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Posted: 26-06-2012 20:45 Post subject:

Digging up the dead
By Lucy Townsend, BBC News Magazine

Thousands of graves will be dug up and moved to make way for the new high-speed rail line between London and Birmingham. But how does this happen and why do people feel squeamish about it?
The space above ground can belie the congestion below. With each new building and every spade in the ground, something is unearthed.
But in a world where space is short and land is at a premium, what should be left in the soil?

The HS2 rail line is expected to run straight through old cemeteries in London and Birmingham. It is estimated that the remains of about 50,000 people could be affected.
And it is not the only instance.
In Salford, campaigners are fighting the development of an Asda store on an old cemetery believed to have more than 300 graves.

In the US, the Chicago Department of Aviation is just coming to the end of its project to remove about 1,500 graves and use the land for a new runway at O'Hare International Airport.

And Walmart has been criticised for applying to build on land in Alabama that is believed to be an unmarked graveyard for slaves.

There have always been developments that have touched formerly consecrated ground. In the 1860s when the Henry Barlow rail line to St Pancras was built, novelist Thomas Hardy, at the time a young architecture student, was among the people who took part in a dig to remove old graves.
He wrote about it in his poem The Levelled Churchyard in 1882:
"O passenger, pray list and catch Our sighs and piteous groans, Half stifled in this jumbled patch Of wrenched memorial stones!"

Natasha Powers, head of osteology at the Museum of London Archaeology, says there is not much land left in cities that hasn't been used before.
"Coming across human remains is a fairly common thing."
It is Powers's job to study the human remains that have been exhumed for building projects, examining the bones for information about health, disease and demographics from the time they were buried.

Among the projects that she worked on was the Spitalfields development in East London, once a medieval priory, now a trendy shopping and living area, where 10,500 remains were removed.
"The onus is always on dignity", she says. "There are some cases if we know the remains are very deep that it might be appropriate to use machinery, but generally we use trowels and go very slowly and carefully."

So when digging up old graveyards is such a common thing, why does it make some people squeamish?
"Death is the last taboo at a time when absolutely everything else has been deconstructed," says Brian Draper, associate lecturer at the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity.
"There's something about letting the dead rest in peace that shows we want to keep this last unknown area of life and death sacred."

Strict rules apply to the exhumation of bodies. In England and Wales, the Ministry of Justice first has to grant a licence for their removal, it then has to gain planning permission and adhere to rules set out by organisations such as English Heritage and the church. Because of the age of most of the burial grounds this tends to be the Church of England.
Reburial must also take place - usually in other nearby cemeteries.

The graves in question date back at least 100 years, though many are much older. In some cases, they are unmarked by headstones and any living relatives are no longer contactable.
As Draper adds, the lack of close living relatives could for some be the line between acceptable digging and not.
"Some would argue that the whole thing about burial is actually more for the benefit of the living than the dead. Once the living connection is lost, then you lose completely the reason to rest in peace in that particular way."

For developers, this is the preferred view.
With large infrastructure projects like HS2, the precedent has been set and there is no room for squeamishness.
Plans for the £33bn scheme were approved by the government in January, and phase one between London and Birmingham should be running by 2026, later extending to northern England.

Under the plans, the Curzon Street terminal would be built on Park Street in Digbeth, Birmingham, a 19th Century graveyard.
And St James Gardens, a consecrated former church burial ground in Euston, central London, will also need to be dug up.

Tim Smart, head of engineering and operations at HS2, says: "It would be different if it was somebody's granny that was being moved, but these are about 100 years old.
"We are talking about disused burial grounds - generally when no bodies have been interred in a century. People understand it might be better to disturb disused burial grounds than other disturbances."
Smart's pragmatism is based on years of established practice. The exhumation path is well trodden.

In 1893, the people of Brooklyn, New York, had their own graveyard issues to deal with. The New York Times ran a story about bodies at the Old Methodist burial ground being exhumed to make way for two new residential roads.
A man called Berger is quoted as saying: "Fudge! They are only bones, so much rotten old bones I don't care a fillip about them."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18505222

Coincidentally, today I've been reading a crime novel where an exhumation has been proposed....

Posted: 03-08-2013 09:01 Post subject:

One Way To Necropolis

Posted: 11-09-2013 13:41 Post subject:

Not sure if I have posted this before, but it's graveyard related, so here goes.

My sister lives out in a small village, and she's had a few experiences she questions since moving there. (One was of hearing what we now call the 'Faerie bells' one summer afternoon when walking up in some woods).

One of the public footpaths runs through the churchyard, and she'll take her dogs there, with one or more of her teen/grown children, so in this case, as in the Faerie bells incident, she was with some-one.

I've done this walk myself. It's a pleasant church and churchyard, very quiet. The path curves through the graves, out along a watery ditch, and across the fields, which are arable, although there are cows in some of the other fields.

She said she was walking back through the churchyard when she heard the sound of galloping hooves coming closer, really thundering, so she looked around, although there's no way there could be a herd of horses in the churchyard, but her instinct was to get out of the way, and the dogs too, behaved with some alarm. The sound, she says, was almost on top of her, and then seemed to whirl upward into the air over her head, and just stop. She was relieved, but baffled and left quite quickly. She considered it might be a herd of cows in one of the nearby fields, except for the loudness, and the feeling that the hooves literally came to where she was, then galloped above her as if into the sky. It's a little place called Clyffe Pypard, if any-one wants to google it.

Posted: 15-09-2013 02:20 Post subject:

Had some business in South Wales today so I naturally visited a couple of interesting graveyards. Very Happy

Cefn Golau Cholera Cemetery

Posted: 28-09-2013 11:05 Post subject:

Bodies 'buried in former car parks due to graves shortage'
Burial space is becoming so scarce that families are increasingly unable to be buried in the same cemetery, a BBC study has found.
By Edward Malnick
7:00AM BST 27 Sep 2013

Cemeteries are so full that people are being buried in former cemetery car parks. The findings have led to calls for ministers to introduce laws allowing graves to be reused.

Dr Julie Rugg, of the Cemetery Research Group at the University of York, said: “Families want to be buried together, but there’s no guarantee that burial will remain local, or even available at all in some areas.”
She called for a change in the law to allow graves to be “lifted and deepened”.
Under the proposals, the remains of buried people would be exhumed and the existing grave would be dug deeper.
The original remains would then be reburied and the additional space used for fresh burials.

Cemeteries and churchyards are run by burial authorities, including councils and other bodies operated by the Church of England and other faiths.
BBC Local Radio surveyed 700 burial authorities across England, of which 358 responded. Of those, a quarter will run out of space within 10 years, it found.
Nearly half will run out in 20 years and some areas already have no space.

Approximately 75 per cent of those die are now cremated.
Tim Morris, the head of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematoria Management, said the survey was worrying.
“It’s a serious situation that really needs tackling now — the knowledge of this problem has been around for a long time and government inaction over the last couple of decades has led us to a looming crisis in our burial grounds.”

Dr Rugg added: “It’s not just a London or a big town problem. Even small parish councils are wondering how they are going to cope when land runs out.”

Currently, only London burial authorities are allowed to reuse existing graves.
Last year, after calls for the policy to be extended across the country, Jonathan Djanogly, then a justice minister, said it “was not critical at this time”.

However, Dr Rugg said: “I’d be very surprised if, after this, the government still maintains that there’s no evidence of a problem.”
The survey found that the only cemetery in Bicester, Oxon, was so full that the council was considering using a small verge on the side of a path and moving a memorial bench to create more spaces.
Other cemeteries are using their car parks and pathways or putting in extra topsoil to create more burial space.

The full results of the research will be disclosed on local radio on Friday morning.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “Any changes in the way in which graves and cemeteries might be managed need to be considered carefully and sensitively. We keep this area under constant review and no decisions have yet been taken.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10337249/Bodies-buried-in-former-car-parks-due-to-graves-shortage.html

Posted: 28-09-2013 12:37 Post subject:

Posted: 28-09-2013 18:13 Post subject:

This is a ghost thread not a general cemetery thread, came here to read ghost stories Sad

Posted: 28-09-2013 21:51 Post subject:

True. There is only one ghost story, and that's on this very page. Perhaps the thread should be moved?

Posted: 29-09-2013 04:02 Post subject:

Moved to Fortean Culture, but I've left its shade on, Ghosts.

P_M Smile