By: By Michele Berger

Published: October 16, 2013

Mount Moriah Cemetery, Philadelphia

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Mt. Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia. (Matthew Christopher)

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How does nature overtake a cemetery? Maybe the last living members of the group in charge die, or the families with relatives buried there move away. Perhaps a few people — or even one individual — cared for the site and then one day stopped showing up for who knows what reason, like in the case of Philadelphia’s B’nai Israel/Hebrew Mutual Cemetery. Then there are those cemeteries under the care of an organization whose age simply means its gravestones have weathered centuries of, well, weather.
Whatever the reason may be, cemeteries are a complicated business, Mary Lish, a family tree researcher and genealogist, told Weather.com. Cemeteries often have a trust fund whose interest they subsist on. Once bodies stop being buried there and there’s little or no money coming in, nature can take over — sometimes even causing its own mini ecosystem, like at Wardsend Cemetery in Sheffield, United Kingdom.
“Wardsend is an unusual cemetery in that it is on a steep hillside and is almost entirely surrounded by trees creating its own microclimate, a mixture of an unofficial nature reserve and a cemetery,” George Proctor of the Friends of Wardsend Cemetery told Weather.com. “Originally the cemetery area had no trees.” Today it’s overgrown, and one of the five cemeteries in the pages that follow. But first, Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia.
“This bucolic hallowed ground was once herald as the largest privately owned, non-sectarian cemetery in Pennsylvania,” writes photographer Matthew Christopher, whose images of the site can be seen above. In 1855, it started as 54 acres; it eventually expanded to 380 acres.
The cemetery no longer operates (though that could change in the future) and because the last known board member of the cemetery association passed away, there’s no one currently responsible for its upkeep either. “The cemetery has been poorly maintained for decades with many of its historic sections overgrown and wooded,” according to the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery.
About 80,000 people are buried in the cemetery, including the first mayor of Philadelphia, singer-songwriter John Whitehead and supposedly famed flag maker Betsy Ross (though Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery said she was moved in the 1970s).

Eerie Cemeteries Left to Nature (PHOTOS)

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By: By Michele Berger

Published: October 16, 2013

Wardsend Cemetery, Sheffield, United Kingdom

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(Friends of Warsend Cemetery)

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In some parts of this UK cemetery, the grass is so thick it nearly covers the forgotten graves. “Currently the cemetery is in a very overgrown state,” George Proctor of Friends of Wardsend Cemetery told Weather.com.
“The weather has had a sizeable effect on the cemetery,” he added. “This summer has been one of the warmest we’ve had for awhile, and combined with the intermittent rain periods, has seen an upsurge in the growth of all the unwanted plant life. No sooner had we cut something back then within a week or two we are back [where] we started.”
The site, according to the Secret Garden Atlas, was once overseen by a church, but the building perished during World War II. Since then, nature has reclaimed the spot. “This has resulted in an eerily quiet atmosphere, yet breath-taking landscape, which has transpired from circumstance and not design,” the Atlas reports.
There’s more to the story than that, apparently.
“Local legend has it,” according to the Friends of Wardsend Cemetery, “that of the four clock faces on the old St. Philip’s Church tower, one was never lit at night. This, it was said, was to allow the body snatchers at the nearby Wardsend Cemetery to carry out their grisly work, unable to see when the witching hour had come.” Click here for the full, creepy story.

Woodland Cemetery, Newark, N.J.

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Woodland Cemetery, Newark, N.J. (Mary Lish)

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Woodland Cemetery has been around since 1856, according to Mary Lish, a family tree researcher and genealogist who created a database of the cemetery. Her great grandparents are buried there. “To put it in Sopranos vernacular,” she told Weather.com, “I know where the bodies are.”
The cemetery’s not in the best part of town, and since the 1960s, vandals have gotten to many of the 80,000 graves on the 55-acre plot — including those of several Civil War veterans. On top of that, grass and other vegetation have overtaken many of the plots, reports the Newark Star-Ledger. And junk like mattresses and stoves end up strewn about the gravesites, Lish added.
Despite efforts by the board of directors to clean up and maintain the site, there’s much more work to be done. Lish and her partner, John Sass, had to cancel Safe Day, a day dedicated to allowing anyone who wants to come to the place and not feel threatened or nervous.
“John and I walked the entire cemetery,” Lish wrote on the Newark Cemeteries page. “The grass has not been cut since Safe Day last year, June 2, 2012. To make matters even more difficult, Hurricane Sandy brought down multiple trees and tree limbs all over the cemetery. Some of the trees have been cut down, but the wood has not been removed. We do not feel it is safe to walk in the cemetery — you cannot even tell where some of the roads are since everything is so overgrown.”

The Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague, Czech Republic

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Some prominent people are buried here, including Rabbi Loew (d. 1609), who is associated with the legend of the Golem. (Flickr/Ulf Liljankoski)

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The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is old, established in the 15th century. The first tombstone dates back to 1439, according to the Jewish Museum of Prague. The last burials there took place in 1787.
Today, the 12,000 timeworn tombstones undulate and tilt on the hilly landscape, looking like they could succumb to weather at any moment. The apparent disarray comes from expanding the cemetery several times, to fit more people. In fact, the Jewish Museum reports that several layers of graves, one atop the other, likely make up the cemetery.
“The cemetery was enlarged a number of times,” notes the Museum. “The picturesque groups of tombstones from various periods emerged through the raising of older stones to the upper layers.”

Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin, Ireland

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Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin, Ireland. (Flickr/William Murphy)

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Ok, so Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin technically isn’t abandoned. It’s a privately owned and run cemetery and crematorium, and its website makes it seem like a perfectly lovely place to be buried. Yet the images above taken in January of this year sure make it seem less-than-cared-for — or at least a little creepy.
William Murphy, whose photos appear in the slideshow, calls the place gloomy, a less-than-ideal final resting place for his grandparents. “I cannot understand why my grandparents chose to be buried in Mount Jerome as it was, at the time, a depressing place relative to other locations that they could have chosen,” he wrote in his image description.
He goes on to describe its fall into disrepair: Burial numbers declined in the 1970s, in the mid-80s it was put into voluntary liquidation and by the late 1990s, it had, as he put it, “fallen into a serious state of neglect with large swaths of the cemetery covered in overgrowth.”
It’s hard to say its exact state today. Either way, enjoy the eerie beauty of the graves and their untold stories.
MORE: More Beautiful Overgrown Cemeteries

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