This thread has two inspirations. One is a thread on another board about “terrible tombstones” The other is several threads here asking for examples of rare or interesting items, such as cars and birds.
Grave markers definitely go through styles or fashions. And how much money, or what kind of heirs, the deceased had, will influence the art of a stone. For example, a hundred years ago it was common to find a little lamb carved or engraved on the tombstone of a child. I see that in the old cemetery where I will be buried, and it still goes on there. Five years ago a mother and two kids, who died together in a car accident, were interred there, and the children have lambs on their stones.
Gravestones can be funny, touching, and sometimes weird. I have here three examples, add your own as you are moved to do so.
Reddit - Dive into anything This one makes me sniffle. I wonder how many people, on seeing it, have tried the recipe.
Not a tombstone, but still an interesting cemeery inscription. In Paradise, Arizona, the sign at the entrance with wording to the effect of “unauthorized burials are prohibited”.
In Cleveland, there’s a cemetery called Lake View. There are a number of prominent people buried there, the most famous of which would probably be President Garfield and John D. Rockefeller. They give people some pretty wide latitude on grave markers and memorials, which means the place has a lot of personality. Here’s a statue placed right behind the grave marker of a Russian musician, Sergey Gaidaenko. I think it’s quite sweet.
Chinese graves are very pleasing aesthetically. I like a good Chinese cemetery. You can see a representative sampling of some and their tombstones here.
The Trinity Church Cemetery in Manhattan is small but interesting for all the tombstones of famous people you can see there. Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton are just two who are buried there.
I’ve seen those in Korea, decades ago… You can be walking along a quiet path in the middle of nowhere, and see a tombstone like that. I cannot explain the cultural significance, only report that I’ve seen them.
There are more deceased major league baseball players buried in St. Louis than any other city. St. Louis is the final resting place for 161 ex-ballplayers, 82 of them in one cemetery, Calvary. New York’s 5 boroughs have 136, Chicago 90, Los Angeles 62.
While I haven’t seen Hello Kitty, I have seen childrens’ gravestones with pictures of toys on them. And gravestones with photographs are not uncommon around here.
The most surprising memorial I’ve seen is on a bench at St. James Park in Toronto. There’s a plaque on the bench that says “In memory of so-and-so, who hated this park”.
There are many variations of this, but one such version is in the Bunker Hill Cemetery in West Hartford, VT. It’s a short distance down a road from the AT, and one gravestone there has a message for thru-hikers passing by:
The tombstone, a simple wooden cross like one would see in a Western, wasn’t all that unusual but the location was. All by itself near the middle of a two block by two block wooded area in Kenner, Louisiana.
A bit east of downtown Orlando there is a gravestone of a couple, one with the only somewhat weird last name of Farless. But the other definitely raises eyebrows these days. The full name on the tombstone is “Raper-Farless.”
There was one I used to see often that was in the corner of a yard. I supposed they couldn’t find the family to get permission to move the graves when they development was built?
There were 3-4 head/foot stones but the only one still legible was that of a little girl that died the day before her first birthday.
I always felt sad for her parents.
Then there was another area I used to drive through in the dark. There were rows and rows of stones all laid out in a straight line and I’d think who would take the time to lay all those stones out in rows like that. It was only when I had to drive through once during the day that I saw the headstones at one end and realized it was a cemetery.
Here’s a picture of one of the stones, which of course I couldn’t see the detail from the road. http://www.historichancocksresolution.org/galleries/hancock-family-photos-and-hancock-grave-yards
