Just curious. I’ve always wondered about what it’s like living next to a cemetary. My first thought has always been “Well, at least the neighbors are quiet”. But the more I think about it, there would usually be some digging going on during many daytime hours and maybe some teens up to mischief at night… but how much really? And grounds maintenance. But grounds maintenance happens in every suburb.
So, pun only kinda intended, can one sleep like the dead in a house built next to a cemetary? [And no, I wouldn’t be creeped out in the least by living next to one]
My parent’s house is just across the street from a cemetary. However, the cemetary is a small family one (although members of the family are still buried there), so we don’t have too many problems with machinery and crowds. It used to scare the crap out of my friends, when I would propose a midnight visit (didn’t help that my dad was in on the deal, and was usually hiding behind a gravestone to scare us half to death).
Another one living directly across the road from one. It’s not really that different from living anywhere else, IM(limited)E. Though it was a very small one in a very rural area, so keep that in mind. There wasn’t very much digging going on–once in a while there’d be a new arrival, but that wasn’t all that common. Grounds maintenance wasn’t annoying at all, no louder than any of the neighbours tending their places. And around there, the teenagers had better places to be at night.
Like at my neighbours house for a prom party. With the band going full blast at 2 a.m. I was not a happy camper the next morning, especially since I had to work. I’ll take the corpses any day.
And yes, I could sleep like the dead, assuming the kid next door wasn’t being a show off (I know this isn’t the pit, but I really cannot stand this guy). So yeah, nothing special, just a bit quieter.
I grew up across the street from a large city cemetary. I never really thought much about it. It is located on a bluff overlooking the Kings River here in central California so it is a really pretty, scenic spot. Grounds maintenance is probably consistent with what you would find at any city park. At the edge of the cemetary (directly next to the existing graves) there is a large grassy area that I suppose will eventually be filled with graves but we used to play football there on the weekends. The only real inconvenience was when there was a large procession coming in and I was trying to leave.
I live right around the corner from a small, boring cemetary. The most interesting thing about it is a large stone visible from the street with the single word “VICE” on it.
I used to live across the street from a park that was an old cemetary until the early '70’s, when they pulled out the stones and moved the bodies that still had living relatives who cared enough to re-plant them elsewhere. It was pretty cool, because it had been used first as a pauper’s cemetary for the Chinese immigrants, then later became a respectable Victorian cemetary. This was in SoCal, and it was the only park in town that had no homeless setting up camp. Also, it was built on a hillside, and there had been a fair amount of ground shifting over the decades. It was not too unusual for my landlady, an avid gardener, to turn up an occasional small bone, or fragment of bone. Couldn’t swear they were human, but…
It was a lovely, quiet park. People mostly stayed away. A fine and private place.
I also live directly facing a huge graveyard. It is about 10 feet away from my back door. Every window in my apartment faces the grounds, and it is actually quite lovely - there are lots of old trees scattered about. The tombstones date back from the early 1800s to the present, and some of them are marvelous. Noise isn’t bad; the groundskeepers really only work on my side of the graveyard on Mondays, and I’m at work then anyways. I haven’t had any problems with mischievous teens (or lonely ghosts, heh, for that matter).
Sometimes seeing all the burials is rather sobering, though.
The last house I lived in had a cemetary directly behind it. It’s fairly old and pretty large too. The only thing I miss about living in that neighborhood is the cemetary. It has really nice tree lined paths and some really cool gravestones. I used to use it as my personal walking park.
It was pretty full so they really didn’t dig much. I don’t ever remember being disturbed by the grounds crew at all.
Nowhere near a cemetary, but I did go to highschool with someone who’s father was a funeral director, and the family had an apartment over the funeral home.
In my house out in the country, we have a slave graveyard in our backyard. Granted, our backyard is about 30 acres. But it’s there. Quite eerie in the early morning to wake up and walk out on the back porch and gaze off into the white mist.
Used to live with a cemetery right across the back yard fence. Best neighbor I ever had.
Grounds crew used a tractor-based mower thar was quieter than any regular home-type mower. House was in the midst of the “old” section, so there was never any digging.
Used to live next to a cemetery in Japan - actually made the rent cheaper, since a lot of Japanese are quite superstitious about that - not that there’s anyone buried there, since they’re all cremated. The dead make great neighbours, although there were rumours about the place - there was a Korean labour camp nearby during the war, and the dead were burnt and the ashes dumped there, sans tombstones - so some locals were always telling stories about strange lights and noises after dark.
I grew up in a small city, in a house a block away from an old cemetary. I walked past it on my way to school and on my way home again; it belonged to my family’s church so I walked past every Sunday, too.
The cemetary was so old that it was closed to new graves, so it was pretty quiet. A groundskeeper now and then, mowing the grass and pulling weeds, that was about it. Some of my classmates who lived farther away from it used to dare each other to go in when we went Trick-or-Treating, but frankly even on Halloween it never scared me at all. It was a pretty place, very quiet and serene.
I don’t now, but my grandmother’s house is beside a convent and a large Catholic cemetary. My siblings and I used to play in it when we were kids.
I never thought of it as a scary place. In a way, it’s rather comforting. When I was growing up, my grandfather, who died when I was 2, was buried up there, as were my great-grandmother, a baby of my grandparents’ that died in infancy, and a number of other more distant relatives (the family goes back in that town to the 1850s). And grandma’s up there now too. I’ve always felt very ancestrally connected when I’m there.
When I last visited last fall with a couple of friends, one of the first places I took them to was the cemetary; I introduced them to a few dead relatives before we went to meet the live ones.
Digging? Mourners? Those are the least of your worries.
True story: Back when I was a kid, I have a cousin who lived next door to a cemetary. They had the typical problems - bats, the occasional skeletal wraith - but the worse were the zombies. They didn’t know it, but they had an infestation of zombies in their garage. Most people don’t know this, but zombies are like rodents in that they squirrel away brains that they can’t eat right away in hidey-holes to last through the winter. Zombies prefer human brains, but they’ll pretty much take what they can get. These particular zombies were living on mouse and mole brains, since my cousins had taken great care to zombie-proof their house (garlic over the thresholds works very nicely).
So my cousin’s dad comes out one day to start up his motorcycle that’d been put up for the winter, and it won’t start. It sputters, and gurgles, and snorts. He takes it apart to find the zombies had filled the carburator and air filter with mouse brains. Even worse, when he turned the engine on, it sucked some of those brains down into it. It was a maintenance nightmare. All because of zombies.
I grew up living in a cemetary where my grandfather was the groundskeeper. We had a huge old mansion that held many members of my extended family and 300 acres of (mostly wooded) land to run around and play on. My grandparents raised all kinds of animals there, too. Overall, I loved it.
[However, I was always spooked by the large tombs with bars over the windows and doors–I mean, why would those be there if something weren’t trying to get out…]
We lived right next to a cemetary when I was around 4 years old. There wasn’t a fence in between, either, just a hedge. I used to go through a hole in the hedge and play in the cemetary. Why my mother allowed this, I don’t know. Maybe it was because she could still keep an eye on me? I used to bring her flowers that had blown off of the graves. I remember her getting on to me for the flower thing, telling me that it was disrespectful to take the flowers, and me assuring her that they didn’t come straight from anyone’s grave. Gah. It seems weird now to remember that I used to use a cemetary for a playground.