Cemetery Walks

When I need to clear my head, I go someplace quiet – someplace where there is no one but dead people.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. I might just have a fascination with the morbid, but I also think that cemeteries are the best place to take walks. As I walk through the winding paths around faded tombstones and mausoleums, I feel as if I can become connected in some small way to the lives and histories of these people. In these graveyards, I can commune with the silence and just have a chance to appreciate it.

I’m not really sure when my fascination with cemeteries began – I’ve always had an interest in exploring old churchyards and trying to learn bits and pieces of history from the stories on tombstones when I visited new places. My high school was right across the street from a massive cemetery, and during my college years at Princeton, I was a regular visitor to the town cemetery, which was just a short walk from campus but still felt like entering another realm. I visited on autumn afternoons to get away from the bustle of the shops, or when I needed a quiet place that wasn’t the library. One dark and windy night shortly before Halloween – and straight out of a scary story – I went to the cemetery to meet up with a ghost tour group. A guide led us around after hours, pointing to the graves of past Princeton University presidents and former residents and telling us chilling tales of their lingering presence. On a winter evening, a friend and I discovered that there was a side gate to the cemetery that remained open even after dark—no special guide or key needed. We wandered around the cemetery and talked until our fingers were frozen. For moments in time, we could leave the hecticness of student life behind and dwell with the dead, who were never in any rush, before eventually returning to the world of the living.

Cemeteries are a place of stillness and silent respect, and became a strange sort of comfort for me, a familiar place to explore even in foreign locations. The summer after my freshman year in college, I had an internship in Copenhagen and lived on my own for eight weeks. As I explored the city and spent a large amount of time on my own, a close-by cemetery, Assistens Kierkegaard, was a place to enjoy that solitude and to feel alone but not lonely as I wandered through centuries of history. The old cemetery’s yellow-orange walls saw me exploring each corner of the landscape during many warm summer evenings when the sun never seemed to set.

Less than a month ago moved to a new city and a new country—Cambridge, England—to begin a master’s program. My first week was occupied with an endless array of errands, moving-in tasks, introductory meetings, shopping trips, and social gatherings. By the end of it, I was both exhilarated and exhausted. But luckily on one of the first days when I had no obligations or mandatory events, I decided to set out for a walk to nowhere in particular. Eventually I came across the gates to Mill Road cemetery, filled with plants, wildlife, and centuries-old headstones. I felt like I was meant to be there to discover a bit of comfort in the quietness. Cemeteries are liminal spaces between living and dead, present and past, public and private. This cemetery felt like someplace between being someplace new and being at home.

A man walked his little dog and a few students cycled through. I paused to read the visitors’ guides sprinkled throughout. The cemetery was filled with sculptures from local artists, some paying homage to different species of birds native to the area and others memorializing war veterans. Trails meandered their way through the cemetery, offering guides through World War I graves and brief histories of Cambridge’s townspeople. I walked in circles until my shoes got damp. I tried to imagine the lives of each person represented by a headstone, tried to fill in the details beyond whatever was given about when they were born or died, and tried to imagine all the people who had lived there before me and who would come after me. I was stepping into Cambridge’s history and becoming part of it by walking that same earth that generations before did. Hopefully, I’m not going to be buried in that particular cemetery (or any cemetery for that matter) anytime soon—but there is still a peculiar pleasure in recognizing the fleetingness of my life, and where I fit in to a history and a community that extends so far beyond myself.

Not everyone may feel so comfortable in such proximity to the deceased, but I recommend you give a stroll through a cemetery try. It’s the perfect activity for a crisp fall day or for a spooky evening post-Halloween, but it’s also nice to do on any given afternoon if you just need a break from the world. Time, in a sense, stops in a cemetery—the dead aren’t going anywhere. Sometimes I need that moment to remind myself to take time to stop, look around, and appreciate my surroundings. It’s my own form of mindfulness, my own take on meditation, my reminder that my mundane worries and daily anxieties don’t matter in the grand scheme. To the dead, no life problem is too big.

By Katie Duggan

Princeton student, now-grown Cambridge grad student, feminist film enthusiast, and lover of all things spooky (clearly).