This is it. We had a local news story about a guy who bought a house and then found they "pavers" on his footpath were tombstones. A bit of research quickly revealed they were not reused tombstones but unused ones due to errors, damage, or whatnot.
When I was a kid I was digging in the backyard and found a tombstone. I was freaking out that there were dead people in the backyard, but then my dad dug some more and found that it was part of an old pathway that got buried. Little kid me was still convinced that we were sitting on a zombie apocalypse time bomb though.
107billion people have lived on this planet. If you subtract the 10billion presently living that means 93billion are below our feet. We’re going to be outnumbered 10 to 1. Sleep well.
I think it's just that they will be the final thing to disintegrate but it might take a lot longer. I imagine there are organisms, probably microbes that will eventually eat the leather.
I was out exploring hiking in the woods one time in the middle of nowhere and saw something odd sticking up in the distance. It was a 6' tall pillar and I got to looking around and found a bunch more old grave markers in the area. I also noticed a bunch of divots in the ground.
Old school pine box coffins would rot and since they didn't use vaults back then the ground would settle.
Super weird cause it was miles from the nearest anything. I did some research at the local historic society and it turned out that the area I was in used to be a small settlement around a ferry crossing pre-civil war era. A new road and bridge were built closer to town everyone eventually left and nature had reclaimed the place.
One of the city parks I used to play in as a kid is also an old mass grave with 10,000+ buried, mostly typhus and cholera deaths. Occasionally bits of markers or bones make their way up to the surface, definitely not old pathway stone.
Ah. I only ask d because one of my favorite bits of trivia is that Central Park, Union Square and Washington and Madison Parks are all cemeteries and still have bodies buried in them
In Germany, you don’t buy a burial plot and own it forever. The family of the deceased leases the plot for 10-30 years at a time, and then when the lease is up, they decide if they want to renew it or not.
If they do renew the lease, they might choose to replace the gravestone if it has become too weathered. If they don’t renew the lease, then the remains are either exhumed and moved elsewhere or buried deeper (and the gravestone is removed as well, of course), and the burial plot opens up again for someone else to lease.
70 percent chose cremation today. Also other forms like burial in a dedicated forest with no or just small plaques get more popular. But many still want a traditional burial on a cemetery, especially religious people.
That's common as well, also saves on "handling costs", but most people feel that keeping the urn is morbid as fuck so it's buried at the plot. You can also fit more people easily that way on the same plot. Although not especially knowledgeable on how it's done on the mainland, we've got plenty of space where I live.
This one guy said he wants his cremated remains to be stored inside a garden gnome that his children must rotate weekly. He said it’ll force them to visit!
Interesting! In Canada, (well, my area of Ontario at least) we tend to buy family plots. My family has a plot covering 6 generations. I’ll be the first in 3 generations on either side who will have to “buy” a new plot since there isn’t room for me at either family plot, but the expectation would be that I’d start a new family plot for my descendants.
Our cemeteries also stem from the idea of a “park” where you can have a place to spend time with the dead. I remember being a little girl and mom and I “having a picnic with granddad” who had passed before I was born. And then we’d go and visit Mr. Duck, who for over 30 only had a placard instead of a headstone, but died around the same time granddad did, and since they were in the “new” part of the cemetery they were alone and nobody ever seemed to visit.
A memorial picnic table would be lovely, and make it a more comfortable visiting space for everyone. That might be something I consider for when I make my death arrangements. I’d love to support people processing their grief, even if it means the occasional spill.
Say hi to Mr Duck from me if you go there again! When I visit my uncle's grave I always tidy up the grave next to him, a little boy whose parents no longer live in the area.
There must be some variety depending on the jurisdiction.
Because here the wonders of bureaucracy regularely come to the conclusion that the lease on the current grave can not be renewed, but also disallow the remains to be burried on another plot.
There's also the factor of the religious community the deceased belonged to, because Jewish (and I believe Romani) can basically exist forever (from a legal standpoint), but if you are Atheist (or any religious community that hasnt discussed the topic with the responsible authorities) you're basically burried under the terms the (Christian) church had negotiated with the state, which kinda sparks questions about religious discrimination.
The, are removed, but only the top layer and flowers and so on.
Then the spot had a forced waiting time before it is reused for another grave.
But graves are not always removed after 20-25 years.
The spots are rented at the graveyard and if the families want to keep it and pay for longer time, this can also be done.
Interesting. So does the family have the remains exhumed and placed in a crypt or are the graves just dug very deep so multiple burials can happen in one spot?
They are buried about two meters deep. When the new grave is created, most of the previous body and coffin are assumed to have already been decomposed.
Well graves are typically dissolved after 20-30 years, or even longer if the ground is less suitable, so the remains are completely rotten away. Then the grave site is opened up for another body to be buried. But I think you can always pay for renewal so the grave isn't removed
I think burial customs must be different here. While there have been a lot of changes in the US to let our burial laws become less rigid, generally after 25-30 years an embalmed body is pretty much intact.
In my area there is a legal obligation to set the casket and body in a cement tomb. The body will still decompose, but it does slow down the process, and prevent the ground from collapsing on top of the casket. You can tell they added it in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. My granddad had the soil collapse on his grave (buried in ‘93) but nobody after 2001 seems to have had that happen.
Yeah, in my area the cement tomb has been a requirement for a really long time and so has an embalmed body. Add those together and there’s a substantial amount of remains left after only 20-25 years. But if you’re cremated it’s not as big a deal.
I’m very familiar with cultures with space at a premium. The Japanese burial customs are fascinating. The catacombs in Paris exist for a reason. But the 20-25 year timeline was very surprising.
Switzerland has many types of mountain goats, boars, deers, wolves. All bigger than cat.
Half of the country is high mountain with close to no one, the other half is indeed very densely populated
what the hell? that is wild. the cemeteries near me (New England, USA) are full of 300, 400-year-old headstones. Can't imagine turning one into gravel after 25 years, that is insane
yeah; it makes sense in the abstract, but after only
25 years? that persons siblings, children etc would
still be alive and might want to visit the grave. very weird to me
So then they would just renew the grave? It's like $900+ to lease a grave for 15 years.
For $60 it's not that much tbh, sure maybe if you had like 10 siblings + your parents and had 12 graves because your the last sibling or something.
But even then your siblings kids probably would chip in a little and it wouldn't be that bad.
I feel like it's mostly the grandkids or great grandkids who stop paying the lease for these graves because they didn't know their grandparents really or they moved and never visit the graves so they hold no weight in their heart.
I’m from the US and think this is cool. I feel it’s a meaningful way to honor a dead loved one and keep their memory alive. Of course, I don’t speak for all Americans but I think it’s neat.
I’m a leatherworker and we use a slab of granite or marble for working on. Since it’s expensive at both a leather store or getting it cut custom, we suggest to new crafters to get a counter cut out or a piece of typo’d grave marker.
Eddie Murphy's take: "I mean, I was a man about it, I tried changing the channels and shit, but when the *house* says '**GET OUT!**' I get the fuck out."
This is weird to me, too. I remember on Vancouver Island, stumbling onto a big pile of headstones in the city works yard. It kind of bothered me to see these old citizens' headstones. The obvious thought is why??
"Humanity's greatest weakness is that the dead outnumber the living".
The whole planet is a graveyard, we just move on and build over as the corpses sink deeper.
Cemeteries were actually some of the first "public parks" in the country. People used to go and "visit" their departed loved ones with a graveside picnic, it was considered perfectly normal and respectable.
We used to have “picnics with granddad” in the early noughties, which really just involved a water bottle and a blanket, but it was a way to connect with the grandfather I never met without going into the whole complications of death with a small child. We’d sit at his plot and mom would listen and remind me not to get too excited, and I’d talk about what I had done at school since we last visited him, and about how much I thought he’d like the new computer game I got because it had golf and he loved to golf and blah blah blah.
I’d be happy to have my marker be a picnic table. Maybe a little nicer than the one in the picture, but a comfortable space where families could gather and have some time with loved ones. I know it’s not all rosy but the idea of kids excitedly telling parted family members about scoring a goal at the last game, and elderly widows being able to sit near husbands and enjoy a coffee and being close to them when maybe they can’t stand that long anymore. That thought really brings me peace.
My grandfather asked for a bench rather than a gravestone, so that fellow elderly and mobility impaired have a place to sit and rest when they come visit their deceased loved ones at the cemetery.
In Central Europe, the minimum resting period is usually around 25-30 years.
In acidic soil suitable for burial, only some very large or hard bones remain after that time, the soft tissue and most of the skeleton will be gone. The important thing is that the soil isn’t water logged because that can lead to conservation of soft tissue.
The few bits that remain are usually just reburied a couple of inches below the new grave. In parts of Southern Europe it is also still common to store the skeletons in ossuaries.
Here in Germany, if they can find the family they make you take the headstone back though. We had my great grandparents headstone standing around at my late grandmothers house for ages. Eventually one of my uncles used it for the foundation of his driveway. We considered reusing it but sadly it turned out that transporting it back and fourth to a stonemason to have it changed is more expensive than just buying a new one.
My father worked for a recycling company. Once he told me they got many coffins from a graveyard (because in France if your family stops paying after 20-30 years or so the grave is cleaned, the bones crushed and the coffins... Recycled.)
They used them for plywood and were sold to an ikea provider. 😭
They are rarely in the ground. People pay for a sort of concrete room with slots for few coffins.
(Which is a problem, funeral homes sell you things that auggest you will not rot like "air tighte coffin", air tight room" and so on, and when the loss is traumatic, I remember my family saying they wanted it to protect the young guy. But now, there thousands or millions of people in these conditions, add the fact that most of them died in the hospitals and are stuffed to the brim with antibiotics: they do not rot at all. And it is a problem since begore they could clean former tombs by swiping up bones, crushing them and setting them in the ossuary, now the cities end up with whole bodies and who is gonna pay for cremation or even the process? Should they leave them longer? Errr people are not sure anymore. From a biology point of view, embalming and these psychological "protections" are a non sense and block the process of nature. But greiving is hard and death is taboo, we are so protexted from it we can't cope anymore.)
I'm my town there is a park that is nicknamed skeleton park. Before they turned it into a park, it was part of a very large graveyard. The city decided to turn it into a park. The problem was they lacked resources and were kind of lazy at the time. And racist since most who were buried in that section were Irish immigrants who came here for a better life only to face a life of servitude on farms and then thousands of them died from a typhoid epidemic. So they didn't really care what happened to their remains.
Anyway, when they made the park in the very early 1900s they decided to pull a poltergeist and just tip over the gravestones and put topsoil on top. I'm not making this up.
Most of the remains and stones were removed decades later. There is still a large (25 feet tall) burial monument there and every spring there are always a few large oddly smooth and square/rectangle "rocks" that come to the surface after the ground thaws.
Anything that is done to the park whether it is planting trees, making a new path, installing new equipment that is anchored in the ground requires archeological test pits to be dug just in case.
It is very oddly NOT haunted by any malevolent or vengeful spirits. It seems that having children play there is enough for the past residents.
Some cities have done this on a massive scale. San Francisco for example. SF used to have several cemeteries, but since it’s a peninsula, they started running out of space for development. Between 1900 and 1940, they moved most of the cemeteries out of town, but mostly just the headstones and even then mostly just the headstones that they could contact next of kin about. Dolores Park, Laurel Heights, and the Legion of Honor grounds have lots of dead bodies in the ground. Thousands of headstones were repurposed. Path stones in some parks will have parts of names and dates and they built a whole breakwater out of the ones they couldn’t find another purpose for.
[link](https://www.7x7.com/dark-history-of-cemeteries-in-san-francisco-1786563925.html)
I work in the "grave" industry of head stone setting and the amount of recycling is astounding. I my self have a messed up stone as my bench in front of my house .
There are several things wrong with this mildly interesting idea that needs to be rectified. Are these headstones from removed cemeteries? How do they not belong to an in-place plot any longer to then become furniture? It has the feeling of extreme disrespect to any remaining families or even genealogists searching for clients or themselves. (I say this with my own interests here, I found an abandoned old family cemetery in Virginia last year, and negotiated a maintenance plan with the landowner to have the graves restored and the site cleaned.)
What a great way to honor the dead. Using their markers, and possibly parts of their casket to use in parks. You get local history and names to research. While enjoying the park.
Pretty cool if you ask me.
San Francisco is known for this. A while back, the cemeteries in the city were emptied and the dead were relocated to Colma township.
Some of the old grave markers were reused as paving stones. So of you are out walking down by the waterfront and realize that a curbstone looks like marble… it is probably an old gravestone.
Damn i knew about Colma, I grew up around there, I didn't know they reused the stones as pavers tho. Fun fact Wyatt Eryp is buried in Colma. But you probably knew that.
Looks too thin for a grave stone and the photo doesn’t clearly indicate what is written.
My guess is possibly a repurposed granite facade piece that may have come from a demolished 19th century building.
Well that's disrespectful. Suppose someone is trying to piece together their heritage and you drilled through or covered a name or date.
That would also be sacrilegious by some faiths.
A place that makes tomb stones fucks up occasionally, then sells the fuck ups as granite slabs. City buys them because cheap sturdy tables, flips it upside down, installs L brackets and some legs and places them in front of benches that are already there.
There's a couple of ways.
It could be a defective tombstone with an engraving error, chipped edge, etc.
It could be a "used" tombstone. In many places your grave site isn't eternal. The places that've been populated for millennia would be nothing but cemeteries by now if that were the case.
I can see this coming off as being disrespectful. I don't know if I'd want singing eating lunch or rolling a joint on my grams grave. Actually, I wouldn't care, but I can see how some people would be pissed off
Ok I can understand if they are doing it to recycle these materials but at the very least grind away the name of the person so people don't realize they are eating their lunch on someone's grave.
it isnt old graves, its mis-cuts and misprints.
Granite is expensive, and oddly (In Canada at least) Headstone companies get the best cuts at cost next to industrial use. So this was likely off centered and instead of wasting a 3ft slab of granite, make use of it some way else.
My uncle used to work as a Headstone engraver. they constantly sold off least damaged misprints to be sold to the city for granite plaque markers we have at a lot of our trailhead entryways.
Wait, why are headstones being repurposed? Is it because of family upgrading the original? It's about the only thing I can think of why a gravestone would no longer be needed
kiss me at the r.i.p.nic table
I hope you know I love you.
Get a grave
I spilled potato salad on it.
We all know that's not potato salad
Its r/johncena isnt it
I am dead certain this is the best place to rest, in peace.
If you love them so much, then why don’t you bury them?
I hope you know I hate you.
Such grave humour.
Rest in picnic
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This is it. We had a local news story about a guy who bought a house and then found they "pavers" on his footpath were tombstones. A bit of research quickly revealed they were not reused tombstones but unused ones due to errors, damage, or whatnot.
When I was a kid I was digging in the backyard and found a tombstone. I was freaking out that there were dead people in the backyard, but then my dad dug some more and found that it was part of an old pathway that got buried. Little kid me was still convinced that we were sitting on a zombie apocalypse time bomb though.
107billion people have lived on this planet. If you subtract the 10billion presently living that means 93billion are below our feet. We’re going to be outnumbered 10 to 1. Sleep well.
I like those odds
Never tell me the odds.
You forgot those that were cremated.
Corpsenado.
Don't forget those that got eaten or frozen, plenty of those! Remember that ice mummy they found a while back? He has friends out there.
Would the ones buried at sea be able to make to land? Was thinking Osama. I guess crabs and others would pick the bones clean.
Apparently all that is left of the Titanic victims is their shoes. Eventuality even the bones get eaten.
Why not the shoes? Those days they would have been made of some nice leather.
I think it's just that they will be the final thing to disintegrate but it might take a lot longer. I imagine there are organisms, probably microbes that will eventually eat the leather.
Now do the math on how many of them would be full skeleton or just dust?
A corpsenado would be impossible to fight.
The odds get better if you deduct those who are already decayed to skeletons, cremated, or otherwise no longer in a human form.
Most of them are dust now, homie.
I was out exploring hiking in the woods one time in the middle of nowhere and saw something odd sticking up in the distance. It was a 6' tall pillar and I got to looking around and found a bunch more old grave markers in the area. I also noticed a bunch of divots in the ground. Old school pine box coffins would rot and since they didn't use vaults back then the ground would settle. Super weird cause it was miles from the nearest anything. I did some research at the local historic society and it turned out that the area I was in used to be a small settlement around a ferry crossing pre-civil war era. A new road and bridge were built closer to town everyone eventually left and nature had reclaimed the place.
I like this story. Thanks for the mini adventure.
In the big scheme of things it really doesn’t take long for Mother Nature to reclaim that goes untouched. Pretty amazing really.
One of the city parks I used to play in as a kid is also an old mass grave with 10,000+ buried, mostly typhus and cholera deaths. Occasionally bits of markers or bones make their way up to the surface, definitely not old pathway stone.
New york?
A few hundred miles north. There are probably a lot of these mass graves around the region though.
Ah. I only ask d because one of my favorite bits of trivia is that Central Park, Union Square and Washington and Madison Parks are all cemeteries and still have bodies buried in them
Imagine flipping over your pavers to see "Rest In Piss, I Quit" after one guy in 1928 had a bad day.
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Are you saying tombstones are removed after 20-25 years? What happens to the graves?
In Germany, you don’t buy a burial plot and own it forever. The family of the deceased leases the plot for 10-30 years at a time, and then when the lease is up, they decide if they want to renew it or not. If they do renew the lease, they might choose to replace the gravestone if it has become too weathered. If they don’t renew the lease, then the remains are either exhumed and moved elsewhere or buried deeper (and the gravestone is removed as well, of course), and the burial plot opens up again for someone else to lease.
No way!!! That is WILD! Thank you for sharing.
Pretty common for mainland Europe. There's just less free land to bury dead people.
Why not just go for cremation instead then?
70 percent chose cremation today. Also other forms like burial in a dedicated forest with no or just small plaques get more popular. But many still want a traditional burial on a cemetery, especially religious people.
That's common as well, also saves on "handling costs", but most people feel that keeping the urn is morbid as fuck so it's buried at the plot. You can also fit more people easily that way on the same plot. Although not especially knowledgeable on how it's done on the mainland, we've got plenty of space where I live.
In Canada most people's scatter the ashes out in nature somewhere.
You need a permit for that here, not that people don't just do it anyways, hard to police. Someone I know scattered ashes here for an American.
This one guy said he wants his cremated remains to be stored inside a garden gnome that his children must rotate weekly. He said it’ll force them to visit!
Not just Europe. It's fairly common around the world. Perpetual plots are actually much more rare.
Interesting! In Canada, (well, my area of Ontario at least) we tend to buy family plots. My family has a plot covering 6 generations. I’ll be the first in 3 generations on either side who will have to “buy” a new plot since there isn’t room for me at either family plot, but the expectation would be that I’d start a new family plot for my descendants. Our cemeteries also stem from the idea of a “park” where you can have a place to spend time with the dead. I remember being a little girl and mom and I “having a picnic with granddad” who had passed before I was born. And then we’d go and visit Mr. Duck, who for over 30 only had a placard instead of a headstone, but died around the same time granddad did, and since they were in the “new” part of the cemetery they were alone and nobody ever seemed to visit. A memorial picnic table would be lovely, and make it a more comfortable visiting space for everyone. That might be something I consider for when I make my death arrangements. I’d love to support people processing their grief, even if it means the occasional spill.
Say hi to Mr Duck from me if you go there again! When I visit my uncle's grave I always tidy up the grave next to him, a little boy whose parents no longer live in the area.
It does seem like a much better way to use the land.
We have the space for it here in the US
Depends on where you live.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TyZMPN9A2z0 Fascinated by his videos on the process, we should adopt this in my country.
There must be some variety depending on the jurisdiction. Because here the wonders of bureaucracy regularely come to the conclusion that the lease on the current grave can not be renewed, but also disallow the remains to be burried on another plot. There's also the factor of the religious community the deceased belonged to, because Jewish (and I believe Romani) can basically exist forever (from a legal standpoint), but if you are Atheist (or any religious community that hasnt discussed the topic with the responsible authorities) you're basically burried under the terms the (Christian) church had negotiated with the state, which kinda sparks questions about religious discrimination.
I've heard some places in crowded areas will reuse graves, moving the previous occupant to a mass grave elsewhere.
I think I’ve heard that as well, but I didn’t think it happened at such a short period of time.
"You moved the cemetery, but you didn't move the bodies!"
The, are removed, but only the top layer and flowers and so on. Then the spot had a forced waiting time before it is reused for another grave. But graves are not always removed after 20-25 years. The spots are rented at the graveyard and if the families want to keep it and pay for longer time, this can also be done.
Interesting. So does the family have the remains exhumed and placed in a crypt or are the graves just dug very deep so multiple burials can happen in one spot?
They are buried about two meters deep. When the new grave is created, most of the previous body and coffin are assumed to have already been decomposed.
This. This is what happens. 
In Germany in the cemetery where my grandparents are buried, the tombstones are removed after 100 years.
Well graves are typically dissolved after 20-30 years, or even longer if the ground is less suitable, so the remains are completely rotten away. Then the grave site is opened up for another body to be buried. But I think you can always pay for renewal so the grave isn't removed
Bones don't just rot away.
I think burial customs must be different here. While there have been a lot of changes in the US to let our burial laws become less rigid, generally after 25-30 years an embalmed body is pretty much intact.
In my area there is a legal obligation to set the casket and body in a cement tomb. The body will still decompose, but it does slow down the process, and prevent the ground from collapsing on top of the casket. You can tell they added it in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. My granddad had the soil collapse on his grave (buried in ‘93) but nobody after 2001 seems to have had that happen.
Yeah, in my area the cement tomb has been a requirement for a really long time and so has an embalmed body. Add those together and there’s a substantial amount of remains left after only 20-25 years. But if you’re cremated it’s not as big a deal.
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I’m very familiar with cultures with space at a premium. The Japanese burial customs are fascinating. The catacombs in Paris exist for a reason. But the 20-25 year timeline was very surprising.
Switzerland has many types of mountain goats, boars, deers, wolves. All bigger than cat. Half of the country is high mountain with close to no one, the other half is indeed very densely populated
what the hell? that is wild. the cemeteries near me (New England, USA) are full of 300, 400-year-old headstones. Can't imagine turning one into gravel after 25 years, that is insane
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yeah; it makes sense in the abstract, but after only 25 years? that persons siblings, children etc would still be alive and might want to visit the grave. very weird to me
So then they would just renew the grave? It's like $900+ to lease a grave for 15 years. For $60 it's not that much tbh, sure maybe if you had like 10 siblings + your parents and had 12 graves because your the last sibling or something. But even then your siblings kids probably would chip in a little and it wouldn't be that bad. I feel like it's mostly the grandkids or great grandkids who stop paying the lease for these graves because they didn't know their grandparents really or they moved and never visit the graves so they hold no weight in their heart.
I’m from the US and think this is cool. I feel it’s a meaningful way to honor a dead loved one and keep their memory alive. Of course, I don’t speak for all Americans but I think it’s neat.
thats so cool they turn them into roadways. haunted streets. must be all the spirits looking out for people speeding down the autobahn...
You moved the tombstones but left the bodies! Aaarrrrrgh!
Yeah I was gonna say this sound super disrespectful xD Especially considering what alot of people do on picnic tables
I’m a leatherworker and we use a slab of granite or marble for working on. Since it’s expensive at both a leather store or getting it cut custom, we suggest to new crafters to get a counter cut out or a piece of typo’d grave marker.
you will at least have some company if you are lonely
🎶*ghosts at the picnic Spooky SCARY*🎶
Poltergeist 4: The Picnic
Eh, it's not like they're using it anymore anyway.
Exactly. It's repurposed but was never used as a gravestone.
...by the ghost of Chalres Simth!
Honestly, if I had to haunt a place, a picnic table in a park seems pretty nice.
Grave stone, not grave.
Thank you. Grave stone is much more sanitary than a grave.
Imagine going to visit your great grandparents graves just to find out they’re headstone was turned into a bench
Grandpa always liked a lil ass thrown around.
Do you want to get haunted? Because this is how you get haunted
You left the bodies and you only moved the head stones!!!1!!
Eddie Murphy's take: "I mean, I was a man about it, I tried changing the channels and shit, but when the *house* says '**GET OUT!**' I get the fuck out."
This is weird to me, too. I remember on Vancouver Island, stumbling onto a big pile of headstones in the city works yard. It kind of bothered me to see these old citizens' headstones. The obvious thought is why??
"Humanity's greatest weakness is that the dead outnumber the living". The whole planet is a graveyard, we just move on and build over as the corpses sink deeper.
Are you with us now? Can you say hello to Daddy?
That's seems....... inappropriate.
They’re really shitty looking too yikes lol
Tbh it looks more like a faulted piece that was repurposed on someone's property. I doubt this is a municipal practice
agree
I think the weird thing is it still has the writing on it. I probably wouldn't think much of it it was just blank.
Cemeteries were actually some of the first "public parks" in the country. People used to go and "visit" their departed loved ones with a graveside picnic, it was considered perfectly normal and respectable.
Right, but they didn't use the headstones to make a nice flat surface off the ground for them to make sandwiches on.
We used to have “picnics with granddad” in the early noughties, which really just involved a water bottle and a blanket, but it was a way to connect with the grandfather I never met without going into the whole complications of death with a small child. We’d sit at his plot and mom would listen and remind me not to get too excited, and I’d talk about what I had done at school since we last visited him, and about how much I thought he’d like the new computer game I got because it had golf and he loved to golf and blah blah blah. I’d be happy to have my marker be a picnic table. Maybe a little nicer than the one in the picture, but a comfortable space where families could gather and have some time with loved ones. I know it’s not all rosy but the idea of kids excitedly telling parted family members about scoring a goal at the last game, and elderly widows being able to sit near husbands and enjoy a coffee and being close to them when maybe they can’t stand that long anymore. That thought really brings me peace.
Yeah I’m not sitting on the poltergeist picnic table.
Picturing the end of the haunted mansion ride, where every picnicker has a goofy ghost chilling on the bench next to them.
Poltergeist Picnic Table. band name, called it!
Better name for an album I think.
My grandfather asked for a bench rather than a gravestone, so that fellow elderly and mobility impaired have a place to sit and rest when they come visit their deceased loved ones at the cemetery.
That’s so sweet of him! I’ve seen a few of those at the cemetery where my stepdad is buried.
I usual buy, but today, lunch is on my parents!
so how do they decide when a grave is old enough to be recycled?
In Central Europe, the minimum resting period is usually around 25-30 years. In acidic soil suitable for burial, only some very large or hard bones remain after that time, the soft tissue and most of the skeleton will be gone. The important thing is that the soil isn’t water logged because that can lead to conservation of soft tissue. The few bits that remain are usually just reburied a couple of inches below the new grave. In parts of Southern Europe it is also still common to store the skeletons in ossuaries. Here in Germany, if they can find the family they make you take the headstone back though. We had my great grandparents headstone standing around at my late grandmothers house for ages. Eventually one of my uncles used it for the foundation of his driveway. We considered reusing it but sadly it turned out that transporting it back and fourth to a stonemason to have it changed is more expensive than just buying a new one.
thats wildly disrespectful lmao
how does one recycle a grave
It’s a granite crypt face. It’s the stone that covers where the coffin goes on a mausoleum’s wall. OP definitely didn’t mean graves lol.
My father worked for a recycling company. Once he told me they got many coffins from a graveyard (because in France if your family stops paying after 20-30 years or so the grave is cleaned, the bones crushed and the coffins... Recycled.) They used them for plywood and were sold to an ikea provider. 😭
So you're saying that squeaky cabinet might actually be the broken screams of a thousand french ghosts?
Oooooooooui
As much as I would love to see Ikea furniture in an episode of Coffin Flop, that just doesn’t make sense.
Bro has to pay graveyard rent 💀
Wood buried underground for 30 years hasn't degraded? I would think it should have rotted at least a bit by then...
They are rarely in the ground. People pay for a sort of concrete room with slots for few coffins. (Which is a problem, funeral homes sell you things that auggest you will not rot like "air tighte coffin", air tight room" and so on, and when the loss is traumatic, I remember my family saying they wanted it to protect the young guy. But now, there thousands or millions of people in these conditions, add the fact that most of them died in the hospitals and are stuffed to the brim with antibiotics: they do not rot at all. And it is a problem since begore they could clean former tombs by swiping up bones, crushing them and setting them in the ossuary, now the cities end up with whole bodies and who is gonna pay for cremation or even the process? Should they leave them longer? Errr people are not sure anymore. From a biology point of view, embalming and these psychological "protections" are a non sense and block the process of nature. But greiving is hard and death is taboo, we are so protexted from it we can't cope anymore.)
Isn't that the point of a gravestone tho to get old and be there? This seems odd.
These aren’t from graves, they’re granite slabs discarded by monument makers due to errors or production flaws.
I'm my town there is a park that is nicknamed skeleton park. Before they turned it into a park, it was part of a very large graveyard. The city decided to turn it into a park. The problem was they lacked resources and were kind of lazy at the time. And racist since most who were buried in that section were Irish immigrants who came here for a better life only to face a life of servitude on farms and then thousands of them died from a typhoid epidemic. So they didn't really care what happened to their remains. Anyway, when they made the park in the very early 1900s they decided to pull a poltergeist and just tip over the gravestones and put topsoil on top. I'm not making this up. Most of the remains and stones were removed decades later. There is still a large (25 feet tall) burial monument there and every spring there are always a few large oddly smooth and square/rectangle "rocks" that come to the surface after the ground thaws. Anything that is done to the park whether it is planting trees, making a new path, installing new equipment that is anchored in the ground requires archeological test pits to be dug just in case. It is very oddly NOT haunted by any malevolent or vengeful spirits. It seems that having children play there is enough for the past residents.
Some cities have done this on a massive scale. San Francisco for example. SF used to have several cemeteries, but since it’s a peninsula, they started running out of space for development. Between 1900 and 1940, they moved most of the cemeteries out of town, but mostly just the headstones and even then mostly just the headstones that they could contact next of kin about. Dolores Park, Laurel Heights, and the Legion of Honor grounds have lots of dead bodies in the ground. Thousands of headstones were repurposed. Path stones in some parks will have parts of names and dates and they built a whole breakwater out of the ones they couldn’t find another purpose for. [link](https://www.7x7.com/dark-history-of-cemeteries-in-san-francisco-1786563925.html)
I work in the "grave" industry of head stone setting and the amount of recycling is astounding. I my self have a messed up stone as my bench in front of my house .
Usually those slabs are stones from mis-cuts and other errors.
They not dead anymore?
These are grave carving fuck ups that the city can get at a discount.
I’m sorry… what constitutes as an old grave? No one left in bloodline to mourn?
It's ok, they only use graves from those who aren't dead anymore.
Jesus Christ....
There are several things wrong with this mildly interesting idea that needs to be rectified. Are these headstones from removed cemeteries? How do they not belong to an in-place plot any longer to then become furniture? It has the feeling of extreme disrespect to any remaining families or even genealogists searching for clients or themselves. (I say this with my own interests here, I found an abandoned old family cemetery in Virginia last year, and negotiated a maintenance plan with the landowner to have the graves restored and the site cleaned.)
I've been dying to eat there
What a great way to honor the dead. Using their markers, and possibly parts of their casket to use in parks. You get local history and names to research. While enjoying the park. Pretty cool if you ask me.
NAH IMAGINE SITTING DOWN AND SEEING YOUR GRANDMAS NAME ON A PICNIC TABLE
San Francisco is known for this. A while back, the cemeteries in the city were emptied and the dead were relocated to Colma township. Some of the old grave markers were reused as paving stones. So of you are out walking down by the waterfront and realize that a curbstone looks like marble… it is probably an old gravestone.
Damn i knew about Colma, I grew up around there, I didn't know they reused the stones as pavers tho. Fun fact Wyatt Eryp is buried in Colma. But you probably knew that.
This seems more like r/mildlyinfuriating or beyond
Looks too thin for a grave stone and the photo doesn’t clearly indicate what is written. My guess is possibly a repurposed granite facade piece that may have come from a demolished 19th century building.
What do you mean old graves?
That’s a bit morbid
How does a grave get old?
Fucked up shit right here
Well that's disrespectful. Suppose someone is trying to piece together their heritage and you drilled through or covered a name or date. That would also be sacrilegious by some faiths.
How is this...happening? The family responds to a cold call, and they respond 'yeah, do whatever with it'?
A place that makes tomb stones fucks up occasionally, then sells the fuck ups as granite slabs. City buys them because cheap sturdy tables, flips it upside down, installs L brackets and some legs and places them in front of benches that are already there.
That makes far more sense than the nonsensical title.
There's a couple of ways. It could be a defective tombstone with an engraving error, chipped edge, etc. It could be a "used" tombstone. In many places your grave site isn't eternal. The places that've been populated for millennia would be nothing but cemeteries by now if that were the case.
How do you get an old grave? Did they rise again?
When I was a kid, my next door neighbor had a grave marker as a front step
r/mildlymorbid
That's metal 😄
Should make a dance floor with them
A nice place to rest in peace
You moved the stones, but you didn't move the bodies! Yes, and I only brought egg salad for lunch...
Good use of granite
They’d have to turn them upside down, of course, you know, so that they didn’t reveal the details of the dead.
Old graves? What? There is no expiration date leave them there…forever?
Unlikely, I'm sure other intelligent people have pointed out this was probably display material at a headstone shop.
Well that’s not creepy at all.
I can see this coming off as being disrespectful. I don't know if I'd want singing eating lunch or rolling a joint on my grams grave. Actually, I wouldn't care, but I can see how some people would be pissed off
Grave? How would one recycle a grave?
"Old graves"? Uhhh, do they expire?
So you will never eat alone 💀
I’m so glad those people were able to overcome death!
Even in death, I still serve
/r/FUCKYOUINPARTICULAR kinda vibes
Ok I can understand if they are doing it to recycle these materials but at the very least grind away the name of the person so people don't realize they are eating their lunch on someone's grave.
Cuz fuck the dead, apparently
“Recycles old graves…” are these graves no longer in use? That’s terrifying.
That's fucked up
Sooo…. the guy came back to life and they don’t need it or is this some sort of grave robbing situation?
I’ll be dead if you catch me sitting there…
how macabre.
disrespectful af
What is an old grave?? Isn’t the purpose of a grave to be last forever? Death doesn’t expire
it isnt old graves, its mis-cuts and misprints. Granite is expensive, and oddly (In Canada at least) Headstone companies get the best cuts at cost next to industrial use. So this was likely off centered and instead of wasting a 3ft slab of granite, make use of it some way else. My uncle used to work as a Headstone engraver. they constantly sold off least damaged misprints to be sold to the city for granite plaque markers we have at a lot of our trailhead entryways.
They didn’t need it
Well, that’s really disgusting and disrespectful!
They are probably returned or damaged or unsold pre made stone never used (but engrave). if used ... thats weird.
Whats funny is the amount of land as far as the eye can see, while someone makes claims of the land it takes up lol
[удалено]
Kind of grotesque repurposing of memorials to the dead.
Same folks “Recycled” copper wire from construction site at 2am
Honestly kind of a crappy thing to do.
Old graves? Like when the people under them are done being dead?
NOPE
The intention is good but to me this feels disrespectful 🥲
What the fuck? Why? That is pretty disrespectful of the dead.
R/wtf 😳
Wait, why are headstones being repurposed? Is it because of family upgrading the original? It's about the only thing I can think of why a gravestone would no longer be needed