Unusual Gravestones and Burials

C.A. Asbrey

I’m sure many of you will have seen the pictures of the two gravestones  holding hands over the wall at the cemetery in Het Oude Kerkhof, Roermond, the Netherlands. J.W.C van Gorcum, colonel of the Dutch Cavalry and militia commissioner in Limburg was a Protestant. His wife, Lady J.C.P.H van Aefferden is buried in the Catholic part. They were married in 1842,the lady was 22 and the colonel 33, he was a protestant and didn’t belong to the nobility. When they died in the 1880s this was the only way they could be linked in death.

This creative solution is typical of the many unusual gravestones from the 19th century. Taphophiles, people who love graveyards, were far more numerous in the Victorian era. Not only was there a socially-sanctioned fascination with death, and everything surrounding it, but graveyards were often one of the few public places with any greenery available to those living in the dirty industrial areas of the ever-growing cities. They were popular places to promenade, and even to hold picnics. The small graveyards of the village churches swallowed up by the urban sprawl become overcrowded, so large areas were set aside to dispose of the last mortal remains of the townsfolk. People flocked to places like Glasgow’s Necropolis (established in the 1830s), Highgate Cemetery in London, and Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York. They were arboretums, refuges for wildlife, and also a place where beautiful sculptures could be admired.  

     

The Victorians were very keen on social structure. Everyone should know their place and keep to it. However, as much as people wanted to fit in, they were every bit as determined to stand out, and funerary art was one of the many methods of self-expression open to anyone with enough money to make a statement.   

This Argentinean grave is famous for giving rise to many a wry smile. The  man is sitting on his sofa looking seriously at the horizon while a woman is seated in another one, at his back, looking in opposite directions. He died first, so the family made his Mausoleum. When his wife died, sometime later, she requested in her will to be placed in a way which represented their marriage: they spent their last 30 years without speaking a word.

Not all couples were as indifferent to one another. Jonathan Reed loved his wife, Mary, so much that when she died in 1893 he couldn’t bear to be parted from her. He had this mausoleum built and moved in with her coffin. He lived there for ten years, with a parrot for company, until he joined her ten years later. At that point, he was interred with her  and the tomb sealed. 

The picture above is a good example of a grave with a window. Edgar Allan Poe’s work of 1844 reflected a wider fear of the 19th century – being buried alive. Taphephobia was more than just a strange phobia. There were documented cases of people being pronounced dead prematurely in the 18th and 19th centuries, just as there are in the third world today. There were numerous patents posted in the 19th century, with various solutions, ranging from bells, windows, and breathing tubes. This grave is a good example of the windowed grave and is in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Vermont. 
Timothy Clark Smith designed his own, and when he died in 1893, he was buried to his own plans. Underneath the capstone is a set of steps, and he was said to have been buried with a bell in his hand, and a set of breathing tubes. The window was placed just above his face so people could check on him, but today visibility extends only a few inches beyond the aging glass. The shaft runs down the traditional six feet to the grave beneath.       

Victor Noire was a political journalist in Paris who was shot dead in a duel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte in 1870. More than a hundred thousand people attended his funeral. Once the Bonapartes lost power in the fall of the Second Empire, his body was transferred to Père Lachaise Cemetery and this statute was commissioned. He initially became the focus of the anti-imperialist movement, but the hyper-realistic nature of the figure ultilmately became the focus for another reason. The face was as accurate as a death mask, but it soon attracted the attention of  women who noticed another part of his anatomy. To this day the figure is covered in verdigris, except for the lips and groin which are polished bronze as young women kiss and rib the statue hoping it will bring them luck and fertility.    

Sometimes it’s not the stone which is memorable, but what is, or isn’t, on it. The grave of rope walker does not bear his name. It was the deceased’s profession. The peg-legged rope walker is buried in the Hebrew Cemetery of Corsicana, a small town 55 miles south of Dallas. In 1884, he had been walking across a rope stretched across the street, with an iron stove strapped to his back, when he fell to his death. He asked for a rabbi, but didn’t have time to give any more details before he succumbed to his injuries. In 2016, a possible identity of the Rope Walker was revealed as “Professor Berg,” also known as “Professor Daniel De Houne.” His real name was thought to be Moses Berg.       

This is the gravestone of Phoebe Hessel who died December 12, 1821, aged 108. She passed as a man and served for many years as a private soldier in the 5th Regt of Foot in different parts of Europe and in the Year 1745 fought under the command of the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Fontenoy where she received a bayonet wound in her arm. 

Phoebe hid the fact she was a woman from her fellow soldiers, and like many women in her situation, that ended when she was wounded. There was little or no medical inspection of soldiers in the past and many soldiers wore their hair long, in the style called the ‘queue’, so it was quite possible for a female soldier to disguise herself as a man and escape detection. And she lived to the very impressive age of 108.

When Sir John Soanes’ wife died, he wanted her to be immortalized in a memorial fitting a woman of her virtues and status. The grave stands in Old St. Pancras churchyard. As the man who designed the Bank of England, he was well-placed to design it himself. Little did he know that he had hit upon something so iconic that it was to become commonplace all over the British Isles and to be as synonymous with British design as the mini or the Union Jack. It inspired Giles Gilbert Scott’s design of the red phone box — specifically the K2 design.

The Loudon memorial is also known as the floating coffin of Pinner. It was built at Pinner Parish church in 1809 by John Loudon to contain the bodies of his parents, William and Agnes Loudon. The unusual triangular design, with a coffin sticking out each side halfway up is more than just artistic expression. It’s said that John Loudon did this to keep money in the family — his parents had inherited some wealth on the condition that it would stay in their family as long as their bodies were above ground. The devil is in the detail of any legal document.

This grave with a trap door has a heartbreaking poignancy when you know the story behind it. A heartbroken mother had this grave designed for her deceased 10-year-old daughter in 1871. The daughter had been terrified of storms. When she died her mother had the grave built with a trapdoor that descends to the level of the coffin. Her mother would come and enter the tomb during storms to comfort her child – and probably herself.