Graves, inhabitants *

* (restored/Halloween countdown post #10)
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Story: ‘”Bruges was desperately depressing at this time…that was the reason Hugh liked it so much…a mysterious equation established itself between his own spirit and that of the place. In the eternal fitness of things a dead town furnished the corresponding analogy to that of a dead wife. The bitterness of his desolation demanded an environment that harmonised with its poignancy. ..his longing was for an infinite silence…”, wrote the decadent French author Georges Rodenbach in his best known novel ‘Bruges-la-morte’. He is buried at Pere Lachaise in Paris, and his grave, in which he depicted pushing open the lid of his sepulchre, is much admired and visited, especially by Goths and latter day decadents.’ — The Guardian

 

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Story: ‘Jacques LeFevrier left nothing to chance when he decided to commit suicide. He stood at the top of a tall cliff and tied a noose around his neck. He tied the other end of the rope to a large rock. He drank some poison and set fire to his clothes. He even tried to shoot himself at the last moment. He jumped and fired the pistol. The bullet missed him completely, but cut through the hanging rope instead. Freed of the threat of hanging, Mr. LeFevrier plunged into the sea. The sudden plunge into the freezing waters extinguished the flames and apparently made him vomit the poison as well. He was dragged out of the water by witnesses on the beach below the cliff and was taken to a hospital, where he died of hypothermia.’ — ssqq.com

 

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Story: ‘Organizers of an Indianapolis fireworks exhibit said Thursday night’s display included the ashes from a recently deceased pyrotechnician. The family of Meredith Smith, who died recently at the age of 74, said his ashes were included in a fireworks shell that was launched to conclude the show, the Indianapolis Star reported Thursday. Smith worked on the north side’s annual fireworks displays for nearly 40 years. Organizers said more than $10,000 was donated by local businesses and individuals to fund this year’s show.’ — UPI.com

 

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Story: ‘A Vietnamese man dug up his wife’s corpse and slept beside it for five years because he wanted to hug her in bed. The 55-year-old man from a small town in the central province of Quang Nam opened up his wife’s grave in 2004, moulded clay around the remains to give the figure of a woman, put clothes on her and then placed her in his bed. The man, Le Van, explained that after his wife died in 2003 he slept ontop of her grave, but about 20 months later he worried about rain, wind and cold, so he decided to dig a tunnel into the grave “to sleep with her”. His children found out, though, and prevented him from going to the grave. So one night in November 2004 he dug up his wife’s remains and took them home, Vietnamnet reported. The father of seven said neighbours did not dare visit the house for several years.’ — Scotsman

 

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Story: ‘Pierre Clementi, the visionary film director and darkly handsome French actor who made a specialty of seductive and menacing roles, died on Dec. 27 in Paris. The cause was liver cancer, although his death is suspected to be AIDS related. He was 57. His final directorial effort was the short film ‘Soleil’ (1988), considered my many to be his masterpiece. Although he had quit acting and directing in the late 80s and was gravely ill at the time, he returned to the screen in ”Hideous Kinky” (1998), about the spiritual awakening of a young woman (Kate Winslet). True to form, he played Santoni, an elderly libertine.’ — New York Times

 

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Story: No one knows.

 

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Story: ‘John Milburn Davis came to Hiawatha, Kansas in 1879 at the age of 24. After a short time, he married Sarah Hart, the daughter of his employer. Her family did not approve. The Davises started their own farm, prospered and were married 50 years. When Sarah died in 1930, the Davises were wealthy. Over the next 7 years, John Davis spent most of that wealth on Sarah’s grave. The amount spent on the Davis Memorial has been estimated at anywhere between $100,000 and several times that amount. In any case, it was a large amount and included the signing over of the farm and mansion. This during the Depression when money was tight. Several reasons are offered for the extravagance including great love or guilt, anger at Sarah’s family, and a desire that the Davis fortune be exhausted before John’s death. The memorial began with a typical grave stone, but John worked with Horace England, a Hiawatha monument dealer, making the gravesite more and more elaborate. There are 11 life size statues of John and Sarah Davis made of Italian marble, many stone urns and a marble canopy that is reported as weighing over 50 tons. The last addition to the tomb was marble granite wall surrounding the memorial to keep people from entering.’ — kansastravel.org

 

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Story: ‘John Hobson is listening to a recording of conversations with his late mother, mostly small talk about family. The words are on a vinyl record, although this is more than a recording of memories. The ashes of Madge Hobson are combined with the vinyl, with a photograph and details of her life printed on the labels. “It makes the perfect family record, which can be passed down the generations,” says Jason Leach, 46, the founder of And Vinyly, which produced the disc. The firm is part of a fast-growing sector of the end-of-life industry. No longer need ashes be stored in an urn or scattered to the wind. Now you can wear, drink from, or display a little part of what is left of your loved one. Mr Hobson, a 69-year-old sculptor, says his mother, a devout churchgoer, would thoroughly approve of her record. “I had to weigh out a quantity of the ashes [which had been kept in an urn], and put a large teaspoonful into a number of small plastic bags, one for each disc,” he says. Fifteen records were pressed for family and friends. Says Mr Hobson: “I think And Vinyly has undoubtedly helped to keep the memory of my mother alive.”‘

 

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Story: ‘Matthew Stanford Robison was born blind, paralyzed from the waist down, and severely disabled. He was supposed to live for only a few hours, but despite what doctors said, Matthew did not pass away that day. Matthew surpassed the expectations of his doctors and lived until he was 11 years old. Tragically, Matthew passed away in his sleep at the age of 11. His devastated family held a funeral service at their church and published a heartfelt obituary. Still, Matthew’s father, Ernest, felt there was something more that they could do to honor his son’s young life, taken much too soon. Ernest had a gravestone created in his son’s memory that depicts a young boy rising from his wheelchair, free from disability and worry. The tombstone stands at Matthew’s burial place in Salt Lake City Cemetery.’ — boredom therapy

 

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Story: ‘Neptune Memorial Reef is the largest man-made reef ever conceived and, when complete, will have transformed over 16 acres of barren ocean floor. The Neptune Memorial Reef project is environmentally sound and is a member of the Green Burial Council. Boat activity at the site is brisk, with families chartering boats or taking their own to snorkel or simply be at the site. Some family members actually become dive certified, enabling them to visit the site, to see their loved ones and monitor the Reef’s growth. Many of our local families dive the reef on a regular basis to visit their loved ones, one family in particular has been out 5 times in as many months. “Mom was thrilled with the idea of becoming part of the Neptune Memorial Reef and forever swimming with dolphins,” says Ronald Hink of his mother Edie. “She accepted her passing with dignity and bragged that she would be forever living on ocean waterfront property. Her epitaph reads, ‘In Care of Dolphins and Angels’.”‘ — Neptune Society

 

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Story: ‘A life-size bronze statue of Victor Noir was sculpted by Jules Dalou to mark his grave, portrayed in a realistic style as though he had just fallen on the street, dropping his hat which is depicted beside him. The sculpture has a very noticeable protuberance in Noir’s trousers. This has made it one of the most popular memorials for women to visit in the famous cemetery. Myth says that placing a flower in the upturned top hat after kissing the statue on the lips and rubbing its genital area will enhance fertility, bring a blissful sex life, or, in some versions, a husband within the year. As a result of the legend, those particular components of the oxidized bronze statue are rather well-worn. In 2004 a fence was erected around the statue of Noir, to deter superstitious people from touching the statue. Due to the fake protests of the “female population of Paris” settled by a French TV anchor however, it was torn down again. So the deterioration of the statue continues.’ — VN.fr

 

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Story: ‘”Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so” was sung by three year-old Sami while swinging the morning of May 2, 2006. Unfortunately, it was the last time. She loved swinging, Dora the Explorer, her dog Yeller, wearing her clothes backwards and picking up rocks of all shapes and sizes. She would even save gravel from the church parking lot and keep it in her purse. She had these very rocks and gravel in pockets when, later in the day on May 2, she rode her tricycle into the family pool and drowned.’ — obittree

 

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Story: ‘What really happened to Sterling Hallard Bright Drake? Some Walla Walla residents swear he suffered a radiation accident. Other locals insist he landed in the State Penitentiary. A few suggest the enigmatic former resident of Walla Walla simply up and disappeared. His tombstone gives only cryptic clues: (Front of headstone): An idealist and a dreamer, he died of loneliness and a broken heart, searching for a shrine he never found. LADY GWINAVIER – A loving and faithful friend, she believed in the dream. Born 2-28-1997, died 7-27-2005. It’s been said that man is the most evolved of all animals on this planet, or is he? I know of no other living creature that perverts what he knows, and destroys what he does not. (Back of headstone): A parting note for those who may pass by. If you quest for the line between truth and reality, you’ll find it in the “Hs” under honor, in the library of ambivalence. Sterling Drake 12-25-1998. (top of headstone): The saddest thing in life is wasted talent. The choises (sic) you make today will change your life forever.’ — whitman.edu

 

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Story: No one knows.

 

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Story: ‘David Alleno served as caretaker of La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires from 1881 to 1910. According to contemporaneous accounts, he was a man obsessed with choosing and controlling his last resting spot and spoke of little else. He seems to have spent his entire life first designing and then supervising the carving of a sculpture of himself to be placed on the small piece of land his brother purchased within the cemetery for the family. He was so focused on finalizing the sculpture’s construction and the plan to be buried at that spot, that on the day the sculpture was completed and arrived in 1915, he went straight home and committed suicide.’ — blok 888

 

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Story: ‘James Bedford‘s was the first of 300 bodies and brains currently preserved in the world’s three known commercial cryonics facilities: Alcor; the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan; and KrioRus near Moscow. Another 3,000 people still living have arranged to join them upon what cryonicists call “deanimation.” In other words, death.

‘Cryonics patients are no longer frozen, but “vitrified.” First, the body is placed in an ice-water bath. Then, ice-resistant chemicals are pumped into the body, taking the place of water in the blood. That way, in the next step, when the body or brain is cooled to well-below freezing using nitrogen gas, it hardens without forming cell-damaging ice.

‘Bedford’s preservation in the pre-vitrification days was a crude, ad hoc affair. He legally died in a southern California nursing home at the age of 73, after donating his body to the Life Extension Society, a group of early cryonics enthusiasts. Hours after death he was injected with the solvent dimethyl sulfoxide in an attempt to stave off tissue damage, packed in a Styrofoam box of dry ice, and eventually submerged in liquid nitrogen.

‘For the next 27 years, Bedford’s liquid-nitrogen-filled chamber was constantly on the move, as various cryonics companies folded or were forced to move for insurance or regulatory problems. The $100,000 he’d set aside to pay for his body’s long-term care evaporated as his wife and son faced legal challenges from other family members objecting to his unconventional resting place. From 1977 to 1982, frustrated with the high cost of maintenance, they appear to have kept his unit in a self-storage facility in southern California, occasionally topping off the liquid nitrogen themselves.

‘Bedford has been seen only once in the last 50 years. In 1991, Alcor moved him from his failing unit to a new storage tank. A report detailing the procedure makes for grim reading. The skin on his neck and upper torso was inflamed. His nose had collapsed. His chest had cracked.

‘To Alcor personnel fearing far worse damage to a man revered as a pioneer, he was beautiful: “I cannot describe the feeling of elation I had when I peeled back the sleeping bag that enclosed you and saw that you appeared intact and well cared for,” former Alcor president Mike Darwin wrote in an open letter to Bedford, to be read in the event of his return. “Whatever else has happened, you have remained frozen all these years.”’ — Quartz

 

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Story: ‘What do you do if your wives keep dying on you? If you’re Dr. Samuel Bean, you devise a near-uncrackable code to print on their joint tombstone. Bean, who was born in 1842 and lived in Ontario, married his first wife in 1865. Mrs. Henrietta Bean enjoyed her husband’s company for seven short months before passing into the great beyond. He quickly remarried to a woman named Susanna. Then she died, too. Both women were laid to rest in Rushes Cemetery, near Ontario. Distraught, Dr. Bean did the only thing a rational man can do when so tested: He commissioned a marble headstone with both women’s names and a 225-character grid that appeared to be a nonsense jumble of numbers and letters. Nobody could coax answers from Dr. Bean about the puzzle’s meaning. Then, during a 1904 vacation to Cuba, Bean fell off the side of a boat and drowned. The secret to his gravestone cipher perished with Dr. Bean. Decades passed. Drawn by the mystery of Susanna and Henrietta’s resting place, amateur codebreakers flocked to the cemetery. Nobody was successful until 1942, when the cemetery’s groundskeeper claimed to solve it. He refused to share the answer, though, and died suddenly before anybody could coerce it out of him.’ — OMG Facts

 

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Story: ‘Zachary Butler, a 38 year old resident of Boise, Idaho, died by suicide on 2014. In his suicide note, he expressed his last wish that his body be cremated and the ashes come to rest in an urn that would take the form of a realistic bust of his head. He had researched the possibilities and directed his surviving wife to contact a company called Cremation Solutions in Arlington, Vermont to construct the urn using of 3D imaging techniques. She dutifully fulfilled his request, which required a laser scan of his head and several representative photos of the deceased. The head urn was created in this way and mounted on a marble base. The urn is about 11 inches in size and cost $2,600. Luckily for his wife, Zachary did not specify how he wished the urn to be displayed, and it is stored away in a drawer in her living room.’ — cremation resource

 

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Story: ‘The Black Angel dates back to the early 20th century and stands watch over the graves of Teresa Dolezal and her family. Teresa moved to Iowa City with her son Eddie in the late 1800s. There she worked as a midwife until 1891, when Eddie contracted meningitis and died. The boy’s body was buried in Oakland Cemetery and a monument carved in the shape of a tree stump was erected to mark his grave.

‘After Eddie’s death, Teresa moved to Oregon where she met and married Nicholas Feldevert. But Feldevert was not long with for this world, either; he died only a few years later in 1911.

‘Stricken by two losses so close together, Teresa returned to Iowa City and commissioned the construction of an eight-and-a-half foot tall bronze angel from Chicago artist Mario Korbel to memorialize her loved ones. When Teresa Feldevert passed on in 1924, her ashes joined those of her late husband. Curiously, no death date was added to Teresa’s name at the base, fueling the statue’s mystery.

‘What’s more, the Black Angel statue had turned from bronze to black by the time of Teresa’s death. Local legends sprang up to explain this phenomenon, with most centering on Teresa’s past. Some claimed that she was an evil a mysterious woman, and that the statue changed its color to warn others to stay away from her grave. One particularly dramatic telling told of a thunderstorm on the night of Teresa’s funeral. A lightning bolt struck the angel statue, scorching it black.

‘With such a reputation, it’s no wonder the Black Angel statue is now said to possess sinister powers. According to one tale, any girl kissed in the shadow of the angel’s wings will die within six months, and anyone who touches the angel on Halloween night will die in seven years. Kissing the angel directly, meanwhile, will cause a person’s heart to stop instantly. One variation states that only a virgin can survive touching or kissing the statue without being struck dead.’ — The Line Up

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. JW was a character, that’s for sure, god love him. Everyone, Mr. E’s notorious FaBlog takes on … well, the entry’s title says it all: Hunter Biden and All That Jazz. ** Misanthrope, Oh, no problem, didn’t expect you to track that down. Of course ToT will be fun, it’s just how, a matter of degree, etc., right? What, you think if you and I started a band it would be better than The Shaggs? I think not, speaking only of the quality of my own theoretical contribution. Muscle memory is a curious thing, but, yeah, it happens. ‘Kick Out the Jams!’ Now you’re talking/playing! Nice goal. And I want to hear you belt it out while you’re playing. Oh, you tracked down JW? Cool. Glad he’s good. Very talented fella. ** Misanthrope, Ha ha, I did have a moment of wondering if I should tag that post as a Halloween themed one, but I decided it was just very teenily far afield. Teenily. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian. JW Veldhoen was a character for the interesting ages. But scavenger hunts can be fun? (Trying to put the best face on it). And getting lost definitely can be. If getting found afterwards is a guarantee, I suppose. There’s this huge, gorgeous famous building here called the Grand Palais — outside, inside — where, as part of art week — there are a bunch of art fairs, events, etc. right now — one event is a scavenger hunt in the Grand Palais where the big prize is an artwork by the famous Japanese artist Takashi Murakami that is hidden in the building somewhere, and people will pay something to go on a mass hunt to find it, and the person who finds it gets to keep it. I notice that they carefully don’t say it’s a big valuable Murakami work, and I suspect it’s probably some print from an edition of 100s that’s worth about $1000 if you’re lucky, so I’m skipping that one. Not sure why I went off about that. Oh, yeah, scavenger hunt. Well, I hope your corn maze has some eerie surprises up its sleeve. Oh, wow, that’s a big question about Bresson. Well, ‘Au Hazard Balthazar’ is incredible. As is ‘L’Argent’. I think you could start anywhere, but I wouldn’t recommend starting with ‘Diary of a Country Priest’ or maybe ‘Un Femme Douce’. People often say ‘Pickpocket’ is a good place to start because it has all of Bresson’s Bressonisms in a very consolidated fashion. I started with ‘Lancelot du Lac’, and it’s the one that permanently blew my mind, but I suspect starting with any of the films would have done that. I personally love the later color films the best but that’s not a hugely popular opinion. So, basically, if you start with either ‘Balthazar’ or ‘L’Argent’ or most of the others, you’ll be good. And, well, ‘Hausu’ won’t steer you wrong on an entirely other planet, as I’m sure you know. Enjoy whatever it is you choose. Fine day to you all around. ** Steve Erickson, Ah. Everyone, new song from Mr. Erickson: ‘I’m not sure how well this song works, but it was an attempt to write anxious and jumpy but relatively quiet music. I sampled more ASMR videos, as well as Tangerine Dream’s score for SORCERER.’ ** Bill, Hi. Misanthrope seems to have tracked him down remotely and reported that JW is doing okay. Uh, 6 volumes, 400 pages each, uh … maybe not for me, ha ha. I’ll give it a gander at least if I see it on a shelf. I’m going to angle for my long planned manga store trip for late this week. Bon day! ** Sypha, Hi. Oh, it’s a recently written memoir. I don’t know why I thought it was something from your history. I like your you-as-FBI agent horror meets New Narrative idea partly ‘cos it sounds like a good idea and partly I can’t fathom what that crosshatch would result in. Encouragement, iow. ** Right. I brought today’s post back from the dead in honor of Halloween’s approach, and I hope you’ll agree that was the right move. See you tomorrow,