Post by Graveyardbride on Sept 15, 2015 6:18:28 GMT -5
Photo by Eric Seals
Nightmare Cruisers Tour Cemetery
DETROIT – It's about how you would expect people who love to drive hearses – yes hearses — to spend a glorious September morning.
Touring a cemetery. A handful of members of the Nightmare Cruisers Hearse Club, a metro Detroit car club of hearse owners, spent Saturday morning communing with some of Detroit's most famous and not-so-famous residents in the historic Woodmere Cemetery in southwest Detroit, walking among tombstones and grave markers and mausoleums dating back to 1869. Lumber baron David Whitney is buried there. So is the Vernors family, of ginger ale fame. And James Scripps, who founded the Detroit Evening News. Among the not-so-illustrious, Sophia Lyons Burke, a well-known bank robber in the late 1800s who claimed to have been arrested in every country except Turkey and Rose Veres, the "Witch of Del Rey" who ran a boarding house and routinely killed the men who stayed there, including her husband, whom she offed with carbolic acid.
"I've always found cemeteries especially interesting," said Kimberly Morton, 25, of Warren, who, not coincidentally, is a first-year student at Wayne State University's School of Mortuary Science. In keeping with her interests in the here-and-after, she drives a shiny black 1991 Cadillac hearse as her personal vehicle. She and her hearse participated in Saturday's walk-and-drive tour. "Really, it's about where we all end up. Our future, you could say."
The cemetery, 250 acres of sometimes rolling hills off West Fort, is a favorite among the Nightmare Cruisers, who admit their fascination with death might seem odd to some. "I just come out here to walk sometimes, by myself," said Shirley Reinhart, 48, of Lincoln Park and the mother of three. She has always felt connected to a life beyond and it gives her peace. She bought her 1999 Cadillac hearse about seven years ago for $3,500 and parks it in her driveway, a fascination to her neighbors. "You can see the curiosity in their eyes," she said.
Nightmare Cruisers' director, Steve Frey, of Dearborn Heights, said the club is not just about the hearses, but about community service, helping to clean up neglected cemeteries and appearing in parades and Halloween events to raise money for charities. "We're not a club of cars; we're a club of people who own hearses. It gets people's attention."
It isn't just the morbid and the curious who enjoy the cemetery, home to 190,000 graves, making it one of Detroit's largest cemeteries. Gail Hershenzon, a retired Detroit elementary school teacher, is Woodmere's official historian and conducts tours throughout the warmer months for notable groups like the Detroit Historical Society and Preservation Detroit, genealogy clubs and church groups. She chronicles for them Woodmere's grand mausoleums and towering marble monuments, marking Detroit's robber barons and prosperous architects; its civic leaders and lawyers; its war heroes and athletes.
Then there are the tiny headstones documenting the deaths of children in the late 1880s, when infant mortality was high. And the simple gravestones, now almost obscured by the encroaching soil, of the men and women who toiled in factories and on railroads and farms.
Families still bury their loved ones at Woodmere, which is owned by a private corporation, and there is room for decades ahead. But it is the past that most interests Hershenzon. "I like to imagine it when they came in carriages, and the roads were dirt and gravel, and the women stood in their long dresses, in all that mud," she said. "Talk about a tough life. But talk about determination."
Source: L. L. Braiser, The Detroit Free Press, September 12, 2015.
