Katherine Ramsland - Cemetery Stories

F OR MY MOTHER ,
Who encouraged me to explore,
A ND FOR M ISS M ARY ,
Who shares the adventure

ONE
Workers of the Dead

TWO
Cemeteries, Tombs, and Traditions

THREE
Whispers and Shadows in the Night

Oh, dont you laugh when the hearse goes by
Or you will he the next to die
They wrap you up in bloody sheets
And then they bury you six feet deep
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
The worms play pinochle on your snout
Therere big green bugs with big green eyes
They go in your nose and out your eyes
And then you mold away.

childs ditty

When I was five, I often sang this little song with my friends. They always joked about it, but I took it seriously. No way was I ever going to ride off in one of those hearses or be invaded by worms and bugs, and I was certainly not going to mold away.

As I grew older, I learned that this kind of stuff actually does happen, whether I laughed at a hearse or not. So like a lot of people, I tried to avoid funerals, or if I had to go, I avoided the corpse in the casket. Cemeteries to me were just interesting places to walk. I didnt think about what might be happening under the earth.

Then my grandfather died. For the first time I had the opportunity to sit alone with a dead body. I knew that he would soon be shoved into a mausoleum drawer and I wanted some private time with him. Hed been embalmed, although I didnt quite understand what that meant. I just knew that he was lying there stiff and full of something that made his cold skin feel disturbingly hard and waxy. His eyes were closed and he seemed more peaceful than hed been during his illness, yet still he wore a strained expression. I cant really say that he looked like himself, but I didnt realize then that hed been calculatedly posed to give me a memory picture. I also didnt know what would happen to him now and I didnt like to think of him encased in a box in the dark, even if he did have a nice mattress.

After that I avoided funerals again, and even the cemeteries lost some of their allure. But then a close friend died and I had to help make some of the postmortem decisions. Everything happened too quickly and I wished Id understood more about the process. It was time, I realized, to learn more about the subject of death and burial. I wanted to know what would happen to me and whether I had any choices in the matter. I also wanted to know who these death-care professionals were who handled all the procedures right down to the grave.

Then I had an encounter with someone who opened the door.

When I came down for breakfast one morning at a B&B in northern Maryland, it seemed like an ordinary day. Nothing prepared me in that moment for the discussion I was about to have.

The breakfast table had room for six, but only one person sat there with his coffee. I took a seat and introduced myself. My lone companion, Charles Zannino, was a tall, lean man with wavy dark hair, and from the way the innkeeper addressed him when she brought out his pancakes, I sensed he was a regular guest. Greeting me with a warm smile, he mentioned that he had quite a busy day ahead.

What do you do? I asked.

Im an embalmer,he responded.

Yikes. I wasnt sure what to say, but then I figured, well, here was my chance. I had in front of me someone who could demystify a subject that most people knew nothing about, so I invited him to tell me more.

He was delighted. As I ate my scrambled eggs (sans ketchup), he launched right into a description about how the mummified finger of an older corpse can be hydrated to get fingerprints.

There are all kinds of reasons why you might find a body in this state, he said. A homeless person left to the elements, for example, or a murder victim who wasnt found for months.

Despite my past avoidance of death issues, I found myself fascinated. He then initiated a discussion about the popular idea that hair and nails continue to grow after death. They most certainly do not, he insisted.

Are you sure? I pressed. Id once heard about a tornado that had mowed through a cemetery and sucked freshly buried caskets out of the ground. A mans corpse had been found several yards from its resting place, and its hair and nails were six inches longer than when they had buried him. At least thats what Id been told, and that remained one of the spookiest real-life images Id ever heard.

When I offered this to Zannino, he laughed. Thats an urban legend, he assured me. I was deflated, but he went on to explain. The skin on the nails dehydrates and recedes, and the hairline falls back so that it looks like theyve grown, but they havent.

He obviously had a passion for his work, and as he talked that morning, I noted that he was also a keen observer of odd things that happen behind a mortuarys closed doors. There are a lot of stories, he confided.

Thats all he needed to say. Suddenly, I was interestedprofoundly interested. I wanted to learn this stuff, but more than that, I wanted to hear some good stories. Where there were bodies, there had to be things happening behind the scenes. I decided then and there to seek out some people who could tell me more about the whole process, but also divulge the secrets. In the end, while some of my expectations proved groundless, other things were even creepier than I had thought.

Cemetery storiesthe tales that people tell about funerals and graveyards. I figured there were as many as there were people whod been buried. Yet I soon discovered that getting these stories was no easy task. First, many people in the death-care industry have incredibly busy schedules. Like physicians, they never know when they might be needed, and when a call comes in, they have to go. (One man told me that in twenty-five years of marriage, he had managed to spend only one Christmas with his family.) Numerous interviews were rescheduled and then rescheduled yet again. I came to have a great deal of compassion for how hard funeral directors work and for the kinds of irregular lives they have to lead to serve the public and make a living.

But there was also another issue: While the poet undertaker Thomas Lynch had no trouble telling thought-provoking stories about his trade, others were more guarded. What kind of information was I seeking? Was I going to write about it and make them look like vultures, as had certain authors who had criticized the American way of death? Was I going to disparage the corporate developments in this business or make them all into morbid necrophiles? Would I embarrass them to their clients?

I understood their concerns, yet my intention was to find out what was really going on behind closed doors, from the principled to the unethical. If some funeral director threw a party that included the bodies, I would say so, but I would acknowledge the experiences of the normal professional, too. I wasnt sure what I would discover, yet by the time I had covered the range of things that can happen during the life of a corpse after death, my entire perspective had changed.