Published Authors

A place for budding and experienced authors to share ideas about publishing and marketing books
 
HomeHome  GalleryGallery  Latest imagesLatest images  RegisterRegister  Log in  Featured MembersFeatured Members  ArticlesArticles  

 

 Cemeteries

Go down 
+2
Dick Stodghill
zadaconnaway
6 posters
AuthorMessage
zadaconnaway
Five Star Member
Five Star Member
zadaconnaway


Number of posts : 4017
Registration date : 2008-01-16
Age : 76
Location : Washington, USA

Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Cemeteries   Cemeteries EmptyFri Aug 21, 2009 7:56 pm

Cemeteries have long been a place of superstition and fear. I have always found them to be places that were peaceful and serene. Of course, I have never had occasion to be there at night. Smile

In daylight one time many years ago, I was mowing an old Pioneer cemetery that was adjacent to my place of employment. While picking up limbs, I caught movement from the corner of my eye. Before I looked squarely at the movement, there were three children there. A little girl riding an old fashioned trike was being chased by a young boy on foot. There was also a girl who appeared to be in her teens in old fashioned attire and clutching a book to her bosom. I could vaguely hear the laughter of the trike rider.

Of course, when I looked directly in their direction, they were gone. But for a moment, it was as if they were alive and happy.

There were many children buried in that cemetery, and I felt sad for them until the happy children appeared to me. Or did they? Was it just my mind trying to tell me to not be sad?

Anyone else have a cemetery memory?
Back to top Go down
http://www.zadaconnaway.com
Dick Stodghill
Five Star Member
Five Star Member
Dick Stodghill


Number of posts : 3795
Registration date : 2008-05-04
Age : 98
Location : Akron, Ohio

Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Re: Cemeteries   Cemeteries EmptyMon Sep 07, 2009 5:49 am

A mind can do strange things at times, Zada.
On the night of the riot at Goodyear in May 1938 the fighting spilled over into a section of East Akron Cemetery that was across the street from Plant One. Our house was about 40 yards from it so in the morning I wandered among overturned tombstones to see the chips from bullets. Lots of blood but no bodies. It was an exciting morning but too short because I had to continue on to school. I didn't want to be late because I had collected tear gas casings from the street and wanted to make the girls cry.
Back to top Go down
http://www.dickstodghill.com
zadaconnaway
Five Star Member
Five Star Member
zadaconnaway


Number of posts : 4017
Registration date : 2008-01-16
Age : 76
Location : Washington, USA

Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Re: Cemeteries   Cemeteries EmptyTue Sep 08, 2009 5:00 am

You were truly a devilish child, Dick! Did you get to make the girls cry?
Back to top Go down
http://www.zadaconnaway.com
Carol Troestler
Five Star Member
Five Star Member
Carol Troestler


Number of posts : 3827
Registration date : 2008-06-07
Age : 86
Location : Wisconsin

Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Re: Cemeteries   Cemeteries EmptyTue Sep 08, 2009 7:05 am

I think I've put this on the messageboard before, but it fits here as well.


The Small Cemetery

My cousin’s son has been going there for years. He lives in Texas, and when he comes to Chicago on business, he rents a car and goes to this small cemetery to wander among the graves of his ancestors.

This is a cemetery where my great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents are buried. When a road was built through the original cemetery, the remains buried there were moved from what had previously been their final resting place to this site. The cemetery is across the street from a horse farm on a quiet country road in Lake County, Illinois, close to border with Wisconsin.

We found the cemetery easily and parked our car across the road. We had come to Chicago from our home in Wisconsin for my fiftieth high school reunion. It had rained all week and the grass in the burial ground was long, plush and very damp.

As we wandered, I noticed the names on the gravestones. I told my husband I thought a third of the people in the cemetery were my relatives. He thought I might be exaggerating. He has walked through many cemeteries with me since I began writing books about my great-grandmothers.

We had lived in Lake County for six years in the late sixties and seventies. My cousins had lived in Lake County during their high school years. The fact our ancestors had lived here had not brought us to live in this county, or had it? In the sixties and seventies, I was taking care of dependants, not checking into the lives of ancestors.

I found the Civil War commemorative stone for my great-grandfather Benjamin Willard Ames, a small white stone sticking out of the ground at an angle. And then I saw the beautiful red marble stone with his name, that of his wife, Hannah Sluman Ames, and that of two babies. It was not an old stone, perhaps no more than five years old, beautifully engraved but with death dates from over a century ago.

My great grandmother Hannah became despondent after the death of her son, a rambunctious two-year-old who had died falling off a pile of wood. Afterwards she had lived with her parents for a while, but her despondency never lifted and she took her own life. Her husband Benjamin, who considered committing suicide an unforgivable sin, had all her belongings destroyed and demanded that no one was to speak of her again. But obviously someone had, someone who had marked her most recent final resting place with a beautiful red marble stone.

An elderly man appeared in the cemetery or perhaps he had been there all the time and I hadn’t noticed while taking in the presence of my ancestors. We went to speak to him and found he was a volunteer who helped with cemetery maintenance. He apologized for the long grass, “but it has been a rainy week.” He asked who I was and when I told him which family I belonged to, he told me he had known Shirley Murphy, my father’s first cousin. It was one of those “small world” moments. Shirley had attended my father and mother’s fiftieth wedding anniversary party at our house in Wisconsin, over a hundred miles away.

“Shirley is buried on the other side of the cemetery. Since she was in the army, she has a military marker.” So, we went to find Shirley’s grave. It was as he had said, a military marker, and there next to it was a beautiful red marble stone engraved with the names of her father and mother, a red marble stone like the one for my great-grandparents, which would have been Shirley’s grandparents.

I knew while standing there that Shirley had put the stone for Hannah and her family in the cemetery, to honor those ancestors close to her, to honor a woman ancestor, although that ancestor had committed what her husband considered the unforgivable sin of suicide, and even acknowledging an uncompassionate husband who had ordered no one to speak of his wife again. Hannah and Benjamin were her ancestors, those who had gone before her, my ancestors, those who had gone before me.

As I looked around, I knew why my cousin’s son came here. I felt the mystery of the place, of a town that once was long ago, of processions to bury the dead, of moving the dead to new graves, praying over them, and cutting the grass.

And quietly we left, closing the small gate, getting in our car. We drove to the original site of the cemetery, trying to imagine what the small town there would have been like, trying to determine where my ancestors could have lived, driving to the town where my great-grandmother grew up, and back to the hotel where my high school reunion dinner would take place.

Unfortunately, my husband had only brought one pair of shoes to the reunion, shoes now completely soaked through from the long, damp grass of the cemetery. He spent some time in the bathroom drying them out with the hair dryer.

The magic stays with me as it does my cousin’s son. Sometimes one goes places and can feel something, something unexplainable. That day I stepped on sacred ground, walking among souls that had given life to my ancestors, whose ancestors came to Illinois in pioneer wagons from Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Massachusetts and before that from across the sea, long long ago.
Back to top Go down
http://www.authorsden.com/ctroestler
alj
Five Star Member
Five Star Member
alj


Number of posts : 9633
Registration date : 2008-12-05
Age : 80
Location : San Antonio

Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Re: Cemeteries   Cemeteries EmptyTue Sep 08, 2009 7:45 am

Carol,

I've read this piece before, and I still think it is among your best writings.

Zada,

I cannot think of cemeteries without remembering Denise Levertov's "Despair" :

http://books.google.com/books?id=Hkt4LGcyq_IC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=denise+levertov+poems+%22while+we+were+visiting%22&source=bl&ots=xYaOxcCvtn&sig=qW8hvY6gsu9ABoxOrQodOnWpfss&hl=en&ei=cGymSovFJ9SinQf4jaH1BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Ann
Back to top Go down
http://www.annjoiner.com
Carol Troestler
Five Star Member
Five Star Member
Carol Troestler


Number of posts : 3827
Registration date : 2008-06-07
Age : 86
Location : Wisconsin

Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Re: Cemeteries   Cemeteries EmptyTue Sep 08, 2009 7:58 am

Ann, I'm going to start with the story about the children at the cemetery when my daughter-in-law's mother died, and then this chapter.

I am also going to try to write Hannah's part in first person, beginning with her regret at taking her life and not seeing her children grown or knowing her grandchildren in this world, and then on with her life.

It is challenging but is the only way I have figured out to get into Hannah's heart and soul. It will be interesting what appears there, and certainly fits this cemetery theme.
Back to top Go down
http://www.authorsden.com/ctroestler
madhatter
Four Star Member
Four Star Member
madhatter


Number of posts : 502
Registration date : 2008-02-13
Location : Tallahassee, FL

Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Re: Cemeteries   Cemeteries EmptyFri Sep 25, 2009 2:11 pm

I like to look for the little small gifts and mementos people leave next to gravestones. Makes me wonder about the story behind them.
Back to top Go down
http://www.rhettdevane.com
Dick Stodghill
Five Star Member
Five Star Member
Dick Stodghill


Number of posts : 3795
Registration date : 2008-05-04
Age : 98
Location : Akron, Ohio

Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Re: Cemeteries   Cemeteries EmptyFri Sep 25, 2009 2:48 pm

Yes, Zada, and they kept coming back for more. In small doses, tear gas isn't bad. Today they'd probably have me arrested.
Back to top Go down
http://www.dickstodghill.com
Rick Waid




Number of posts : 6
Registration date : 2014-12-21

Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Re: Cemeteries   Cemeteries EmptySun Dec 21, 2014 6:29 am

Graveyards are special places. Energies are around everywhere. Who knows what was there before the graveyard was.
Back to top Go down
Sponsored content





Cemeteries Empty
PostSubject: Re: Cemeteries   Cemeteries Empty

Back to top Go down
 
Cemeteries
Back to top 
Page 1 of 1

Permissions in this forum:You cannot reply to topics in this forum
Published Authors :: Society :: Paranormal Phenomena-
Jump to: