'Tombstone tourists' find the beauty and joy in cemetery visits
CTV
Until she left for college, film historian Karie Bible spent almost her entire childhood living next to a cemetery. Other kids may have traded creepy stories about cemeteries or swore they’re haunted, but Bible was convinced of their value.
Until she left for college, film historian Karie Bible spent almost her entire childhood living next to a cemetery.
It’s where the Texas native rode her bike, played with her brother and passed by nearly every day. Other kids may have traded creepy stories about cemeteries or swore they’re haunted, but Bible was convinced of their value.
“Being right next to a cemetery was normal for me,” she told CNN. “I always thought they were extremely beautiful.”
Years later, after landing in Los Angeles as an adult, she ended up in one of the most famous cemeteries in the country: Hollywood Forever, a paean to Old Hollywood and the people who built it. There, visiting the graves of silent film star Marion Davies, famed director Cecil B. DeMille and ingénue icon Judy Garland, she found countless stories to tell.
That was more than 20 years ago. She’s been the cemetery’s official tour guide ever since, leading visitors on monthly treks across the grounds to visit elaborate mausoleums, humbler headstones and various tributes to major stars and Hollywood everymen.
“I love these people, and it gives me so much joy to keep their memories alive and their legacies going,” she told CNN.
Bible spends her days with “tombstone tourists” — fans of cemeteries who travel across the country and world to significant cemeteries to commune with those buried there and bask in the history. (Philip Stone, founder and executive director of the Institute of Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, likened tombstone tourism to “sightseeing the mansions of the dead.”)
