The wind was blowing heavily, pelting me with rain from darkened skies as I made my way up a narrow path to find the Hill of Tara in Ireland. My hubby elected to remain in the parking lot, safe and dry in our rental car, but I was determined to see, even briefly, the legendary seat of the High Kings of Ireland in ancient times.
There was no one else about, even as I crested the hill to find the Visitor Centre. It was housed inside a former church so dark and dismal on the exterior alone (at least on that misbegotten day) that I felt I was in a Hammer movie. Branches of the surrounding trees were whipping about, and the church was completely dark. Since there was no one to say I couldn’t, I made my way along the gravelly path past the church and through the eerie graveyard, with lichen-shrouded headstones tilted at odd angles.
At the far end of the graveyard, there was an old gate flanked by trees, and as I undid the latch and stepped out onto the rolling grassy field beyond, loud cawing erupted from the branches. Crow-black birds, but with ghostly white beaks – rooks, omens of death and misfortune. Some think that, like other corvids, they guard the threshold between realms.
They’ve been known to mob people they don’t like, but they left me alone, other than to make an enormous fuss as I progressed toward the Hill. One of their many epithets is a clamour of rooks.
I slipped up and down a few muddy slopes, fighting my way through the rain while my plastic poncho shredded around me. I got close enough to see the Stone of Tara in the distance, but the going was so hard that it would have taken me at least half an hour to reach it, and I turned back before my hubby sent out a search party.
The rooks screeched again when I returned, and I took the photo you see in the featured image for this post. Truly, one of the creepiest damn places I’ve ever been to.
Graveyards are themselves thresholds between this life and the next. They remind us of our mortality, which is probably why we tend to feel uneasy on their grounds. We hope that our loved ones are resting easy, having moved on to a better place, but how many people would be willing to walk through a cemetery alone after dark? I know people who won’t live near one, although I don’t think that would bother me.
Today cemeteries stand apart, but up until the early 19th century they were typically attached to a church – in Christian practices anyway. Urbanization made churchyards dangerously overcrowded and cities began to create cemeteries on the outskirts. So technically, graveyards are those burial grounds attached to churches, but they both share a history of superstitions meant to protect the still-living from any spirits that might not be staying put in their entombment.
According to folklore, then, graveyards needed guardians. Whenever a new churchyard would open, the first soul buried there was then required to protect the graveyard from the Devil, or that each new soul would have to take up that duty until another was interred. Resting in peace? Not so much. If I were the new Keeper of the graveyard, I think I might wander myself looking for a replacement.
Is it any wonder, then, that it became essential to never step on a grave, for fear of misfortune (though when I was growing up I was told that we do it out of respect). Pointing a finger at a tombstone would make your hand or finger wither and rot, and whistling in a graveyard was said to either attract those mischievous spirits lurking about or summon the devil himself (be vewwy, vewwy quiet). I must admit, I’ve never heard anyone whistle in a cemetery. When departing a burial, one should walk backwards to confuse any spirits who might want to follow you home.
Being the first or last person to leave a funeral was, along with perhaps a little tacky, also a pretty bad idea: it marked you to be next to kick off. Explains why, at every funeral I’ve ever attended, people cluster and shuffle off en masse.
And yet, with such a miasma of potential bad luck, we are drawn to explore graveyards and cemeteries, either for the history in all of those tombs, or the chills and thrills of such ghostly premises.
The oldest graveyard we’ve ever visited was on the Rock of Cashel in Ireland, where the place just breathes antiquity. But it has its own dire legend: the Rock of Cashel was originally on a mountain about 20 miles north, the Devil’s Bit; when St. Patrick banished Satan from a cave there, the Rock’s landing in its present location.
When we visited Sleepy Hollow country in NY state a number of years ago, we were lucky enough to join the first graveyard tour ever offered by the Old Dutch Church and Burying Ground, where we saw the plot of the author of my very favourite Halloween tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Washington Irving is so revered by people that the church had, at that point, already replaced his tombstone three times from the wear and tear of literary pilgrims touching it. (Could be even more times by now).
That graveyard is so old (1600s) that it even contains several of the eeriest things I’ve seen: headstone-swallowing trees. Some of the trees are so ancient that they’ve fallen, leaving little tableaux with very Sleepy Hollow movie vibes (the Christopher Walken version of the Headless Horseman).
I wish could show you photos of tombs in the above-ground cemeteries in New Orleans, where a few of them were so broken they looked like the inhabitant had broken free, but sadly my old laptop crashed with those pix on it. I’ve also lost photos I took at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles, where the slab fronting Marilyn Monroe’s wall tomb is perpetually covered by red kisses left by adoring fans.
Symbolism is profound in burial sites, whether modern tributes or early emblems. Even the fences, particularly those made of wrought iron, have had special purposes, including warding off spirits as well as marking sacred soil. Iron has long been believed to repel supernatural entities.
On gravestones, a Skull and Bones represented mortality and the impermanence of life. Full of poignancy, a Broken Column denoted a life cut short – someone who died too young. Winged skulls, which we’ve seen in many older graveyards, represented the ascension of the soul on wings. An urn at the tomb signified the body’s return to dust.
In centuries far past, some privileged people were interred inside churches. Because such spaces were limited, the practice was mostly restricted to royalty and major church benefactors and nobles whose funds helped to build and maintain the elaborate stone buildings, as well as some members of the clergy. The regular prayers and services held in the church would ideally shorten the deceased soul’s time in Purgatory.
The practice stopped when, as time elapsed, the decomposing bodies beneath the floorboards of crowded churches began to reek during services – the origin of the phrase “stinking rich”.
There’s rich history to be found in the places and ways that humans have laid out their deceased – in eternal rest, or something less than. Highgate Cemetery in London, which I have yet to visit, is notorious. The final home of many famous people, from philosopher Karl Marx to author Douglas Adams (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), scientist Michael Faraday, singer George Michael, and many more, is purportedly extremely haunted. If you choose to visit, beware the Highgate Vampire: in 1968, the story goes that a group of youths interested in the occult visited on Halloween, perpetrating strange activities that included arranging flowers in odd patterns and even driving an iron stake through the lid of a coffin to impale the corpse within. Afterward, many stories of sightings began to be reported – the classic ‘woman in white’, a ghostly cyclist, a tall man in a hat, and more.
Mobs of ‘hunters’ from all over London and beyond began climbing into the locked cemetery, despite police efforts to control them, and in 1970 police found the charred and headless remains of a woman’s body. A couple of rival hunters named David Farrant and Sean Manchester seem to have been convinced of the presence of a vampire, and feuded about it well into our present century.
Whatever floats your boat. Should you decide to do a little spirit-hunting yourself this spooky season, I say only one thing: do be careful. You don’t want an unexpected hitchhiker from beyond.