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| Cemeteries make us ridiculously happy |
While Mom parked the car, I walked into a dusty, wonderfully musty cemetery office populated by three men in various positions of relaxation. I spoke to the one who looked the most in charge and asked if he could help us find some family graves. He asked the names, I gave them to him, and he said. "Ohhh." Then to his cronies: "Those are the ones with the theft."
Uh, what? "Something was stolen?" I asked, thinking maybe there was a figurine or some decorative thing removed by the neighborhood toughs. Just the usual cemetery hijinks. The guy was very quiet until he said, "Let me take you up there."
Just a beautiful, beautiful cemetery, by the way. It's located on a hill with huge old trees, and as it was a sunny day in early October, the leaves were starting to turn, but it was still pretty warm. We followed the man as he drove us around to the graves we were looking for.
We made it to our family's gravesites. The cemetery man explained that these family members had done very well for themselves, financially, and the father had had built an underground crypt for his family's burials, accessible by three granite slabs placed in the ground. Above ground is a cupola and other headstones engraved with their names.
"So what about that theft?" I asked.
Cue the neighborhood toughs. Cemetery Man said that as a prank, some high school boys had removed one of the slabs in order to access the stairs down into the crypt. Upon entering the crypt, they encountered the family in various stages of decomposition, and they stole a skull. They took my aunt's skull off her body.
I can't even imagine how gross, scary, or stupid, but I have to admit that my respect for the neighborhood toughs rose slightly - just the physical act of removing that slab was impressive. And then - this must have shocked the guy - Mom and I started cracking up laughing.
He continued the story by telling us that the crime went unsolved for quite a while until one of the boys' moms found the skull in her son's closet. We laughed harder.
Once the skull was returned to the cemetery, one of the cemetery guys had to go down into the crypt and, uh, give the skull back to its owner... speaking of gross. I wondered who the lucky cemetery employee was. And then, he said, they filled in the stairs with dirt. "So if anyone tries pulling up a slab again, all they'll see is a bunch of dirt. There's no way to access the crypt now."
A few days later in Salem, Massachusetts, to honor our auntie's skull's trip to the kid's closet, Mom bought a wonderful black scarf with cute white skulls on it for me. Thanks, Cemetery Man, for the memories!