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Each morning, we wake up to Morning Edition on NPR and usually hear a jarring barrage of campaign orations, weather reports or obituaries (recently: Helen Gurley Brown).

At this rainy August dawn, I picked up on something that’s apparently been going on all summer but escaped my drowsy attention: A series called “Dead Stop” – visits to cemeteries and burial grounds across the country.

I went online to see what I had missed and thought these stories of significant – or insignificant – and off-beat, quirky stories worth sharing. For the most part, it’s a lighthearted look and means no disrespect to the more somber and sorrowful side of death. But it seems worth sharing as these stories do shed more perspective and insight into traditions and transgressions of how the dead are buried and remembered.

Gravestones lie against a tree in a dilapidated portion of Lincoln Cemetery in Montgomery, Alabama (Chris Pruitt)

You can view a complete list of the stories and links to the broadcast or printed text here but I’ve also listed a sampling of the stories below:

• Tuesday’s story was focused on Boot Hill Cemetery in Tombstone, Ariz. , visited by almost 150,000 people annually. The gift shop sells souvenirs and fudge made on the premises and the site was immortalized by Johnny Cash in “The Ballad of Boot Hill.” Headstones include: “Killeen, 1880. Shot by Frank Leslie.” “Red River Tom, shot by Ormsby.” “Marshal Fred White, 1880. Shot by Curly Bill.”
• There’s the Ben and Jerry’s “Flavor Graveyard” in Waterbury, Vt. where old flavors die but are not forgotten.
• Fascinating that Dorothy Parker’s ashes are buried in Baltimore, not her beloved New York, because she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr. – who knew? – and when he died, the NAACP inherited both her ashes and literary rights. She’s buried next to their headquarters.
• Andy Warhol, another famous New Yorker, is not buried there either. He was buried in 1987 next to his parents in the St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, not far from downtown Pittsburgh where he was born.
• Bill Wilson’s grave in Vermont attracts visitors who credit him with changing their lives: he was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
• There’s Eklutna Cemetery in Alaska, near Anchorage, a territory once claimed by imperial Russia. Native Americans and Russian Orthodox spirits live on in small houses placed atop the graves.
• How about Stonewall Jackson’s amputated arm receiving a Christian burial in a private cemetery in Virginia – but not where his body was buried in Lexington when he died of pneumonia?
• There’s always the Hollywood Hills cemetery where Bette Davis and Buster Keaton are buried, not to mention Frank Inn, trainer of celebrity animal stars.
• How sad that jazz legend Billie Holliday is not buried in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery with other well-known entertainers — Duke Ellington, Celia Cruz, Miles Davis and Lionel Hampton – but was placed, instead, in a much cheaper resting place in the Bronx.
• The Garden of Peace in Flint, Mich. was created in tune with Muslim burial traditions – all facing the same direction, east.
• Concordia Cemetery in El Paso, Texas, not far from the Mexican border, is 52 acres of 60,000 buried people – Chinese, Jewish, Mormon, Masonic and African American.
• Lincoln Cemetery in Montgomery, Ala., was established in 1907 for African-Americans, and was designed for 700 graves. So far, a volunteer corps restoring the neglected burial ground has recorded more than 6,700 graves.

All of these stories are worth a listen if you have a curious moment during these end-of-summer days when other activities don’t quite fit the cusp between seasons and the change of focus from vacation to the upcoming fall swirl of events leading into the holidays.

Next up: Natural Burial Grounds Are An Ecological Alternative

Susan Soper

Susan Soper is a longtime journalist: as a writer for Newsday where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for The Heroin Trail, writer at CNN, Features Editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Executive Editor at Atlanta INtown. Recently, she created and published a workbook, ObitKit (www.obitkit.com). She is currently working on a number of writing and editing projects, including obituaries and life stories. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, Bo Holland. Her interests include hiking, reading, the arts, people (dead and alive) and, in a better economy, travel. Staying close to home these days, she takes and documents “Urban Hikes” and is interested in sharing sites of interest with readers of Like the Dew.

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