About Loren Rhoads

My fascination with graveyards goes way back. I grew up down the road from a country graveyard where my grandfather was buried. After a series of missed connections during the First Gulf War, I ended up in London’s glorious Highgate Cemetery. From that point on, I was hooked.

In the 1995, I edited Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries. Spanning the globe from Argentina to Wall Street, 27 authors and photographers documented the residences of the dead. The book has been out of print for years, but used copies occasionally turn up on Amazon: Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries. In 2015, I started running a series of guest posts — Death’s Garden Revisited essays — on this blog.  The collection of them can be found here.

I’ve been a member of the Association for Gravestone Studies since 1999. You can follow my cemetery discoveries on the web on Pinterest, see my cemetery postcard colletion on Instagram, and check out my favorite cemetery videos on Youtube.

Between 1997 and 2002, I wrote a monthly series of travel essays about visiting cemeteries on Gothic.Net.  Some of those essays were collected in Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, originally published by Western Legends Press in May 2013. Other essays in the book originally appeared in my Morbid Curiosity magazine, as well as in Morbid Outlook, Eleven Eleven, and other places. An updated edition of the book came out from Automatism Press in 2017.

I am also the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die, published by Black Dog & Leventhal in October 2017. That hardcover, fully illustrated book is a worldwide encyclopedia of cemeteries that welcome visitors.

Do you take cemetery adventures yourself?  I’ve made a notebook in which to record your field notes and observations. The Cemetery Travels Notebook features 80 lined pages, interspersed with 20 full-page color photographs of cemeteries from Paris to Tokyo to inspire your wanderlust.

In addition to blogging at CemeteryTravel.com, I’ve written about cemeteries for Gothic Beauty, Mental Floss, Scoutie Girl, Atlas Obscura, and more. My cemetery CV is here: Loren’s Cemetery Work.

I’ve been honored to speak several times at the lovely Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California and at conferences including the Death Salon Forum in San Francisco, the Nebula Weekend, and the Stoker Weekend on the Queen Mary.  I would love to talk to your book club or historical association about cemeteries.

If my fiction interests you, please check out my other website at lorenrhoads.com.

Still curious? Sign up for my monthly mailing list for morbid adventures, peeks behind the scenes, and more: https://mailchi.mp/aa9545b2ccf4/lorenrhoads.

You can contact me by leaving a public message below or with a private message on the Contact Me form.

My cemetery bio in brief:

Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. She’s written about cemeteries for Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, Gothic Beauty, Scoutie Girl, and more. She’s spoken about cemeteries as travel destinations at several Association for Gravestone Studies conferences, the Science Fiction Writers Association’s Nebula Weekend, the Horror Writers Association’s Stoker Weekend, and at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park.