What is the Statute of Limitations on Graveyards?

Factual Questions
1

Dear Fans:

Back in the back in the day, late '70’s, maybe Spring ‘78, my ol’ man heads out to buy some shubbery at a nursery about 60 miles away.

So he’s all about shopping, shopping, and happens upon a rather large pile of blackdirt-fill they are selling. This particular pile has gravestones in it. My 'ol man goes up to the Shrubber and says he says, “Yo, Shrubs, can I take a couple of them thar headstones?” The Shrubber gives him the nod.

Being “Head Groundskeeper” about the lawn in those days, I would ponder, while empowering the Lawn-Boy, the gravestones he had brought home and set about some large Oak trees in the yard.

One was complete. The dude’s name was there,“Dell N. Woods” born early 1820’s died at like age 36 or 37, I mean it was a grand headstone. Limestone, perhaps, it was white but not a type of marble.

Another was a child, a girl; the top where the name would be was broken off, but the inscription was script, and the lifeline was measured like: “18 Mos. 6 Days” or some shit. Mid 1800’s.

There were one or two others, very weathered, and because of a series of years of beers and weed, good and bad, I cannot remember accurately dates nor details.

I live near some 200 year-old cemetarys, and I can tell you that any “gravestone restoration” is 100% “Take the old headstone and mount it on a new chunk of granite.” Nothing is thrown away. Besides, if they were a by-product of a different type of resortation, wouldn’t you keep the original bacause it is cool and an antique with the dates on it?

I live 3 miles from a poineer cemetary, was there last Saturday on a booze-cruise, and saw a stack of headstones around a tree, amongst standing and restored gravestones, like they had no home. Stacked in a pile.

After a while, we build homes on our graveyards, don’t we? I mean, shit, farmers in my area till areas that were once Native American settlements and burial sites. I know, I have went artifact hunting during Springrime on land tilled in the fall. Invited by the farmers.

JoBeth Williams was never sexier than when she was smoking pot in bed in the movie. “Poltergiest”.

Word.
KXZ

2

Word up. Can’t help you on the Statue of Graves but I enjoyed reading your post.

ps- Good chance a Zombie will show up soon… that knows more than I…

3

I think, in a perfect world, a portion of the money from selling plots is supposed to be set aside in trust for future upkeep in perpetuity.

In the real world, this idea is fairly recent and that money is often mismanaged and stolen.

4

Cite?

5

So some guy in the soil business starts just digging up dirt under headstones? Who does something like that? What else might he think is marketable? Recycled caskets?

6

That perpetual care cemetery trusts exist, or that money is mismanaged and stolen?

7

That the money is often - your word - mismanaged and stolen.

8

It is a certainty, they are selling the plot to you for an eternity.

Cite, for what is basically implied perpetual care, The Pyramids of Egypt, every lost family plot, abandoned church, and ghost town cemetery. Every cemetery that has been moved and every cemetery that’s been deemed an archeological site.

For a more recent cite here is an article from the Chicago tribune

9

This sort of thing is actually pretty common. Like any other business, cemeteries can fail for financial reasons. And by the time that happens, the money in the perpetual care fund has usually been spent. Perpetual care funds tend to work like pension funds: chronically underfunded, and prone to being “borrowed” if the company needs some quick cash.

10

Every business that uses money is susceptible to fraud or mismanagement. Every one. That’s why you can come up with examples for any and every business, including non-profits, religious institutions, and the government. Where there is money, there is temptation.

Your job, therefore, is to show that problems linked to perpetual care rise above this general level of abuse to the level of “common” or "often."One example from twelve years ago doesn’t cut it. That’s confirmation bias.

I’ll bet the money in any perpetual care fund that you couldn’t answer even the most basic questions about the cemetery business. You don’t know how many cemeteries there are in this country. You don’t know how they are run. You don’t know the laws in each of the 50 states, i.e. 50 different laws. You don’t know what percentage of cemeteries even have perpetual care funds. You don’t know what the terms of those funding agreements are. You don’t know how many of them have been abused. You don’t know whether this is a high or low percentage compared to other forms of businesses.

You have heard or read some story about a cemetery and made the leap that it applies to all of them. It doesn’t. I don’t know of any evidence that abuse of perpetual care funds occurs “often” or indeed above the average for businesses. I would say not, because they are regulated by states and most business money is not. Abuse is a touchy subject and gets reported, probably to a much greater extent than most other financial frauds. Level of coverage isn’t the same as frequency.

I’ve mentioned here before that I used to work for city government. We had municipal cemeteries under our care. We had to know the law and we had to know the industry, since we were always under comparison to private cemeteries. Funding for perpetual care was always an issue. It is expensive, and cemeteries are reluctant to charge as much as is needed. But that is not the same as stating that the money is “often mismanaged and stolen”. I challenged for a cite on “often.” I got back nonsense. You two can try again, but I don’t expect anything different as a result.

11

Not my fight, and I don’t know anything about cemeteries, but I would be hard pressed to say that any large money-handling organization, whether corporate, private, or government, does NOT suffer from a fairly decent amount of mismanagement or fraud. You pretty much said the same in the bolded section above. Just my impression, but I didn’t see that **sitchensis was implying that it happened more often than it did other places, just that it was common.

I work for county government, and have all my life. I don’t get my back up when people say money is “commonly” mismanaged or stolen by county government, because it is! Usually not for nefarious purposes, and usually not in great or terrible quantities, but it is, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise just because I feel a bit smeared by the association.

I’m all for actual cites and evidence, but there’s also a place for common knowledge, and I would say that the fact of graveyard and cemetery abandonment and disrepair is pretty common knowledge. I don’t have any special experience with them, but I can think of lots of recent news articles about soldier’s graves misidentified or lost and bodies stacked into the same plots at Arlington, a recent news story where a funeral home stopped cremating people and stacked the bodies in a hearse in an abandoned lot, and lots of sad “local interest” stories of churches with more dead members than live, who can no longer keep up their cemeteries. It doesn’t have to be from evil intent to happen, especially in this train-wreck of an economy.

12

All you are saying is agreeing with me that stories about dead bodies get a disproportional amount of press coverage. But that is the definition of confirmation bias. And that’s all your post amounts to. If every single problem receives coverage then people are naturally going to assume that problems are common. That has nothing whatsoever to do with facts, numbers, or percentages.

There is never a place for “common knowledge” in GQ. The very definition of “common knowledge” is “stuff people know that isn’t true.” GQ exists to pound that into the ground, so to speak.

13

To Exapno Mapcase:

Granted, the desecration and/or destruction of graveyards is a relatively rare event, compared to the sheer number of cemeteries in the United States. Municipal, National, Historical, and private, not to mention small family cemeteries typically located in “farm country” probably number in the thousands, if not hundred-thousands. And for the most part, people respect the dead.

The cases where markers are discarded or graveyards are bulldozed are noteworthy mainly BECAUSE people respect the dead, and such reprehensible behavior is not the norm.

Most folks carry a grain or two of superstition, as well, and interrupting the sleep of the dead is supposed to unleash supernatural things that are not nice.

There have been cases in the Chicago area, and also one in Southern California which have been in the news because the cemeteries are still recent. Unscrupulous owners/operators were caught re-selling plots. Occupants would be disinterred and the caskets discarded, so the same piece of ground could be sold, over and over.

Mortuary abuse has also been in the news. Owners have gone bankrupt and abandoned remains. It’s hard enough to deal with the loss of a loved one, but knowing your loved one was allowed to sit and rot is incomprehensible.

One of the biggest cases of notoriety was a owner in Southern California who underbid other businesses for the contracts to cremate unclaimed bodies. He tried to save money by cramming as many bodies as he could in the crematorium chamber. This worked fine for a while, but it stressed the crematorium so greatly that it finally just blew up. After that, he hauled the bodies out to a piece of land he owned in the High Desert, where he set up a shed with a furnace, completely unregulated and substandard. Bodies would be incinerated, and the “cremains” dumped in a common barrel. If any relatives came to call for their deceased loved one, the workers would use a coffee can to scoop out an approximate amount of “cremains” and place in the standard container.

Neighbors in the High Desert complained of the smoke and the ash residue and the smell.

This same owner also helped himself to the worldly goods of the deceased receiving a traditional burial. His particular talent was harvesting dental gold.

Finally, he was busted. It turns out, most of what he did WAS NOT ILLEGAL. He received a token amount of judicial punishment, and I think his State license was revoked, but it was because of his callous behavior that there are now definitive laws on the books in California regarding proper handling of the dead.

People simply EXPECT certain behavior, certain respect of our dead. Unfortunately, the exploitative nature of some people will allow them to seek out loopholes and jump through them with glee while collecting as much cash as they can.
~VOW

14

Because I have the entirety of all human history on my side, perhaps you could provide a cite for a grave that has been cared for, for an eternity.

Historically perpetual care has meant, care until we forget about you, or there is social or political upheaval, or until we decide we need the land.

What percentage of people who are buried under one of these agreements will receive nonstop perpetual care for the next million years? Every person that doesn’t receive what they paid for and agreed to is the victim of mismanaged funds.

15

Well, hopefully this doesn’t enrage anyone bc I don’t have a cite, but FWIW I once asked the mayor of my city why a particular cemetery was so unkempt and he said that the money in the so-called “perpetual care” trusts, or whatever they are, had run out long ago and was never going to be replaced bc the cemetery was full. He didn’t mention anything about it being stolen or deliberately mismanaged or anything like that. I got the impression that it was just due to rising and unforeseen costs and lack of new money coming in.
Just an anecdotal data point, I know.

16

First question first. The man may have a deal with a local cemetery or two to buy the leftover dirt from burials. Depending on the location and quality of dirt he could resale it right then or mix it with mulch and such and then sell it. As for the stones – see below.

I bought three caskets from a local scrap yard. He got them the same way one local funeral director got his display of “caskets from around the world” - bodies shipped home in one box and buried in another.

On the headstone side; headstones get replaced now and then for various reasons. One case I know of the husband (survivor) remarried and gave the plot next to his first wife to one of their daughters who never married. She wasn’t cool with just having the “Beloved Father” side polished out and recarved and she had the money so she replaced the whole stone. The headstone maker polished out the entire stone and resold it. My grandfather died long before my grandmother and we were pretty poor back then so all the headstone he got was a simple basically homemade thing of sandstone. When Gramma passed we passed the hat and got them both a fairly nice stone like she always wanted ---- but never could quite bring herself to get when she was alive. The people making the new stone asked what they should do with the old one — bust it up, pitch it, bury it where they were filling in a section of low ground, or what. I have it in my basement. It does seem to frighten plumbers for some reason though.

On batches of headstones and a little before my time - back around 1940/1950 the one cemetery was being moved due to the property being wanted for another purpose/development. The graves were (supposedly) opened and the remains moved to a common grave in another cemetery. The stones were basically pitched/destroyed by being buried where the cemetery dumped its extra fill. Or so they said. Every now and then one still turns up in someones basement or garage.

The piece of property was used for one thing or another and in the 70s some became a large garage. In the 80s, the garage became a paint and body shop. The owner was told in polite terms by the former owner “If you ever want to sink a pit of anything, do it on the far right quarter”. A few more years passed and the local highway was being rerouted and the body shop got closed. Ground was broken (where the owner was told NEVER to sink a pit) and — ooops. Bones turned up. End result was probably the newest graves (post 1900) had had their bodies moved but the older sections just had the stones removed.

It happens sometimes.