Cemetery Girls

A few days before things got really crazy with total home lock down style quarantine, my sister and I went grave walking.

This is our story…(dramatic duh duh!)

I didn’t realize that going to cemeteries for family fun wasn’t a normal thing to do until I was older. Almost thirty really.

I switched my minor to English at the end of my first semester and it was all because of one class.

The Archaeology and Literature of Death.

I saw the flyer for the class posted outside of my US History class. Back when I was still hoping to be a middle school social studies teacher. (Surprise! I am one now!)

I HAD to be in this class. It discussed graveyards and tombstones as the archaeology part. Supernatural belief as the literature element.

It was my favorite class of all the classes I took in college. Like if somehow all my classes had been this kind of a mesh I would have my doctorate by this point.

We read Dracula and Mama Day (by Gloria Naylor, incredible fucking novel BTW), then we went to the local cemetery. I was 100% the most obviously excited person.

The Geo majors said that I should take more classes if I was interested in graves and dead things so much. I would’ve, but as we all know, college ain’t cheap.

My parents took us to cemeteries more than they ever took us to a park. Sometimes we’d stop at a relatives grave for the required moment of awkward silence before we’d all spread out among the stones.

It was like some weird family scavenger hunt: Who could find the weirdest tombstone? Who could find the coveted grave-with-a-photograph on it? Who could find the oldest?

It was never announced it just always happened.

We’d shout dates and weird names across an open field full of dead people beneath our feet like we were calling out scores at a sports event.

I hadn’t thought about this for a long time. I hadn’t been to any cemeteries recently. Then we were told to find activities where few people could be found and everyone was at least six feet apart, and a light bulb flashed above my head.

A memory sparked.

My sister was game. It’d been a few years since we’d done this. We discussed the oddity of our family on the drive. The fact that our father believes in Bigfoot and our Mother had an extensive library on both the supernatural and true crime. All of which we had total access to.

I headed off to elementary school with an extensive knowledge on The Bermuda Triangle, The Jersey Devil, The Bell Witch, and Jack The Ripper. I also had pretty good knowledge of the layout of nearly every grave yard within a 100 mile radius.

This particular day, my sister and I headed for an old family cemetery that required about fifteen turns onto roads that look more like driveways.

This cemetery has a lot of graves that are just rocks put into the ground. There is no name and it is not a headstone it looks like someone found the biggest rock they could nearby and just shoved it into the ground. Two of my favorite graves in this cemetery are like this, without names, but the rocks are put into the ground so that they look like triangles. It seems to adds a little something.

The second grave yard was a hot spot of local lore. A good portion of that lore coming from my father who lead one too many hay rides that always ended up having a mechanical malfunction right in front of the cemetery. The tractor or truck would just “die”, and there we would all be, a wagon full of cousins and church kids, in the pitch black looking out into a wooded area filled with tombstones.

“It’s the witch!” dad would declare, and once there were a few screams (and at least one boy making obviously nervous jokes) the tractor/truck would suddenly start to work, and off we would go into the night.

We spent a few hours wandering through old stones. Trying to find the most interesting. Trying to find the oldest. I took pictures and she read off dates and sometimes causes of death.

It was a good family outing.