St. Michael's Cemetery: Headless

I have passed St. Michael's cemetery many times on the way to LaGuardia airport (and eaten at a diner across the street), but I finally made it inside of the grounds recently. It was established in 1852, is open to all faiths and is one of the oldest religious, nonprofit cemeteries in the city. The cemetery is boxed in by the Grand Central Parkway and the Brookln-Queens expressway, in an area of Queens that seems pretty car-centric. Walking there via Astoria Blvd was not the most relaxing of walks, but once you're inside, the grounds are surprisingly peaceful.

It's not the oldest, or largest, or smallest or most interesting cemetery that I've visited and at first glance I was underwhelmed. It's large, but the majority of the graves are fairly new and I saw several people tending to graves and at least one funeral-in-progress. No offense to the recently deceased, but new graves and headstones just don't interest me much. In fact, I try to avoid them because I cherish my alone time when I'm exploring cemeteries, and running into grieving families is just not my scene.

I'm always wary of appearing disrepectful—especially as I snap a million photos—so the older the gravesite, the better. Cemeteries interest me for their history, typography, tombstone design and symbolism, all of which I find to be lackluster with newer (1960s-now) burials. 

Somewhere in between being underwhelmed and trying not to get heatstroke, I started to realize that St. Michael's has a lot of statues—more than I usually see—and I got even more interested when I noticed that a large portion of them had lost their heads. I love anything out of the ordinary and macabre, and a headless statue will always pique my interest. St. Michael's appeared to be in very good condition and well-tended otherwise, so I'm not sure what's to blame for the headless epidemic, but I kept finding new ones wherever I looked.

Some statues also had their wings or hands broken and some were laying on the ground, whole or in pieces. What was even more surprising to me was that multiple headless statues still had their heads—resting on top of the stone or on the ground, presumably undisturbed since they first left their bodies. I"m not proud to admit that I was overcome with the urge to pocket a cemetery souvenir, but ultimately decided that stealing from anyone's eternal resting place was too horrible to justify—no matter how at home one of those heads would be in my new curiosity cabinet.