Since “willy” is a euphemism for penis, they consider it ironic that you solved the mystery?
“Here may be found the last words of Roberta of Lukanen. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of aaarrrrggh.”
Here lies the body of Mary Lee;
died at the age of a hundred and three.
For fifteen years she kept her virginity;
not a bad record for this vicinity.
True that.
This is a grave issue, please keep that in mind.
:: eyeroll ::
Many thanks, 48Willys, for finding out the real story. This was a fascinating thread.
Spelling nitpick for others: it’s “cemetery.”
I spotted just such a marker last week (was walking through a cemetery in Massachusetts). It had a list of family members, with dates of birth and death; the second-to-last didn’t have a date of death.
The graveyard in question was old - deaths back to the mid to late 19th century. Many of the markers, surprisingly, had been replaced with modern-looking granite ones.
The weirdest one I saw had a monument listing parents and their son who apparently died as a teenager. Nearby, a low-to-the-ground marker was where I presume the son was actually buried. It was a square about the size of a floor tile, about three inches thick, and his name was engraved on one of the 3-inch-thick edges.
Upside down.
I admit it doesn’t quite rank up there with the OP’s find, but it seemed mighty strange to me!!
Might have been a foot marker. I don’t know why, but in older cemeteries, foot markers seem to be pretty common.
My dad’s been the secretary-treasurer of my small hometown’s cemetery assn. for many years. His favorite headstone, paid for by a not-so-grieving widower:
Forty years with a tongue so sharp;
O angels! Give her a harp.
We were in a cemetery in Michigan and noticed a family monument that listed 3 adults and 3 children. We figured that it must have been a car crash or fire, except I noticed that one of the adult’s date of death was a week prior to everyone else’s. We speculated for a long time as to what the circumstances were. It was unlikely that there was an accident where one person died immediately and 5 others died a week later on the same day. I did an internet search a while back, but found nothing.
Years later it popped into my head and I did another search. This time I found some scanned newspaper articles on Google. Turns out the one person died in a motorcycle accident in California. The others (2 adults and 3 children) drove to the funeral from Florida, but their car broke down near New Orleans. They borrowed some money and bought airline tickets on Pan Am Flight 759. The article was how the parents went to California for their son’s funeral, then had to fly to New Orleans to identify the bodies of their daughters and grandchildren.
Wow. What a horrible story. I thought I’s never hear anything worse than the Tylenol funeral, but that beats it by a mile. After the funeral of one of the victims of the Chicago Tylenol poisoner, his family was gathered at his apartment, and a couple of them were overcome by the situation (and probably lack of sleep), and developed headaches, so they went looking through their deceased relative’s medicine cabinet…
Yeah, it kind of haunts me once in a while. When you feel shit’s being piled on you, think of these people. Here’s the story I found.
And now, on top of all that tragedy, I’m totally creeped out by the story at the bottom of the page about the guy caught bathing in the baptismal font.
Bumped.
My dad just sent me a photo of a married couple’s tombstone in a rural North Carolina cemetery. Above the wife’s name it reads Good Woman. Above the husband’s name, So So Man.