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Breath and Memory
Dec. 6th, 2024 08:16 amI'm doing Writer Stuff this morning and I've been reading up on unmarked graves, abandoned cemeteries, and how they located unmarked grave sites.
I grew up in east Tennessee, in the mountains. Not IN the GSM, but close enough that I went to school with kids who were literally birthed in houses inside the National Park. The woman who raised me, Carolyn, did a lot of genealogy, and she used to tell people that by the time I turned three, I'd been in every cemetery, churchyard, and family plot in the county. She'd push me around in a stroller while taking gravestone rubbings and such. In case you ever wondered why I'm like this. :D
Anyway, there were always rumors and creepy stories among kids at school about this or that place being haunted. You might not really be surprised how many of these places had unmarked graves in them. Not anything nefarious - just family burials from way back, graves that probably had a wooden marker that eventually rotted away. We knew an older woman who claimed to be able to find these graves with dowsing rods, but I never saw her do it.
The TVA had to move a lot of burials when they were building dams and needing to move towns. Douglas Lake filled up over a settlement, for example. One thing they had to do was move graves, and my history teacher told us a story about needing to go identify her father's remains so they could be moved. They had to open the coffins in front of someone, usually a family member.
A different teacher lived in a house that had been built pre-Civil War, and one of her front rooms had a bullet hole in the wall where someone shot a guy who'd been doing abolitionist work in the area. And yes, I got to go see it. That was the same teacher who had some geese, and one time we were visiting when I was very small and a goose chased me all the way back to dad's truck. Geese are terrifying when you're the same size they are.
I grew up in east Tennessee, in the mountains. Not IN the GSM, but close enough that I went to school with kids who were literally birthed in houses inside the National Park. The woman who raised me, Carolyn, did a lot of genealogy, and she used to tell people that by the time I turned three, I'd been in every cemetery, churchyard, and family plot in the county. She'd push me around in a stroller while taking gravestone rubbings and such. In case you ever wondered why I'm like this. :D
Anyway, there were always rumors and creepy stories among kids at school about this or that place being haunted. You might not really be surprised how many of these places had unmarked graves in them. Not anything nefarious - just family burials from way back, graves that probably had a wooden marker that eventually rotted away. We knew an older woman who claimed to be able to find these graves with dowsing rods, but I never saw her do it.
The TVA had to move a lot of burials when they were building dams and needing to move towns. Douglas Lake filled up over a settlement, for example. One thing they had to do was move graves, and my history teacher told us a story about needing to go identify her father's remains so they could be moved. They had to open the coffins in front of someone, usually a family member.
A different teacher lived in a house that had been built pre-Civil War, and one of her front rooms had a bullet hole in the wall where someone shot a guy who'd been doing abolitionist work in the area. And yes, I got to go see it. That was the same teacher who had some geese, and one time we were visiting when I was very small and a goose chased me all the way back to dad's truck. Geese are terrifying when you're the same size they are.
