It may seem ghoulish, but a cemetery visit can often enliven (oops) a trip.
Think of all the tourists who make their way to Pere Lachaise in Paris to view the graves of Jim Morrison, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde, or to the Jewish Cemetery in Prague where Franz Kafka is buried.Some of the most famous tourist sights in the world are tombs: the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal, among them.
Closer to home are many memorable but less well-known cemeteries. Here are some of their most famous - and infamous - occupants.
Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis is the burial site of so many illustrious names that a five-page, single-spaced list, along with a map, is provided at the gate.
After all, in the 19th century St. Louis was the gateway to the West, so anybody who was anybody passed through - and sometimes passed on.
Today one drives along Bellefontaine's winding roadways past Victorian-era winged angels, Gothic sepulchres, Greek temples and majestic marble mausoleums.
Noted permanent residents include Thomas Hart Benton, who was Missouri's first U.S. senator; poet Sara Teasdale; and Charlotte Dickson Wainwright, wife of a millionaire brewer, whose limestone mausoleum, with its bronze grilles and stone carvings, was designed by architect Louis Sullivan as a modern-day Taj Mahal.
The equally striking mausoleum of Adolphus Busch, patriarch of the Anheuser-Busch beer empire, bears the words "Veni, vidi, vici" above a bronze gate, visible through a Gothic arch.
Gen. William Clark, of Lewis and Clark expedition fame, ended his days as superintendent of Indian affairs for the Missouri Territory. His grave is topped by an obelisk that rises from a granite platform. His accomplishments are carved on all four sides of the obelisk, with a bronze bust of him in front.
Buried on the shaded grounds of Calvary, a Roman Catholic cemetery next door to Bellefontaine, are Dred Scott, the runaway slave whose precedent-setting trial was held in the city's Old Courthouse, and novelist Kate Chopin, who dropped dead after a long day's tour of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
Two surprises are the graves of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and playwright Tennessee Williams.
Sherman, who worked for the railroad in St. Louis after retiring from the U.S. Army, has an imposing granite memorial with a large cross. It is surrounded by smaller headstones marking the graves of his wife, daughter and two sons.
Williams' large, upright, pink-marble slab - near his mother's simpler, gray-granite stone - is inscribed with a quotation from his play, "Camino Real": "The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks."
Tomb Tours
Samuel Clemens - better known as Mark Twain - rests in a secluded grove of oak trees at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, N.Y., hometown of his wife.
His monument, a tall granite column at the end of a shaded walkway, is topped by a bronze medallion bearing his profile.
Just below on the same column is a similar profile of his son-in-law, a concert pianist. He gets equal billing because his wife erected the memorial.
Graceland Cemetery, near Wrigley Field on Chicago's North Side, is a veritable "Who Was Who," with the tombs of retailer Marshall Field, inventor Cyrus McCormick, detective Allan Pinkerton, railroad pioneer George Pullman and boxing champion Jack Johnson.
Notable Graceland graves include those of real-estate magnate Potter Palmer and his wife Bertha, who are buried in twin sarcophagi inside an Ionic-column-lined Greek temple, the largest monument in the cemetery.
Architect Louis Sullivan is entombed beneath a rectangular granite stone with a large bronze medallion that he himself designed. Fellow architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe rests nearby, beneath a flat, black, granite marker built by his grandson Dirk Lohan, also an architect.
The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, on a landscaped hillside not far from Monument Square in Concord, Mass., is chockablock with ambience and ancient headstones.
On its silent, shaded "Authors' Ridge," many of Concord's 19th-century literary lions - including Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau - are buried beneath simple marble markers.
In the old town of Farmington, Conn., Riverside Cemetery is generally known as "New Cemetery," though it dates from 1838.
Among those interred here are William Gillette, a Broadway actor famous as Sherlock Holmes; Sarah Porter, founder of the nearby Miss Porter's School; noted furniture designer Lambert Hitchcock; and Fbone, a Sierra Leone native who, as a member of the Amistad slave-ship mutiny, was defended by John Quincy Adams and acquitted in 1841.
In Baltimore's Westminster Burying Ground lie the remains of writer Edgar Allan Poe, a local resident. His gravesite has a bronze bust of Poe set into a slender, 6-foot-high, white-marble marker with only his name and dates on the bottom. On the same monument are the names of his wife, Virginia Clemm, and her mother, Maria.
The plot thickens
Right next to the Old Dutch Church in the New York suburb of North Tarrytown is Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a historic graveyard housing the remains of Andrew Carnegie, Walter Chrysler and Washington Irving (whose plain marble marker lies behind a fence and hemlock hedge).
Here, too, the ghostly spirits of Irving's creations, Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, still seem to linger among the timeworn gravestones.
The largest monument, on one of the highest points of ground, belongs to local resident William Rockefeller, brother of John D. Rockefeller Sr.
The beautifully kept, 400-acre grounds of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, N.Y., have long been the final home of well-known and moneyed New Yorkers, such as department-store founders Roland Macy and F.W. Woolworth, and musician Duke Ellington.
Wild West gunfighter Bat Masterson is here as well. He spent his final years as a New York reporter, and his epitaph entirely ignores his checkered past, saying only that everybody loved him.
Other must-see Woodlawn graves include that of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, nicknamed "The Little Flower," whose gray-granite rectangle sports (surprise) a little flower etched on top.
Author Herman Melville's upright marble gravestone has a blank scroll (he was not famous when he died), with a border of etched ivy that seems to reach out to the ivy carved into his wife's adjoining headstone.
Famous Last Words
Flat, palm- and pine-studded Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood, Calif., is smaller and less famous than Forest Lawn, the Glendale, Calif., cemetery satirized by Evelyn Waugh in his book "The Loved One."
It has more early stars, however. This is where Rudolph Valentino, among others, is buried. A map lists the celebrity sites, set among the curved roads and ponds.
Clearly the most ostentatious is the sunken reflecting pond with water lilies in front of the Douglas Fairbanks Sr. sarcophagus, which bears his profile in bas-relief.
First runner-up is Tyrone Power's white marble bench, one side of which is a giant book with the masks of comedy and tragedy. On the bench is inscribed the "Good night, sweet prince" quote from "Hamlet."
Surprisingly insignificant is the glitzy but tiny plaque memorializing John Huston. On a predictably epic scale is Cecil B. DeMille's family mausoleum. The graves of Janet Gaynor and her first husband, Adrian, with two cypress trees and a red rose bush planted between them, are among the most touching.
Perhaps the most fitting of celebrity graves, however, is to be found in Beth Olam Cemetery, a section of Hollywood Memorial. There, a simple marble stone for Mel Blanc, master of many cartoon voices, reads "THAT'S ALL, FOLKS."