I feel peaceful; also, I love looking at monuments with interesting stories and if famous people. A few interesting places are a cemetery in Cade’s Cove TN where entire families died within days of each other(what epidemic took them?) and Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond VA which has a former President, a child’s grave guarded by a dog statue, a section of Confederate and Union soldiers, and a huge pyramid with a stone for each soldier killed during the Civil War; and a local graveyard near where I lived in Asheville NC that had stones back past 1800. Oh, and St. Augustine, 1500’s, plus the cathedral floor graves in northern England. Fascinating.

When I was sixteen years old I spent the summer vacation with my sister and her husband who was employed to look after the grounds of a church. Part of his work included digging graves and cremating the deceased. Often I would help him dig a grave and it was hard work because we did not have the use of a mechanical digger. I recall that one day late in what had been a long hot summer we had to open up a grave in which someone had been buried six months earlier. I had dug down about just over four feet and the clay was very hard so I asked my brother-in-law to pass me a pickaxe but little did I know that there was barely two inches of earth between where I stood and the coffin below. I raised the pickaxe and brought it down with some force and it got stuck in the hard clay and I had to hunker down to pull it out and it did not want to budge and then suddenly I fell backwards with the pickaxe and there was a loud whoosh! as the gas from the corpse escaped. I was completely enveloped by it and even though I showered and scrubbed myself the foul smell lingered around me for two or three days.

Barely two weeks later we had to cremate a body. We wheeled the coffin into the crematorium room where the burner was situated and pushed the coffin from the trolley into the burner. We then set the process in motion and the first burners came down and my brother-in-law suggested we have lunch after the process was completed. Several minutes into the cremation something went wrong and the steel door opened and a jellified burning mass slid onto the floor. Holding my nose with one hand and a shovel in the other I scooped him back into the burner, a hell of a stench filled the room.

I hear people are just dying to get in one.

I love them. Often, older parts are permitted to return to nature and thus provide an oasis of calm and tranquility in urban environments.

I love exploring old cemeteries.

Waste of valuable land.

I feel nothing. I think in the future we are going to make better use of harvesting reusable body parts and the rest should be composted. The stories must be preserved though. People's memories, their lives and their experiences is what matters...the flesh n bones not so much.

Historically interesting for the lives that are no longer. Environmentally a way to preserve open space and not build up more houses or businesses.

The really old ones I have seen in the Eastern part of the country are interesting, but overall I think they are an incredible waste of space, serving no real purpose.

In Mexico, when cemetaries get full, they dig up the old graves, crunch the remains with bulldozers, lay fresh dirt, and re-use them. When I was an anthropology student, we had about 30 sets of human skeletal remains,that came from a Mexican cemetery.

Treasure troves for history buffs like me. I love to read the epitaphs and weave stories into the family names. I think I’ve inherited this from my father, we lived near the centre of Edinburgh, and on Sundays, as there was nothing open, apart from the churches....we nonbelievers went walking. Every route we took from our house took us past some ancient graveyard or other, and in we went, reading all the family histories, even as a child I found it fascinating.

I had a girlfriend in high school, who wanted to go into a nearby cemetery at night, and play crazy eights, on top of a grave, by flashlight. (Not kidding!). So, we did. Then, she wanted to make wooky-nooky on the grave. So, we did that too.Gosh, how I miss those days!

Like it's a waste of perfectly good land.

They are nice and quiet places.