Favorite Haunts

Aside from my local cemeteries and a family cemetery, my favorite is Lakeview in Cleveland, OH. Our friends took us there one year and we've stopped through on every trip back. I even used the famous "weeping angel" for the Thing(amabrarians) That Go Bump in the Night group.

Where do other people like to visit?

I used to "haunt" the Woodlands cemetery in Philadelphia when I was in school. Fantastic, sprawling cemetery with an 18th-Century Federalist-style mansion on the grounds. My favorite place to study, read & reflect.

Monhegan Island, Maine (ten miles out to sea, only about a mile and a half long, pretty rugged place)


It's oldest gravestone, little Phebe Starling

doogiewray, that cemetery looks absolutely *gorgeous*.

There's a large pet cemetery (how hard is it not to spell that with an S?) in Methuen, MA that is great. I spent the better part of an afternoon there last year.

Melbourne Cemetery (yes in Australia) has very interesting historical sections as well as it's quirky Elvis memorial here apparently put together by the Elvis fan club shortly after his death. I was so surprised the first time I saw it!

The greatest cemeteries in the world? Well, the ones with the greatest authors must include Novodevichy (Mikhail Bulgakov, Gogol), Highgate (George Eliot, Karl Marx), Pere Lachaise (Oscar Wilde. Marcel Proust, Alice B. Toklas).....but the most beautiful, a real museum of national history, must be Kerepesi in Budapest........Most spectacular author's grave? Must be Jules Verne at Amiens..... http://www.findagrave.com/photos/2001/222/vernejules2.jpg

I'm a big fan of Wooster's markers - the pic on this group's front page is a great example - so I like the buying ground in Lexington, MA. There are quite a few of his there.

I'll be in Paris next month, and my husband is shaking his head at the idea of Pere Lachaise, but I'd really like to spend a day there. I'll go alone if no one will go with me - unless someone can tell me it's a bad idea?

Linda -- going to Pere Lachaise alone would be perfectly safe, I think. I visited PL, Montparnasse, and Montmarte when I was in Paris several years ago. All are really nice, but PL is maybe the most exciting/interesting to look around -- it's definitely worth the visit. -- J.

Pere Lachaise is the one cemetery I want to spend time in before I die. Perhaps some day, I'll get there in person, instead of just in books that I own.

For me, to be there alone with my own thoughts would be preferable. I would guess that one could spend a week there.

David Robinson photographed Pere Lachaise (among others) in two of my favorite books: Saving Graces: Images of Women European Cemeteries and Beautiful Death : The Art of the Cemetery (Penguin Studio Books).

Anyhow, Linda, I envy you (and you, too, wintering) ... enjoy your visit! (and be sure to give us a report when you get back here, ok?).

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

I certainly will report back - and my husband sounds more interested in it now, too. He has a fancy new camera he wants to try out. :)

I visited Highgate two years ago and loved it! I especially like the part one has to visit with a guide. Mine was an elderly gentleman, extremely knowledgeable and pleasant, and very happy to answer all the questions. Beside George Eliot and Karl Marx, there also are Radclyffe Hall and physicist Faraday, among the others.
Two other cemeteries worth visiting, in Italy, are the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan and Cimitero di Staglieno in Genoa (my hometown). Staglieno is visited by thousands of people every year.
And, last but not least, Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. Among the many famous people buried there: Duke Ellington, Fiorello La Guardia, Miles Davis.

Maybe someone can help me out here? My first visit to Europe included an afternoon at Westminster Abbey in London. I was only a 15 year-old kid from Indiana ... what did I know?

My perception of Life changed, however, when I found a stone in the floor upon which were inscribed the words "Here lies ashes, dust, nothing."

No name or dates ... nothing.

(A light bulb came on over my head).

Anyhow, does anyone know of this stone or did I just dream it? Does anyone know who's remains are under it? In spite of it's lesson in Nothingness, I've always wondered over the passing, what?, almost 50 years now? It did catalyze my future views on Life and Death, though.

Thanks,

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

My compliments to ExVivre for the title to this topic.

I've always been intrigued by old cemeteries and, being a midwesterner, it's tough to get back beyond, say, the early 1800s. We, my wife and I and friends, just came back from Ocracoke Island, NC, the southernmost occupied island in the Outer Banks, only reachable by ferry boat (no bridge). We rented a small older house and, lo and behold, there was a small - 7 graves - cemetery not 3 feet from the front porch. Well, I was smitten. The house was on Howard Street and many of the houses on the street had private cemeteries. Apparently, it was custom to bury grandma or grandpa in the yard when they checked out. Actually, that custom lived in early days at some midwestern farms as well.

Howard, incidentally, is the quintessential Ocracoke Island street, although it looks more like a poorly kept, unpaved, narrow alley.

Sunnyside Mausoleum in Long beach. It has guest from over a hundred years ago, is almost completely made out of marble and granite, and even has a giant pendulum that is powered by the rotation of the earth. It is quite and solemn yet, like its name, bright.

the tiny ones on Ocracoke sound wonderful. I've really got to get to the Outer Banks.

In New England we have the oldest European graveyards in the country and I spend a lot of time photographing them. The gallery is here if anyone wants to take a peek - http://wickeddark.smugmug.com/Graves-and-Cemeteries/Graven-Images/10855476_Q4SxN

some of my favorites are tiny ones in the woods that are all but forgotten.

My daughter mapped and recorded the local small town cemetery for a Heritage 4-H project in the late 80's. The graves don't go back much over 100 years, but we found plenty of heartache and unspoken stories. Dunning Cemetery is pretty typical, but the older lichen-covered children's stones catch at your heart.

When I was a teen, my grandfather took us to a small cemetery out in the middle of south-central Nebraska farmland. I've never been able to find it since. Somewhere in the vicinity of McCool Junction is a tiny cemetery filled with the graves of early settlers, including far far too many children who died within days of each other during one of the many runaway disease plagues of the 1800s. I'd like to find it again. I remember it as shady with huge sighing pine trees.

I love old cemeteries, started by living in an apartment complex built on an old homestead, with three graves right outside my door.
My favorites are Bonaventure in Savannah, Georgia, Magnolia in Charleston SC, the First Congregational church in Charleston, and Bellefontaine in St. Louis MO, about twenty minutes from my house.