While I’ve spent a lot of time writing about cemeteries and interviewing other people about them, I don’t get interviewed too much myself so it was fun to share my pet cemetery expertise with the New York Times for “The Most Popular Pet Name of the Century (Maybe).” I find the places where people memorialize their pets to be fascinating. (I shared some favorite epitaph sightings at Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in 2014 on Atlas Obscura.) It’s a choice to bury your pet in a pet cemetery and each grave is designed with such emotion and care:

According to Allison C. Meier, a writer and licensed New York City sightseeing guide who gives tours of the city’s cemeteries, including Hartsdale, pet cemeteries provide a historical record of wider cultural shifts around our relationship to pets.

“The way that people refer to their pets changes,” Ms. Meier said in an interview. “On a lot of old dog graves, they call them a gentleman — like, ‘He’s a great gentleman. He lived like a gentleman.’”

I had the opportunity to write an essay on the really extraordinary charts by 19th-century Masonic artist George M. Silsbee for their first public exhibition at Ricco/Maresca in Chelsea. They are dense with symbolism and ciphers and were likely intended for some Masonic rite or ritual. There’s not much known about Silsbee except that he was an  artist, miner, engineer, and organ builder, and very little of his work is known, so it was a challenge but rewarding to examine this handful of facts against the incredibly elaborate charts:

Even without understanding the exact intentions behind each element of these works, it is easy to get pulled in by the repeating of phrases and characters that Silsbee used to build these pathways to knowledge of something ancient and spiritual. Moving through the scripts of “Explanatory Marks of Jehovah’s Private Teacher’s,” where black curls of ink and ciphers add to its aura of deep meaning, the phrase “I am” emerges again and again like a mantra: “Christ Jesus Son Of God Three In One I Am That I Am I Am I Am I Am I God Jehovah … I Am God I Am I Am One Of Three 3 In One.” It goes on and on, letters interrupted by numbers, symbols, and combinations that resemble equations. A textural pattern of tiny dots joins it all so you can almost hear the meditative tap of Silsbee’s hand reverberating through each line, trying to find a way to communicate sublime mysteries whose complexity could not be expressed by terrestrial images.
Read more…

My first talk (online, as we are still in times of pandemic) of 2021 was on cemetery symbols with Morbid Anatomy. As I get the hang of these virtual lectures, one upside has been reaching a national (or even international) audience and then expanding these topics to look more globally at their origins and meaning. If you missed it, you can find a recording on the Morbid Anatomy Patreon.

I joined Witchhassle, a podcast focused on witchcraft, magic, and other occult themes hosted by Cooper Wilhelm, to talk about cemetery symbolism and other death-related topics. Check out the episode on Soundcloud where you can find their whole archive of fascinating interviews with people exploring the arcane and wondrous in the world.

I joined the virtual October Odd Salon, themed on “Shock & Art,” to share the story of Georgiana Houghton and her spirt-guided artwork. (You can read all about her enigmatic art in my 2019 story for the data visualization publication Nightingale.) As this was my third talk with Odd Salon, following ones on the Paris catacombs and the magician Adelaide Hermann for two of their New York events, I was honored to be named an Odd Salon Fellow. You can watch my “Shock & Art” talk on YouTube and find a playlist of the whole evening of lecture shorts.

In a short history post for JSTOR Daily, I wrote about how the 19th-century pro-cremation movement battled religious tradition as well as the specter of mass graves during epidemics:

The cost and simplicity of cremation led to its rise in popularity through the twentieth century, supported in large part by its cultural acceptability. Now, as epidemics and pandemics continue to challenge our funerary systems, the history of cremation and its relationship to our understanding of disease show how every health crisis has required a rethinking of our infrastructures for death.

For the Halloween season I led another virtual talk for Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery on the language of flowers as it appears on tombstones, such as snapped roses for a life cut short, lotus flowers for rebirth, and poppies for sleep. I explored the Victorian-era rise of “floriography” and what these sometimes obscure symbols can reveal about the past. I’m planning to develop some of the material into a zine, stay tuned!

In a fun project, I created the Cooking with the Dead zine with two friends to try out recipes left on tombstones around the world. Carved and etched on granite gravestones, they dictate—sometimes hazily—the instructions for delicious fare such as cookies, cobblers, and bread. Scouring cemeteries and the internet, we collected and attempted seven of these kitchen formulas, found in burial grounds from Alaska to Israel.

In a short post for JSTOR Daily, I wrote about how Black communities came together to build their own schools through the Rosenwald Fund that was established in 1917. The story also looks at how these historic sites are now in danger of being lost:

When the National Trust for Historic Preservation released its annual list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in 2002, it included the Rosenwald schools, estimating that only 10 to 12 percent of the buildings were still standing. One in Texas was torn down last year by an oil company; this July, one in Tennessee was destroyed in a fire. However, the National Trust recently announced that the 1921 May’s Lick Rosenwald School in Kentucky would receive a grant through its 2020 African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. The saving of these sites protects a physical memory of how Black communities came together to give their children an education at a time when legal segregation and discrimination denied it.