Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Graveyards

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why graveyards are secretly incredibly fascinating. Special guest: Jason Pargin.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Graveyards. Known for being spooky. Famous for being gravy. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why graveyards are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm very much not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, hello. Hello. It's me, and I'm alive. I am too. And our topic is about folks doing the opposite of that. We're also joined by a wonderful guest. You know him from being an old pal of this show, also a bestselling novelist and a top TikTok creator. And his next novel coming up is

Zoe is Too Drunk for This Dystopia, pre-order now out in October. But we're very happy to be joined by Jason Pargin. Jason, hey, welcome. Hello. We have declared it to be Halloween. Yeah. I don't know when this is going up. August doesn't matter. It is Halloween season. They have opened the Spirit Halloween in my nearest abandoned department store. It is 117 degrees outside. Doesn't matter. We're doing a spooktacular episode because I have declared it to be Halloween. That's why they call it August. Yeah, that's literally the origin.

That's the origin of the name. It actually used to be a ghost. Just have to shout it that way. A ghost. Caesar's successor, Octavian, is going to be so mad. Oh, man, he's going to be so upset. Yeah. Caesar's also a ghost, so. True. They're all upset. Yeah. Caesar's also a ghost.

True. They're all dead. They're all dead. I feel like listeners fully did that decision. This was chosen by many people in the polls over the Discord and suggested by FMH Furland. Thank you, FMH Furland. And yeah, a friend of mine was posting on August 1st that their Target now has all the Halloween stuff out because as we especially discussed on a past episode about Halloween stores, they just get that going right away. It's great. It's earlier and earlier every year.

You got to roll out the, what is it, 16-foot skeleton? Which will instantly sell out to the $300 Home Depot giant skeleton. Yeah. You have to be there early to get it because otherwise they're getting snapped up. Well, luckily this podcast is all about where you put your skeletons. Truly, because the topic is graveyards. And starting with Jason, what is your relationship to this topic or opinion of it? And starting with Jason, what is your relationship to this topic or opinion of it?

I do not get death rituals, our death rituals at all. I do, of course, understand getting everyone together for a service to talk about the departed. Obviously, you know, sharing our grief together, sharing memories. I get that part. I do not understand graves, graveyards, tombstones. I do not understand graves, graveyards, tombstones. I realize I'm the one that's wrong, but I love the idea of trying to understand how this has evolved through various civilizations and why we do it, because it is alien to me. Yeah, you do see its value. It's just not, it doesn't ring powerfully for you.

Well, for example, there's in the latest Indiana Jones film, like they kind of finally addressed the whole thing of, well, this is kind of grave robbing, like you're, you know, you're intruding on people's. And I think that is a really interesting conversation to have, because for example, if we find bones of a caveman, we don't still think of that as like their sacred burial site. It's like, no, this is science now. After a certain amount of time, I guess after that person's friends and family have all gone, it's okay to just dig it up and put it in a museum. But if some other civilization came and conquered the United States, I would not be okay with them

digging up my mother's bones and saying, look at their weird cultural practices. I would have thought they had disturbed something sacred. So what's reasonable for how long to not disturb their resting site? I think that is a fascinating question. We're all sitting on top of bones, right? Like statistically, you're on top of somebody's bones. Yeah, worldwide, and especially in the United States, but worldwide. Yeah. I think about that a lot when like I'm eating or drinking water. I'm like, did this food used to be bones? And did this water used to be some ancient person's pee-pee? Because, you know, I like to think it's been a long time since it's

been some ghost pee-pee, but it's really hard to get over that. Yeah, Katie, what is your relationship to this topic beyond the ah, ghosts feeling about it? Mostly ah, ghosts, because when I was a kid, I had a terrible, terrible phobia of graveyards and dead things in general. I had like, it was like a contamination phobia. I didn't want to walk in graveyards, didn't want to walk past them. I'd like hold my breath walking past a graveyard because I was scared of breathing in graveyard air. I've gotten over that now. I still don't like graveyards. I don't go to them for fun, but I can deal with it. The older the graveyard, also the less grossed out I am by it. When it is a new graveyard, I'm thinking like there could be like a fresh dead person in here and I could catch something, right?

I know that's not true for the most part. It is a sort of irrational instinctive response that I have. It is a germaphobic kind of thing where it's like fear. I think maybe I'm weird where I feel good about the old ones and the new ones because the old ones, it's just long enough ago that it's all decayed. And so it's sanitized that way. And then the new ones, I just figure everything's very professional. At least in the US, you have to have licenses or whatever to arrange and bury things. Alex will just hang out with any corpse. He doesn't discriminate. That's true. Hey, dead listeners, swing by.

Discriminate. That's true. Hey, dead listeners, swing by. And this topic, there have been many on the show where I began researching and find how humongous it is. And this one almost approached the fermentation tier where it's too big. It's kind of the topic of all human death ever. But I think we have an amazing episode here about graveyards and burials and a lot of the specifics there, which is great. On every episode, our first fascinating thing is a quick set of numbers and statistics and this week that's in

a segment called all the stat things numbers truth brings to alex we'll count all of it out always i know you'll learn from this show counting statsing civpod teaches things and that name was submitted by colin hammer thank you colin we have a new name every week please make him as silly and wacky and bad as possible submit through the discord or to civpod at gmail.com speaking of graveyards how old is that song now 1000 years i don't know it's old yeah it sounds about right the weirder thing is the fact we cannot talk about like the ufo news from the u.s military and all that without mentioning blink 182 because2, because it's the Blink-182 guitarist who is one of the major activists in that field and is one of the reasons why that stuff is in the headlines. Google it. We do not have time to talk about it in the episode today, but

history may remember him more for the UFO stuff. The first number this week is about burials. And the first number is 63 feet tall or more than 19 meters. The biggest skeleton. Woo. Oh, it's a home depot, yeah. The 63 feet is the modern height of the largest Attawa mound. And the Attawa mounds are a historically marked cultural site in what's now the U.S. state of Georgia, because from around 1000 AD all the way to 1550 AD,

the Etowah Mounds were a city and gathering place for a large group of Mississippian Native people, and some of the mounds were large burial structures. You know, we have lots of graveyard stuff to talk about, but it would be strange to skip over the enormous and extensive and amazing burial practices of people here in North America before colonizers came through. And when you mentioned something about like a large burial structure, I think instantly most people instantly think of like some sort of a pyramid or something. So when you use the word mound, I also think some of our listeners are just imagining a giant pile of dirt. But these are like eight or nine stories tall.

So what kind of structures were these? The amazingness, I think, is different from masonry stuff and architecture stuff, that it's tremendous cultural continuity. stuff and architecture stuff, that it's tremendous cultural continuity. One source this week is the book The American Resting Place by Stanford University professor Marilyn Yalom. It says that a lot of the construction went this way, quote, all were built from earth that had been carried in baskets from borrow pits and then piled over the dead, the mounds increasing in size as new bodies were added. They would simply start burying people in a mound and then grow the mound as time went on. And then also these would be central structures in cities. And not every Mississippian mound was for burials, but I find it really amazing and different from something like Egyptian pyramids,

because instead of one structure for one person and maybe some of their things, or maybe the rest of their family, you just have an ongoing community growth of this site that reminds me of graveyards and cemeteries. Like those will start with a plot of land and then it fills in and doesn't expand upward, but expands as a community's generations pass on. less noticeable or sort of more, not so much to like, oh, we don't want to see where the memorial is, but it's like, we don't have as much of the sense of like, there is a body under here. It's just kind of like discreetly buried under where's with a mound. It gives you more of a feeling of like the number of people that are, have died in your community. Also, I think that it gets into the concept of using your burial places as something that's intended to last. Like these are some of the only remaining structures we have of that culture that we know about, right? Like if you ask any

random person, picture, you know, ancient Egypt, like there's exactly one structure that's going to come to mind. These people did not all live in pyramids, but the pyramids they built for their rulers, it feels like those were very much intended to last. And it feels like the same thing here. You are putting your dead into a structure that is designed to remain. is designed to remain. When you're putting them into a mound, it's like we are building something that is solid and noticeable and that will be here after we're gone. It's a lot harder to build over a mound like that than it is sort of a graveyard. And I think a lot of times people would build around these structures. Although as we're going to get into in a moment, in many cases, we had no problem building on top of these mounds.

They are amazing, but also some people were like, you know what would be more amazing? A hardware store. Oh, God. Or whatever. I did not mean to impugn specifically hardware stores, but we'll get to that. Home Depot is haunted is what Jason is saying. I hear it's full of skeletons. They did not stalk those skeletons. They just appeared. This whole culture too, it is something that we're going to use pretty general names for,

because unfortunately, a lot of records of them have been lost other than some existing mound sites and some artistic artifacts and cultural artifacts that are nearby or in the mounds. These Etowah mounds contain pieces of art like copper jewelry. There are marble statues of men and women. There's a lot of amazing things in them. But we generally don't know a ton about these Mississippian cultures, even that name as just something we're applying later to call them something. The word Mississippi comes from French translation of an Ojibwe word. Ojibwe people were up in the Great Lakes. Most of the Mississippians were in the Mississippi River Valley or in the Southeast. But then unfortunately, colonizers in particular from Spain visited the

region and then gave these people diseases that killed at least 80% of them. And so then the remaining Native people tended to not continue mound building. And also either they didn't record that culture or Europeans ignored and destroyed records of it. So we're really guessing at a lot of things about these people other than their burials. Yeah, I mean, like basically an apocalypse happened in North America, like a pandemic apocalypse pre-U.S. history. To the point that a lot of what they were saying about how empty the land was, and it's like, wow, it was just like this whole place is just gifted to us. It's all open and empty.

Like, well, it wasn't. Yeah, right. You're seeing the aftermath of something that you didn't realize necessarily had happened. But yeah. And one of the few ways some Europeans had to accept that there were people there before is these mounds. Especially in the early U.S. colonial period, farmers and city planners would either ignore or flatten out a lot of these mounds. There's even some poetry from the time. In 1832, poet William Cullen Bryant says, Are they here, the dead of other days? Let the mighty mounds answer.

Because before a lot of U.S. colonizing proceeded across some places, End quote. sites like Attawa. It's just very obviously people building monumental dirt structures that were the centers of cities. Just I guess, like, how would people know whether it's a hill or a mound? Until you started excavating into it? Like, would it be based on Hey, like, this is the only this is a flat area. And this is the only mound for many miles. It's probably manmade. area and this is the only mound for many miles, it's probably man-made? Yeah, it's that and humongousness and also a lot of these mounds had flat tops so that there could be structures on top of them. I see. Some of the particularly large ones like what's now Cahokia Mounds in present-day

Illinois, there's a largest mound we call Monk's Mound that UC Berkeley archaeologist A.J. White says was built across 14 different stages of construction. And it's really huge and was one of about 120 mound structures in that place. So some places like that have survived just because it was too hard to ignore or hard to not notice. But many other ones have been flattened out or removed. And it's, it's, so the ones we have left are really significant. Yeah. So we could tell ourselves that maybe when they were flattening these out and then they

ran into hundreds and hundreds of human bones that they very carefully and respectively and respectfully like relocated them to some other uh place for reburial maybe maybe some of them did that others just uh built their hardware store right there yeah and just needed the ground to be flat so they could sell uh whatever gold mining equipment last thing to say about this fits in the humongousness of this topic is that these mound builders who, again, we're just kind of calling mound builders, there were probably various names and cultures within that, but they were pretty specific to one region. And so Native people's burial practices have varied a lot across the Americas. And a lot of people on the Great

Plains would just leave a body out in the elements, but also in a ritual way. There are also people in North America and Australia who've practiced tree burials, where the body is on a tree or up on a scaffold in a ritual way. And as we were prepping this, Jason pointed out the sky burial practice of many peoples in the Himalayas, which is where a body is left out at a high point for scavenging animals and bringing it up there has ritual significance. So there's many, many forms of burial. And these mounds struck me as graveyard-like. But native people are not a monolith.

That's not the only thing they did. I want a sky burial. It's pretty cool. It's a good name, too. I want a sky burial. It's pretty cool. It's a good name too. I want to be eaten by birds. Just put me up somewhere high. Cause that can't, there can't be any laws against that. Right. Why would there be a, wherever the, wherever there are buzzards or whatever, just, just drag me up somewhere and let the birds eat me. I guess. Yeah. I feel like it's legal and you just want to make sure nobody mistakes it for uh your loved ones

like dumping a murdered body you know that would be the only thing i'm guessing the reason it's illegal is that birds would be dropping limbs that were too heavy for them to carry off and they would just they would be landing landing on nearby playgrounds and everywhere else still i like still that's not any weirder than what we do. I don't know too much about sky burials, but I think in modern sky burials, often like the body that is prepared is sort of they pre dissect the body such that it is a faster process where the vultures will eat the body a little faster. And, you know, you won't have sort of a, you won't have like, say, like a whole arm just kind of left or something like that. Yeah. And I feel like that makes it more of a ritual in a positive way. Like if you need to bother to do that, it is that committing of time and attention that seems to help us as people. Yeah, exactly. And the next number here

is a very quick number. It is two, because two is the number of words we ought to define in the context of European graveyards. It turns out it's not a hard and fast rule, but there's a distinction between graveyards and cemeteries. A graveyard usually means a burial place that's attached to a church or to a house of worship. And then a cemetery is a burial place where that's the main thing going on. Like a cemetery is a piece of land that mainly operates for burials. And then a graveyard, a piece of land that mainly operates for burials. And then a graveyard, it's more of a spare piece of property that's part of a church and part of the community and rituals of a church. Definitely did not know that those two words had different definitions until today, but it makes perfect sense with the terminology. Like the graveyard, it's like on the grounds, this is the yard where the graves are, and here's the part where the church is,

and here's the lawn. You see, like, you're designating just a part of the property that happens to have the graves on it, where a cemetery is like, no, that's all there is. Well, and once upon a time, people would bury their dead on their own property. Like, you know, you go to these old estates where they've got a little section of the yard where, you know, you've got five generations of people that have been buried out there. So once upon a time, you would have your own graveyard on your land. I actually visited that one for my ancestors when I was like 12. Oh, wow. I was horrified.

So my mom dragged us there because she was very interested in our family history. I think that this was like the Crandall's graveyard in Rhode Island. And she wanted to visit the old like sort of Crandall estate. It was basically this like rundown farm at that point. It was pretty overgrown. There was like one guy that we met there. At first, he was pretty confused why we were trespassing. And he was actually very nice.

I was so scared he was going to murder us though, because he was this old guy who was like missing several fingers. I think he had like one tooth. So as a child, you don't understand, like that does not mean the person is evil. I hid in the car while the rest of my family went and checked it out because I was certain it was either haunted or we were going to get murdered. When my mom asked the guy who still lived there, like, can we see your cemetery? And he said, oh, it's not my cemetery. It's all of your cemetery because we're all in the same family. I was like, he's going to kill us and he's going to bury us there. And that is going to be an ironic statement later. I was so scared.

Nothing happened. He was a lovely man. But yeah. Pop culture has definitely told us that the graveyards and cemeteries are spooky and New England specifically. Yes. So that makes sense that a Rhode Island one was creepy, even though it's not. I mean, there was like a rusted tractor next to it. I was convinced we were going to be killed

and turned into like zombies. Says all of these people were executed for witchcraft one after another. And over here is a separate cemetery of all of the victims of their witchcraft. Because it turned out it was true.

Yeah, Katie, your ancestors are witches, right? Like all of them? Oh, well, you know, probably. Sure. Yeah, cool. Cool, cool. Yeah, and this distinction, it's not quite a law that you have to use one word or the other, but it turns out it's a super common thing that I now just notice all the time. I notice that I have relatives in a Catholic cemetery because it's not the yard of a Catholic church. And this cemetery system also can often be much more humongous than the little graveyard of a church. One amazing number there is more than 5 million, because more than 5 million is the dead population of Wadi al-Salam, which is

maybe the largest cemetery or graveyard in the world. It's a Shiite Muslim holy city called Najaf in modern Iraq. They have more than 5 million people estimated to be there. How big is the cemetery? Apparently it's so big, it comprises more than 13% of the entire area of the city. Wow, a humongous cemetery that began around the 600s AD. Because that's when people built a mausoleum for Ali bin Abi Talib, who was a cousin and son in law of the Prophet Muhammad, the first Shia Imam, sort of the beginning of the Shiite denomination of Islam. And then people said, hey, this mausoleum's important, let's build out a cemetery around it. And over the past 1300 years, an estimated 5 million or

more people have been buried there. There's also domed family crypts, there's underground burial vaults. There's just a lot of amazing architecture and structures to fit that many people there. This is the kind of thing that as an American, I have absolutely no context for. The idea of a place like that, that has continuity over the last 1300 years, and it's like this has been a burial site and a grave site that is still in operation. It's not an archaeological find. Like it has, people have been visiting this spot for the same reason for 1,300 years. I don't have any mental context for that in the United States where an old house is 150 years old.

Like we see that as like ancient and sacred or whatever. The idea of something that goes back that long, I don't have that in my life. Same. Again, like we kind of like overwrote a lot of North America's history. And so our old, And so our old, you know, it feels pretty young. And I think that Europeans and other people who come from countries where there truly is just like history going back thousands of years, they're like, oh, yeah, America is a little baby nation. And they can't imagine us thinking of anything in the U.S. as being old buildings or something like that. Or that in England that they have pubs that have been open for 300 years. It's like this place has been open since 1724. It's like that's not a thing here.

That also brings us into a takeaway that'll have numbers in it too, because takeaway number one, the history and future of U.S. graveyards is a battle between maintaining permanent graves and relocating or reusing those spaces. And we've referred to this a bit earlier in the show, but I was surprised to learn the U.S. is a little of an outlier when it comes to graveyards. It turns out we tend to put one person in one place forever. And the big exception is city graveyards, because those space constraints are kind of the main reason there are large U.S. cemeteries today. And a lot of our biggest cemeteries are where I am, New York City. And a lot of our biggest cemeteries are where I am, New York City.

A number there is about 3 million, not Wadi al-Salam level, but about 3 million. That's the number of people at Calvary Cemetery in the Queens borough of New York, which is the most graves in any one U.S. cemetery. It's really hard for me to imagine how that fits in New York, given the size of New York and the density. I guess not the size. New York is big, but the density of New York. I think all of the listeners are asking the same question. Are these truly three million people who each have their own permanent spot that's forever a single coffin?

Or how can I put this delicately? Are they being layered in some ways that maybe they don't talk about? Like it, it feels implausible that they have perfectly respected that everybody gets their own exact. I don't know. It's, it's the second thing. And it's also, they're basically keeping Calvary expanding two ways. One is that physical creativity, either building up, digging down, or cremating people, and then that's a less large body. But then the other solution is land acquisition. There are currently four administratively connected sections that make up Calvary. And the first section of Calvary Cemetery was declared full in 1867.

So, you know, back to Ulysses S. Grant times, they said, we're out of space. And they solved it by adding three more cemeteries to the cemetery. In some ways, it's kind of like what I call the birthday card dilemma. When somebody sends you a birthday card, how long do you keep it before it's okay to throw it away? Because it feels rude to immediately throw it away. And so you want to treat it as a kind of sacred object because this was a thoughtful thing a family member did. But how long am I required to keep this thing?

It's kind of the same thing. We do not have a specific number in mind for how long a grave is to remain undisturbed. And to some degree, it depends on how famous you were or how wealthy you were, or do you still have people around who will complain on your behalf? Because obviously moving, you know, whatever, Elvis's grave would be very, very different from any of his contemporaries who may have been buried in some very poor part of town that has since been built up by developers. And I personally believe when it came time to move those graves of those non-elvis people they may have just moved the headstones yeah like i have trouble believing that if they you were tasked with moving 20 000 graves that they went through 20 000 sets of remains and carefully reburied them if these were not people who still had prominent family or advocacy groups around to complain and make demands that otherwise it's kind of like, well, you know, it's a birthday card from six months ago. Surely it's okay to

put a Home Depot here and maybe not, maybe just kind of ignore the fact that they're still under the tool section. Yeah. I actually had a similar thought. I just recently visited the Pantheon in Rome, which is this ancient, really cool domed structure. And there are some remains there. And one of the remains is the painter Raphael. And he gets this nice tomb, this nice sepulcher. You can look at it. It's above ground. And he requested this, and he's got like a statue of Mary and Jesus above it. And then the ring in the middle of the dome, the oculus, shines light down onto his sepulcher.

Like at the end of the day, it's like the longest amount of light there. And it's like, well, this is really lovely for Raphael. And then I started thinking about like, man, there are like millions of people who lived in Rome who do not get this kind of nice treatment when you die. And most people do not get that kind of treatment. Yeah, at minimum, all four of the turtles should get it right i know raf is the leader but come on like donatello wants to be buried in pizza i know that but i don't mean to step on that with the joke. It is a really amazing insight.

Because, yeah, this is... I'll never critique a turtle joke. So don't worry about that. You know, a rural church can kind of just theoretically keep up or leave that graveyard as it is. But, Jason, that birthday card dilemma you mentioned, that is the reason Calvary Cemetery exists. Is that people in Manhattan said, the birthday card expiration is up for Manhattan church graveyards, and we need to move a bunch of these. And there's a few that have achieved that historical status, and that becomes a different way they're kept up. But when New York City was just Manhattan, its dead got buried in Manhattan's church graveyards.

I don't know if people know that there are four other boroughs of New York City because the population expanded and also went to new locations for cheaper land and more space. And so, you know, as Manhattan's island fills up with living people and the burial sites fill up with dead people, the solution was cemeteries in places they considered rural. And so Manhattan's Catholic churches bought land to create Calvary Cemetery with help from a New York state law in 1847 called the Rural Cemetery Act. Because at the time, they considered what's now Queens to be rural. And then the really fun one like that is 1838, rich New Yorkers just set up their own country rural cemetery. But that's now a place called Greenwood Cemetery.

And it is surrounded by prime Brooklyn, New York real estate and is basically a park because now there's living people around it. And maybe eventually Greenwood and Calvary and elsewhere will have to repeat this cycle and find a even more quote unquote rural place where we send people next. and just picnic there versus just a lonely cemetery where it is desolate and no one is there, just not even mourning, just enjoying life. And another way we don't know how the dead would feel about it is with big city cemeteries, a lot of their occupants are dead people who, when they were living, selected a plot in a different place and then have been relocated there. That's a big thing in New York. And another big example is the Bay Area of California. There's a town called Colma that there's an amazing 99% Invisible episode about,

because now 73% of the land in Colma is graves. The city of San Francisco and nearby places like Oakland kind of ran out of graveyard space, like they ran out of a lot of land, and then just built huge purpose-built cemeteries in this whole other place and started moving the existing dead people and putting the new dead people into that new place. There's a word we've come up with that is a wonderful word for a city of the dead, a necropolis. Yeah. I want to be buried in a necropolis. I want to be buried in it. I forget the sky burial thing I said earlier. I want to be buried in a giant city of the dead. I want people to drive past a sign that says you are now entering the necropolis.

Yeah. I think necropolis, since it does have city in the word, it does feel more, I don't know, lively, no pun intended, than like a cemetery, right? Like a necropolis. It sounds exciting. It sounds like it's the place where dead people with things to do go. Right. Like, have you been to the downtown shopping district of Necropolis? Oh, it's fantastic. There's skeletons looking at purses and dresses and stuff. Yeah, that'd be nice.

And yeah, and in general, other places in the U.S. might start facing a lot of this decision that New York and San Francisco made before, because the U.S. is an outlier about often legislating at a state level that you can't throw the birthday card out. According to NPR's show Planet Money, in the U.S., a lot of states have laws mandating that graveyards and cemeteries keep up those graves forever. And that's very different from especially modern European countries, where people are either given a free public grave for a short period of time, or purchase more time. But either way, the bones have a set amount of time and then get removed and put in a bone house. And it's because a lot of European graveyards are much older,

there was continuity there, and they are out of space and have to do that. I don't want to be crude or disrespectful, but I've now decided that I want to be buried in a bone house. That I want to spend eternity in the bone house. And when people go to visit me, they say, yes, it's the anniversary of his death. We're all going down to the bone house to see him. Jesus, we'll do a power rankings at the end of the episode, like number one bone house and then Sky Burials is up there. And yeah, if we could just if there was an entire sort of region of bone houses and it was all sort of the city zoning was just for bone houses you could

call it the bone zone go on go on go on uh you could threaten people i'll be like hey if you don't if you don't get out of my face you and i are going to the bone zone And then it's like, wait, do I want that? It's starting to sound good. I might. Maybe this awakens something. I don't know. Let me think about this. Yeah.

To be serious, this makes way more sense to me that you have a specific time where it's considered courteous. Like, look, as a practical issue, we're going to leave the grave there. You can visit it. You've got a place, but you do not have a right to claim that plot of land for all of eternity. Like, the living need the land. It's interesting to me that in the United States, which is a heavily Christian country, you know, probably more so than large parts of Europe, where it is explicit in our beliefs that the spirit is not in the body, which is a different belief system than, you know, previous cultures and hunter-gatherers

that believe that, you know, that the ancestors still resided in their bones and in their remains, or the ancient Egyptians who believed that the body would be escorted into the afterlife. Like America is explicitly about the spirit has flown from the body and this is just ash to ashes, dust to dust. That it's here where we are so insistent on, no, this needs to remain, like these remains need to remain undisturbed forever, where there's other cultures have a more practical approach. And I don't know that I've ever found a satisfactory answer as to why the, like it seems to run so counter to our religious beliefs. And I just believe that we inherited it from pre-Christian cultures. Yeah. And I think with the United States as a country, a lot of it must just come from the belief that our land is endless, because they know it's not in Europe. And the BBC says that the City of London Cemetery finally started reusing graves in 2011. New cutoff is 75 years time, but many other European places did it sooner. but many other European places did it sooner. There's even so much turnover in parts of Norway that The Guardian says one Norwegian cemetery worker tried to invent a solution to Norwegian

cemeteries needing to pull the bodies out before they've decomposed all the way, and there's sanitation issues. So he developed the process of injecting a lime solution into new bodies to make them decompose faster. They're dealing with turnover in a way that the U.S. has chosen not to. The one very American thing about it is the capitalism. U.S. states have state laws mandating the upkeep of these cemeteries and graveyards, but then also the one way you can remove one without anybody stopping you is if the graveyard loses its active maintenance. And that's usually an issue of money. It turns out that some states legally require funds be set aside from new burials to keep up old burials.

And then also if that falls into disrepair or if a cemetery goes bankrupt because financially a cemetery can go officially bankrupt, then that allows a town or a city to pretty much just take all of it out. Then it's suddenly not legally protected. I mean. Well, I mean, you can tell a lot about a culture by their burial practices. You can tell a lot about a culture by their burial practices. So it's appropriate that we have a fee-based system. Yeah. Yeah. Just like eventually it'll be a thing where the tombstone comes with a little card reader and your, you know, remaining relatives have to keep re-upping your tombstone.

Otherwise it like gets rid of your name, dumps your body and someone else can rent that spot. It's a little animation of your soul going into hell because you did not pay to keep their spirit at rest. But in the future, again, you know, I don't know how history will remember the United States. But when they talk about our culture and our religion, they will see a lot of gravestones that have religious slogans on them. But they will also notice that the largest stones were wealthy people. Like, yeah. Yeah. So it's like, OK, so the large stones did not go to their high priests unless they were very wealthy priests who had TV shows.

It went to the people who had cash. So what was their religion? It seems they worshiped a god called 401k. The near future of U.S., especially graveyards for churches, a lot of it might depend on whether churches remain popular and going. The Pew Research Center says the number of Americans who identify as Christian is rapidly declining. And then for a graveyard's purpose, the graveyard needs people to not just identify as Christian, they need to be at church most weeks and interested in the building and the graveyard attached. So, you know, we're more and more into a future where graveyard maintenance is a question for everybody. Like, will the graves be relocated or built over or maintained as a historical site,

or will a church continue being an institution? It's almost like the continuity of our burials and our monuments are a way that we signal whether or not our culture has remained dominant. Yeah, how about that? That's what happens when your culture gets overwritten by a new one. The first thing that happens is that they erase your graves. And it kind of seems like that practice of making some sort of a permanent marking spot for your for your dead is almost a way to symbolize like, hey, our culture is still capable of defending this land. I think the lesson here is that if you want people to respect your system of graveyards, you got to do a giant three-dimensional triangle. That's the only way we're going to keep

it. Something that is such a pain in the ass to move that even conquerors just like, just leave it. of pain in the ass to move that even conquerors just like just leave it right yeah just like put a bunch of booby traps like you know release some spikes or some bees when people try to yeah uh drive over your graveyard swarm of beetles always good scarab beetles yeah yeah beetles that burrow under your skin, some kind of like curse. This idea of this continuity and more that leads into the couple other big takeaways for the main episode. And we're going to hit those after a short break. See you in a sec. Hey, folks, I have very nice quick anniversary news. We commissioned a gift poster for people who support this show to celebrate episode 150.

It's art by artist Adam Koford. There is a character for each and every episode from 101 to 150. So it is a very fun feast for the eyes. As you explore, I really enjoyed writing the characters of this poster. I wrote jokes for all the characters and then Adam drew them brilliantly and added stuff too. He's awesome. That digital poster is only for supporters of the show. If you were already set up to support SIF through Maximum Fun, you should have got a very handy email with exactly how to go into your Booko and get that poster. It's right there with the other posters, and you can enjoy it there. If for some reason you did not get an email, even though you support the show,

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but never got anything. We'll get you set up. It's easy and it's fun. So hope you enjoy. And here's to another 50 episodes that we're on the way toward. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast,

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Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And we're back. And a couple more astounding takeaways here. One last number to bring us into it. The number is at least 2,000 years old. At least 2,000 years old is the age of a tree in Scotland. Trees can be thousands of years old. And this tree is called the Fortingall

Yew. It is a yew tree in Perthshire in Scotland. And it could be as many as 5,000 years old, but it's at least 2,000. And if it's way beyond that, it's probably the oldest living thing in all of Europe. Wow. I was going to make a joke about the queen being the oldest living thing in Europe. And then, but yeah, the podcast is like, I don't know, a year too late for that. Yeah. Because while I have trouble seeing like graves and gravestones as being sacred a tree that has managed to survive for 5 000 years that is sacred yeah that tree is sacred like i i look into that thing it's like i have been here as empires and entire cultures have risen and fallen one after another and still i have been here this whole time and nobody has been able to cut me down or anything. That is magic. That's amazing.

Yeah, I do feel like that's pretty universal, if anything is. And that leads us into an amazing takeaway, because takeaway number two. Some of the first Christian graveyards got built on the local land that was most significant to pagans. And we partly know that from one old Scottish tree. Because there's a really interesting thing here where early Christians did a lot of their burials in the yards of churches. their burials in the yards of churches. And the question there is, why? We take it for default, but why bury people by the church? Like part of the existence of the Wadi al-Salam cemetery we talked about in the previous half is that in Islam, you generally don't bury people in or around mosques. You keep it separate. That's just the practice there. It seems like early Christians decided that church land was already consecrated for worship and for ceremonies like baptisms. So why not use the yard because it's near consecrated land or is

consecrated to? And then on top of that, a lot of churches got built in places that were already significant to pagans because of stuff like ancient trees. I mean, I know pagans love a tree because the Christmas thing, you bring in a tree. That was a pagan thing, I think, before the Christian sort of co-opted Christmas. Germans, yeah. Yeah. So what was the significance of the tree in terms of like burying people next to a tree in the old pagan religion? That's a great question. And it turns out pagans seem to be aware how old these trees are, like over human generations, especially yew trees. They would say, we noticed that this tree just keeps living. And so it must be significant.

that this tree just keeps living. And so it must be significant. And Atlas Obscurus says in some cultures, the yew tree was worshipped as a long living plant. And I just didn't know this about yew trees. They would be a good topic, I guess, because the UK Woodland Trust says they commonly live 400 to 900 years, occasionally more than 1000 years. And And the Fordingal U and a few others in the world have just outstripped that and kept on going. Not to be too reductionist or whatever, but one thing that's magical about the way human civilization works is that we figured out that if you can find a thing and that we all agree that that thing is sacred, it's like a really clear and easy way to organize people. Because it's like, we may disagree and we may, you know, want to fight over this piece of land or this practice or whatever, but we all agree that this rock is sacred, right?

And as long as we all agree that the rock is sacred or this tree is sacred or that the sun is sacred, as long as we all agree on that, then we we don't kill each other. A tree where your great, great, great grandparents remember that tree being in that spot. That is as good of a thing to declare sacred as any. Why not? Of the things to declare sacred where like in america you know the celebrities are what we declare sacred mostly and then of course christianity when it comes along more than we like to admit just borrows what was already sacred and just swallows it up like the borg it's like yeah fine this is also this is where we're going to bury our dead whatever magic was here we don't believe in magic.

We don't believe there's nothing in our Bible that says that soil is blessed by God than another. It was all made by God. But if these people thought this place was magic, why not? Who knows? Yeah, there's a recent bonus show of the podcast about octopuses where we talked about a Protestant church built in Polynesia, probably on the location of former worship of an octopus god, you know, and this is kind of like that.

It's believed that Scottish pagans worshipped at this ancient yew tree. And so then when Christians moved into the area and converted people, they said, this is a great site that people like, let's use it. Like, why not? It also is something that may go away if we treat the tree poorly, which also feels fair to me. I guess we should lose the spot if we're mean to the tree. But science writer Sabrina Imler says that in recent centuries, people have damaged the tree to basically take pieces of souvenirs. Oh, come on. Like in 1833, vandals cut down whole branches to make drinking cups and other fun things

they thought. And tourists to this day will take twigs or leaves. And apparently the tree's under enough stress that it partially changed sexes, which a conifer tree can do. Apparently a male conifer tree makes pollen, a female makes berries. And then in 2015, one branch of the Fortingallew switched to berries instead of pollen. And it's one of a few recorded examples of a conifer changing gender in part of its structure over, we believe due to stress, a tree can feel stress and that's why. Yeah.

I mean, the thing with the tree is it's not like, it's not just a structure made out of wood. It needs that stuff. It needs the leaves. It needs the, needs the branches. You can't just keep taking stuff off of a tree. I think there was a book about that called The Giving Tree, where it's like some kid killed a tree. And you could say that the idea of this thousands-year-old organism finally succumbing

to the force of tourists, that there's something symbolic in that. But I don't think it's symbolism. I think it's just an actual thing that's happened. Yes. I don't think it's a symbol at that point. I think it just is. And then in terms of how we feel about these places, there's one more main takeaway for the main show, which is takeaway number three. Graveyards might be our most underutilized green spaces. And a lot of our green spaces are secretly graveyards. I think there's two pieces of really good news here.

One is that we can use graveyards as a space to be and to have green area, but also that we are already doing that with our regular parks. In many cities, if not most cities, they happen to be on top of former graveyards. It's just not talked about or marked all of the time. One of the most famous examples is plague pits in European cities, especially London. It turns out some victims of bubonic plague in the 1300s did get individual burials, but many others were piled in mass graves. And so we'll link a map of plague pits in London, where standard graveyards could not contain the dead. And many of those are now public squares or yards or green spaces in that city. You know, just nobody wants to really dig it up.

And also it has been open for a while and other buildings got built around it. I mean, it would be a hard sell to call something Plague Pit Park. Yes. Plague Pit Park. It's a tongue twister, if nothing else, you know, forget it. I can't do it. Plague Pit Park. Am I warming up for high school theater? No way. Right. Right next to the Bone House. It's, yeah, I mean, I think that there's enough time has gone by. It might be disconcerting to people.

And then many U.S. cities have also done this with epidemics or just with large graves. with epidemics or just with large graves. It turns out that in Manhattan, again, New York, Washington Square Park is a really beloved park with a fountain and an arch and everything. It's built on more than 20,000 bodies buried there after yellow fever epidemics in the late 1700s, early 1800s. The children's playground at Madison Square Park is on a potter's field of unmarked graves from the 1790s. And probably better known, part of Central Park is on the site of Seneca Village, which was a whole Black American community that had all the parts of community, including a graveyard. And then that community got displaced. The few graves there got turned into parklands without moving the bodies.

got turned into park lands without moving the bodies. And then many California cities like Ventura and San Diego have turned graveyards into parks after a 1957 California state law permitted cities to remove tombstones of abandoned graveyards in the way we talked about before with bankrupt cemeteries and graveyards. I'm so glad you didn't say that to, like, 12-year-old me. I would never leave my house.

You'd just grow up being like, what are swing sets? Never heard of it. I don't play. And then this might be the darkest U.S. park origin story of them all. And it's about Denver, Colorado. This Vice News covering it. bodies and put the parts into several child-sized caskets to make more money. Rather than hire someone new to finish the job, the city fired McGovern and leveled the land. By current estimates, at least 2,000 bodies remain. End quote. That is, the grift was so strong.

The grift was so good. They're like, we just, we got to close this loophole. It's going to be haunted. Sorry, guys. It's going to be haunted. Sorry, guys. It's going to be haunted. Right. We can think of no other way to prevent the grift from happening. Yeah.

Oh, Lord. And it's just that's just kind of going on a lot of places, as cities have said. This is green space because it's a graveyard. It can be a park. And, you know, Denver was trying to relocate the bodies, but the scammiest dude in the history of U.S. graveyards was doing it. So they couldn't. I can promise you that he is not the scammiest dude in the history of the burial and funeral industry. That is, you can have a separate episode about some of the grift that occurs there.

You can have a separate episode about some of the grift that occurs there because you have grieving people who will pay any amount of money and also the customers are dead. So what you do with them and the corners you cut, you're a good chance nobody's going to notice. There is many horror stories. We wanted to totally bum out the listeners so we could share. wanted to totally bum out the listeners so we could share. But yeah. There is a recent story, I think, in the U.S. of someone whose loved one passed away and their body, according to their will, was donated to research. Well, it turns out somehow the body got into the hands of the U.S. military who used it for explosion research on like, hey,

how close can someone be to this explosion? And so like exploded this body. And when the person's loved ones found out, they were not happy. Right. That's how I that's how I want to be. That's how I want my body treated. I want an explosion research. That's what I want. Forget the other stuff I said. What if we explode the bone zone? I feel like the spirit of fun is the closing thing here because in addition to a bunch of existing city parks being former or current graveyards,

we can use things that are actually considered graveyards as green spaces to be. And there are a lot of big city cemeteries like Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn and Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles that host year-round entertainment programming and tours. And Hollywood Forever is famous for movies being screened on the side of mausoleums. And then also there are people who just check the local or individual cemetery laws and do picnicking and do time spent there that is considered respectful. And I also want to point out a game people developed. This is from a really cool book called Reality is Broken by a futurist named Jane

McGonigal. She says that there are groups playing what's called cemetery poker, which is an outdoor game where you give people a set amount of time to build the best simulated hand of cards by finding interesting tombstones. One group played a version where the last digit of death dates on tombstones can be the number of the card. And then if there's multiple names on a grave, that counts up to various face cards. There's also suits from tombstone shapes, like a flat top is a diamond, a pointed top is a spade, a round top is a heart, a statue on top is a club. That's a very specific example of gamifying a cemetery, but that kind of thing is available to us.

Like not only are these green spaces, but they are packed with artwork and with history and with individual people with stories in a way where it's a it's a really engaging place to spend your time. remember when Pokemon Go was a big thing. There are so many stories about people finding Pokemon in the graveyard and or in the cemetery and going in there and people found it disrespectful. There should be some respect, but like having it be used by people feels nicer than having it just be mostly empty all the time. It feels so lonely to me. And I also like the idea of having a culture where there's more acknowledgement of death in day-to-day life. Death isn't making death less of just this like taboo. For me, I like the idea of sort of having more,

you know, obviously with respect. And there are certain sites, grave sites where you may not want that, like the sites of atrocities or something where you, you know, I think that it is the somberness is definitely warranted. have died, it seems nice to, you know, have there be some connection that communities have to those graveyards in normal life. And if I had one like summary or closing thought, it's that I would like this to always serve the purposes of the living and not the dead. That if it's, whether it's for memorial purposes or something else, like marking the site of an event, you do not want people to forget. But that's for the living. It's not it's not for the dead. It's for the people who are still here.

Yeah. And I just like knowing about these places in a bigger way. When you try to find out what graveyards do today, it turns out that they're hugely helpful for all the other species that are alive. Scientific American indexed some studies. They said that we have found rare orchids in a cemetery in Turkey. We found a range of medicinal plants doing well in a graveyard in Bangladesh. Ancient burial mounds in Ukraine that have rare steppe grassland plants. And the flowering plants support pollinators. If it's a quiet green space that helps animals

that like to communicate like birds. So let's be like our animals. Let's go thrive in these graveyards. It's great. And if anybody out there has a problem with that, you can come meet us in the bone house. We'll explode your bone zone. And if you like that or don't, you know, either way, swing by.

Hey, folks, that is the main episode for this week. Once again, I want to thank Jason Pargin, a very special guest for me and Katie. And again, his new novel is Zoe is Too Drunk for this Dystopia. It's the next book in the Zoe Ash series. Also, you can jump in at any point. It's a funny, cutting-edge sci-fi thriller. I'll put together all of those things all at once and really unique and awesome. And please don't wait if you're going to read it. sci-fi thriller. I'll put together all of those things all at once and really unique and awesome.

And please don't wait if you're going to read it. Please go ahead and pre-order because pre-orders are what make an artist's whole situation go on the business end of publishing. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the history and future of U.S. graveyards is a battle between maintaining permanent graves and relocating or reusing those spaces. Takeaway number two, some of the first Christian graveyards got built on the local land most significant to pagans, and we partly know that from one old Scottish tree. Takeaway number three, graveyards might be our most underutilized green spaces, and a lot of our green spaces are secretly graveyards. Plus a ton of numbers about what

qualifies as a graveyard versus a cemetery, the biggest cemeteries in the world, the burial mounds of North America, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the oldest grave in North America and a couple of astounding and positive stories behind it. Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 13 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun

things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book The American Rusting Place by Stanford University professor Marilyn Yalom. Another book called Reality is Broken, Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by futurist Jane McGonigal. Also a pretty astounding amount of digital resources, I would say. We look to UNESCO, UC Berkeley, Reuters, NPR's show Planet Money, the BBC, The Guardian, the Pew Research Center, Atlas Obscura, the UK Woodland Trust, Vice News, Untappd New York, Smithsonian Magazine, and Scientific American, to name a few. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge

that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Jason taped this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Sa'atza Yaha peoples. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, Jason's location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life.

There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord, and we talked a lot in this episode about Mississippian people in particular. There's a lot of just research links as well, if you look in the episode links. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 79. That's about the topic of the Legend of Zelda franchise, one of the more obviously incredibly fascinating topics we've ever done. And yet most people don't know that, fun fact,

Nintendo's longtime head of the Zelda franchise is a marionette maker who joined the company before he had ever played video games. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode.

Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly

by you.