The eerie attraction of old graveyards

Confession time, folks! I´ve been yearning to offer you a graveyard tour ever since I took my first hesitant steps on Substack a year ago. But I was scared of frightening away innocent new subscribers if I led them through a few spooky old cemetries before they got to know me. I figured I had to first show them my Pollyana side, hinting that Wednesday Addams was hiding behind the smiling facade, as I did in one of my earliest posts (On becoming better).

But now it´s Halloween season again, when graves and ghosts and skeletons become part of the silly decor for children´s parties. Even in France, nowadays, although France also has a much older tradition of celebrating La Toussaint (All Saints´ Day) on 1 November, still a major public holiday here, when families take flowers to the graves of deceased loved ones. For a week or two, cemetries across the country get splashed with vibrant colour, filled with yellow and orange and purple chrysanthemums.

So what better time to share my passion for ancient graveyards with you?

Although I have to admit, straight away, that this is probably my least favourite time of the year to snoop around in old cemetries. Too many people, too much activity, all those garish flower colours taking away the essence of what I love in old cemetries. The melancholic beauty of desolation and dilapidation, that´s what I´m after.

As I wrote in my most recent non-fiction book, My Year of Fear and Freedom: Old cemetries are places of mystery and melancholy, of unanswerable questions about life and death. I always wonder about the names and dates on the gravestones and make up stories about the most enigmatic cases. The three-year-old and her five-year-old brother who died on the same mournful day, the elerly father who outlived all twelve of his children – how pitiful is that – and the many young women who died hopelessly too soon while giving birth to the next generation.

I have no desire to hang around in modern, soulless cemetries. This is my excuse, perhaps debatable, for never having visited the graves of my maternal grandparents in Stikland Cemetry next to Voortrekker Road in Bellville. I went to their respective funerals, when I was around eleven and sixteen years old, and even at that young age I found the setting deeply depressing.

I did, however, search for my paternal grandparents´ graves in a cemetry in Stilbaai a few years ago. Although this is not an ancient cemetry, far from it, and unfortunately also situated next to the town´s main road, at least the road is not as noisy as Voortrekker Road in Bellville. Except during Christmas vacations when Still Bay turns into Noisy Bay, as my grandmother who lived here used to complain. She died decades ago, and she would have turned around in that very grave I was trying to find if she could have seen what Still Bay´s summer invasion looks like nowadays.

But I wanted to show my Frenchman where my ancestors and I came from. In Stilbaai, this included the dunes where I left my youthful footprints in he sand, the long beach up to the Preekstoel (once resembling a pulpit, now just a broken rock) where Pa and I harvested mussels when I was small, the river my grandmother´s family crossed by pont long before the bridge was built in the fifties.* The graves of my grandparents were part of the package deal, whether my partner liked it or not.

We had to search for a frustratingly long time before we finally found the pair of graves uniting Oupa Willie and Ouma Hannah in death as they were throughout their long lives. (They died within a year of each other, Oupa at 90, Ouma at 87.) This experience made me grasp the difference between a visit to the centuries-old graves of people who died long ago and a search in a relatively modern cemetry full of ugly modern headstones for the graves of people I remember. The former is an aesthetic experience that stimulates my imagination without affecting me personally. Stilbaai´s cemetry, on the other hand, offered too little that satisfied me aesthetically and too much personal history.

Or that is how I tried to explain it in the book I wrote about my `geriatric gap year´ - during which I visited many magnificent cemetries all over the world. In Los Angeles, for instance, I looked for the names of famous film stars in Hollywood Forever Cemetry – and enjoyed it much more than looking for those same names in the pink stars on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard. Although Hollywood Forever is not what I´d call a beautiful cemetry – many of the mausoleums look like tacky 20^th century pyramids, some of the statues are mind-boggingly kitsch, and Valentino´s tomb is decorated with fake red roses - it remains a peaceful and quiet place from which to contemplate the nine gigantic letters of the Hollywood sign on a hillside. To think of all the seediness behind the superficial glamour, and all the broken dreams in this dream factory.

Yes, even a kitsch Hollywood cemetry can drive me to melancholy.

But if you´re a real graveyard enthusiast, you cannot miss Savannah in the southern state of Georgia. Even people who don´t share my passion for old graves are drawn, in their millions, to the Bonaventure Cemetry, all because of John Berendt´s bestselling book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which tells the story of an actual murder in Savannah´s high society. The Bird Girl statue shown on the cover of the original edition had to be removed from the cemetry, since too many readers wanted to not only see it but touch it too, but there are still countless other sad and splendid statues in Bonaventure. You could spend hours getting lost among moss-covered graves and Southern Gothic imagery and centuries-old oak trees with Spanish moss hanging from their limbs like stringy grey hair.

Back in France, of course I´ve visited Père Lachaise in Paris, officially listed as one of the most beautiful cemetries in the world, final resting place of famous people like Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison of The Doors, Chopin and Molière and numerous others. During my first visit, decades ago, I was mainly interested in the most famous graves, easy to spot because they´re always surrounded by crowds of fans. On subsequent visits I was more drawn to the lonely graves of long-dead and completely unknown people, to the dilapidated but still gorgeous tombs that nobody ever visits.

I´ve wandered through Père Lachaise in all four seasons, but I love it most of all in winter when the trees are bare and the sky is grey and sadness hangs in the air like low clouds. Visiting a cemetry on a bright sunny day with birds chirping in the branches of green trees feels a little counterproductive if melancholy is what you´re after. And let´s face it, why else would you hang around in places filled with dead people?

Sure, to pay respect to the dead people you admire, which is why I´ve also explored that other great Parisian cemetry of Montparnasse, where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir share a tomb, and where Samuel Beckett and Baudelaire are buried. Or to pay respect to people you´ve never heard of, who died senselessly, often at a shockingly young age, in one war after another. France´s official War Cemetries, with their endless rows of white crosses, always fill me with a particular kind of sadness. Not mellow melancholy, more like dark despair over humankind´s immeasurable cruelty. And saddest of all are the many nameless graves in these war cemetries. The distressing thought that so many soldiers´ descendants would never know what became of their remains.

But more and more I prefer simple graveyards hidden deep in the countryside, filled with the neglected graves of unknown people. Especially in a bare winter landscape. In fact, this has become one of my favourite winter activities. Walking through small villages and discovering ancient graveyards, often in the shadows of even older churches - which, to my surprise, I´ve also become quite passionate about. I´m still not a church goer, but I´ve become an avid church explorer.

And if by now you´re thinking, shame, she should really get a life, well, perhaps this is what happens if you choose to live in the secluded countryside. You get a new kind of life with a new kind of joy – which might even include regular visits to ancient churches and graveyards.

But not at Halloween or Toussaint. I´m waiting for the crowds to disappear, for the chrysanthemums to fade and die, for the grey desolation of deep winter before I return to my favourite country graveyards. And of course I´m hoping to discover a few more during the long winter ahead.

*Also quoted from My Year of Fear and Freedom.

Sound of the week: Listening to the young Irish actor Dane Whyte O´Hara reading Maggie O´Farrell´s novel Land on Audible – with that unmistakable Celtic lilt in his voice - I was reminded of the Irish roots of Halloween. Samhain was an ancient Celtic festival, celebrated over 2 000 years ago, to mark the end of the harvest season and the onset of winter, a time when the veil between the living and the dead was believed to be at its thinnest and spirits roamed the earth. Turnips were carved to create scary-faced lanterns to drive away malevolent spirits and to frighten people. It was only when Irish immigrants brought the tradition to the USA that turnips were replaced with the quintessentially American pumpkin – and Halloween became the typically American festival that has since spread all over the world. So, quite by chance, Land turned out to be the perfect book for Halloween, although it is also a great story that I would recommend you to read at any other time.

Sight of the week: In the USA you often see houses and gardens extravagantly decorated during Halloween season, but in the French countryside the decorations are usually limited to a few fake dust webs or some store-bought stickers of witches and ghosts. That is why I was totally gobsmacked to discover a house with a huge garden resembling a Halloween theme park in a neighbouring village. Tall black-draped figures of The Grim Reaper next to the front door, a life-size skeleton guarding a balcony and another one sitting on a bicycle in a big window, giant spiders crawling up the walls, tombstones all over the lawn, decapitated dolls hanging from trees, even a car accident staged with a real car and what looked like dead people inside the car. I came to the conclusion that you can run but you can´t hide, not from from Halloween, not even in a small Perigord village.

Taste of the week: Once the inevitability of Halloween celebrations struck me, I went out and bought three big bags of bonbons, just in case any village kids come trick-or-treating. Last year I was mortified when a few little ones in disguise knocked on the door and I had nothing to offer them apart from half a slab of dark cooking chocolate. I couldn´t see their faces behind their masks, but their body language told me this was definitely not what they were hoping for. So this year I put a small pumpkin on our postbox with a colourful handwritten sign saying `Bonbons ici´ (Sweets inside) - with the uncomfortable feeling that this might look like a paedophile trap – and the three masked trick-or-treaters who were brave enough to visit us could at least leave with something better than bitter cooking chocolate.

The rest stayed away, maybe warned by last year´s disappointed team.

The result is that we now have a ridiculous amount of very sweet sweets left, and with no kids in the house, we feel duty-bound to eat them ourselves. `What´s the problem?´ my sweet-toothed Frenchman asks as he chomps on the gummy bears and caramel toffees and other colourful sugar-laden children´s delights. And because I´m worried about what would happen to his ageing teeth if I let him eat the whole hoard on his own, I´m helping him. No greater love, and all that jazz, but what this means is that my Halloween week has a distinct taste of regression into childhood.