Cypress Hill Cemetery

Two weekends ago, JMP and I decided to meet for diner breakfast (as we do) and I suggested that we explore a cemetery afterwards (as we also do). I had evening plans in Brooklyn and I'd been wanting to see more of the Queens/Brooklyn cemetery belt ever since I saw Houdini's grave almost a year ago. A quick look at the map shows more than 11 separate named cemeteries in the stretch between Bushwick and Kew Gardens.

I've always been easily overwhelmed by choice, but recently I found out that two of the Fox sisters are buried in Cypress Hills. There were actually three Fox sisters—the younger two convinced the older one that they were able to communicate with spirits and thus became instrumental in creating the Spritualism movement. Although they eventually confessed to making it all up, Spritualism had caught on and all modern-day psychics (and those that love them) have the Fox sisters to thank.

Margaret and Kate Fox are buried in section 3 of Cypress Hills and, along with a photo of their indistinctive headstone, that's all the information we had. Cypress Hills is a beautiful cemetery, but their signage is a bit lacking and we wandered for some time searching for section 3 before we broke down and asked a security guard for a map. The sections are pretty large, but JMP spotted the Fox sisters' grave with barely any trouble at all, like a total rockstar. The headstone is really difficult to read, and even harder to photograph but it says "Fox Sisters, Mediums of the Advent of Modern Spiritualism," followed by their names and dates of death.

Cypress Hills is very large—we only covered about a fourth of it before it was closing time. It's a really beautiful place and is very well-maintained. There are a lot of new plots mixed in with the old and a lot of people were tending to graves while we were there.

Although we felt perfectly safe, we got the impression that Cypress Hills might not have always been in such good shape. A lot of the mausoleums had been bricked- or cinder blocked-shut, which I don't think I've really seen before. One of my favorite parts of any cemetery is finding headless/limbless statues, and there were some great ones at Cypress Hills. At one point I spotted one and ran over to it as I exclaimed "OooOoh! Something headless!" which if you know me, probably doesn't seem odd at all.

Cypress Hills has some really excellent directional signage (excellent in design, not necessarily usefulness), as well as some really great examples of tombstone typography. There were so many great examples of "Rest in Peace" stones that I lost count, which stood out to me since I've often wondered how that phrase became so synonymous with tombstones when I rarely see it used. A part of Cypress Hills is also a National Cemetery that looks like a little Arlington—rows and rows of identical white stones laid out like dominoes.

I would definitely go back and explore more of Cypress Hills, and the rest of the cemetery belt. It was fun searching for a specific stone, and even more rewarding that we found it—maybe we had a little bit of help from Margaret and Kate Fox.