Eastern Cemetery: Abandoned
On our way to Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, KY to visit the final resting place of Colonel Sanders (naturally), we missed the entrance and had to turn around. JMP pulled into what looked like another entrance to the cemetery, but it turns out it was for a different cemetery, one adjacent to, and separate from Cave Hill.
Eastern Cemetery opened in the 1840s, making it one of Louisville's oldest cemeteries. While we were exploring, we were approached by a man that had been cutting the grass. We immediately thought that we were in trouble, but we couldn't have been more wrong. He had noticed our out-of-state license plate, and just wanted to share some information about the cemetery with us. His story was incredible, and made our visit so much better than it would have been otherwise.
The sordid story of Eastern Cemetery goes something like this: in 1989, a disgruntled employee came forward with information that the cemetery had been reselling old graves, perhaps starting as early as 1858. Cemetery officials would keep track of which graves were frequently visited by family and friends, and ones with no visitors would be marked "OG" in the records, for "old grave." OG's would subsequently be resold, and according to a New York Times article about the scandal, "the remains of up to 48,000 people were buried in graves that were already occupied."
Whoever owns the cemetery assumes liability and by law must make efforts to reinter all of the mistreated remains—an astronomically expensive and exhaustive task—so the cemetery has sat abandoned since the 80s. In 2013 a volunteer group was started to help clean up the cemetery, and their efforts are very obvious—in fact, most of the cemetery no longer looks abandoned. Our de facto tour guide said that when his group started, the grass was more than 7 feet tall around the headstones.
Speaking of the headstones, what did the cemetery do with the old stone when they resold the plot? Our guide said that was a mystery until recently, when a stone expert pointed to a particular grave with an unusually carved headstone. Not only was the cemetery reselling graves, but they were shaving names off of headstones and reselling them as well (!!). As if that wasn't crazy enough, Krug's stone was re-carved twice. After we saw once instance of this, I became obsessed with finding others. I think we found a few that were suspicious, including a lot of plain granite stones with plaques attached, which seems like a great way to easily change a stone.
The story of Eastern Cemetery is so crazy to me, but I can't help but wonder if its residents aren't the only ones to have suffered such indignities—the cemetery business model is not a very sustainable one, and who knows how long they would have gotten away with it if someone hadn't blown the whistle. If i lived nearby, I would love to volunteer to help maintain the grounds. I'm grateful, however, that the residents of Eastern Cemetery seem to be finally getting the care they deserve, and especially thankful for the volunteer who stopped to share his incredible story with us.
