A pyramid tomb in Metarie Cemetery in New Orleans. In April, Nicolas Cage announced he will be buried in a similarly shaped tomb in a New Orleans cemetery.

Nicolas Cage owns a Gulfstream jet, two Europeans castles, a haunted mansion, a collection of shrunken heads, a dinosaur skull, a line of comic books called VooDoo Child and more than 30 cars, including nine Rolls Royces, an Enzo Ferrari and a Lamborghini once owned by the Shah of Iran, but this past April he purchased what may be his most outrageous possession of all: a nine-foot tall pyramid in a New Orleans cemetery. In it, he plans to spend eternity.

Cage’s pyramid is just the latest eccentricity in a city with a colorful, and often ghostly, cemetery history. Because much of the city lies at or below sea-level, early graves were dug just a few feet down rather than the standard six. Still, they often became soggy and filled with water. During big rainstorms, caskets would pop out of the ground and float away. Settlers placed large stones atop coffins to try and keep them down or bored holes in the top, but to no avail.  The solution was above-ground burial vaults.

The first cemetery in New Orleans with above-ground burial vaults was Saint Louis Cemetery #1, which was built in 1789 by Governor Esteban Miro, while the city was still under Spanish rule. People continued to be buried below ground but in the early 1830s a series of epidemics struck the city. Many died and the outbreak was blamed partly on noxious fumes emitted by corpses. The city council passed an ordinance requiring all future burials to take place on land adjacent to the Bayou St. John, but an exemption allowed burials to occur elsewhere as long as they were in above-ground structures. This began the tradition of above-ground tombs.

Buried in Saint Louis Cemetery are numerous legends from the early days of the city, including Homer Plessy, a Creole man who in 1892, violated a Louisiana state law by boarding a white only railroad car. His famous case, Plessy vs. Ferguson, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The resulting decision institutionalized segregation in the south for more than half a century. There is also Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville, a French-Creole American playboy and businessman who now has a section of the city named after him. As a child, he dined on plates of gold and is credited with introducing the dice game craps to America. Eventually, Marigny lost his fortune gambling and died impoverished.

Also buried in the Saint Louis Cemetery is the famous voodoo queen of New Orleans, Marie Laveau, a mysterious 19th century Creole hairdresser who serviced wealthy white families. She supposedly owned a snake named Zombi, after an African god, and may have run a brothel. According to the local papers, she died on June 16, 1881, but many residents claimed to continue to see her in town. Doubters said the sightings were simply that of one of her daughters, also named Marie, but some were sure it was her. Her tomb still draws crowds. Visitors customarily mark three X’s on the side of her grave in the hopes that her spirit will grant them a wish.

Other famous New Orleans cemeteries include The Carrollton Cemetery, established in 1849. It was divided into two sections, white and colored. The colored section had smaller plots and wooden tombstones with handwritten epitaphs. After Hurricane Katrina, this side of the cemetery lay scattered with bones. The white section consisted of elaborate vault tombs decorated with copings.

The Charity Hospital Cemetery, built in 1847, was a mass grave for the cities poor for nearly 150 years. Most of those buried within died during the Yellow Fever and Malaria epidemics that ravaged the city during the 19th century. Many of the dead were lain in unmarked graves. Bodies are no longer buried here and because dogs kept getting into the cemetery to dig up body parts, the gates were closed. The cemetery is now surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire.

The Cypress Grove Cemetery is dense with live oak and magnolia trees though it has few actual cypresses. Inside a large tomb for Chinese immigrants is a small fireplace where family members burn prayer notes for the deceased. Also in Cypress Grove is the grave of the first New Orleans firefighter to be killed in the line of duty. His name was Irad Ferry.

In Chris Rock's new comedy, “Death at a Funeral”, mourners continually battle each other. The flick is lighthearted, but in many funerary tiffs the blood is real. At a Bay Area funeral two years ago a man killed a close friend with a World War II collector’s knife.

Men in sharp suits carry a well-lacquered coffin into a fancy suburban house. “Who is this?!” screams Chris Rock, when the lid is cracked. The body is supposed to be his father but there’s been a mix-up, inside is an Asian-looking man. Thus begins “Death at a Funeral”, a slapstick movie released last week that stars Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence and Luke Wilson. It tells the story of a family funeral that turns into mayhem. The fiancé of a foxy niece accidentally takes mescaline and her jealous ex-boyfriend shows up to win her back. An invalid and irascible uncle goes off the deep end, two competitive brothers brawl beside the coffin and a suspicious dwarf in a leather jacket is demanding money and packing heat.

“Death at a Funeral” pulled in $17 million last weekend but some reviewers weren’t so fond of the edgy aspects of the flick. For others the film’s violence is hilarious, but in many funerary tiffs the blood is real.

Two years ago, a funeral in the Bay Area turned deadly in what began as a booze-fueled altercation. Emotions were running high and many guests were drinking heavily, a lawyer involved in the case later said. Two close friends, Darien Munson and Derrell Woods, got into a loud argument outside the funeral home. Munson passed out and later awoke to the sound of yelling, two women had gotten into a fist fight. Munson, still in a stupor, grabbed a large World War II collector’s knife from inside the funeral home and sprinted outside like a madman. He thrust it into Woods’ stomach; his friend died later that day.

At a funeral home in Martinsville Indiana, a fight broke out last month between brothers who were putting their mother to rest. Eulogies had been given and the coffin was in the ground when “out of nowhere” Eddy and Dennis Nail began beating the hell out of each other. “My concern was that if somebody would hit their head on a monument,” said the funeral director. The police showed up with stun guns to find a barroom-like brawl. Both brothers and one of their wives were arrested on the charge of disorderly conduct.

A 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal about violence at funeral parlors provides insight into the trend. “I’ve been in this business 42 years and I’m jittery now,” says a Cincinnati funeral home director named Clarence Glover. On at least two occasions he says that gunfire at grave sites has forced him to dive into the dirt. He recently installed a surveillance camera in the chapel of his funeral home and now regularly hires security guards. Often, before a wake he will brief staff on who potential trouble-makers might be.

The article describes a funeral in Louisville Kentucky for an elderly man named Frank Sherley Jr. who had died of natural causes. It was “a perfect day,” remembered one funeral home employee, “there was no expectation of violence.” Suddenly two gunmen appeared in the parking lot and began firing. One attendee was killed and four others were wounded.

Another incident involved funeral home director Carl Swann Jr, whose family has been in the business for a century. He expected trouble from the beginning for the funeral of Raeshaun Hand Jr., an ex-con who had continued to deal drugs after being released from prison and was also wanted for murder. Hand was murdered himself, inside his car. His family tried to keep the funeral private but word got out. Once inside mourners guzzled booze and smoked in the church bathroom. Just as the lid was coming down on the casket a group rushed in and pinned the undertaker. They clocked Swann in the face then attacked Hand’s father and brother. “I started fighting back, throwing punches,” says Swann. “This wasn’t in the job description.”

But with funeral violence showing no signs of slowing up, self-defense just might have to be added to a funeral director’s job description. “Death at a Funeral” certainly makes it seem like fights are a requisite. By the end of the film nearly the entire cast has gotten into some sort of violent argument. But the tone stays light, quite a few of them have also accidentally ingested mescaline.

Frankie Yale was murdered by Al Cappone's gunmen. His Brooklyn funeral was the most ostentatious in mob history, featuring a $15,000 silver casket and 110 Cadillac limousines. One woman bolted from the crowd and spit on the gleaming coffin; Yale’s thugs had murdered her husband while in bed some years earlier.

With a heavy police presence and a bevy of gawking onlookers, a golden coffin was carried through the streets of Montreal’s Little Italy neighborhood earlier this week. Inside was the body of 42 year-old Nick Rizzuto, gunned down in broad daylight while standing beside a black Mercedes. His father Vito, considered Canada’s most powerful mafia boss, is presently in a Colorado prison on racketeering charges related to three mob murders.

For Montreal, it was a noteworthy funerary event, but as crime family funerals go, the funeral procession was uneventful and the end for Nick was swift and unexpected. Mob deaths can be much worse. Salvatore Maranzano, a Sicilian-born New York mobster known as the “boss of bosses” was shot and stabbed to death in September 1931 in his Park Avenue office by four thugs posing to be detectives, a murder arranged by Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano. Carmine “Cigar” Galante, acting boss of the Bonanno crime family in the late 1970s was showered with bullets in an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn with a cigar in his mouth, having just polished off a plate of spaghetti. And then there is the unlucky end of Frankie Yale.

The Italian-American was first arrested on suspicion of homicide while still a teenager and eventually became boss of the notorious White Hand gang, which murdered its way to the top of the Brooklyn crime syndicate. Yale survived a hail of bullets ordered upon him by Bill “Wild Bill” Lovett but when Al Cappone caught him hijacking his Chicago-bound booze trucks he ordered a hit Yale couldn’t evade. While racing down New Utrecht Avenue in his brand new Lincoln coupe four gunmen in a Buick tore Yale and his vehicle apart with Tommy Guns.

His funeral was the most ostentatious in mob history. Mourners filled more than one hundred Cadillac limousines; nearly two-dozen additional cars were required just to carry all the flowers. Thousands lined the streets of Brooklyn for the procession, which featured a $15,000 silver casket. One woman bolted from the crowd and spit on the gleaming coffin; Yale’s thugs had murdered her husband while in bed some years earlier. Adding to the hoopla, two different women showed up claiming to be Yale’s wife.

Over-the-top crime funerals aren’t exclusive to mafia families. The 2008 funeral of Mark “Papa” Guardado, the 46 year-old president of the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels who was shot dead after a barroom brawl drew more than 2,000 Angels. They came from as far away as Australia and Germany. “We don’t get along with the press,” said one biker to a reporter. “And if you stick a camera in someone’s face, you’re asking for trouble.”

Mourners led what local police claimed was the largest motorcycle procession in the history of the Bay Area, from Daly City to the Cypress Lawn Cemetery, in Colma, making a detour through San Francisco to cruise down Dolores Street, not far from where Guardado was killed. Some bikers were involved a minor collision en route.

Gangster funerary mayhem occurs outside the United States too. A pastor in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago posted the following comment on the website of the nation’s local newspaper:

“Over the past 15 years these eyes of mine have been privy to what can best be described as a very disturbing trend…When a notorious gangster is slain in this country, he is usually forgotten as members of the public rejoice that the only good gangster is a dead one. But what we forget is that these gangsters have fellow gangster friends and family members who attend their funerals en masse, resulting in what can only be described as total mayhem, mass hysteria, and wild uncontrollable behaviour in the hallowed grounds of the cemetery.

At the burial site the scene is one of loud bravado and cartel music blaring from speakers mounted in pimped-out rides, incessant flowing and consumption of alcohol, marijuana smoking, loud cursing and swearing of revenge on the police and rival gangsters who deprived them of the company of their slain ‘homie.’ It is extremely unfair to other grieving mourners who must stand by helplessly and watch as these elements literally take over the cemetery with their nonsense. Mourners from other funerals are also put at risk since these gangsters never go anywhere without ‘packing heat’ (wearing guns) around their waists. These gangster funerals are a haven for criminals (wanted and unwanted), usual suspects, and men for whom there are outstanding warrants.”

Zombie walks are a relatively new phenomenon. Their increase is linked to the recent surge in the popularity of zombie films and may be a result of modern society

A ragtag mob with ashen, blood smeared faces and darkened eyes roamed downtown San Diego two weeks ago, flailing their arms, searching for brains. They were zombies, on a zombie walk to promote Woody Harrelson’s much anticipated film, Zombieland, due out in October.

The first such walk was about ten years ago, according to Erik Zempel, co-founder of the Zombie Reporting Center, one of several websites that tracks zombie films. Three years ago, nearly 900 zombies stalked the Monroeville Mall, outside Pittsburgh, setting a Guinness World Record. So far this year, zombie walks have occurred in dozens of states, including Georgia, Arizona, Illinois, Idaho, Alabama and Alaska.

“I think if we as a society were more involved with the death process and the funeral process these sorts of themes might never come up,” said Zempel.

Americans have been physically distancing themselves from death for the past century, he argues. The more we distance ourselves, the more popular zombie movies seem to become.

“It seems to me there is a fear of dead bodies and perhaps 100 years ago that wasn’t so,” said Kempel.

The economic recession may also be partially responsible for the recent pulse in zombie walks and films. This year’s selection includes: “Mud Zombie”, a Brazilian film in which zombies emerge from the mangroves and overrun a tiny fishing village. “Dead Air” reveals what happens at a radio station the night zombies created by a chemical terrorist attack storm the city. “Gallowwalker” is a zombie western, shot by Wesley Snipes and “Samurai Zombie” is a Japanese film about old samurais that return from the dead to stalk a family on a hiking trip in remote mountains.

“Pathogen” is a zombie flick written by a 10 year-old and “Zombie Girl” is the documentary about the making of it. “Le Horde” depicts an epic battle between corrupt cops and gangsters the night of a zombie outbreak and “Dead Snow” is a highly buzzed about Norwegian film that tells the story of eight friends at a remote cabin who discover Nazi zombies frozen in the snow.

The first Zombie films were in the 1930s, and focused more on mind control than hordes of blood thirsty half-dead. The most well-known film from this era was “White Zombie”, released in 1932, in which a man resorts to voodoo to transform a beautiful woman into a zombie so he can scare off her lover and woo her himself. The story takes place in Haiti, and draws heavily on Haitian vodou, which has roots in West African beliefs and practices.

It wasn’t until the 1968 film, “Night of the Living Dead,” directed by George Romero, that the zombies in movies developed a mad craving for human flesh. Romero actually didn’t call his nightmarish figures zombies, but that was the name that stuck, and the genre under which his film and the many it inspired came to be known.

Zombie films remained popular through the 1980s and lost ground in the 1990s. They have now returned with a vengeance.

With the increased popularity comes a more diverse fan base, said Zempel. The idea that zombie fans are all macabre goths obsessed with death is inaccurate, said Zempel.

“They really cut across a wide cross-section of the U.S. population,” he said.

Michael Jackson's after-death has been relatively normal, considering. British aristocrats have had their hearts stolen and their heads put on sticks. (Photo by Justin Nobel)

Michael Jackson is still missing his brain but it has been a pretty normal after-death, considering. The afterworld of royalty can be much stranger…

Sir Thomas More was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. More’s head was taken from the scaffold, parboiled, stuck on a pole and exhibited on the London Bridge. His daughter, Margaret Roper, bribed the bridge-keeper to knock it down. She smuggled the head home and preserved it in spices. When she died, the head was buried with her. In the nineteenth century the tomb was opened and More’s head was put on public view in St. Dunstan’s Church, in Canterbury.

Queen Anne Boleyn was beheaded in 1536 on the orders of her husband, King Henry VIII. Her heart was stolen and hidden in a church. Three centuries later it was re-discovered and placed under the church organ.

Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England, died in 1658 and was embalmed and buried in Westminster Abbey. After the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, his body was dug up and taken to Tyburn where it was gibbeted until sundown. The Public Executioner lowered the body, cut off the head and impaled it on a 25 foot pole on the roof of Westminster Hall. It remained there until 1685 when it was dislodged during a gale. A soldier found the head and hid it in his chimney. On his deathbed, he bequeathed it to his daughter. In 1710, the head appeared in a freak show as ‘The Monster’s Head.’ A doctor bought the head for a significant sum and donated it to Sydney Sussex College in 1960 where it was buried in a secret spot on the college grounds.

During the French Revolution the tomb of Louis XIV of France was plundered. His heart was stolen and sold to Lord Harcourt who later sold it to the Very Reverend William Buckland. One night at dinner, the Reverend, who liked to experiment with food, ate Louis’s heart.

King Charles I was beheaded in 1649 and buried at Windsor Castle in the same vault as Henry VIII. In 1813, Sir Henry Halford, the royal surgeon, performed an autopsy on the body and secretly stole Charles’ fourth cervical vertebra. He used it as a salt-holder at dinner parties.

Argentina was obsessed with Evita Peron, the wife of the country’s president in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1952, when she died, of cancer, theaters shut, restaurants stopped serving food and within a day every flower shop in Buenos Aires had run out of flowers. Eight people were crushed to death in the stampede to see her body transported through the city. It was to rest in a monument in her honor set to be larger than the Statue of Liberty but after a coup overthrew Perón Evita’s corpse was hijacked. It was buried in a crypt in Milan, Italy under the name Maria Maggi. A 1995 book about Evita revealed a slew of misdeeds surrounding her corpse. One official purportedly committed sexual acts with a wax replica of the body.

When Bob Hickey first visited Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery in the early 1980s he encountered a strange man with a Band-Aid on his chin, smoking a joint. The grave is one of the most visited cites in Paris, according to several travel websites. (Photo by Bob Hickey)

Bob Hickey arrived in Paris and went straight to the cemetery.
“I had heard that there was a joint constantly burning at Jim Morrison’s grave,” said Hickey, a sound technician on tour with James Taylor. “I thought, ‘Great, I will go there and see if I can catch a buzz.’”
Attendants at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, the cities largest, handed Hickey a map written in French that he was unable to decipher. Fortunately, finding his way was easy. Spray painted arrows led him along and graves marked with mystical lyrics and messages like “Jim this way” confirmed the route. At Morrison’s headstone, he encountered a strange man with a Band-Aid on his chin, smoking a joint. “He was sharing it with Jim,” said Hickey.
Jim Morrison’s grave is not only the most popular one in the cemetery, which includes the graves of Marcel Proust, Frédéric Chopin and Maria Callas, but it has become one of the most visited sites in Paris, according to several travel websites.
“He is just so big,” said Hickey, who grew up listening to The Doors and Frank Zappa and spent the latter half of the rock and roll era touring with groups like Pink Floyd and Eric Clapton. “He is simply overshadowing.”
Morrison studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote poetry and smoked joints on Venice Beach and co-founded the psychedelic rock band, The Doors, with fellow UCLA student, Ray Manzarek. The Doors exploded out of Los Angeles and wowed and terrified the world. Morrison composed most lyrics, passionate and poetic verses about drugs, incest and mysticism. His looks, talent and charisma cemented the band’s fame. But there was another side to Morrison, something much darker.
On a family road trip through New Mexico, at age four, Morrison observed a truckload of Indians, freshly wrecked. “There were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death,” Morrison later wrote. “The souls of those dead Indians — maybe one or two of them — were just running around, freaking out, and just landed in my soul, and I was like a sponge, ready to sit there and absorb it.”

The scene appears in the bands’ songs and opens Oliver Stone’s movie, The Doors. The eerie desert accident seems to have hung like an omen through Morrison’s own life. He attained unimaginable success but drifted toward doom, over drinking, abusing drugs and becoming languorous. On July 3, 1971, he was found dead in the bathtub of a Paris apartment. He was 27.
The official report listed heart failure as the cause of death although many suspected a drug overdose. Some suspected far stranger. “Rumors still abound that Morrison committed suicide, was assassinated by the CIA, murdered by a witch, died in a toilet at the notorious Rock and Roll Circus (a nightclub in Paris) or any number of variations. Add to that persistent rumors that he is still alive and living in India, Africa, South America, as a cowboy in Oregon, above a Quik-Check in New Jersey, or in North Dakota anonymously and the ‘Morrison legend’ has taken on a life of its own,” reads a website on Hollywood stars.
The mystique of Morrison is linked to the mystique of the rock and roll era, said Hickey, who grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1960s. “My whole education came from the mythology of rock and roll records,” he said.
But there were dozens of wildly popular rock musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, many who led lives just as glamorous and destructive as Morrison’s—why is his grave the one that gets visited by the masses?
“He was a great poet,” said Hickey. “His lyrics were good. He was talented, and, I don’t know how to put this into words…he was one of music’s first dark hero-figures.”
—
Click here for more of Bob Hickey’s photos of Jim Morrison’s grave.

v3fgzi2y4j

Body snatching was once so pervasive in America that wealthy families hired shotgun-wielding watchmen to protect the graves of their kin. Sentiments against the body-snatchers exploded in New York City during the Doctor’s Mob Riot of 1788. (Photo by Justin Nobel)

“The activity engaged in by this funeral director was utterly repulsive,” reads a recent newspaper article.

The man referred to is Stephen Finley, a funeral home director who clipped skin, bones, tendons, ligaments and heart valves from his clients and sold them for use in transplant surgeries. The case shocked the nation but the crime goes back centuries.

Leonardo Da Vinci, the sixteenth century artist and inventor who painted The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, also sketched sinews, sex organs, skeletons and one of the first reproductions of a fetus in utero, all of which he obtained from corpses. Da Vinci received his bodies from the hospital Santa Maria Nuova, in Florence. Michelangelo drew cadavers from the nearby church of Santo Spirito. Surgeons, who required corpses for medical study, had a much more difficult time obtaining them.

In England, the demand for cadavers was alleviated somewhat by the Murder Act of 1752, which gave surgeons access to the hung bodies of murderers. Anatomy schools flourished and the corpses of murderers did not suffice. Surgeons paid shadowy villains known as Sack’ em up men, or Ressurectionists to unearth bodies from cemeteries and churchyards. Thieves dug with a wooden spade, quieter than metal, cracked the coffin open and dragged the body out with a rope. Because bodies had no value stealing them was not considered a crime. Body snatching occurred primarily in winter, when corpses lasted longer.

“Corpses cost two guineas and a crown and children six shillings for the first foot and nine pence for each extra inch,” explains Dr. D.R. Johnson, in a reading given to present-day anatomy students at the University of Leeds, in England. “Freaks cost a lot more. O’Brien, the Irish giant, well over seven feet tall, who died in 1783 was bought by John Hunter for 500 pounds, despite his wish to be buried at sea to avoid such a fate.”

Body snatching was so pervasive in America that wealthy New York City families hired shotgun-wielding watchmen to protect the graves of their kin for two weeks, by which time the rotted corpse was useless for dissection. Inventions were spawned to protect the dead, such as Bribgeman’s patent cast iron coffin and the mortsafe, a cage with iron bars that surrounded a tomb.

Sentiments against the body-snatching surgeons exploded in New York City during the Doctor’s Mob Riot of 1788. A young boy peeping through a window into the dissection room at New York Hospital noticed a medical student at work on a corpse. The peeved student picked up the corpses arm and waved it at the boy. “This is your mother’s hand,” he shouted. “I just dug it up. Watch it or I’ll smack you with it!”

The boy’s mother had actually recently died and he ran home and told his father. A mob marched to the local cemetery, dug up the grave of the man’s wife and found the coffin pried apart and the body missing. The mob rushed to the hospital, where they called for those inside to be lynched. Doctors and medical students escaped through a window just before the mob broke in and thrashed the place, destroying rare specimens and surgical instruments. During the night the mob did the same at Columbia College. In the morning, Governor George Clinton called out the militia, which was led by Baron Friedrich von Stueben, a hero of the American Revolution. He refused to use force, but when a brick smacked him in the head he ordered his men to fire. Eight rioters were killed. Wounded were treated by the same doctors they had tried to lynch.

In England, more than 1,000 corpses a year disappeared from burial grounds in the first decade of the nineteenth century, says Tim Marshall, in his book, “Murdering to dissect: Grave-robbing, Frankenstein and the anatomy literature.” In 1829, Burke and Hare, two Irishmen commissioned to murder for Dr. Robert Knox, a well known Edinburgh anatomist, were brought to trial. They killed by smothering and delivered more than a dozen corpses to Knox’s back door. The trial received significant public interest and three years later The Anatomy Act of 1832 was passed. Anatomy schools were required to obtain licenses, the Murder Act of 1752 was repealed and surgeons and students were granted access to unclaimed corpses.

Helen Sclair, 78, has coffins in her dining room and a copper-lined burial vault in her living room. She lives in a cottage on the grounds of Bohemian National Cemetery, in Chicago, and is writing a book about the ethnography of Chicagoland cemeteries. Buried in Bohemian are Muslims, Assyrians, Romanians and Bohemians. (Photo Courtesy of Matt Hucke, http://graveyards.com/)

In Helen Sclair’s dining room are coffins: one from the 1940s fit for a baby, a wicker model from the 1920s and a Civil War-era pine casket. A copper-lined burial vault adorns her living room, and on her walls are the death mask from a notorious Depression-era Chicago bank robber and paraphernalia from Day of the Dead and Qingming, Mexican and Chinese festivals that involve decorating ancestral graves.

“People seem to be somewhat afraid of death,” said Sclair, a 78 year-old widow who adores it, and is known locally as the cemetery lady, “But if you look closely you’d be amazed at what you’ll find in cemeteries. You step back in time and you cross oceans.”

Sclair sang opera as a young woman and taught kids with learning disabilities in inner city Chicago. The death of her husband, some 30 years ago, led to a fascination with Chicago’s cemetery history. “It was just total idle curiosity,” she said, “something to fill the time on weekends.”

When Sclair took a bad fall ten years ago, her daughter suggested moving to a one floor home or an elevator building. Sclair scoffed at the idea, and instead, called the Bohemian National Cemetery, on the north side of Chicago, and asked for a home. After a nod from the board of directors, Sclair moved into one of three simple cottages on the property. “It’s been wonderful,” she said, “I live with death on a daily basis.”

Sclair may be unique, but an adoration of cemeteries cuts across the country. Mount Auburn Cemetery, a vast plot of rolling hills, gardens and graves, just outside Boston, was America’s first designed public green space, built in 1831, and attracts 200,000 visitors a year. Birders come early on mornings in April and May; nearby office workers walk during lunch hour and organized tours focus on horticulture, graves of famous children’s book authors, angel motifs on monuments, native woodland restoration, healing qualities of medicinal plants and nighthawks. “I think the major reason people come here is because it is so beautiful,” said Piper Morris, vice president of development at Mount Auburn. “Once you get inside you’re not even aware you’re in the city.”

Mount Auburn inspired other garden cemeteries across the country, such as Laurel Hill Cemetery, in Philadelphia, and Oakwood Cemetery, in Troy, New York, as well as green spaces sans headstones, like New York City’s Central Park.

Notable Mount Auburn burials include Louis Agassiz, a 19th century Swiss geologist who was the first scientist to propose that earth had been subject to a past ice age, Fannie Farmer, a turn of the 20th century cookbook author, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a 19th century American poet renown for his lyricism. Also buried in Mount Auburn are a large number of Armenians, an immigrant group that still populates the surrounding neighborhood of Watertown.

The ethnography of cemeteries across Chicagoland is the subject of a book Sclair is currently working on. Bohemian, where she lives, was founded in 1877, after a Catholic priest denied burial in the Bohemian-Polish Catholic cemetery to one Marie Silhanek. Irked, the Bohemians, led by a newspaper editor named Frank Zdrubek, founded their own cemetery.

Now, Muslims, Assyrians, Romanians and Bohemians are all buried there.

“Everyone seems to be getting along quite famously,” said Sclair.