Thinking About Cemeteries

When I was a kid, I went on an excursion to a cemetery. I’m not sure why our school decided to send a group of children to a field of dead strangers. Maybe they wanted to expose us to the reality of our inescapable mortality. Or it was just cheaper than an aquarium. Regardless, I spent the bus ride there jittery with nerves. I wasn’t a brave kid—I slept with a light on until I was about thirteen—so the excursion sounded like a waking nightmare to me. My only exposure to cemeteries had been from TV, so I was imagining cobwebs and bats and maybe a ghost. I freaked myself out picturing hands with black nails erupting from moist earth, clawing at my ankles.

Then we got there. I looked around and was almost disappointed to realise it wasn’t scary at all. There were a lot of trees. The grass was very green. The teachers let us loose to explore after a lecture about respect. We ran around, giggling at the old-fashioned names, daring each other to jump over the headstones. I can imagine people driving past and seeing a few dozen children in lemon-yellow school uniforms frolicking in a graveyard.

I thought about the cemetery a lot in the weeks after the excursion. About headstones and funerals and putting corpses in boxes and burying them in a hole. About coffins enclosing white bones and tattered clothing that used to be walking, talking people. That sounds dark, but I wasn’t left plagued by the thought of my inevitable death or anything—like most kids, I saw death as something that happen to old people and getting old as something that wouldn't happen to me. My plan for growing up was to become an immortal cyborg. My preoccupation was with the cemetery itself. About how different the experience had been from what I expected.

There’s a word for being drawn to cemeteries: taphophilia. It sounds like an unpleasant rash, but it’s a real thing. Taphophilia is not to be confused with taphonomy, which is an interest in decomposition and decay, the gradual breakdown of biological matter from the onset of rigour mortis. Coimetromania is different too—it’s an obscure mental condition that leaves people desperately enamoured with cemeteries and plagued by a compulsive need to visit them. It’s definitely not related to necrophilia (which I strongly advise against researching) though the two are often confused.

Taphophiles are hobbyists who, instead of sewing or drawing or collecting teacups, hang out in cemeteries. You may think that taphophiles are a little weird, that surely there aren’t many of them in the world. Normal people don’t like cemeteries. But a little digging reveals that this might not be the case. If you’re an avid reader like me, you don’t need to look further than your bookshelves to prove it. Fiction loves fatality.

Lots of stories take place in cemeteries. Perhaps it’s something about their liminality, the way they blur the line between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s father apparently taught her to read by having her trace the letters on her mother’s grave. Some believe she later lost her virginity on top of the same grave. What an icon. It seems unlikely that it was a coincidence she went on to write a story about a scientist who robbed graveyards so he could puzzle together new life. Cemeteries were, in a way, the birthplace of Frankenstein.

Thinking about all of this—cemeteries and taphophiles and authors, all tangled up together—I began to theorise that writers may be especially inclined to taphophilia. Which, as a writer myself, led me to a nagging question: was I a taphophile? Sure, I thought cemeteries were cool in an abstract way, but there’s a difference between reading about a cemetery and wandering around one in broad daylight, peeping at graves like some kind of voyeur. Did I like cemeteries, or did I just like the idea of them?

I decided there was only one way to find out—visit another cemetery. Conveniently, I was a student at UQ at the time, and the campus is right next to the South Brisbane Cemetery. You can see the gravestones if you have a window seat on the left side of the 66 as it comes into the Lakes stop, which I often did. It apparently contains around nineteen and a half thousand graves, which means I’ve probably talked to fewer living people than there are dead people buried there. I walked towards the cemetery with my stomach tied into knots, not sure what to expect.

I wasn’t a kid anymore. Death was no longer an obscure notion in my mind. In year 11, one of my favourite teachers died of cancer. She started every class with ten minutes of meditation because she knew how stressful school could be. She wanted her classroom to be a safe space for us. On her last day at the school, she didn’t tell us she was leaving because of her condition, but we all knew something was wrong. We brought presents and a card, and everyone hugged her goodbye. A few months later, the school counsellor told us she was gone. I struggled with it for a long time—the fact that she had been alive and warm with her arms around me the last time I saw her, and then suddenly she wasn’t in the world anymore and never would be again.

I was old enough to understand that death is something that will happen to the people I love, something that will happen to me. I was honestly expecting the nostalgia of my childhood recollection to fall apart in the face of this adult reality. But then I stepped into the cemetery. There were a lot of trees. The grass was very green.

I was wearing a mask—it was still the era of COVID and I had a nasty flu—but social distancing isn’t much of an issue in a cemetery, so I pulled it down and took a deep breath of crisp air. There were birds everywhere, in the trees, on the graves, zigzagging through the sky above me. I’m not sure you can call the sounds Australian birds make singing, but the chorus of squawks and warbles that greeted me was comforting. A lady and her dog were playing fetch under a tree. A cyclist was zooming down the hill, outfitted in lycra.

Historically, the line between cemeteries and parks isn’t as thick as it’s sometimes made out to be. In the 19th century, the Victorians designed their cemeteries as picturesque green spaces. Mostly a privilege of the rich, they had winding paths and lush greenery and elaborate statuary. When they were first built, people had picnics in them, took leisurely strolls, read poetry on the grass. They were even used for carriage racing. I suppose if there was an accident during a race, they didn’t have to move the body very far.

The trend of garden cemeteries began in France, with the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, which opened in 1804. When I Googled it, the first thing that came up for me was the Paris Tourist Office website, which has an article extolling its many virtues. More than three million tourists flock to it every year, all of them taphophiles by technicality whether they know it or not.

There are a lot of cemeteries in the world that attract tourism. London’s Highgate Cemetery is one. My sister told me about another in America, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which hosts live music events and summer movie screenings. The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York is popular as well, positioned right next to the churchyard that inspired ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’.

The main reason Père-Lachaise is popular is its catalogue of famous residents. Another name for taphophiles is ‘tombstone tourists’ because many taphophiles enjoy visiting notable graves—and Père-Lachaise has an abundance of them. The first notable burials there were the star-crossed lovers Heloise d’Argenteuil and Peter Abelard. It’s also the resting place of novelists Marcel Proust and Colette. Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B Toklas, are buried there as well.

My theory about the entanglement of writers and cemeteries led me to focus on the graves of notable literary figures, but Père-Lachaise has composers and scholars and scientists and politicians and … well, just about every type of person. A corpse for every character. One of the most popular residents in the cemetery is Oscar Wilde. His tomb is topped with a statue of a naked birdman, something like an angel or a sphinx. There's been a long tradition of visitors lathering on lipstick and giving it a kiss, leaving vermillion stains all over it. The statue looks like a cute kid recently besieged by enthusiastic great-aunts at a family reunion.

Another often-visited grave is that of Victor Noir, a journalist who died in 1870. Prince Pierre Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon, slapped the guy across the face and shot him dead in the street over a dispute between two newspapers. Sculptor Jules Dalou memorialized the journalist’s inglorious death with a statue of Noir sprawled in the position he died—on his back, top hat by his side, and a bulge in his pants. The last detail is what usually catches people’s attention. The bronze has long since been oxidized to a minty green, but his lips, the tips of his shoes, and his crotch are still shiny, kept polished by rubbing hands. Poor guy.

I found the grave of an Australian journalist during my jaunt around the South Brisbane cemetery, though it wasn’t quite as spectacular as Noir’s. It was made of some kind of white stone, with carved flowers and a column rising out of it. His name was George Hall, and his epitaph said:

AN ESTEEMED CITIZEN AND PRESSMAN.

FOR MANY YEARS CONNECTED WITH THE PUBLIC PRESS OF QUEENSLAND.

AND THE WELLKNOWN CONTRIBUTOR THERETO OF

‘ODD NOTES BY A BOHEMIAN.’

DIED NOVEMBER 8TH 1888

AGED 61 YEARS.

After finding it I wanted to know more. He was a writer, successful enough to get a fancy gravestone and a long epitaph that mentioned his work. Surely, I could dredge something up about him online? At first, I didn’t have much luck. I searched his name and death date and started clicking on links at random.

George Lothian Hall, a watercolour painter who also died in 1888, came up a lot. His art is pretty, lots of misty landscapes and idyllic coastal scenes. Next, I found an archived newspaper article in the National Library of Australia’s online database, Trove. Apparently, a spectacular variety show was held at Melbourne’s St Georges Hall in 1888. It was run by the Cogill brothers who, according to a newspaper article from the time, ‘introduced several diverting novelties into their minstrel and burlesque entertainment’ and were ‘nightly greeted with pleased audiences.’

After a few more false starts, I finally found the correct man. News of George Hall’s death can be found on page 13 of The Week, November 17, 1888. It’s under the title ‘Death of “Bohemian”’. As I read it, I felt the thrill of finally striking gold. I felt like a detective who’d just cracked a case, or an adventurer who’d finally reached the X that marks the spot.

George Hall worked for the Guardian, the Courier, and the Telegraph. He wrote under the nom de plume ‘Bohemian’, running an opinion column called ‘Odd Notes’—that explained his epitaph. An anonymous writer, unmasked after death. Apparently, a procession of assorted editors and writers and other notable journalistic figures attended the funeral to see Hall off.

None of this was exceptionally riveting stuff. It certainly didn’t beat being shot by Napoleon’s nephew and memorialised with a boner, but something about the fact that I had only found out about George Hall because I’d stumbled across the guy’s grave made it exciting. Tangible. He was real to me in a way historical figures don’t always feel real.

People would know about Oscar Wilde with or without his grave, but would anyone know or care about Victor Noir if not for his unfortunate memorial? I certainly wouldn’t. And even if that isn’t the case, I wouldn’t know about George Hall if I hadn’t explored the cemetery he’s buried in.

Cemeteries, I have decided, don’t just inspire stories. They contain them, preserve them. Like libraries of biographies. Cemeteries are places of history, and history is just stories constructed from facts. Can you imagine what our world would look like if we didn’t have gravestones, epitaphs, obituaries? If we didn’t memorialize our dead? The Greeks believed immortality was existing in the minds of the living—your story outlasting your life. As a writer and an atheist, living on as a story is as close to an afterlife as I can believe in. Maybe that’s what ultimately inclines writers to taphophilia.

Or maybe it’s just what inclines me.

Roseleigh Priest is a writer, editor, and researcher based in Kamilaroi Nation/Inverell. She is a sub-editor for UQ's Jacaranda Journal, and is also currently working as a research assistant for Community Publishing in Regional Australia. Roseleigh has been published by Creature Magazine (2024) and Grattan Street Press Blog (2025). Her favourite kind of writing is the sort that makes you laugh, or makes you shudder. (She/Her)