Spinoff: Who loves visiting cemeteries?

I love cemeteries. Both sides of my family are buried in the cemetery in Mandeville so I often spend time there tending graves and I remember as a child playing among the tombstones. I was always respectful and loved it there.

I just find cemeteries to be beautiful and interesting places to be. I am always interested in knowing more about the people buried there.

I've got some Awesome pics from the old section of the cemetery in Natchez.
Let me load them up and I'll post them.

This one was particularly interesting.

On the back of it I found this.

I'd never seen an epitaph on the back of a gravestone before. It was faded, as a hundred years and more is wont to do. But eventually I was able to decipher it. This is what it read.


"Isabella is dead a child as,
Sweet and fair,
As opening rosebud in the,
Morning air,
Round her pure urn let,
Darkest cypress wave,
Youth could not save her,
From an early grave."

I wish I were dead if that counts

I've been to quite a few in Lousiana and East Texas when geocaching. Caches are sometimes placed near them. It's interesting how the styles of tombstones can vary so much within a few miles.

Pere Lachaise in Paris, where Jim Morrison is buried, is interesting. You will see a stone from 1700s with a French name, then maybe next to it a Japanese stone from a guy buried last month. I think they sort of rent or lease the spaces. Morrison's family finally paid up for perpetuity, I recall reading.

There is a documentary about that cemetery and the famous folks in it. Most interesting was how widows come weekly to scrub the stones of their dead husbands. Some have come weekly for decades. No widowers were shown scrubbing the stones of dead wives.

Beautiful, fr33

What's odd is cemeteries out in the woods that are unmaintained and abandoned. We had one on an old hunting lease. Most of the people were buried in the 1800s.
Kinda sad they just left out there completely unknown to their relatives

I took a day trip to Milan years ago, and took a bus out to this massive and awesome cemetery. It had stones and vaults that put Nola's to shame.

Love visiting cemeteries.

Grandfather was from Edgard. I was a child when the last of his relatives died there and we went to the funeral.

I don't remember anything else about the church or graveyard except for one very old tomb with a small, round glass window and a tube going down to the casket. I suppose it is has something to do with perpetual light for the deceased.

My brothers and I thought it was the coolest thing ever to look down and see the bones but my sister was scared to death of it so we didn't get to mess with it much.

There's a very pretty old cemetery behind a church near where I live that I like to visit from time to time. Some of the diseased were buried in the early 1800's. Kind of a surreal experience

One of the interesting stories from the Natchez cemetery....




"Florence Irene Ford (Sept 3, 1861 - Oct 30, 1871) died of yellow fever. Her family was distraught over her death, but her mother was especially devistated. She had a special coffin constructed for her daughter that had a glass window to display her body. Furthermore, when the grave was dug, Mrs. Ford had a set of concrete steps constructed so that she could descend them and look into the grave through a special glass windown that she had the workmen install. Because her daughter was terrified of thunderstorms, every time it would rain Mrs. Ford would descend the stairs and sit there by her daughter's coffin, separated only by the thin glass wall. She could also gaze at her deceased child through the glass of the coffin. After the mother's death, the glass wall was covered by concrete to prevent vandalism, but today you can still descend the steps to Florence's grave."

LINK