In my travels around rural New England, I have visted quite a few old cemetaries. Most of them have a strange structure, which is a mound of earth, or a small hill, which is cut into by a wall on one side. This has a small door in it, (usually secured a by a very old, very rusty lock). Above the door is a stone lintel, with the name of the cemetary.
Is this a burial vault? These are no names on the exterior…or were these just storage failities?
Someone told me that they were temporary vaults, used when someone died during the winter months (the ground was frozen too hard to dig a grave).
Anyone know?
Yup, temporary storage vaults. Used until the ground thaws. Mostly out of use now that graves are dug by powered equipment.
Equally plausible explanation: Quarantine area for potential zombies or vampires.
Also known as a receiving vault.
I never realized that they were just for temporary storage. Good to know.
Looking for a place to hide a body?
I’ve actually been in one before. You’d be surprised at the interior. It’s not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat.
Maybe not as crazy as you think. OK, well it is, but it still reminded me of ye ole New England vampires and this particular account:
HOAX.COM: unravelling the truth from fiction, past to present... (warning-pdf)
Lovecraft set one of his better stories in a receiving vault. It is called, perhaps unsurprisingly, “In The Vault”.
Unless you’re Stephen King, it’s spelled “cemetery”.
You never know when you’ll need to hide a (literary!) corpse.
Also, our own local vampire legend of Mercy Brown.
Impressive! (And kinda squicky…)
So what WAS it like? Was there something to eat?
On a related note, I’ve noticed that New England cemetaries are very often on the side of a main road, often a main road leading into a town (one of those quaint little towns that are all over the place over there), such that the cemetary is the first thing one sees of the place, as good as a sign post with the village name. In various outandabouts I’ve driven many routes of back roads from west to east along the upper states, and noticed that somewhere in eastern upstate New York is where you start to see this - so much so that I have come to think of this custom as one of the informal boundaries demarcating “New England”.
Sure, you see cemetaries by the side of main roads in other parts of the country, but not with such regularity, at least that’s been my impression.
Anyone else noticed this and/or can comment?
Kudos for the Tolkien ref.
President Lincoln’s body was kept in a receiving vault while his massive, monumental tomb in Springfield, Ill. was under construction. The vault is still there, on a hill behind and below the tomb.
Sometimes referred to as a Charnel House.
Whose secrets, Poe wrote on.
I thought a charnel house was just a slaughterhouse.
Yeah, now that I know two things it’s not like.
I’ll be in my hobbithole.
A charnel house is a vault where unearthed bones are placed after the grave has been “recyled”.
And that means comfort.