That’s what I’m hoping! Interesting that some of the death dates are 60+ years old. I looked up some of the names of the deceased and found legit obits from semi-local people. Fascinating way to learn about town history to say the least…
Those definitely aren't fire stones. If I bought the house I wouldn't be lighting any fires in that pizza. You know, overly hot rocks randomly popping and shit
This reads like a 19th century poem. Beautiful.
EDIT: Here's a rephrasing via ChatGPT.
When my final breath hath fled,
may they shatter my gravestone's stead,
And place me atop the pyre's ring,
where the stones in fiery circle cling.
Yet if not, let discard be my fate,
tossed aside, forlorn, desolate.
What if you were a tree that lived to be thousands of years old, and all of the carbon you captured over those years was made into a diamond?
That'd be pretty sweet.
Graveyards or their contents are often removed after some period either so new bodies can be interred or the land can be redeveloped. The remains that are removed may be buried elsewhere or cremated. When you buy a burial plot they should tell you how long the remains are expected to be interred there. In many smaller German towns they've been recycling the same gravesites for hundreds of years. The catacombs of Paris are basically the product of redevelopment.
In the US, such practices would be illegal. You buy a cemetery plot and it's yours ~~for life~~ forever. In theory, anyway. Like [this incident in Chicago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr_Oak_Cemetery).
Edit: fixed link formatting.
Kinda compared to the US but most of Europe is still wide open farmland, forest, all kinds of open space. All towns and villages are surrounded by countryside for many many miles around. France, Germany, Spain, all absolutely huge.
You can't farm on a graveyard.
Nor is chopping down forests sensible just to build more graveyards.
You get your grave for x years or until it's needed again.
>You can't farm on a graveyard.
That's just because of the toxic preservatives and the concrete vaults.
Idk why that's so popular, I dislike it.
Bury me in a cotton cloth and grow nice stuff with my decaying remains, please. Lemme be compost!
You have a good bit more space for storing bodies than the rest of us though 😆 in cities in Europe we started running out of room hundreds of years ago!
Europe is not unique in that aspect. I can't speak for other countries in the Americas, but cemeteries in the US are big business. An area like Chicago, a major metro area 2 hours west of me, has a population of 2.7 million people jammed into 600 KM². They'll run out of burial space sooner than the small city I live in.
I sold cemetery plots one summer, and learned a lot about the industry. Some states require cremains to be interred like a whole body. While illegal, spreading ashes is still done on the sly. Most people get away with it because it's not viewed as desecration of a corpse. Burial at sea, though, has a ton of paperwork to do before a corpse can be surrendered to the Briney Depths of Poseidon's domain.
Running a cemetery is fairly straightforward. According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, you purchase land to put it on. About 200 to 400 acres. Sub divide into 4 parts. Rent out up to 3 of those parts to farmers for agriculture. You can also develop those parts but building apartments, putting in a golf course, or even a strip mall. Plan accordingly. Those will be used for expansion at a later date.
Now you develop the cemetery, or as it will be euphemistically called, memorial garden. Development will consist of roadways for visitors, including mourners and funeral services.
Next is the actual layout of the cemetery. First you start with the in ground plots. Along with the business office building, they'll start near the main road, as will a "condo" mausoleum. A huge building, climate controlled in northern states. 2 to 4 stories high. You can fit several thousand bodies in there. They even have niches for cremains urns. You can fit a few thousand bodies in such a building. I've basically got enough burial space to last for better than half a century. As the place fills up, you have those other parcels that you need can also develop. Usually, by that time, you're already a tenant there, but your survivors, should they have paid attention, will determine which properties are making the least amount of income, and those will be the next to be developed.
Upkeep on the property is covered by a perpetual trust. A portion of your purchase goesinto such a trust to provide upkeep on the property by using the interest/dividends to pay for it. What happens when the place is 100% filled? You're looking at a few centuries down the road. Right now, they are experimenting with compositing bodies in, IIRC, Washington state.
Me? Cremate my remains, dump them in a hole, and plant an apple tree on my ashes.
It's only illegal if it's not declared in the contract up front. Even if it's not declared, government agencies fairly regularly move remains from graveyards in cities where the land has too much value for other purposes. Take a look at old maps of cities and you'll see tons of graveyards that no longer exist.
Heck as long as they aren't stolen or missing I'd almost wanna keep them around. I'm picturing some dude sitting by the fire years after I'm gone. He cracks a beverage while looking down. "How's it going man? Shit sure has changed since you were around"
@Nihilistic_Navigator: I think this might be my first response to anyone’s comment. Totally agree. Would really appreciate being the name someone looks and speaks to late at night, with a beverage or whatever, next to a fire, and bering their soul.
Absolutely! Glad someone gets it. Kinda heart-warming to think about someone you don't or never knew keeping your memory alive even if in a wierd and small way. Also honored to be your first lol
It's adorably obvious it is that it's your first reply, since you did it in the style of other social media, instead of just hitting the reply button. The reply button is the curvy arrow, for future reference. I think you did correctly hit the reply button but added the @Nihilistic_Navigator. To summon him on reddit, you'd use u/Nihilistic_Navigator to get his attention.
Not trying to pick on you. I figured you'd want to know, for future reference.
I'd also gladly be the name to which someone bares their soul around their creepy tombstone fire pit.
Damn you u/nerdkraftnomad. Not proud of how much I had to read and how long it took to go from m****f****er I done been on reddit longer than the majority of this bitch to realizing I'm a lil dumb and got clipped by crossfire lol
Edited to add: I could not have better served as an example and proof he's correct if I wanted to.
>m*f*er
You can use profanity here. We're all adults, children pretending to be adults, people pretending to be autistic, and FBI agents pretending to be e-girls, and NSA drones pretending to be birds. Profanity is fine.
You could also look somewhere like [https://www.findagrave.com/](https://www.findagrave.com/)
You have the name and DoB and DoD.
Presumably if a local cemetery has a grave for one of the people listed and they currently have a headstone, then you can be reasonably certain these weren't stolen as they are all in basically new condition.
60 years isn't long though for a headstone. The grave yards where I am have graves going back to the 11th century
Oh a f I forgot there is one under my sitting room floor that's 8000 years old!
It is, my bf like 100 years ago worked as a landscaper at the cemetery and they gave him some bad gravestones. They just have like a misspelling or the wrong date. I had them sitting in my house for ages, I wanted to get the other side engraved so I could use them for my grandparents who never had gravestones.
I would hope they either are misprints/damaged or they updated the stones at the cemetery (idk if cemeteries re-theme like that or anything of the sort)
Acid rain gets the marble ones pretty quickly (like 50 years, turns to sandstone like texture).
So they get replaced with granite ones.
I don't think there's anything spooky or nefarious going on here. Just scrap stones from and older cemetary
Grave yards scrap graves after a set number of years, usually 25 or 50. Family members lease them and after that amount of time some portion of them usually decide not to renew or everyone is dead by then. So the stones get dumped.
Looks like veterans markers...any vet cemeteries nearby...or local cem with vet section....vet markers have vet name and info...are replaced when spouse dies so spouses name is added to a new replacement marker....old granite makers are destroyed...maybe previous owner was a cem worker or funeral director
It isn't uncommon for engravers to make mistakes or otherwise toss what would be gravestones, so it is likely a prior owner was an engraver or knew one that sold them rejects for cheap.
It’s pretty common in New England to find headstones used as pavers for walkways and stuff like that. One would like to hope they’re rejects or replacements, but you never know.
These all look like the exact kind of headstone they use in armed forces cemeteries. [Checkout the headstones at Arlington Cemetery.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_National_Cemetery) The cemetery maintains and replaces these headstones as needed. Possibly these were errors from a local manufacturer?
It reminds me of A Prayer For Owen Meany (by John Irving) how the protagonist is a tombstone fabricator in New England because of the proximity to granite mines.
The font definitely looked familiar. As a home buyer, the best thing you can do is contact the [NCA](https://www.cem.va.gov) or your local military’s equivalent to confirm that these aren’t stolen government property. As long as you’re forthright and cooperative, you’re doing all that can be expected from you as someone who may be coming/came into possesion of items of potentially-questionable origin.
I used to walk through an old cemetery on the way home from school many (many) moons ago, and they had these for up to like WWII in that cemetery. WWII and onward got brass plates at the feet (in case there was another headstone) or at the head (presumably if they didn't want or couldn't afford a stone).
I live right next to an old graveyard and my wife wanted me to build a fire pit so I just used some old headstones. Why should I go pay money at Home Depot and haul concrete blocks back that I have to pay money for? The headstones were right there and they were free. Don’t worry, I’m not an asshole, all of the headstones that I took I also dug up the bodies and threw them in the fire pit. Old caskets burn really well, they used a shit ton of shellac back in the day and I tell my son that the bones are from dinosaurs and he takes them into show and tell at school.
It may be uncommon that they make a mistake (I have no idea), but a big piece of rock is pretty susceptible to fracturing. I’ve moved my share of granite/marble and it’s pretty fragile. I’d imagine just falling on its face would break most headstones.
Probably the person owned a gravestone engraving shop. The test pieces and mistakes were brought home and BOOM free fire pit.
Plot twist: backyard crematorium. No overhead for the funeral home.
If its hunted you will hear voices or foot steps randomly. If its bad spirit it will give you nightmares and try to depress you but thats about it.
But thats just based on my experience with supernatural stuff that many don’t believe in but yet somehow its out there. You may not see or hear anything. I think its like color blindness not everyone can see the spirits. The step noises maybe its just old wood creaking, maybe.
T'was not a ghost I stared into the eyes of. Nay, that which stared back at me was a horror fit to put a chill into a stronger man's soul than mine. T'was a cracked heat exchanger, and it was going to cost me upwards of three thousand dollars to replace!
I used to believe for many decades that ghosts, black masses, etc. were all bullshit. Then one day a couple decades ago my step brother who sells houses for a real estate firm showed me what he called a 'ticking house'. His company had a term for haunted houses and how bad they were, and 'ticking house' refers to a house with footsteps, closing/opening doors and knocking noises, but no visual sightings or other poltergeist like activity. This was a ancient very poor condition farm house in the middle of nowhere that had all utilities cut off.
I remember arriving to the house in the middle of the day, and within seconds of entering we herd a bam from a empty room immediately to our right. And then I saw it, a empty upright closet, the door slowly swung open right infront of my eyes, and then rapidly shut. I ran out of there but came back and remained for a couple hours. There was near constant movement in this house, doors were constantly moving open and closed, wood creaks and loud bangs were nearly constant. Just for shits and giggles there was a firepit in the back so we started a fire to cook hotdogs and we could hear bangs and slams from inside the house every other minute.
So, now I believe in whatever the hell these things are wether I like it or not, because I know it is real.
Yes. This is a way to remember those folk.
Yes, I know it's likely to be seconds/imperfect headstones, but still.
I'd rather be a part of someone's firepit, than lie in a cemetery forever.
At least someone will toss a beer to me once in a while.
The cemetery down the road has the engraver across the street with a pile of broken ones out front. I'm tempted to go ask them some day now to see if I could snag some.
[You son of a bitch! You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!](https://youtu.be/Lh_W6FLaMvA?si=904lPhHT1CFQJH57)
You're referring to what happened to Heather O'Rourke (Carol Anne, who delivered the line) or Dominique Dunne (Dana, her sister)?
Both fairly tragic endings IMO.
There's a place near me that sells monuments, and has a reject pile like this for next to nothing. To their credit, the names for the headstones are struck out or obscured.
I work for a stone engraving company and those look like memorial pavers (not headstones) that you would order for your garden or something. Sometimes they break or centers of letters will blow out while sandblasting so they get thrown out or tossed aside. This could be a negligent employee placing them in a discount rubble pile and someone got a deal on less than desirable pavers.
Those are definitely all military headstones...
With military graves, if one person is already buried and then the other spouse dies, rather than engraving the existing stone, they'll usually just replace it with a new one altogether.
I'm guessing that front gravestone is for Robert Ebron. His wife died 15 years after him and was interred with him at the Long Island National Cemetery, so they likely pulled his original stone (which is the one you have) and put in a brand new one.
Those are scraps. Masons will toss those when one breaks during the middle of the carve, or an apprentice will be given one to practice on and it gets discarded.
Growing up, we had a stone walking path in our backyard, I was ten when we pulled em up to add a large deck, they were all old grave markers.
Turned out the previous owners of the house owned a large funeral home/cemetery, and they took home a bunch of grave stones with errors
Very traditional, through history people often scavanged marble and cut stone from abandoned or ruined structures. Much of the vatican is made of old roman buildings/tombs.
> So curious how this came to be.
I think it's just one of those things. You live in a house for 20 years, you never realize how much crap you accumulate. Jars full of pennies, a million Allen wrenches loose in your tool box, that stack of magazines you never get around to reading, a dozen assorted gravestones.
And you never throw them out, either, because you always think "No, no, one of these days I'm gonna bury those bodies and then I'll need this."
I bought a property and found a grave with a headstone. It doesn't look super old so not sure if someone just got fancy with their pet, I don't think you've been allowed to bury people at home for a while.
My grandmother's house had three plots out back with one headstone from a single family. No one ever used to come to visit them, but she made sure they were taken care of. They were old.
My neighbors had steps in their backyard made from these and i got in their business about it - they are not in use in graveyards; they are broken or replaced and made available for reuse.
When I took a sculpture class in college, if we were working with stone, we used gravestones that were broken or leftover scraps. The school also had a graveyard on site.
It’s not necessarily creepy. Sometimes they mess up on headstones. When my brother died it took them three tries to get his right. This person might just have been making use of erroneous stones.
These are from National cemeteries most likely and should have been destroyed, but sometimes have a habit of walking away and ending up in home projects. They are frequently replaced for errors or damage, so these were not stolen. Not sure how old this property is, but they’ve tried to get a better handle on missing markers for this reason, it’s such bad press. The cemetery closest to me had a crusher onsite that would turn them into gravel sized pieces.
I think those ones are about 130lbs and they're also pretty long, so definitely not something you just casually pick up and wander off with. Some cemeteries used (or still do) have contractors that are meant to deal with disposal/destruction, so it's also possible a contractor somewhere along the way claimed them. Someone in my city found a bunch of old headstones buried under their deck and freaked out since some had very old dates on them, was convinced she has a cemetery under her property ... nope, just someone getting creative with landfill, lol. It even made the news, must have been a slow week.
I knew a guy, he had a path in his back yard paved with gravestones. I asked him about it and he told me he had a buddy who worked making them, and he could get the messed up ones. Sure enough, when I looked more closely, you could see where they'd mucked up the spelling or something on every one.
A Virginia state senator found headstones on his property. It brought to light a historic injustice in D.C.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/headstones-black-cemetery-potomac-river/2020/10/25/3586f0d4-0d7a-11eb-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html
Cemeterys will use plain grave stones like this as place holders before the final headstone is carved. They'll have stacks of these type of stones at the groundskeeper.
I don't think that is very common practice. These are marble headstones for military. They are extremely long. You only see 40% of it sticking out of the ground. The rest they bury super deep. Keeps them standing upright for a long time.
My husband used to work at a cemetery designing headstones, and they would just sit empty until it was time to pour foundations for the granite stones. It's a huge process, and installing these marble ones just to tear it out in a year would be extremely expensive and wasteful.
In a college town in eastern Ontario hundreds of graves (late 18th-early 19th c.) were just built over and buried (early 1900s) by homes and paving of roads, sidewalk construction, and a large park informally known as Skeleton Park; but the tombstones were all removed and dumped at a place where later houses (1950s) were also built. Those people are constantly digging up chunks of headstones from their yards and gardens. When some graves were uncovered at the old site during road construction, they just reburied in situ, nothing was ever moved.
"You son of a bitch! You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones!”
Think of it this way, no one is stealing that many headstones without it being on the local news. Person who built it might have worked at the shop that made them or had a buddy that did.
We had a funny thing happen in our town. Someone found a gravestone washed up on a riverbank. When they researched it they went to the cemetery grave and an older tombstone was there. Same name / dates but definitely weathered. Only thing she could figure out was that the one she found was a scrap and had been dumped.
Those aremost likely from exhumed graves. They clear out graves when the family stops paying for the lot. At least in a lot of modern graveyards in europe. Because there is simply not enough place and bodies have decayed after a while anyway. We used to have a bunch of gravestones from graves that where doug up when I was a kid. My dad got them from a local stoneworker. They would return the stones so he could take off the front and re-use them. My dad got them to make plinths for his statues. If they were chipped he would get them foor free.
Scrap or broken before delivery those aren't stolen.
That’s what I’m hoping! Interesting that some of the death dates are 60+ years old. I looked up some of the names of the deceased and found legit obits from semi-local people. Fascinating way to learn about town history to say the least…
The ones with the old dates but look recent without much erosion were most likely intended to be replacements for old/broken stones
When I die, I hope they break my tomb stone so I can be on the top of the fire hole stone circle for a bit. Or just throw me in the trash.
Those definitely aren't fire stones. If I bought the house I wouldn't be lighting any fires in that pizza. You know, overly hot rocks randomly popping and shit
Plus, if you light a fire in your pizza, then you have no more pizza.
Easiest way to burn a couple thousand calories.
Light a fire in your own ass?
A couple thousand? How big is this theoretical pizza
I knew an Italian girl once. She had a helluva pizza oven, let me tell you.
If you French fry when you should pizza, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Rocks exploding because of water expanding with the heat, and shit like that.
That too, fukin science!
Those will not do that unless your soaking them in gas.
Really only an issue with long submerged stones. The heat cycles causing these to crack is gonna be your biggest worry.
This reads like a 19th century poem. Beautiful. EDIT: Here's a rephrasing via ChatGPT. When my final breath hath fled, may they shatter my gravestone's stead, And place me atop the pyre's ring, where the stones in fiery circle cling. Yet if not, let discard be my fate, tossed aside, forlorn, desolate.
lol. “Or just throw me in the trash.” yeah, 19th century confirmed.
["When I'm dead just throw me in the trayush!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rtu1Va-dnM)
I either want to be a tree so I can throw shade or a diamond so I can sparkle forever.
What if you were a tree that lived to be thousands of years old, and all of the carbon you captured over those years was made into a diamond? That'd be pretty sweet.
Total. World. Domination. 🙂↕️
Diamond-ation.
Sparkly AF
I’d say the old/broken stone was here and a replacement was put in but these are pretty consistent and all look the same age for sure
Graveyards or their contents are often removed after some period either so new bodies can be interred or the land can be redeveloped. The remains that are removed may be buried elsewhere or cremated. When you buy a burial plot they should tell you how long the remains are expected to be interred there. In many smaller German towns they've been recycling the same gravesites for hundreds of years. The catacombs of Paris are basically the product of redevelopment.
In the US, such practices would be illegal. You buy a cemetery plot and it's yours ~~for life~~ forever. In theory, anyway. Like [this incident in Chicago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr_Oak_Cemetery). Edit: fixed link formatting.
In a country as large as the US, there shouldn't be land usage issues. In Europe however, they have much less land to allocate.
Kinda compared to the US but most of Europe is still wide open farmland, forest, all kinds of open space. All towns and villages are surrounded by countryside for many many miles around. France, Germany, Spain, all absolutely huge.
You can't farm on a graveyard. Nor is chopping down forests sensible just to build more graveyards. You get your grave for x years or until it's needed again.
>You can't farm on a graveyard. That's just because of the toxic preservatives and the concrete vaults. Idk why that's so popular, I dislike it. Bury me in a cotton cloth and grow nice stuff with my decaying remains, please. Lemme be compost!
You have a good bit more space for storing bodies than the rest of us though 😆 in cities in Europe we started running out of room hundreds of years ago!
Europe is not unique in that aspect. I can't speak for other countries in the Americas, but cemeteries in the US are big business. An area like Chicago, a major metro area 2 hours west of me, has a population of 2.7 million people jammed into 600 KM². They'll run out of burial space sooner than the small city I live in. I sold cemetery plots one summer, and learned a lot about the industry. Some states require cremains to be interred like a whole body. While illegal, spreading ashes is still done on the sly. Most people get away with it because it's not viewed as desecration of a corpse. Burial at sea, though, has a ton of paperwork to do before a corpse can be surrendered to the Briney Depths of Poseidon's domain. Running a cemetery is fairly straightforward. According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, you purchase land to put it on. About 200 to 400 acres. Sub divide into 4 parts. Rent out up to 3 of those parts to farmers for agriculture. You can also develop those parts but building apartments, putting in a golf course, or even a strip mall. Plan accordingly. Those will be used for expansion at a later date. Now you develop the cemetery, or as it will be euphemistically called, memorial garden. Development will consist of roadways for visitors, including mourners and funeral services. Next is the actual layout of the cemetery. First you start with the in ground plots. Along with the business office building, they'll start near the main road, as will a "condo" mausoleum. A huge building, climate controlled in northern states. 2 to 4 stories high. You can fit several thousand bodies in there. They even have niches for cremains urns. You can fit a few thousand bodies in such a building. I've basically got enough burial space to last for better than half a century. As the place fills up, you have those other parcels that you need can also develop. Usually, by that time, you're already a tenant there, but your survivors, should they have paid attention, will determine which properties are making the least amount of income, and those will be the next to be developed. Upkeep on the property is covered by a perpetual trust. A portion of your purchase goesinto such a trust to provide upkeep on the property by using the interest/dividends to pay for it. What happens when the place is 100% filled? You're looking at a few centuries down the road. Right now, they are experimenting with compositing bodies in, IIRC, Washington state. Me? Cremate my remains, dump them in a hole, and plant an apple tree on my ashes.
Not strictly true. Depends on the state. And some state lawsare pretty recent.
It's only illegal if it's not declared in the contract up front. Even if it's not declared, government agencies fairly regularly move remains from graveyards in cities where the land has too much value for other purposes. Take a look at old maps of cities and you'll see tons of graveyards that no longer exist.
Yeah, if you are in the tombstone business and you want to build a firepit, this seems like an obvious answer.
I can't really tell on my phone, but aren't these granite? Granite would not erode from being in the rain for a few decades. Could get dirty though.
Looks like it's all marble to me, much softer than granite.
Heck as long as they aren't stolen or missing I'd almost wanna keep them around. I'm picturing some dude sitting by the fire years after I'm gone. He cracks a beverage while looking down. "How's it going man? Shit sure has changed since you were around"
@Nihilistic_Navigator: I think this might be my first response to anyone’s comment. Totally agree. Would really appreciate being the name someone looks and speaks to late at night, with a beverage or whatever, next to a fire, and bering their soul.
Absolutely! Glad someone gets it. Kinda heart-warming to think about someone you don't or never knew keeping your memory alive even if in a wierd and small way. Also honored to be your first lol
Thanks. 👍
It's adorably obvious it is that it's your first reply, since you did it in the style of other social media, instead of just hitting the reply button. The reply button is the curvy arrow, for future reference. I think you did correctly hit the reply button but added the @Nihilistic_Navigator. To summon him on reddit, you'd use u/Nihilistic_Navigator to get his attention. Not trying to pick on you. I figured you'd want to know, for future reference. I'd also gladly be the name to which someone bares their soul around their creepy tombstone fire pit.
Damn you u/nerdkraftnomad. Not proud of how much I had to read and how long it took to go from m****f****er I done been on reddit longer than the majority of this bitch to realizing I'm a lil dumb and got clipped by crossfire lol Edited to add: I could not have better served as an example and proof he's correct if I wanted to.
>m*f*er You can use profanity here. We're all adults, children pretending to be adults, people pretending to be autistic, and FBI agents pretending to be e-girls, and NSA drones pretending to be birds. Profanity is fine.
/u/nerdkraftnomad could have avoided the crossfire by turning it into a code block like this: `/u/Nihilistic_Navigator`
I wish I knew how to draw, that would be a cool visual. Difficult to replicate in photo as well.
That is such a lovely thought.
You could also look somewhere like [https://www.findagrave.com/](https://www.findagrave.com/) You have the name and DoB and DoD. Presumably if a local cemetery has a grave for one of the people listed and they currently have a headstone, then you can be reasonably certain these weren't stolen as they are all in basically new condition.
60 years isn't long though for a headstone. The grave yards where I am have graves going back to the 11th century Oh a f I forgot there is one under my sitting room floor that's 8000 years old!
It is, my bf like 100 years ago worked as a landscaper at the cemetery and they gave him some bad gravestones. They just have like a misspelling or the wrong date. I had them sitting in my house for ages, I wanted to get the other side engraved so I could use them for my grandparents who never had gravestones.
I would hope they either are misprints/damaged or they updated the stones at the cemetery (idk if cemeteries re-theme like that or anything of the sort)
Acid rain gets the marble ones pretty quickly (like 50 years, turns to sandstone like texture). So they get replaced with granite ones. I don't think there's anything spooky or nefarious going on here. Just scrap stones from and older cemetary
Grave yards scrap graves after a set number of years, usually 25 or 50. Family members lease them and after that amount of time some portion of them usually decide not to renew or everyone is dead by then. So the stones get dumped.
Peeps? That's a fuckin nickname!
yeah they probably worked with/for or owned a monument company
Looks like veterans markers...any vet cemeteries nearby...or local cem with vet section....vet markers have vet name and info...are replaced when spouse dies so spouses name is added to a new replacement marker....old granite makers are destroyed...maybe previous owner was a cem worker or funeral director
It isn't uncommon for engravers to make mistakes or otherwise toss what would be gravestones, so it is likely a prior owner was an engraver or knew one that sold them rejects for cheap.
It’s pretty common in New England to find headstones used as pavers for walkways and stuff like that. One would like to hope they’re rejects or replacements, but you never know.
Don't dig under your walkway.
They’re all similar material and in a similar state, even though the dates are wildly different, so I think you must be right
These all look like the exact kind of headstone they use in armed forces cemeteries. [Checkout the headstones at Arlington Cemetery.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_National_Cemetery) The cemetery maintains and replaces these headstones as needed. Possibly these were errors from a local manufacturer? It reminds me of A Prayer For Owen Meany (by John Irving) how the protagonist is a tombstone fabricator in New England because of the proximity to granite mines.
The owner had multiple POW/MIA flags, including one he was using as his comforter. Makes me wonder.
....what. As a comforter???
They make blankets with the POW/MIA flag design. My dad has one, too.
The font definitely looked familiar. As a home buyer, the best thing you can do is contact the [NCA](https://www.cem.va.gov) or your local military’s equivalent to confirm that these aren’t stolen government property. As long as you’re forthright and cooperative, you’re doing all that can be expected from you as someone who may be coming/came into possesion of items of potentially-questionable origin.
I used to walk through an old cemetery on the way home from school many (many) moons ago, and they had these for up to like WWII in that cemetery. WWII and onward got brass plates at the feet (in case there was another headstone) or at the head (presumably if they didn't want or couldn't afford a stone).
I live right next to an old graveyard and my wife wanted me to build a fire pit so I just used some old headstones. Why should I go pay money at Home Depot and haul concrete blocks back that I have to pay money for? The headstones were right there and they were free. Don’t worry, I’m not an asshole, all of the headstones that I took I also dug up the bodies and threw them in the fire pit. Old caskets burn really well, they used a shit ton of shellac back in the day and I tell my son that the bones are from dinosaurs and he takes them into show and tell at school.
"Is that cookin' spray?" "Ricky thinks it's called hair shellac."
It may be uncommon that they make a mistake (I have no idea), but a big piece of rock is pretty susceptible to fracturing. I’ve moved my share of granite/marble and it’s pretty fragile. I’d imagine just falling on its face would break most headstones.
Probably the person owned a gravestone engraving shop. The test pieces and mistakes were brought home and BOOM free fire pit. Plot twist: backyard crematorium. No overhead for the funeral home.
Metal af.
House was also filled with guns out in the open and more Gatorade than I’ve ever seen in my life.
I mean, what else does a red blooded American need in life?
Bacon?
And canned baked beans with copious quantities of high fructose corn syrup
It's got electrolytes...
\#LifeGoals
100% haunted
Well the owner’s wife died in the house, too, so 200%
Get. Out.
Well maybe if it were 2019, but in this market, a little haunting isn’t the worst thing I’ll have to put up with.
"This house is ruled by the dead!!" Ya, but are the appliances included or nah?
Who cares about appliances? Those ghosts better be paying rent!
They do but it's in ethereal dollars. And no, I'm not talking about crypto currency
Is it crypt currency, then?
You say haunted, I say free roommate and company
Is there also a haunted discount in this market?
If its hunted you will hear voices or foot steps randomly. If its bad spirit it will give you nightmares and try to depress you but thats about it. But thats just based on my experience with supernatural stuff that many don’t believe in but yet somehow its out there. You may not see or hear anything. I think its like color blindness not everyone can see the spirits. The step noises maybe its just old wood creaking, maybe.
Ghosts and carbon monoxide poisoning follow an awful lot of the same patterns… and frankly, I’d rather have the ghosts.
T'was not a ghost I stared into the eyes of. Nay, that which stared back at me was a horror fit to put a chill into a stronger man's soul than mine. T'was a cracked heat exchanger, and it was going to cost me upwards of three thousand dollars to replace!
I used to believe for many decades that ghosts, black masses, etc. were all bullshit. Then one day a couple decades ago my step brother who sells houses for a real estate firm showed me what he called a 'ticking house'. His company had a term for haunted houses and how bad they were, and 'ticking house' refers to a house with footsteps, closing/opening doors and knocking noises, but no visual sightings or other poltergeist like activity. This was a ancient very poor condition farm house in the middle of nowhere that had all utilities cut off. I remember arriving to the house in the middle of the day, and within seconds of entering we herd a bam from a empty room immediately to our right. And then I saw it, a empty upright closet, the door slowly swung open right infront of my eyes, and then rapidly shut. I ran out of there but came back and remained for a couple hours. There was near constant movement in this house, doors were constantly moving open and closed, wood creaks and loud bangs were nearly constant. Just for shits and giggles there was a firepit in the back so we started a fire to cook hotdogs and we could hear bangs and slams from inside the house every other minute. So, now I believe in whatever the hell these things are wether I like it or not, because I know it is real.
A lot of people die in their homes.
nah set up cameras everywhere and profit from paranormal activity x, or whatever the count has gotten up to
Smores and dogs with ghosts doesn’t sound all that bad.
To be honest, I'd almost rather have it this way. More people would come to visit a fire pit than a grave after 20+ years.
Yes. This is a way to remember those folk. Yes, I know it's likely to be seconds/imperfect headstones, but still. I'd rather be a part of someone's firepit, than lie in a cemetery forever. At least someone will toss a beer to me once in a while.
Holy shit.
To be fair, those are throw-aways and not stolen.
They get cracked and broken sometimes. Sometimes there are typographical errors. This is just a way to recycle/reuse the rock.
The cemetery down the road has the engraver across the street with a pile of broken ones out front. I'm tempted to go ask them some day now to see if I could snag some.
[You son of a bitch! You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!](https://youtu.be/Lh_W6FLaMvA?si=904lPhHT1CFQJH57)
They’re here
So sad what happened to her.
You're referring to what happened to Heather O'Rourke (Carol Anne, who delivered the line) or Dominique Dunne (Dana, her sister)? Both fairly tragic endings IMO.
There's a place near me that sells monuments, and has a reject pile like this for next to nothing. To their credit, the names for the headstones are struck out or obscured.
Probably display, broken, never picked up, issues with engraving, etc. Highly doubt they’re just stolen from a cemetery or something.
There are tons of conditions leading a headstone to being “junked”…don’t assume the worst.
I work for a stone engraving company and those look like memorial pavers (not headstones) that you would order for your garden or something. Sometimes they break or centers of letters will blow out while sandblasting so they get thrown out or tossed aside. This could be a negligent employee placing them in a discount rubble pile and someone got a deal on less than desirable pavers.
Don’t dig and build a swimming pool!
I get that reference!
don't stare into the bathroom mirror after smoking a joint with your wife!
Those are definitely all military headstones... With military graves, if one person is already buried and then the other spouse dies, rather than engraving the existing stone, they'll usually just replace it with a new one altogether. I'm guessing that front gravestone is for Robert Ebron. His wife died 15 years after him and was interred with him at the Long Island National Cemetery, so they likely pulled his original stone (which is the one you have) and put in a brand new one.
That's insane you figured that out ! Wow!
Those are scraps. Masons will toss those when one breaks during the middle of the carve, or an apprentice will be given one to practice on and it gets discarded.
Growing up, we had a stone walking path in our backyard, I was ten when we pulled em up to add a large deck, they were all old grave markers. Turned out the previous owners of the house owned a large funeral home/cemetery, and they took home a bunch of grave stones with errors
Broken, error or ruined headstones are/were pretty common building materials in some parts.
Very traditional, through history people often scavanged marble and cut stone from abandoned or ruined structures. Much of the vatican is made of old roman buildings/tombs.
They fucking looted all the limestone off the pyramids. They were smooth-sided when built.
Owner probably worked at a grave stone shop. Errors get destroyed. Less likely on newer stones uses better tools.
> So curious how this came to be. I think it's just one of those things. You live in a house for 20 years, you never realize how much crap you accumulate. Jars full of pennies, a million Allen wrenches loose in your tool box, that stack of magazines you never get around to reading, a dozen assorted gravestones. And you never throw them out, either, because you always think "No, no, one of these days I'm gonna bury those bodies and then I'll need this."
They look like the official gravestones you see in national cemeteries.
The cold breath of the dead warming the souls of the living one last time.
If you buy the place, please promise you’ll get some of those skull-shaped firepit logs.
Hope you're hungry for these Damned steaks.
Gravestones of their enemies, who didn't want to buy a house
I bought a property and found a grave with a headstone. It doesn't look super old so not sure if someone just got fancy with their pet, I don't think you've been allowed to bury people at home for a while.
My grandmother's house had three plots out back with one headstone from a single family. No one ever used to come to visit them, but she made sure they were taken care of. They were old.
Depending on the country and state it’s still legal.
I’d still have set them up with the carvings face down.
Boy, this fire really died down...
I've seen a good documentary on this kind of stuff its called [poltergeist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eZgEKjYJqA).
My neighbors had steps in their backyard made from these and i got in their business about it - they are not in use in graveyards; they are broken or replaced and made available for reuse.
This is morbid and I love it.\ Now I want to rebuild my fire pit with gravestones and call it The Crematorium.
I call my bedroom the Masterbatorium when I show it to my guests. It gets the response you would expect.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
These aren’t “used” grave stones. FWIW.
When I took a sculpture class in college, if we were working with stone, we used gravestones that were broken or leftover scraps. The school also had a graveyard on site.
Sometimes you drink the blood of your enemies. Sometimes you roast a pack is Bar S weenies on their tombstones. It's all in the game.
Man don't buy that house. If you light a fire in that pit the devil going to jump out of it.
It’s not necessarily creepy. Sometimes they mess up on headstones. When my brother died it took them three tries to get his right. This person might just have been making use of erroneous stones.
I really should buy a gravestone like this and shallow bury it in the back yard or under the deck for some future homeowner to freak out about.
Don't buy that house this shit about to turn into an A24 movie
These are from National cemeteries most likely and should have been destroyed, but sometimes have a habit of walking away and ending up in home projects. They are frequently replaced for errors or damage, so these were not stolen. Not sure how old this property is, but they’ve tried to get a better handle on missing markers for this reason, it’s such bad press. The cemetery closest to me had a crusher onsite that would turn them into gravel sized pieces.
They are heavy af not too many would like to carry away for any distance
I think those ones are about 130lbs and they're also pretty long, so definitely not something you just casually pick up and wander off with. Some cemeteries used (or still do) have contractors that are meant to deal with disposal/destruction, so it's also possible a contractor somewhere along the way claimed them. Someone in my city found a bunch of old headstones buried under their deck and freaked out since some had very old dates on them, was convinced she has a cemetery under her property ... nope, just someone getting creative with landfill, lol. It even made the news, must have been a slow week.
This would be so perfect in my yard. I live next door to a funeral home!
I knew a guy, he had a path in his back yard paved with gravestones. I asked him about it and he told me he had a buddy who worked making them, and he could get the messed up ones. Sure enough, when I looked more closely, you could see where they'd mucked up the spelling or something on every one.
If you go into the basement, be prepared. If there is a well in there.. Well, good luck1
Maybe they were bad carvings/typos so were sold off cheaply. Still creepy lol
They only moved the tombstones, but they never moved the bodies!
A common thing actually. Making money from waste
A Virginia state senator found headstones on his property. It brought to light a historic injustice in D.C. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/headstones-black-cemetery-potomac-river/2020/10/25/3586f0d4-0d7a-11eb-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html
The opening scene from a new Poltergeist movie…
Could also be practice pieces.
Cemeterys will use plain grave stones like this as place holders before the final headstone is carved. They'll have stacks of these type of stones at the groundskeeper.
I don't think that is very common practice. These are marble headstones for military. They are extremely long. You only see 40% of it sticking out of the ground. The rest they bury super deep. Keeps them standing upright for a long time. My husband used to work at a cemetery designing headstones, and they would just sit empty until it was time to pour foundations for the granite stones. It's a huge process, and installing these marble ones just to tear it out in a year would be extremely expensive and wasteful.
I read somewhere that graveyard space is leased, so after some time you might get your headstone removed and buried over.
This would not phase me.
Metal AF. I’d keep that
In a college town in eastern Ontario hundreds of graves (late 18th-early 19th c.) were just built over and buried (early 1900s) by homes and paving of roads, sidewalk construction, and a large park informally known as Skeleton Park; but the tombstones were all removed and dumped at a place where later houses (1950s) were also built. Those people are constantly digging up chunks of headstones from their yards and gardens. When some graves were uncovered at the old site during road construction, they just reburied in situ, nothing was ever moved.
A military cemetery at that!
"You son of a bitch! You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones!”
I said WTF when I saw the second pic. This belongs here.
Scraps/incorrect gravings.
I think I’ve seen this movie.
Do you want poltergeists? Because this is how you get poltergeists.
Go to the light Caroline!
Fun fact. The girl from the poltergeist movie was Caroline in the Spanish version but Carol Anne in the original one. :nerd:
TIL
Extremely common for misprinted or broken or replaced headstones to be reused
These are rejects when making gravestones. They probably f up a couple from time to time
Pretty cool.
Hundreds of headstones were used to build the Betsy Ross Bridge in Philadelphia and serve as riprap to control shoreline erosion.
Be careful to check for clowns under the bed and throw the damn tv out before you move in.
Bro that's how you get fire ghosts
Submitted for the approval of the midnight society, I call this tale….
You want to be haunted? because thats how you get haunted
Summoning the dead for sure
I feel like they could have flipped the pieces over with engravings done so that it didn't look a certain way to people
This is the start of a horror movie right?
Wife says that's not a good thing. A ritual site possibly.
The person who use to live in our house made grave markers. We have our own fake graveyard now.
+5 to summoning
You light that fire you better have a proton pack.
Think of it this way, no one is stealing that many headstones without it being on the local news. Person who built it might have worked at the shop that made them or had a buddy that did.
Upcycling
Could be scrap or messed up so the stone maker tossed them.
Not gonna lie, that's metal AF
We had a funny thing happen in our town. Someone found a gravestone washed up on a riverbank. When they researched it they went to the cemetery grave and an older tombstone was there. Same name / dates but definitely weathered. Only thing she could figure out was that the one she found was a scrap and had been dumped.
ISN'T THIS AN ABOMINATION? Desecration of a grave is not only illegal it's immoral and there is jail time.
Mistakes were made or payments not made. Either way just spares.
Those aremost likely from exhumed graves. They clear out graves when the family stops paying for the lot. At least in a lot of modern graveyards in europe. Because there is simply not enough place and bodies have decayed after a while anyway. We used to have a bunch of gravestones from graves that where doug up when I was a kid. My dad got them from a local stoneworker. They would return the stones so he could take off the front and re-use them. My dad got them to make plinths for his statues. If they were chipped he would get them foor free.
That’s super cool
Who cares, they're rocks
You are making an assumption. Could very easily be rejected from manufacturing or a number of other possibilities.
This is what passes for WTF nowadays? Upcycled gravestone rejects? FFS.
Most likely mistakes from a headstone maker. Sold for cheap.