This episode has everything: An airfield, a distant jamboree, more crunchy leaf ASMR, goths audibly eating French fries (sorry about that one).

We went to White County in Tennessee to find an assortment of comb style graves and found a few other interesting things along the way! Most of my research was pulled from Richard Finch's The Tennessee Comb Grave Tradition. As always, we'll be posting pictures and reviews on our Instagram which you can find here.

Hypothetically this is our last episode for this "season" but we may just try going to a different format, perhaps bi-monthly. I'll get back to y'all on that though.

Elizabeth found a goofy local ghost story/urban legend that led us to finding pieces of important local history that have been neglected.

Links:

Find a grave for Old Jefferson

Old Jefferson directions plus links for getting to the Trail of Tears segment of the trail (these haven't been updated in a while and were a little difficult to follow. The best course of action was using this map and cross referencing it with the Google maps app--I had full service out there so GPS worked no problem)

History of Old Jefferson

Pictures of Old Jefferson

We went up to Kentucky to see some of Mammoth Cave National Park's beautiful cemeteries! This episode has everything: poor planning, a story about the Kentucky Cave Wars, a river ferry, us still not knowing how to record a podcast. It's a good time!

I used this really neat interactive map to plan our trip. It has locations and descriptions of all the identified cemeteries in Mammoth Cave National Park. You can zoom in and see the layouts of different cemeteries and in some cases pictures of individual headstones.

Elizabeth had a nice chat with Park Ranger Amber Flowers who works with the bats in the caves and has some nice shots of the park over on her Instagram!

Don't forget to check out our new Instagram account for pictures and cemetery reviews!

We're back!

Kicking off our 2021 season with a discussion of the 1950 article "Status After Death" by William M. Kephart which takes a look at class distinctions within funerary proceedings and customs in Philadelphia. We follow that up with a more recent article that's a good companion piece, "The Difficult Business of Dying" by Jess Bergman, which talks about the modern Funeral Industrial Complex. 

A little promo to let y'all know we're coming back for October 2021!

If you want to check out our cemetery reviews from last year they're up on my instagram here (maybe this year I'll move them over to an actual account for the show)

We talk to our friend Sarah about visiting Père-Lachaise, walk around in crunchy leaves, and discover that the pentagrams we were seeing on tombstones are actually less metal than we thought.

Notes:

[I definitely said that Père-Lachaise was established in 1806 but it actually opened in 1804.]

Using Thomas W. Laqueur's article "The Deep Time of the Dead" as a frame work, we talk about why cemeteries exist and why we like hanging out in them.

Notes: [TW: brief mention of suicide around 24 minute mark]

[The book I couldn't remember the name of is The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas W. Laqueur]

Answering the burning questions: What is this? What will y'all be talking about? Is this a podcast?

Notes:

[Elizabeth would like to note that in her egalitarian take on modern cemeteries when she said that race was a bit more of a "sticky subject" specifically in the context of cemeteries, she was trying to not over simplify and misrepresent the fact that race still plays a role after death, especially in historical gravesites, but was trying to stay on topic and not meander too far into another subject without having research/knowledge to back up what she was saying. We hope to talk about burial and race more in the future, preferably with someone who is well versed in the topic.]