Who's up for a scavenger hunt... at a cemetery? 'Talk Death' aims to make dying less scary
CBC
How do you destigmatize a place that’s as scary as a cemetery? You could follow the steps of Talk Death and make it a place to play.
During Halloween season, Talk Death — a group founded by two Hamiltonians which aims to make people more comfortable around death and dying — has been organizing scavenger hunts in cemeteries across Canada and the U.S. in order to try and make them less scary.
This year was no different, according to organizers, around 1,000 people across Canada and the U.S. went to their local cemeteries to look for clues and submit them to win prizes.
“People see these spaces as spaces of death. I think that they can remind people of their mortality. Which was the point of these kinds of cemeteries,” said Talk Death co-founder Jeremy Cohen while at the Hamilton Cemetery, at 777 York Blvd., on Sunday.
“But I think that in our modern age, that makes people a little uncomfortable.”
Cohen, who is also a religion anthropologist and an assistant professor at McMaster University’s Department of Religious Studies, said cemeteries started as public spaces for people to “go on a Sunday afternoon and have a picnic at a graveside.”
It started in 2020 as a small, improvised family and COVID-friendly Halloween activity, now it’s part of the Hamilton-based company’s yearly roster.
They partner with several cemeteries in both counties to make it happen, but people all over the world can join in.
“We have people in Europe that do it in the middle of the night,” said Talk Death co-founder Mandy Benoualid. She and Cohen are based in Hamilton.
“We say as long as it's like a historic cemetery that's large enough that could have some of the clues.”
Pat Gallagher, a volunteer historical interpreter, said visiting places like the Hamilton Cemetery and learning about its history is important in order to preserve the stories buried in it.
“If nobody talks about it, it disappears. We've uncovered stories in there that might just totally get lost if somebody doesn't talk about it and keep it going,” he told CBC Hamilton.
He was there on Sunday to give scavenger hunters a tour and history lesson.
Hamilton-born John Charles Fields, for instance, is buried at the cemetery. He was the founder of the Fields Medal, which is often described as the Nobel Prize in mathematics.
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