part of Pennsylvania is pointed out to visitors as one of the sights of the neighborhood. It was placed over the grave by a widower who, while not lacking in love for the departed one, was penurious to a degree. He ordered a small stone because it was cheap, and told the mason to engrave on it this inscription:Here's one more version in which the phrase appears on a floral arrangement at a funeral.
"Sarah Hackett. Aged ninety years. Lord, she was Thine."
The stonecutter said there was too much inscription for so small a surface, but was told to go ahead and "squeeze it on somehow." Here is the inscription as squeezed:
"Sarah Hackett. Aged 90. Lord, she was Thin." [Link]
Katie Ruth is finally getting a gravestone, thanks to the efforts of Paul Harris and the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum. Little has been written about the Babe's mother, and some of what has been written is wrong.
Even Ruth swung and missed. He had two ghost-written autobiographies. The first, published in 1928, didn't specifically mention either parent. The second one, in 1948, did. But Ruth got the facts wrong. He said his mother's maiden name was Schanberg and she lived until he was 13. Actually, she was born Catherine Schamberger, and she died in 1912, when the Babe was 17. The mistakes are hardly surprising. It's not really clear what the slugger knew about his mom - in life or in death. [Link]
Merv Griffin's headstone has been placed, and is drawing crowds at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.
As one of his final wishes, the late talk show king asked that his granite grave stone bear this tongue-in-cheek inscription: "I will not be right back after this message." [Link]
Workers found a tombstone in the basement of the courthouse in Bangor, Maine, for Isaac Cobb, who died Sept. 7, 1874, at age 72. A second epitaph was written on the back—presumably by inmates at the courthouse jail.
It appears to have been printed in black paint on the back of the headstone.I actually know Isaac Cobb. He was born in the same town I was, and his mother was a Dunham—a distant cousin of mine. I have no known connection to "Pretty Boy Floyd."
Titled, "Pretty Boy Floyd Redmond," the first two verses read:
"Beneath this sod so cold and deep,
Lies the once bold Floyd R,
Now, the meek and dirty creep.
He came to our town,
His motto to "do or die,"
But now he’s stocking shelves,
It makes you wonder why." [Link]
Archaeologists hoped to dig out the long-buried gravestone of Methodist preacher James Gwin in Vicksburg, Miss.
What the excavators did not expect to find under years of dirt and grass was a second crypt, bearing a name unfamiliar to the researchers. The tomb of Elizabeth P. Mosby lay next to the reverend's, and the dates inscribed appeared to show she died on Sept. 11, 1841, barely a month after Gwin. She is named on the stone as the wife of J.C. Mosby.As it turns out, Elizabeth was the daughter of Reverend Gwin.
Who was she? Why bury her here? Why were her remains so close to Rev. Gwin?
"Perhaps she was the organist," quipped Hobbs Freeman, a local artist who rode along on the excursion. [Link]
At a gathering in Milford, N.H., Dave Palance explained that gravestones can reveal more than names and dates.
Early death’s heads were simple skull and cross bones, but later ones are made to look like the departed. Many have wings to show that the person went to heaven. At the graves of couple Samuel and Mary Leeman, buried in a Hollis cemetery, only the husband went to heaven.
“He earned his wings, she didn’t,” Palance said. [Link]
Just before he left Illinois for his first inauguration, Abraham Lincoln stopped by a cemetery in Coles County to visit the graves of his father and step-mother. It was Gale Baker's grandfather, John W. Baker, who showed Abe where the bodies were buried.
At the time, the burial sites were mostly unmarked, so Abraham Lincoln carved the initials of Thomas and Sarah Bush Lincoln on a piece of wood to serve as a rudimentary grave marker.If I remember correctly, some other stuff happened between his going to Washington and getting shot.
At least, this is the tale handed down to Gale Baker from his grandmother, Susan D. Baker.
Abraham Lincoln “found those graves and then went to Washington and was shot there,” said Gale Baker, 90. “That’s the story as she told it.” [Link]
The oldest graves in my neck of the woods are generally aligned east-west, in line with the rising and setting of the sun. Thomas S. Klatka found in his study of Roanoke County, Virginia, burying grounds that the orientation of subsequent graves often depended on when the first hole in a cemetery was dug.
Individual graves were rarely dug on a precise compass orientation, but rather they were generally oriented toward the position of the rising sun on the eastern horizon. Additional variability was introduced into this procedure since the exact position of the sun rising over the eastern horizon changes throughout the year.Rayne, Louisiana, was recognized by Ripley's Believe It or Not for having the "only cemetery in the U.S. that faces north and south"—St. Joseph's Catholic Cemetery. (Klatka notes that Catholic cemeteries are less likely to follow the east-west tradition.)For instance, at the latitude of Roanoke the rising sun moves from approximately 60 degrees east of true north during the summer solstice in June to approximately 120 degrees east of true north during the winter solstice in December (U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office 1964). As a result, the exact orientation of graves tended to vary from any northeast through any southeast direction depending on the time of year when the graves were excavated. Following cemetery establishment and excavation of the initial grave shaft, the long axes of subsequent graves within a cemetery generally ran parallel with only minor variation. This pattern often persisted even in cemeteries that were active for lengthy periods of time. While graves within a cemetery were usually oriented parallel to one another, the overall orientation of graves between cemeteries tended to differ more markedly. As a general rule, the orientation of graves within cemeteries tends to reflect the time of year when individual cemeteries were founded.
Perhaps the gravedigger did not have a compass. Perhaps the priest did not oversee the work of a common laborer. Whatever the case, the most commonly accepted version of what happened is that the graves were mislaid and before the mistake was discovered, too many people had been buried; the expense of reburials (not to mention the effect it would have had on the grieving families) was too great a cost. The citizens allowed the cemetery to remain as it had originally been placed, albeit at the expense of being a rarity in the civilized Western world. [Link]The only cemetery in the U.S. that faces north-south? That's a claim that just begs to be refuted. I can certainly think of cemeteries where the "east-west rule" was thrown out the window. (When the garden cemeteries of the 19th century were designed, aesthetics outweighed celestial considerations in the placement of graves. Just look at the layout of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass.) I can't, though, think offhand of a cemetery I have visited where the graves were all oriented north-south. Can you?
A comment on this mental_floss post mentions an oddly named couple.
I once saw a photo of a grave for a gentleman named “Fredrick Unfred” and his wife, “Bologna Unfred.” Fred Unfred and Bologna? What were their parents thinking!Fred's surname was originally "Unfried," which makes his wife's name look like uncooked luncheon meat. On the other hand, given the variety of spellings and misspellings in census and other records, her name may well have been "Bulimia."
Nancy Millar—author of The Final Word: The Book of Canadian Epitaphs—says that tombstones are no place to settle scores.
"You cannot step over certain lines and call your wife a bitch or anything like that."
One of her favourite examples of an epitaph done right -- one she describes as "a friendly agreement between husband and wife" -- is a monument along an old logging road in Grand Forks, N.D.
The top inscription reads, 'Here sits the bench of a Viking wench.' Upon the woman's companion's death, a subsequent inscription was added: 'Now the Viking wench has company on her bench.' [Link]
In Riverside Cemetery in Wichita Falls, Texas, stands the statue of a young woman descending a staircase. Witnesses say that the statue, on occasion, weeps.
"I saw what looked like a tear," said Julie Coley, a genealogist who has meticulously recorded the graves of Riverside Cemetery, where the girl's statue stands.Of course, you can't have a spooky gravestone story without a tragic, fictional back story.
"It was a tear stain on her right cheek. I've gone back many times since in all kinds of weather and all times of day. I've never seen the statue cry again."
It was on her wedding day, dressed in her flowing dress, that she tripped on her train and fell down the mansion's stairs, her young life cut short by a broken neck - or so some say. [Link]The true story? She died of typhoid in Detroit.
BBC History Magazine has named a winner in its Mysterious Memorials contest. Sarah Johnson's epitaph recounts "the 28 times the
deceased was drained of fluid in her abdomen – the treatment for ascites, which is related to liver disease." It's thought that this was an "early example of brazen advertising" by the doctors mentioned on the stone. (If so, this was the worst advertising campaign ever. Sure, it makes me want to have a few hundred gallons of fluid drained from my abdomen, but not by these quacks.)
You can read Sarah's medical memorial and runners-up here (pdf), and all the "Shortlisted Entries" here.
The story goes that 6-year-old Inez Clarke was locked out of her house by her parents on the night of Aug. 1, 1880, for being a naughty girl. She was promptly struck by lightning. Her guilt-ridden parents claimed she had died of tuberculosis, and had her buried in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery beneath a lifelike marble statue. Little Inez has been haunting the cemetery ever since.
A great story, if only Inez Clarke had existed.
An 8-year-old boy, Amos Briggs, is actually buried beneath the statue. Walavich suspects that the intricately carved statue was an advertisement for its maker, Andrew Gage."Based on cemetery records there's no such person buried in that grave," Al [Walavich] says.
He's even looked up U.S. Census records from the 1800s and found "no indication that such a child ever existed."
There's even an affidavit from Inez's "supposed mother" issued in 1910 -- 30 years after the child's death -- that claims the Clarkes had two daughters, both of whom were still living at the time. The document also stated neither parent had any other children, Walavich says.
"And the most telling fact was that one of the Clarke family [relatives] had been in touch with cemetery about statue and grave. When asked who Inez was, she said, 'I have no idea, but isn't it a lovely statue,'" he says. "It's kind of hard to have a haunting when the supposed person never really existed." [Link]
Richard Hill has been arrested in North Carolina for desecrating the grave of his ancestor, who served on both sides of the Civil War War of Northern Aggression.
According to the warrant, Hill, apparently a sixth-generation descendant, "tore down and removed a tombstone on the grave" of Stephen S. Shook, who is buried in a family cemetery behind Upper Laurel Baptist Church near Mars Hill, "then replaced the stone with a Confederate stone."
According to the warrant, Shook was "a Union soldier who died on June 10, 1902."
But before that he was a Confederate, the family agrees. [Link]
Here's an account of Yang Cai's tombstone-reading software in action.
"This is just kind of a fun project ... but I think it's very meaningful to have something where people feel excited," said Cai, director of Carnegie Mellon CyLab's ambient intelligence lab, as research assistants cloaked in black focused a beam of light and a digital camera on Isabelle Seville's weathered gravestone. "We take this as a combination of science, art, technology and culture."
The Rev. Richard Davies couldn't read the worn indentations in Seville's tombstone. Charcoal or crayon rubbings revealed little. But Cai's technology constructed a 3-D image, complete with Seville's name, and her place and date of birth -- London, 1781. [Link]
CMU professor Yang Cai has developed software that can decipher illegible inscriptions on ancient tombstones. He's testing it on stones at Old St. Luke's Church in Carnegie, Pennsylvania.
During the past two weeks, Cai's research team trekked through the church's three-acre cemetery, scanning unreadable gravestones and then storing the images on laptops.
"We are exploring new 3-D reconstruction technology to decipher the gravestone names," said Cai. "Essentially, we reconstruct the tombstone surfaces by applying filtering and detection algorithms for revealing the words on the archaic surfaces," he said.
In addition to discovering who is buried in the church cemetery, Cai is developing a digital cemetery for Old St. Luke's Church. [Link]
Vickie Wendel guides cemetery tours in Anoka County, Minnesota.
Interpreting the carvings is not a perfect science, she said. For instance, a Victorian-era gravestone featuring a rosebud or lamb might indicate a child's grave. However, Wendel saw a lamb on the gravestone of an 80-year-old woman. And she was told about a family in the 1890s that planned to bury the bird it kept for a pet. Uncertain how to carve a bird, the stonecutter made a lamb instead. [Link]
