Cemetery Walk: Journey into the Art, History and Society of the Cemetery and Beyond

Minda Powers-Douglas

Format ISBN Price   Paperback (5x8) 9781420868265 $ 16.00

What awaits beyond the cemetery gates …?

 

Journey into the cemetery and beyond with author Minda Powers-Douglas and meet cemetery sextons, gravediggers, preservationists, writers, artists, authors, ghost hunters, the director of a funeral museum, a genealogist, and an assortment of taphophiles (people who love cemeteries). Discover what’s really behind our attitudes toward death, graveyards and those resting inside them. Find out what is superstition and what’s fact in this insightful and often funny guide into the world of cemeteries.

 

You’ll meet British horror author Simon Clark, “low-brow” artist Madame Talbot, genealogy author and lecturer Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, Jon Austin from the Museum of Funeral Customs, and New Orleans Voodoo Priestess Miriam, as well as many more intriguing individuals.

 

Come explore the dark side … it’s not as scary as you think.

 

You’ll never look at a cemetery the same way again.

 

Minda Powers-Douglas is a writer and editor for a chiropractic college by day and an avid reader and writer by night. A graduate of Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., she has taught writing and creativity workshops for more than ten years (including memoir, creative writing, poetry, cemetery art and even Feng Shui). She created and directed the self-esteem enhancing program, Girls Make a Difference, for five years. Girls Make a Difference was based on the book of the same name, which was self-published and given to each of the girls who participated. She is also the author of “Memories of Me: Your Life in Memoir,” which is in limited print.

 

Minda is the founder and editor-in-chief of Epitaphs, a magazine for cemetery lovers by cemetery lovers. She lives in Moline, Ill., with her husband, Bill, and their feline “daughters,” Shakespeare and India. Please visit her Web site at www.TheCemeteryClub.com, and feel free to e-mail her at minda@thecemeteryclub.com.

Drive through any town, city or countryside and it’s not very long before you pass by a cemetery. They are as big a part of our scenery and everyday lives as buildings and houses. We know what they are; they are the final resting places of the dead. Most of us know people who have been buried in them, and we also know that one day we will most likely end up in one as well.

 

Yet there is something mysterious about cemeteries. Stones rising up from the ground, like old, jagged teeth. The image of decomposing bodies six feet under the surface. Ghosts and boogeymen lurking inside every mausoleum. While it sounds like I’ve been watching too many “B” horror movies (which I have), these are the strange notions many people have about cemeteries. While spooky stories are fun to tell and listen to, we must look beyond them when we step into a cemetery. There is history, art and meaning to be found there.

 

People have been burying their dead since civilizations began. Disposing of the bodies may have been one of the early reasons for burial (once Ungah Bungah realized that Urk wasn’t smelling or looking too hot in the caveman days, he probably performed the first burial then and there). For others later on, burial was linked to resurrection. According to the Web site IfIShouldDie .co.uk regarding Christian funerals, the “belief is one of resurrection and the continuation of the human soul, which is usually dependent on how life on earth has been lived” (3). The main reason in recent history for burials, though, is memorial. Cemeteries are believed to be sacred places to many people, regardless of religious belief or lack thereof.

 

There are as many types of cemeteries as there are cultures and beliefs. There are burial mounds, church graveyards, small family cemeteries, garden or rural cemeteries, urban cemeteries, veteran cemeteries, private cemeteries, lodge or fraternal cemeteries, ethnic cemeteries, mass burial sites, lawn cemeteries with the stones flush to the ground, pet cemeteries, mausoleums, cremation tombs, scattering grounds, ecological cemeteries, etc. The word “cemetery” (Greek for “sleeping chamber”) was made popular in the early 1830s after several garden cemeteries opened. Garden cemeteries (also known as rural cemeteries) are large, sprawling and the most like parks. In fact, cemeteries were the first public parks, since people would use them as places to socialize and entertain themselves as well as for paying visits to their loved ones.