Horror Stories

WORKING AT A CEMETERY IS A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE

So I work at a cemetery. Pinelawn Memorial Park to be exact. My family has owned it for nearly five generations, and I've been working there since I was 12 (officially since I was 15). Cemeteries, I know, are sort of inherently creepy, and despite my family being in the...dead...people...business(?) since long before I was born, I still have always found it to be a weird place, and for much, much more than the obvious reasons. I posted a couple of my stories related to Pinelawn here in the past, but I decided to put them in a more concise format as well as add several more.

Growing up, I heard stories aplenty of weird things that happened at the family cemetery. One thing I'd always been told is that even though weird things happened, no one that's ever worked there had ever been harmed (other people are another story). I suppose I should begin with the very first one I ever heard, per my mom. Some weird stuff had happened before this, I guess, but since it was the first story I'd ever been told about Pinelawn, this is what made me weary to ever be there by myself, or at night.

Something like 100 some-odd years ago now, the cemetery was obviously much smaller than it is now. At that time, there were around 120 bodies buried here. Apparently, the city wanted to develop, and they wanted to buy the particular land that my family owned, effectively shutting us down. My family fought it, and a deal was reached to sell them the land we had, if the city would then also pay a portion of the land next to it, on which my family could continue the business.

The city acquiesced, and they partially paid for an equal amount of adjacent land; my family, at that time, also bought several more acres past that, which we're still filling up to this day. Anyways, when that happened, my family had to inform all the other families that the remains of their dearly departed loved ones were going to be moved into new plots. Work began on that, and as bulldozers and other large shoveling equipment wasn't yet common, it all had to be done by hand.

All went well for the first roughly 2/3rds of the moves. The ground was dug up, the caskets were retrieved, and they were moved, along with their headstones, down to the new, freshly dug plots. The final third is where things got weird. Back then, caskets were generally made of wood, and rather than crafty woodwork designs made, a decorative cloth was laid over it. These wooden caskets more often than not weighed roughly equal to or less than the body they contained. All this is to say that in may cases, the weight of the body inside was discernible from the casket itself.

Well, when they got to that final, northernmost third of the land that the city had bought, the caskets became lighter. The sounds of the corpses within, e.g. slight sliding, a jerky step making a limb fall to one side, hitting the inside of the box, etc., began to become fewer and farther between. Eventually, with the last 20 or so caskets, they felt like there was nothing inside at all. With the permission of the families, the cemetery employees opened these caskets they thought were empty, and found just that to be the case. The insides of the caskets were bare, and looked as if there hadn't ever been anything inside them.

This was quite a bit of a scandal, as I'm sure you can imagine. My family, both publicly and privately, swore up and down that the land had been untouched since the caskets in question were buried, and that the absence of any contents as well as the cleanliness of the caskets themselves was simply impossible. It took some years for the reputation of Pinelawn to recover, but alas, it did.

My grandpa worked at Pinelawn starting in the 60's, but lived there his whole life. The house that my family built on the property (one that I actually live in now; it's been passed down generation to generation), is about 30 yards back from the main office. His room was on the second floor, facing the cemetery itself. By then, some 40 years after the missing body incident, the cemetery had grown quite a bit alongside the town/city itself, with several hundred burial plots.