Graveyard tourism
2005-08-22 13:43
Michael Hill
Albany - Here lies President Chester A Arthur, amid the tall trees and tousled grass of Albany Rural Cemetery.
A dribble of people still visit the Victorian-style grave of the little remembered 19th-Century United States president. More than a hundred years after his death, Arthur is something of a cemetery star.
Consider Patrick Weissend, who travelled hundreds of kilometres to see Arthur's grave - twice - as part of his quest to visit all 38 presidential graves around the USA.
"This kind of thing gets you off the expressways and you get to see America," said Weissend, a 37-year-old museum director from Batavia, New York.
An unusual hobby
Weissend is part of the thriving community of people whose idea of fun is checking out lonely roads and rows of granite. They are sometimes called "gravers" or "grave hunters".
They are an odd assortment of history buffs, celebrity hounds, military aficionados, amateur genealogists and the occasional Goth kid.
They like the tranquillity, the connection to the past, the beauty, the thrill of the hunt and the buzz of being close to famous people - albeit dead ones.
"People initially think it's this morbid, weird fascination," said Jim Tipton, proprietor of the popular Find A Grave website. "I'm not there thinking about what their decaying body looks like or anything like that, you're thinking about their life."
Cemetery tourism is nothing unusual. Visitors flock to Arlington and Gettysburg national cemeteries, as well as to the handful of star-packed graveyards around Hollywood.
Grave hunting is a bit different. Gravers typically seek out individual plots of specific people, be it megastars like Marilyn Monroe, less lustrous lights like general George Custer or their great-uncle.
Specialists
Voracious ones like Salt Lake City-based Tipton will visit graves of famous people even if they're not quite sure who they were.
He once searched out Cy Young's grave in Peoli, Ohio, on a cross-country trip with his sister even though they were not quite sure which sport Young played.
"He has a baseball with wings on it on his grave," he said. "We said, Well, that pretty much definitely answers what sport he was involved in."
Then there are the specialists. Weissend began focusing on presidents after a visit to Millard Fillmore's grave in nearby Buffalo, New York.
He has since criss-crossed the nation visiting the graves of 30 dead presidents.
Other hunters limit themselves to Civil War figures or movie stars. Then there are grave canvassers like Deborah Dash, who is in the process of taking pictures of thousands of graves near her home in the San Francisco area and then logging the information on Find A Grave.
Mysteries carved in stone
She likes looking at the words etched into stone, and considering the mysteries they convey.
"You read stones from the turn of the century where you've got a married couple and they have five kids who all died in infancy," she said. "And it's, OK, was it a smallpox epidemic? Was it the flu? Was it an accident?"
That sense of connection is common among grave hunters. Weissend describes the poignancy of visiting Calvin Coolidge's hillside grave in Vermont - a simple headstone befitting a farmer.
Tipton talks of visiting gangster Al Capone's grave before it was moved from Chicago to Hillside, Illinois, and feeling "something powerful" being 1.8m up from the iconic gangster. It got him hooked. He has now visited about 1 200 graves and maintains the website full-time.
Tipton relies on an army of volunteers to contribute to Find A Grave, making it a Wikipedia-like listing of graves of just about anyone who amounted to something in anything.
Celebrities actually make up a small fraction of the 7.9 million graves listed, since registered contributors can also put their dead grandparents or anyone else on the site.
Ambitious project
Tipton said he would like to get every grave in the nation catalogued eventually, and maybe beyond.
"We're adding new names surpassing the US death rate, so we look at it as gaining positive ground," he said.
Other sites have a narrower focus, like the Political Graveyard, which bills itself as "The website that tells where the dead politicians are buried".
A number of sites are devoted to dead celebrities like Karen McHale's Hollywood Underground. Her website gives useful tips like this one: "Jerome 'Curly' Howard - Actor, Curly of the 'Three Stooges' and brother to Shemp and Moe. Location: Western Jewish Institute Section, SW Corner, Plot 1, five rows back."
The wealth of detailed information can make "grave hunting" seem like a misnomer, since most of the famous graves are logged already.
But there are still challenges such as finding poorly marked graves and the occasional hassle. McHale notes that while staff at some more heavily trod cemeteries are unfriendly, gravers should stand their ground.
"As long as you are unobtrusive and stay out of their way, then there's not a whole lot they can do," McHale said. "Open ground is fair game."
- AP