Substack of the Dead: Cemetery Wanders
Finding a place to belong between the worlds of the living and the dead
Were you one of those kids who rushed past a graveyard when you walked home at night? Or were you one of those who lingered in spooky places day or night, feeling comforted by the hush of restful death in a way that nothing else did?
Did you know there’s a difference between graveyards and cemeteries? Are you aware of the glorious existence of Columbariums?
I was one of the kids that wandered graveyards and cemeteries at every opportunity. It started when I was 14, and a dear friend had died just before the end of the school year. My WASPy mother didn’t approve of messy things like grieving teenagers, so I wasn’t allowed to cry in the house (too dramatic!), and since I didn’t have anyone alive to discuss my depression and struggle with. At the time, I was pushing away my second sight and attempting to “be normal” for reasons both religious and practical: ghost whispering was directly frowned on in the Northwest Indiana town where I grew up. Sure, everyone had ghosts in our just-after-antebellum and just-after-Depression era homes, but no one was supposed to admit it. As far as I could tell, the city policy was to insist ghosts weren’t real until the ghosts bought into it and they all disappeared. If there were ghosts in that cemetery, none of them spoke to me.
I did experience a difference of atmosphere stepping into the cemetery from the sidewalks that riddled my town. I recognize in retrospect that I was experiencing the animistic side of spirit contact, sensing a collective spirit of place as opposed to individual spirits.
The collective attempt to banish ghosts with the power of white cultural erasure made no difference to the parasol-hoop-and-cane couples I saw promenading down Main Street at twilight. They didn’t care that I could see the houses they walked past through their abdomens, nor were these spirits impressed the city officially insisted that they didn’t exist. They kept walking their walk, and my non-Anglo father just told me not to mention such sightings to my mother.
Looking back. I’m fortunate nothing followed me home from that small town site. It was the one that ostensibly held the body of the town founder; perhaps my adolescent wanderings had the dead as scandalized as the living by my oft-lonely walks.
Perhaps these 150-200-year-old residents were inclined to give a 14-year-old grieving kid a break.
The “real” haunted graveyard in my town, ostensibly the (racist term redacted) graveyard, was outside of town, and I wasn’t cool enough for other kids to show me the spooky places. Despite how many people have told me they imagined me, I wasn’t the kid sneaking out of the house to sit in mosquito-swarmed woods, reciting letters off an Ouija board by camping light.
Eventually, I healed enough to stop wandering that cemetery, as boyfriends and friends and getting out of a town I would never feel welcome in became more pressing. I moved on, and I don’t think I even walked through that cemetery while my father was dying of leukemia on that final, likely never-to-return visit.
As my second sight became more intrusive and my need for outside-the-box solutions to such problems as conjuring money for school and disengaging from a culture I couldn’t conform to and live became more insistent, my need to visit graveyards to shed the noise became a semi-annual event. In Mankato, I found the one nestled on a hillside, hidden behind a thick grove of trees so that the superstitious wouldn’t panic as they drove through the winding road at night and welcomed me for picnics and panicked moments at the end of my undergraduate study. In Minneapolis, the cemetery at the end of King’s Highway, hidden like a gothic faery grove, offered a good walk and some fascinating art on a beautiful day. There are many benefits - and risks - to cemeteries for empaths, and all those risks can be mitigated with appropriate cemetery etiquette. While I had for many years simply asked permission to enter at any liminal gateway, those who spend all their days in those liminal spaces have begun raising the price of admission, so to speak - perhaps because more shadows are falling across those gateways than there were.
Only after I moved to San Francisco did I even start experiencing beings following me or attempting vampiric attachments. These were settled quickly and easily: a coin tossed over the shoulder without looking back here, a sharp word there, a quick request for aid when my guides could answer. From time to time, as I developed into my city priest role, spirits at cemeteries interacted with me for redirection, release, and help in their steps toward rebirth. I have stories of the cemetery at Mission Dolores, complicated and strange - just as it would be in a place where indigenous people are buried next to their chief oppressor, Father Junipero Serra.
It didn’t take me too long to learn of the cemetery gatekeeper, a seeming universal entity, sometimes in the form and feeling of Oya, appearing with the vibe of a crossroads spirit but specifically for the dead, sometimes an ancestor of the settlement, an ancestor of the land, or a specific animistic land spirit. I understood the principles of showing honor to the dead and what was necessary for the laws of hospitality to apply. After all, gravesites are legally registered as real estate, and when you walk into a well-maintained one, you are wandering into a planned and literally gated community. (There’s some baneful city magick in that understanding.)
In 2019, I made a brief video about graveyard etiquette and safety that I’m sharing here.
Later in the year I’ll be posting an updated step-by-step on cemetery work for our paid subscribers. My way is far from the only way, and the other methods are sometimes specific to religious and cultural traditions with aspects that will never be publicly shared. All these practices have two things in common: a willingness to walk into a space that offers no guarantee of comfort and, from the bottom of your heart, respect for that which you may never understand. I haven’t formed a relationship with a cemetery at my new home in Kalamazoo yet. Certainly, there are opportunities - there are so many in my area, gated and not, newer and older. One even has a bad pun woven into its property name (Mount Restmore.) I’ve received the formal invite from the oldest in town, across the street from the haunted castle. I haven’t gone yet - while I have no need or desire to collect cemetery dirt, which takes the most relationship building - meeting with a gatekeeper spirit takes a certain kind of energy, a mix of courage and humility, fear and firmness.
Want to read more? This week, I talk about Boomer Blindness on my Medium.com blog. Take a look, clap, comment, and share with other Gen Xers and younger who struggle with the same financial myopia as older generations.
Looking for more on getting started with witchcraft? Are you looking to deepen your practice or just understand it? Over at Golden Apple, we have the Deep Beginning Witchcraft Series running in 2024. We’re starting with the hard, slightly embarrassing questions.
Deep Beginner’s Witchcraft Guide: Witchcraft and Social Rejection
Deep Beginner’s Witchcraft Guide: Let’s Talk about Cults
Deep Beginner’s Witchcraft Guide: Is Witchcraft a Religion? (Short answer: depends)
Deep Beginner’s Witchcraft Guide: Could Witchcrat all be a Delusion? Facing the Uncomfortable Truth.
Don’t miss the next class at Wicked Grounds!
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