Lachaise (Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein),
Los Angeles’s Hollywood Forever (Cecil B. DeMille, Fay
Wray), and Buenos Aires’s La Recoleta (Eva Perón). But
I learn more off the beaten path. While hiking a seaside
bluff in Scarborough, England, on a chilly mid-Decem-
ber day, I inadvertently came upon a small graveyard
that held the body of writer Anne Brontë. She died in
Scarborough in 1849 at age 29, having journeyed to the
ocean one last time while suffering from tuberculosis.
Hers is a grave with a killer view, overlooking the sea
and backlit each evening by the coastal sunset.
Brontë’s final resting place shares an aging stone
boundary wall with a small grassy parking lot.
Headstones crowd the perimeter of the lot. Part of
the graveyard had been repurposed by the adjoining
church to provide parking for its parishioners—an act
not uncommon in land-limited England. This adapta-
tion of cemetery space reminded me that graveyards
aren’t relics. They are places reshaped to meet our
personal and cultural needs.
I’ve seen this reality play out all over the world. I
interviewed a cemetery manager in London who reuses
graves and headstones after long periods of abandon-
ment. I visited a graveyard in Jakarta, Indonesia, a
megacity of 10 million with less than 10 percent green
space, where children flew kites and vendors sold food
and coffee among the graves; the dire need for public
park space tempered the typically solemn air of Muslim
graveyards. And at Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol,
England, I scanned an augmented-reality app over
graves and was greeted by on-screen ghostly narrators.
Caricatures of graveyards surround us during
Halloween season. However, I invite you to view
cemeteries not as places of death, but as places of
life. Learn about the death rituals in your destination,
and, if the community welcomes visits, go. Remember
that people have long been excluded from burial in
graveyards based on religion, race, and inability to
pay, and think about who is—and is not—represented.
Feel the power of kinship as you stand beside a labor
or social union’s shared burial plot, like the Butcher’s
Benevolent Society tomb in New Orleans’s Lafayette
Cemetery No. 2. Perhaps you will experience the joy
of finding a witty quip on a headstone, like the one in
Washington, D.C.’s Oak Hill Cemetery that declares,
“We finally found a place to park in Georgetown!” Treat
cemeteries as they are: spaces for the living.KATIE THORNTON ( @itskatiethornton) writes
KAT about death (and life) on itskatiethornton.com.
IE^ T
HO
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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019GREEN-WOOD,
NEW YORK CITY
This garden-style ceme-
tery’s trees, plants, and
views made it America’s
second biggest tourist
attraction in the 1860s
(beaten out only by Niagara
Falls). Position yourself just
so within its 478 acres and
you can see the cemetery’s
impressive gothic entry-
way, the neighborhoods of
central Brooklyn, and the
Manhattan skyline.
OKUNOIN CEMETERY,
JAPAN
Japan’s largest cemetery
is located in the haunt-
ingly beautiful, sacred
woods of Mount Koya,
two hours south of Osaka.
Ancient pines tower over
moss-covered stone lan-
terns, statues, and paths of
pilgrimage. It is the resting
place of some 200,000
Buddhist monks.
HONG KONG CEMETERY,
HONG KONG
In the high-end neigh-
borhood of Happy Valley,
Hong Kong Cemetery’s ter-
raced and compact graves
ascend a mountainside,
echoing the density of the
neighboring skyscrapers.Views to Die For
In many parts of the
world, the dead are given
prime real estate. These
three cemeteries have
vistas worth the visit.
For additional graves
with great scenery, go to
natgeotravel.com.place for contemplative walks, and the obvious desti-
nation for close-to-home adventures. But my interest
wasn’t a macabre phase. After college I spent three years
conducting historical research and planning public
events for that same cemetery. Now, as a Fulbright-
National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow, I
travel the world interviewing people in cemeteries—
from gravediggers who gave up their comfortable
office jobs to stonemasons who continue handcarving
tombstones even though the craft is “dying.”
I walk graveyards like a detective, using epitaphs
to decode history. At Chicago’s Woodlawn Cemetery,
I noticed a grave marked “Unknown Male No. 1.” I
walked the cemetery’s aisle as the numbers on the
nearly identical tombstones climbed higher, reset at
“Unknown Female No. 1,” and climbed again. Nearby
graves bore the names “4 Horse Driver” and “Baldy.”
More than 50 graves had nearly the same death date in
June of 1918. When I reached a memorial monument
in this plot known as Showmen’s Rest, the full story
took shape: A circus train wreck had claimed all these
victims on one tragic summer day.
At London’s famed Highgate Cemetery, I came
across the inscription “Also of their infant children” on
an ivy-covered family grave. Similar to the famous six-
word story—“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”—this
short epitaph elucidated the realities of Victorian-era
infant mortality more succinctly than any history
book. Through epitaphs I discover tales of daily life,
epidemics and emigration, industrial booms and busts,
love and loss.
But it’s not just epitaphs that help us peek into
the past. By stepping inside one of Singapore’s few
remaining historic cemeteries, I got to trade the
superstructures of the city-state’s modern skyline
for what remains of the tiny island’s majestic rain-
forests. Ninety percent of the country’s forests—and
most of its historic cemeteries—have been cleared to
make way for development in the urban nation smaller
than New York City. But in Bukit Brown Cemetery,
still alive with the buzz of mosquitoes, the smell of
rain, and the threat of snakes, I glimpsed Singapore
before urbanization. Volunteer historians used walking
sticks to pull back the dominating greenery and reveal
intricately tiled tombs. Families brought me to their
ancestral graves, where they poured coffee for the dead
and left meals their forebears might have enjoyed in
life. I watched as monkeys cheekily snatched the food
offerings left behind. Here, death fuels life.
Travelers like to haunt graves at Paris’s Père