Graceland Cemetery and surrounds is said to be one of the most actively haunted sites in America. Jesse

The Gravedigger.

A Chicago Reporter’s Visit To the Cemeteries.

Gravedigging a Healthy Vocation–Burying Alive–Chicago’s Twenty-Six Cemeteries–A Busy time–Work and Wages. How “Familiarity Breeds Contempt.”

A withered, bent and gnarled old man was digging leisurely away at a grave in Graceland cemetery. The old man was John Kane, the oldest active gravedigger in the United States. He is 65, and when he walks his back is at an angle of 45 degs. But there is a lot of life in old John Kane yet, and he may well live to complete his four score and over.

“I have buried a great many in my life–many thousands,” said the old man. “I’ve been here, a grave digger, making a good living at it, since 1860, when Graceland cemetery first started. I7ve never dug up any treasures, and I don7t suppose I ever shall. But I’ve earned my bread at it and provided for my family, and me and my boys used to do a great deal of hard work in this cemetery. It’s an old saying that grave digging is a healthy trade and that a grave digger lives longer than most other people. I don’t see exactly why it should be so, for one often digs up poisonous gases in removing bodies elsewhere. But it’s open air work, and it has to be done in all sorts of weather and at all seasons, and thus it makes a man tough and not liable to give in to small ailments.”

There has never been, as far as reliable data are at hand, a case of burying alive in Chicago cemeteries. It was rumored that there was, some time ago, such a case at Waldheim, the great “Friedhoff” (literally peace yard) of our German fellow citizens. But a visit paid there and diligent inquiry made failed to bring out any corroboration of the rumor. “That’s all bosh” said Theodore Harks, the superintendent of the German Lutheran cemetery, adjoining Graceland. “I have buried thousands and have opened many coffins years afterward, when the bodies, for some reason or other, had to be placed elsewhere. I have always found the bodies exactly in the same position in which they were laid to rest. All this talk of burying people alive is nonsense. It doesn’t happen, and folks might as well dismiss that fear from their minds.”

Graceland has the largest alien population of all Chicago’s twenty-six cemeteries. “If the 45,000 who lie there so quiet could rise up again, hale and hearty, what a population that would add to Lake View!” exclaimed the philosophizing car driver, as his car rattled on through the thinly settled tract surrounding Graceland. There are 5,000 buried in block 5 alone. Of the twenty-six cemeteries fourteen are Hebrew ones, all small, and only twelve are of fair sized or large dimensions. Graceland, however, with 100 acres of ground, Clavary and Rose Hill seventy-five each, and Waldheim with a territory of just about the same extent, together with Concordia and St. Boniface, hold just about the bulk of dead Chicagoans. Altogether probably some 150,000 are laid away in all these–a large number for a young city like ours. But there is room for another 300,000 in these burial grounds. In view of the large number buried, and of the hundreds that die every week, it may sound strange when it is said that there are altogether less than one hundred gravediggers employed at the twenty-six cemeteries.

The shovel, pick and spade, together with the strap to lower the coffin into the grave form the complete outfit of tools for the gravedigger. During the warm season it takes but an hour to dig a grave in ordinary soil, and of the regulation size, i.e. four and a half to five feet deep and about seven feet long. It is different in the winter time. The pickax is then necessary, and even with its help it takes from three to four hours to make the hole, with the frost often three feet deep in the ground. The busiest time for the gravediggers is the early spring, generally about the middle of April, when all the bodies that have been stored away in vaults during the winter are interred. At Graceland, for instance, as many as thirty-two a day have been buried. This is, of course, nothing in comparison to the dread periods of epidemics passed through during the last fifteen years–smallpox, diptheria, etc. Then there were days when 200 bodies were handed over in one day to the authorities of one cemetery alone for interment. During such times of stress extra help has, of course, to be employed.

It is a mistake to think that the gravedigger earns big wages. A regular monthly pay of $40, or $1.50 to $2 when hired and paid by the day, is about all these men receive for their hard work. But of course it does not require much skill nor much previous training to become a good gravedigger. Any one used to handling the spade or shovel, and able to dig a ditch or a square hole can do the work well. Of course, in addition to the digging of graves, these men have to do the sodding of the graves, and have to care besides for a large number of them after the planting, etc., has been done by the flourists and his assistants. One gravedigger, besides digging probably a daily average of two graves all the year round, has to mind a couple of hundred graves. the watering of the plants and turf, which is done with the hose, take up a large portion of his time.

It seems chests chock full of Spanish doubloons, old tumuli harboring the bones of a hero long dead and his golden ornaments as well, and all such buried treasures, are mighty scarece around these diggings here spoken of. Nothing of the kind ever has been found in Chicago cemeteries. That’s not to be wondered at, after all, because it’s all virgin soil. Not even ancient Indian weapons nor the skeletons of dogs or men have been found underground.

It is said that “familiarity breeds contempt.” It is therefore not to be wondered at that a grave digger, by dint of handling bodies all his life, becomes callous and looks upon the dead body of his fellow beings much in the same way in which a grocer looks upon a dead herring–that is, as a ware which must yield him so much profit. He tumbles the dead man in his narrow little house very unceremoniously into the grave, when there happens to be no near relatives about. What they ahte to do of all things is the digging out of a body for removal elsewhere. One cannot blame them, for the job is, to put it mildly, a disagreeable one. Many a man wouldn7t do it for any money. These men have to do it for a few dollars.–Chicago Herald.