jane q. public

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I took so many photos (somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500) during my trip to St. Augustine last summer that I’m still going through them all.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded another set of them to Flickr.

This is making me so, so antsy for another vacation.  I liked St. Augustine a lot – probably because it is so old.  And of course there were the sweet little alligators.  If the money situation improves (doubtful), I’d like to go again this summer.

Oh Lordy… I need to get out of town.

click image to view photo set

I took a little field trip out of town this weekend, and managed to spend yesterday afternoon visiting a couple of creepy/morbid spots because I’m weird like that.

Naturally I had to make a stop at Waverly Hills again.  I didn’t hear any creepy noises this time (though I never would have over the icy, whipping wind), and the photos I got are nearly the same as my previous ones, but it was cool nonetheless.  The photos from yesterday are here.

I also visited a spot that I didn’t know about when I was in town in November (though it shares a brick wall with Cave Hill Cemetery) – Eastern Cemetery.

Eastern Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, has been abandoned since the late 1980s when it was learned that graves had been reused (sometimes numerous times) since as early as the 1920s.

In 2005 it was discovered that a crypt in the middle of the cemetery stood unlocked with boxes upon boxes of “cremains,” some of which were labeled with multiple names or simply as “unknown.”  Some of the boxes remained (though I don’t know if they were empty or not) when I visited yesterday, but the crypt was locked.

All possible points of entry to the old crematory/office/columbarium facility had been sealed up with cinderblocks, though I’m thinking that may have been recent, as I’ve found pictures on the internet taken inside the building as recently as July 2008.

One of the smokestacks from the two crematory furnaces still stands, but the other was reduced some rusty pieces of Swiss cheese on the ground.  Since I couldn’t get into the basement of the building to check out the furnaces, these were the next best thing.

Though cemeteries don’t really give me the creeps (I reserve that for abandoned buildings), I was convinced from all that I’d read that Eastern Cemetery was going to give me goosebumps – so much so that I had a scary dream about going there a few weeks before I actually went.  However, I went away just feeling sad.

If a person paid for a burial place and a headstone or plaque, it seems that they may have wanted to be remembered.  Sadly, everything about that burial ground seemed lonely and forgotten.

Click below to go to the set of photos I took at Eastern Cemetery – I’ve captioned them in case that’s of some interest.

Click mosaic to view photo set.

More on Eastern Cemetery:

Thousands Buried in Old Graves, Investigators in Kentucky Report [New York Times, 1989]

Some graves contained the remains of as many as six people, and graves containing the remains of three or four are common…

Unlocked Crypt Latest In Line Of Local Cemetery Problems [WLKY, 2005 - transcript/video]

[W]e find a crypt on the middle of the property, not locked, containing what appears to be the cremated remains of dozens of people. Some of the remains are numbered or labeled ‘unknown.’ Some containers list the names of several people.

Disgraced Cemeteries [WLKY, 2005 - transcript/video]

The investigation also details finding scores of babies buried only a foot deep, and finding bones everywhere from a toolbox to a White Castle bag, forcing authorities to shut down the cemeteries.

Photos by Stephen Lutz

Louisville Ghost Hunters Society photos

This morning, if you were to head out to Woodlawn Cemetary and find yourself standing over my grandmother’s grave, you might be creeped out by a rumbling sound*.  Don’t be alarmed.  Bev’s just rolling over in her grave a few times over this morning’s big news.

My grandmother was one of those folks who would vehemently deny any charges of racism you lobbed at her, but nonetheless, she had a little bit of that disease.  It was infuriating, but she was my grandma and I loved her.  Anyway, this made it all the more bizarre that the woman truly believed that O.J. Simpson wasn’t guilty of those murders**.

I was a kid at the time. In fact, I was sitting on a couch in California watching “Married With Children” when my show got interrupted for the White Bronco debacle.  I always liked to say, “O.J. didn’t do it.  It was the one-armed man.”  But I knew, and so did everyone else.

I got my politics from my mom (thank you sweet baby Jesus!), but I’m also the daughter of a defense attorney, so I absolutely agree with the verdict in that old case.  You just can’t convict a person of murder in such a poorly-conducted case full of holes.  The police and the prosecution failed to do their job well, and the jury did exactly as they should have.  So the system both worked and failed.

But my grandma, all the way to the end, had some inexplicable belief in his innocence.  If she were here now, I guess she’d be bummed to see him convicted and facing a potential life sentence, 13 years to the day from his big acquittal.

I just hope the jury whose verdict was read yesterday did their job properly and convicted based on the evidence in this case alone.

Wow.  I can’t believe I just spent 10 minutes out of my life pondering O.J. Simpson.  WTF?

*Sorry, mom.

**Don’t know if y’all remember that whole thing.  I think there were a couple of news stories on it back in the mid-nineties.

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