Category Archives: Cemetery essay

My thoughts in a longer form about graveyards and the challenges they face.

Toasting The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe

Friend to Cemetery Travel and contributor to Death’s Garden Revisited, Sharon Pajka, PhD, is a professor of English at Gallaudet University and the author of Women Writers Buried in Virginia. On the weekends, you can find her in the cemetery, giving history tours or volunteering and running the website River City Cemetarians.

Sharon has a brand-new book out from The History Press about the graves of people who knew Edgar Allan Poe during his life. I asked her to tell us about it.

Toasting The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe

by Sharon Pajka

I have fond memories of visiting cemeteries with my maternal grandfather, a genealogist. I remember him handing me slips of paper with distant family members’ names. I would search to find their graves. Not much has changed since my childhood, except instead of searching for my family members, I now create thematic tours of cemeteries for others and myself.

As a literature professor, I tend to focus on writers. Most recently, I have been searching for graves connected with the author Edgar Allan Poe. For the past few years, I have given an annual tour in Shockoe Hill Cemetery in which I highlight connections between Poe and those interred in the cemetery. The cemetery is 12.7 acres with approximately 30,000 interments. It was much smaller during Poe’s lifetime. He lived with his foster parents in several places in and around Shockoe Hill’s neighborhoods. He visited the cemetery both alone and with his wife to grieve the loss of his foster mother as well as a significant muse. Today, the cemetery includes his foster family, his first and last fiancée, and more friends and acquaintances than any other cemetery. Poe most likely would have been buried in this cemetery if he had not taken that last fateful trip in 1849.

Last year, I expanded my research from Poe’s connections who are buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery to create a grand tour of cemeteries to visit many of the people Poe knew well during his life. Some of the cemeteries I visited were places Poe also visited. Some cemeteries were places where Poe would recognize only the names on the graves; others were places where Poe would both recognize the names and be familiar with the land—although prior to it being established as a burial ground.

There is nothing inherently unique about visiting the graves of individuals whose work was admired during their lifetimes; many bibliophiles make excursions to the graves of their favorite writers. There is something unique about visiting the graves of those who were one degree of separation away from an author. I wanted to meet the people Poe knew when he was alive to have a fuller story of the author based on the people with whom he associated.

I went to cemeteries and visited graves of his mother, wife, foster family, first and last fiancée, bosses, friends, cousins, school peers and instructors. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore lists over 200 correspondents along with “420 surviving letters.” It was not possible for me to visit the graves of everyone Poe knew, at least not in one summer. I conducted research and made several road trips to southern cemeteries, mostly in Virginia and Maryland, along with Washington, D.C., Kentucky, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

I traveled to 19 cemeteries and visited 37 memorials. The names I had read in biographies and museum exhibits were now the names engraved on the tombstones—his birth mother Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, who is buried in Saint John’s Episcopal Churchyard in Richmond, VA; one of the judges for the Baltimore Saturday Visiter literary contest that Poe won and who would later help support Poe financially: John Pendleton Kennedy, who is buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland; southern author and friend, Philip Pendleton Cooke, who is buried in Burwell Cemetery in Millwood, Virginia; the reverend who married Poe to his cousin, Amasa Converse who is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky; William Gilmore Simms, who in Poe’s words was the “best novelist which this country has, upon the whole, produced,” is buried in Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina; and the man who received an urgent message about Poe’s health, Joseph Evans Snodgrass, who is buried in Hedgesville Cemetery in Hedgesville, West Virginia. These were individuals who supported, inspired, and challenged him. There are even a few who attempted to foil his dreams.

Since I was a teen, my father has clipped newspaper articles that he thinks will interest me. Many of the articles that I have kept since the late 1980s are focused on the Poe Toaster, the individual who visited Poe’s grave annually and left tokens at the grave. I have long been enchanted by this shadowy figure’s ritual of visiting Poe’s grave on the author’s birthday for over seven decades. Recently, I have even taken the time to offer my own toasts— although unlike the Toaster, I did not leave roses or cognac.

While standing in each cemetery, I read letters to and from Poe at the graves of those who knew him. It is often too easy to walk through a cemetery admiring the memorials and epitaphs while completely forgetting that these were people with their own interests and stories. I did not want these visits to be solely focused on learning about Poe. I wanted to understand each individual’s life before standing at their stone. They had their own stories, which organically led me to becoming somewhat of The Toaster for each of them. I took a whiff of orris root at the grave of Frances Allan, a perfume Poe’s foster mother was remembered for wearing. I sat by the water near where Susan Ingram gathered with family and friends 173 years ago when Poe read poetry to them. Although we do not have recordings of Poe reading his work, the Poe Museum in Richmond offers several great renditions online, including “Ulalume,” which seemed magical to Ingram.

While I learned much about Poe during this project, I also learned about poets and writers I had not previously studied, including Philip Pendleton Cooke of Winchester, Virginia. Poe delighted in Cooke’s work and valued his opinion, so it was, in fact, Poe who introduced me to Cooke and his beautiful poetry. I read Cooke’s poetry about fall trees at his grave while early spring winds blew pollen around me. I still felt the magic.

Taking this journey — and visiting Poe’s grave numerous times — I was able to learn about him from so many different angles and perspectives. I admire his work ethic and his drive to make a living doing something for which he clearly had a talent. Writing was not pure joy for him. He did not always have an opportunity to advance southern literature or even American literature, frequently churning out popular stories that the newspaper readership demanded.

The amazing part of this project was that I was able to have a deeper connection to Poe’s life, work, literature, and the sacred burial grounds. Visiting the graves transformed me. On August 21, The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe will be published by The History Press. I hope that my book encourages readers to make their own connections with cemeteries and to visit some of the graves of Poe’s family, friends, and foes. Maybe you’ll bring your own toast.

You can order a copy of The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe from Amazon or directly from The History Press.

Upcoming book: Mourning by Lisa Kereszi

Published by Minor Matters, Mourning is photographer Lisa Kereszi’s long-awaited sixth photo book, which centers around her family’s gravesite in suburban Philadelphia. The large-scale edition, whose production is solely funded via crowd-sourcing, contains grids of images made remotely with a hunter’s trail camera during a mourning period of sorts.

The presale ends on 8/1/23, then the book will come out physically before the end of the year. Check out the link at the bottom to get a copy of this beautiful, powerful book.

Here’s an excerpt from Lisa’s essay in Mourning:

“Your dad died,” my four-year-old daughter said. Matter-of-factly. Looking me in the eye. It seemed to me a statement, but also a question, somehow. Maybe she was looking to me for a reaction, some guidance on how to feel?

I just replied, “Yes. My dad died.” I didn’t know what else to say. He was 64.

His last year had been one of shuffling, suffering, and mourning. His mother had died that May before, just shy of her 83rd birthday. His sister and her friend had been occupying the family home and continued to do so, changing the locks immediately after their mother’s death, and barring him – and anyone else related to him — from entering.

Instead of mourning and settling my grandmother’s estate as I had been asked to do by her, I was locked in a battle with my aunt, obsessively trying to recover as many of my Nan’s belongings from inside the mildewed home, as well as from local pawnshops, consignment shops and even the free store where she had sold and deposited items from the house.

Unable to settle my grandmother’s estate on my own terms, I acted efficiently and with purpose to have my father’s gravestone, etched with my earlier portrait of him in his beloved pink Caddy, mounted at the family plot before that year’s end. This I could achieve. But within weeks, it was knocked over. When I learned this, my first thought was that someone had toppled it. Someone random? Someone angry? My aunt or one of her friends? Or was it not set properly? Was it maybe a large animal that didn’t expect it in its path?

Flabbergasted, I had it fixed and from afar enlisted a small army to mount a trail camera that allowed me to keep tabs on the site. Over the course of seven months, I received from the camera daily visual missives that became part of my morning routine. I didn’t even notice that the year was set incorrectly at first, the type of human error that abounds every January 1st, and the days and weeks that follow. I was focused on what was in the frame.

I watched my paternal family plot through the changing times of day, and through the seasons. I saw who, and what, visited— a family of deer, a lounging squirrel, a fox, and some birds. The only humans walked dogs and kept the grounds neat. I saw the foliage sprout, the vines creep, the fog roll in and burn off, and snow dust the grass, then melt as the sunlight took over the darkness. But no mourners, no family appeared in the frame, unlike the traditional visits my Eastern European forebears once kept up, as evidenced by the photos in my grandfather’s scrapbooks of his family posing with graves in the rust belt of Pennsylvania.

One day there was a summer storm, and the branch bearing the trail cam fell. Like a patient anesthetized on a table, or a body laid out for viewing at a funeral home, my visual viewpoint was now pointed up towards the sky. One of my volunteer army, my mother, put it back up. Within days, the camera disappeared.

The Victorians considered one year the mourning period for a child who lost their parent. But since it was a difficult relationship, let’s call my seven months a fulfillment of that requirement. With the anxiety-quelling cellular device gone, I had lost control. My virtual graveside visits ended in July of 2019, and my recorded mourning period was cut short half a year before the world began a collective mass-mourning.

Things are not ever the same after a parent dies. Things are also not the same after a pandemic changes everything. Losing one’s overarching direction and sense of order of the universe leaves one orphaned and unmoored. It takes some getting used to.

The camera turned up a few years later, memory card intact. By then, I was finally able to visit in person and make sense of what had happened, admit that I was grieving, and decide that enough time had passed for me to gather my wits and largely move on. The best of the 3568 pictures fell into grid form, a means for the artist to control the content. I am a daughter, and a granddaughter, and I am the parent now. And, yes, Virginia, my dad is dead.

“This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” These words, etched onto my grandmother’s flat gravestone nearby, come from a prayer she always recited, and even copied into her diaries. The sun rises, and the sun sets. Every single day (at least it does for now).

MOURNING by Lisa Kereszi (12 x 18.5 inches, horizontal, HC with Japanese stab binding; 32 pages, 112 photographs) with an essay by Marvin Heiferman (of the @whywelook Instagram, which is his own visual manifestation in grieving his partner, an early loss from Covid-19) is being published by Minor Matters in Seattle, crowd-sourcing all production costs with a deadline of August 1, 2023. To join as co-publisher before the deadline and get your name printed in the back of the book, visit: https://minormattersbooks.com/collections/pre-sales/products/pre-sales-mourning-by-lisa-kereszi

You can also follow Lisa on Instagram.

Death’s Garden Revisited is available now!

I’m so excited to announce that my next cemetery book is available now.

Death’s Garden Revisited collects 40 powerful personal essays that explore 60 cemeteries — accompanied by 80 full-color photographs — to illustrate why people visit cemeteries. Spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina and from Portland to Prague, Death’s Garden Revisited explores the complex web of relationships between the living and those who have passed before.

Genealogists and geocachers, travelers and tour guides, anthropologists, historians, pagan priestesses, and ghost hunters all venture into cemeteries in these essays. Along the way, they discover that cemeteries don’t only provide a rewarding end to a pilgrimage, they can be the perfect location for a first date or a wedding, the highlight of a family vacation, a cure for depression, and the best possible place to grasp history. Not to mention that cemetery-grown fruit is the sweetest.

You can see a preview below:

You can order your copy of the book in paperback or in hardcover directly from Blurb. The ebook is coming soon.

Contributors and Kickstarter backers: The books arrived earlier than expected. I’m getting those into the mail as soon as I can!

Why would anyone visit a cemetery?

In every conversation I have about cemeteries, in every interview, on every podcast, I get asked two questions. One is “What is your favorite cemetery?” On the surface, that’s a funny question, because its underpinning is the second question: “Why would anyone visit a cemetery?” Unspoken, usually, is the rest of the question, either “by choice?” or “on purpose?”

I’m not sure when Americans were taught that it’s weird or creepy or disrespectful to visit cemeteries, if you aren’t driving straight to the gravesite of someone you’re related to, saying a few words, and leaving as soon as you can. I’ve even had people ask me if it’s legal to visit a graveyard where you don’t have a family connection.

Promenading at Bonaventure. Vintage postcard with undivided back, pre-1907.

During the 19th century, people flocked to cemeteries. They took carriage rides through them. They strolled in the shade of world-class arboretums. They fed flocks of birds or picnicked or read poetry. They studied the statuary and read the epitaphs and considered visiting cemeteries part of a moral education.

Out of sheer curiosity, I’ve been asking all kinds of people why they visit cemeteries: genealogists and geocachers, tour guides and travelers, historians and teachers, bloggers and horror writers and people who’ve never written anything before but have a good story to tell.

I’ve collected their answers into a book called Death’s Garden Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries. It will be available for crowdfunding next Thursday, which will allow you to reserve a copy before it’s published in October — and to help fund full-color photos to illustrate each story.

You can click on the image below to be taken to the Death’s Garden Revisited pre-launch page on Kickstarter. There you’ll see a button that says “Notify me on launch.” If you click on that, Kickstarter will send you an email on March 17, the day the campaign goes live. 

The direct link is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/deaths-garden-revisited-relationships-with-cemeteries.

I hope you’ll consider helping bring this beautiful, touching, thought-provoking book to life. Thank you for your support!

My Cemetery Work Crosses over into Fiction

When I’m not writing about cemeteries as travel destinations, I am a novelist. Whenever I can, I work cemeteries into my ficiton.

In the Nineties, just as I was beginning to explore cemeteries, I collaborated with Brian Thomas to write an epic love story between an angel and a succubus. As part of our location scouting for the books, Brian took me to cemeteries all around Los Angeles.

The first cemetery we visited was, of course, Forest Lawn. Brian lived in Glendale at the time, so Forest Lawn was practically in his neighborhood.

As we developed the story, I wrote some chapters and Brian wrote others. One of the pieces he wrote was about the angel Azaziel meeting a teenage runaway named Ashleigh amidst the statuary at Forest Lawn. Further into the story, Brian returned to Forest Lawn and particularly to the stained glass Last Supper window for a wonderful scene where the fallen priest Joseph regains his faith.

My Cemetery of the Week listing for Forest Lawn is here: https://cemeterytravel.com/2011/05/04/cemetery-of-the-week-14-the-original-forest-lawn/

Marilyn’s lipstick-stained marble niche in Westwood Village Memorial Park

I’ve written about exploring Westwood Village Memorial Park in the dark on Cemetery Travel before. When I was revising the second book in the angel/succubus series in 2019, I realized that Lorelei and Azaziel needed a place to have their first real date, so I wrote Westwood into Angelus Rose.

The Cemetery of the Week listing for Westwood is here: https://cemeterytravel.com/2012/10/31/cemetery-of-the-week-82-pierce-brothers-westwood-village-memorial-park/

In that same revision, I found a place to work the cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels into the book, too. When Brian and I initially wrote the books, the cathedral was still under construction. All these years later, when the books were finally being completed, it felt weird that the cathedral — such an important part of the religious life of Los Angeles — didn’t appear in our story. I revised the scene where the high school choirs perform for all the angels in the city and set the concert in the courtyard at the cathedral. I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

The Cemetery of the Week listing for Our Lady of the Angels is here: https://cemeterytravel.com/2021/03/26/cemetery-of-the-week-173-the-crypt-of-our-lady-of-the-angels/

Angels in Angelus Rosedale, Los Angeles California

Once we imagined the trajectory of Lorelei and Azaziel’s love story, Brian knew where the books had to end.  He took me time and time again to explore Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery. The angels, palms, family tombs, chapel, and columbarium all appear in the book Angelus Rose, although they end up worse for wear.

The Cemetery of the Week listing for Angelus Rosedale Cemetery is here: https://cemeterytravel.com/2012/02/15/cemetery-of-the-week-51-angelus-rosedale-cemetery/

If I’ve piqued your curiosity about our angel/succubus love story, it’s available in paperback, ebooks, or as an ebook set of both books.

Here are the links for Lost Angels:

Here are the links for Angelus Rose:

Or you can pick up both books in one ebook set at https://amzn.to/31L5U1G.