Meet the Louisiana Graveyard Woman

I like hanging out at old cemeteries. Some of my favorite things happen there. I let my dogs run free in the cemeteries, and I wandered around enjoying the peacefulness of the place. I never encountered anything bad. I didn’t really get scared in the cemeteries. I didn’t mind touring around the countryside by myself looking at all of cemeteries in Louisiana. It wasn’t the dead people that scared me, it was the live ones.

I remember I was up in the Livingston area in northern Louisiana where there are lawn jockeys. That’s where the KKK headquarters was or so I recall. People would drive around with gun racks on their back windows. I was there right after a bank robbery had occurred no less, and so everybody was outside standing around watching strangers like me go by. I would go right up to the civic and county offices to pull records. In one way people seem friendly and waved – just strangers – and I thought “you don’t know me,” and then I would wave back. But I would find development going on right next to a cemetery, and I would take pictures of it, and people would watch. I had California plates so they knew I was from out of town, and I would be followed up and down country roads for long periods of time not knowing if they had bad intentions. And there was radio interference – they didn’t like strangers there, they were very antigovernment – so someone was jamming the radio signals and I couldn’t get GPS readings in some of those cemetery locations. Obviously cell phones would not work either. It made me quite nervous.

Then there were comical situations as well. I was in one town in the southwest part of Louisiana and they were having a Spank Fest! Yes, a Spank Festival. They were going on a spanking spree, so I got out of there fast! In another town I was going through the place hanging out of my window and taking pictures. I was driving an old Cadillac, and people thought that I was working for the government or something – so one local gal came up and knocked on my window – scared the beegejuz out of me because she looked like a heroin addict – and was demanding to know what I was doing parked there. They were curious and they would come out and try and find out about this strange woman with California plates driving an old Cadillac.

I could always tell when I was getting close to a graveyard by the smell of formaldehyde and decay in the air. Sometimes there were crypts that were open; it’s because the water table was so high. Everything was all kind of decaying. One time I found a skull at the entrance of the cemetery. People were not being buried there properly, and frequently were being buried there illegally. You had to pay for people to be properly buried and the poor people just couldn’t do it. Also there were a whole lot of cemetery regulations; rules about the upkeep of the cemetery. If it’s overgrown you could be fined $500 which is a lot in the South. Or you could be put in prison for six months. So everybody walks away from the cemetery; they would throw up their hands and say “I don’t know who owned that cemetery, I don’t know who’s being buried there.” Then they would see me coming around taking pictures and recording date and names off the tombstones, and when I would come back the whole cemetery would be cleaned up! They thought I was an inspector or something. I would mark the cemetery down as being abandoned, and I would come back two weeks later and it’s been all cleaned up; mowed and weeded and everything. So I would have to go through it and take more pictures and mark it as in use.

And the jokes that they played in Louisiana can be quite dangerous. I got framed once for a bank robbery! This was on Christmas Eve. I was in the Library and I was researching – going through the newspaper archives. And as I drove away I drove by a bank and there were news reporters all standing around, and they all started taking pictures of me as I drove by. I was looking at them, and they were looking at me shooting video and taking pictures. So I’m watching the news that night because on the news was an exposé about cancer and the oil industry and how you could have cancer too. And right after that, the news came on with a statewide search for the bank robbers and they showed the picture of my Cadillac with a baby doll’s head on the front bumper. They put it on the news that the bank robbers were three black men with hooded masks and they made their getaway in an old Cadillac with a baby doll’s head on the front bumper!

And I’m like “how did I disguise myself as three black men?” I thought, “Incredible! It’s Christmas Eve and everybody is watching this! What am I supposed to do?” So I called up the police.

And they asked, “You’re a female student at LSU?” (Like they couldn’t tell from my voice?)

I said, “Yes.”

And they said, “Yeah, we’ve already heard about you. We know it’s not you that robbed the bank.” Apparently, many of my classmates had been calling the police saying, “We know who it was!” So nice to have friends.

Really they had no idea who the bank robbers were, they just said three black men like they made up the getaway car. So the next day I put a Mardi Gras hood on the baby doll’s head because I felt like Mardi Gras was really an expression of segregation, with different groups of men dressed up in Mardi Gras costumes that look like the clan with their hoods. After that, people beg me to take the hood off of the baby doll’s head because it was scaring their children.

It was interesting going to LSU, the school was very liberal, very dynamic, and very open to a lot of things. But I still think they were kind of surprised when I arrived. I was a little bit different than they had imagined. A single woman with her dogs, no money, and an old Cadillac with a baby doll’s head on the front.

NEXT WEEK:
How I became interested in doing a Historical Geography PhD dissertation on the graveyards of Louisiana.