The living play karaoke among headstones, hang their laundry from mausoleums, put on plays in crypts and golf right on top of graves in multipurpose cemeteries around the world, where the dead are integrated into modern life instead of remaining in solemn roped-off spaces. In some cases, it’s happening due to sprawl, like the family graveyard in a Walmart parking lot in Georgia, but in others, it’s more deliberate. As we grapple with population growth and urbanization, alternate ideas for the burial of our dead are coming into focus, all seemingly sending the same message: life goes on.

Habitable Cemeteries: Living with the Dead in the Philippines

Within the walls of Manila’s largest cemetery, 6,000 living residents thrive, going about their lives right on top of gravestone after gravestone, sometimes living in mausoleums alongside the tombs of their dead. The residents of North Cemetery are typically extremely poor, creating makeshift domiciles and living surprisingly normal lives. Within their cemetery city, they’ve created systems of public transit and schools.

A second cemetery in the Philippines, the Chinese Cemetery, is nicknamed the ‘Beverly Hills of the Dead’ for the spacious, luxurious tombs that are fancier and more comfortable than most homes of the living. These houses of the dead have fully-functioning kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms where relatives can sleep alongside their deceased loved ones, and sometimes live there full-time.

New Lucky Graveside Restaurant, India

The patrons of New Lucky Restaurant in Ahmadabad, India don’t seem to mind dining right next to coffins from an old Muslim cemetery, which may belong to the followers of a 16th century Sufi saint. The owner decided to leave the coffins in place when building his establishment, and says the proximity to death hasn’t put a dent in business, which is brisk. In fact, he believes that it brings good luck, hence the restaurant’s name. Each morning, the servers pay their respects to the graves, wiping them, covering them with cloth and decorating them with fresh flowers.

Solar Power in Santa Coloma de Gramanet, Spain

With so much of the rest of the land too hilly and shaded to be of use, the town of Santa Coloma de Gramanet outside Barcelona found the one location that would be viable for its solar energy program. It just happens to be a cemetery. The densely-built town packs 124,000 residents into 1.5 square miles, so they have to make creative use of every inch. Now, 462 solar panels provide enough energy to power 60 homes each year. The panels are perched above ground level, so there’s no notable change to the feel of the sacred spaces below. “The best tribute we can pay to our ancestors, whatever your religion may be, is to generate clean energy for new generations, says the director of Const-Live Energy, which runs the cemetery.

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Living With The Dead 12 Cemeteries With Surprising Alternate Uses

The symbols carved into stones commemorating the dead can reveal a lot about the deceased’s beliefs and philosophies, or at least those attributed to them by their families when they were buried. Grave symbolism ranges from well-known symbols of major religions to the arcane and complex, each one often containing layer after layer of hidden meaning known only to those initiated into certain organizations. These 15 common symbols seen in cemeteries around the world are often meant to relay messages to those who are still living.

Winged Skull

(images via: jenn g, xlibber)

The winged skull most often means a dead person’s journey is not over; after they’ve shed their physical form, they are flying away to another realm. In the United States, the ‘death’s head’ was initially a non-religious symbol simply used to denote a buried corpse, as the Puritans didn’t believe in using religious symbols on graves. The particular style of the death’s head motif on older graves acted as a calling card for the carver.

Serpent

(images via: henning muhlinghaus, chynna67)

The serpent represents everlasting life, especially when seen in ‘ouroboros’ form, when it creates the shape of a circle with its own tail in its mouth. The snake cheats death by shedding its skin. The Orphic Egg (a snake wrapped around an egg) is an occult symbol representing the personification of light, the hermaphroditic Greek deity Phanes/Protogonus, who created the other gods. Two snakes wrapped around a winged staff (aka the caduceus) similarly represents the hermaphroditic god Hermes and has been incorrectly used by the healthcare industry as a symbol for medicine – mistaken for the rod of asclepius, which has only one snake and isn’t winged. The latter is often seen on graves of doctors. A snake wrapped around a cross can symbolize the Masonic brazen serpent, a symbol of the 25th Degree Masons, or foreshadowing of Christ’s crucifixion.

Clasping Hands

(image via: RPM)

A loved one may be gone, but those they left behind often have hopes of seeing them again someday, as represented by clasping hands on a grave. Symbolizing unity even after death, it’s often depicted on the shared graves of spouses.

Flying Hourglass

(image via: sean, todd mecklem)

‘Time flies’ and death comes too soon for many, as symbolized by an hourglass with wings. In the early 18th century, it wasn’t unusual for the dead to be buried with an actual hourglass to represent the sands of time having run out. In Masonic symbolism, it’s often paired with the scythe, another emblem of how easy it is to sever the boundary between life and death.

Inverted Torch

(images via: jpmatth, godutchbaby)

Inverting a torch would typically extinguish the flame, so when it’s seen on graves with the flames still burning, it represents eternal life.

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The Language Of Death 15 Gravestone Symbols Explained

A skyscraper filled with corpses may sound morbid, but soon, such things may become a necessity. The earth is already packed with dead housed in oversized caskets that have been designed to outlive us all – so what are we going to do with the never-ending stream of human bodies as we face life’s greatest inevitability?

Skyscraper Cemetery for Norway

A metal exoskeleton around a central core serves as the framework for a multi-story graveyard that looks, on each individual floor, the way any ordinary graveyard would. It’s got trees, benches and memorials. The only difference is, it’s high above ground level, and roofed by the next level of graves. Norweigian designer Martin McSherry envisions the Skyscraper Cemetery that can help solve the problem of lack of burial space in the country, with a crane permanently situated beside the structure to constantly add new floors as needed.

Memorial Necropole Ecumenica, Brazil

The world’s tallest existing cemetery is Brazil’s Memorial Necropole Ecumenica, a 32-story high rise where tombs are rented by the year and private memorial rooms go for about $105,000. Because of the hot Brazilian climate, bodies must be interred within 24 hours, so the MCE, as it’s known, is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The building also contains a chapel, lagoon, peacock garden, waterfalls, an aviary full of parrots and toucans and even a small restaurant.

Tower for the Dead, Mexico City

The population of residents aged 65 and older is expected to triple in developing countries over the next four decades. That’s a big problem when it comes to burying the dead, especially in places like Mexico City where buildable area is very scarce. Creating more conventional cemeteries would mean losing valuable agricultural land and what few unspoiled green spaces are left. This proposal, Tower for the Dead, actually combines vertical necropoles with inverted skyscrapers for an 820-foot-deep subterranean complex conceived as a massive screw driving into the earth. The experience might be a little intense, as each floor has a theme based on a stage of grief.

“This project proposes an underground vertical cemetery for Mexico City – a vision that takes into consideration the overpopulation, the scarcity of land, and the psychological and sensory experience of grieving. The ‘Tower of the Dead’ allows the family members of the deceased to be reborn, after a trip to the underworld, where they just buried their loved one.”

Vertical Cemetery for Paris

This vertical cemetery concept for land-challenged Paris would create “a symbolic tower with a rightful place within the city that the deceased so much loved,” a city that currently has so little space for graves that many remains have still not been properly buried. A skylight pours natural light into the center of the tower, down into a water pond at the base, with a spiral ramp offering a walkway to the top floor. Flexible filaments on the outside of the tower each stand for a deceased person, aiming to embody their essence as they move in the wind.

Stacked Cemeteries of New Orleans

New Orleans is one city that already stacks its dead vertically, up to four tombs high. The reason for this is simple: the city is set well below sea level, so the water table is far too high for underground burial. Dig just a few feet down, and you’ll hit soggy sand. For a while, residents attempted it anyway, stacking heavy stones on top of the caskets to hold them down, but storms would bring them floating up to the surface. Families are typically stacked together within individual vaults. At the city’s infamous Lafayette Cemetery, human remains are even interred right in the walls that surround it.

Moshka Tower Cemetery, Mumbai

The Moshka Tower was designed for Mumbai to free up a significant amount of ground space for the living, accommodating all four of the major cultures and religions found within the city (Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Parsi.) Facilities are available for both garden burial and cremation. A tower of silence is located on the roof for Parsis, and additional space is available for worship, prayer and meditation. The multi-layered facade is filled with vegetation to absorb heat and CO2, and new technology enables more sustainable cremation that doesn’t fill the air with pollution.

Mountain of the Dead, Egypt

Egypt’s Mountain of the Dead, also known as Gebel al Mawta, is a Roman-era burial site that towers above the landscape of the Siwa Oasis, looking a bit like an ant hill. Made of limestone, it was developed during the 26th Dynasty of Egypt, and served as a hiding place for soldiers during World War II. Tombs cover virtually every square inch of its base as well as its terraces and all sides of the conical portion. Many of the tombs have been raided over the centuries, and robbery continues to be a problem.

Amphitheater for the Dead: Hong Kong Hillside Cemeteries

Look out onto the hillsides from a high-rise in Hong Kong and you’ll see something that’s highly uncommon in the west: tier after tier of graves built onto hillsides resembling ancient amphitheaters. Each grave within these cemeteries is shoehorned beside the other. It didn’t take long for this trend to die down in the city – the practice began in the ’60s, and by the ’80s, space ran out, so officials had resorted to interring bodies in nearby high-rise buildings. Hong Kong is twice as dense as New YOrk and four times as crowded as London, so it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with next.

In America we have a seemingly endless succession of near-identical cemeteries, filled with orderly rows of bland stones that tell us nearly nothing about the people buried underfoot. But in other parts of the world, the final resting places of the dead are far more interesting, exotic, decorative and strange. Some tribes of the Pacific bury their babies in trees, while others hang their coffins from cliffs. Solemn ossuaries deep beneath churches in Austria and Italy hold thousands of hand-painted skulls, and colorful cemeteries in Romania tell dirty jokes about loved ones who have passed on.

Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic

The skeletons of somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people are arranged in dazzling decorative patterns all over the walls and ceiling of the Sedlec Ossuary, a small Roman Catholic Chapel in the Czech Republic. Located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints, this subterranean ossuary attracts over 200,000 visitors per year who gape and gawk at garlands of skulls, a massive chandelier, ceiling patterns and other designs made of human bones.

Cliff-Hanging Coffins, Philippines

Coffins cling precariously to a cliffside at Sagada, on Luzon Island in the Philippines. Rebar is hammered into the limestone to support the coffins as part of a unique burial ritual; the coffins are typically made of hollowed-out logs. This tradition is thousands of years old, and some of the wooden coffins have begun to decay, providing glimpses of the skulls and other human remains held inside. Some of the coffins are in caves rather than clinging to the cliffs, making them more accessible. Unfortunately, not everyone is respectful of the customs, and there have been problems with tourists taking home bones as souvenirs.

City of the Dead, North Ossetia

This looks like the remains of a medieval village, with small dwellings grouped together on a grassy hill. But go knocking on the doors, and you won’t find a living soul. That’s because this is the City of the Dead, an ancient cemetery near the village of Dargavs, Russia where residents have been burying their dead for hundreds of years. Legend has it that in the 18th century, a plague infected many of the townspeople. Those who didn’t have family to build quarantine houses for them and care for them simply went to the cemetery and waited to die.

Tree Graves for Babies, Indonesia

The small thatched doors on this tree in Indonesia are, sadly, not entrances to some kind of mythical fairy land. They’re graves for the babies of the Toraja ethnic group. The Torajans have a number of unusual death rituals, including hanging graves from ricky cliffsides like those in the Philippines. They also have a ritual called Ma’Nene, wherein the bodies of the deceased are exhumed, washed, groomed, dressed in new clothes and paraded around the village before being reburied.

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Tree Tombs Cliffside Coffins 14 Unique Cemeteries

Our modern culture has made the physical process of burial little more than an afterthought, leaving us to numbly choose from a small assortment of wooden boxes in a showroom or catalog in the aftermath of a loved one’s death. But some casket designers literally think outside the box with colorful, celebratory or just plain bizarre creations ranging from coffins shaped like beer bottles and cars to those equipped with warning signals in case you’re buried alive.

6 Amazingly Weird Coffins by Kane Kwei Carpentry in Ghana

In Ghana, the Ga tradition of carpentry includes a fun and colorful array of fantasy coffins unlike anything you’ll see anywhere else in the world. Drawing from local culture and the personalities of those for whom the individual coffins are commissioned, the designs flout worldwide customs of somber funerals. The first one, a pink fish, was made for a fisherman from Accra in the 1950s, and from there the trend took off. Some might represent careers, others vices – you could be buried in a bottle of beer, for example.

Star-Trek Themed Casket

If you’re enough of a Star Trek fan to learn how to speak Klingon, perhaps you’re enough of a fan to be buried in this Star Trek-themed casket inspired by the ‘Photon Torpedo’ design seen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Or, if you’re partial to cremation, there’s always the Star Trek urn.

Coffins with Bells and Whistles – For Indicating That You’re Not Dead

In the centuries before modern medicine made a pronunciation of death much more reliable, people had justifiable fears of being buried alive (which got even worse after Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial.’) Hence the many designs for ‘safety coffins,’ which literally included bells and whistles so if you happened to wake up in the midst of your own burial, you had a chance of getting out alive. Some have handles or strings that can be pulled to activate a signal, while others were mouth-operated. One terrifying spring-loaded ejector coffin will launch you out of the ground (to the heart-stopping terror of anyone who happens to be nearby.) Some cemeteries, like the Williamsport Wildwood, even have escape hatches on the vaults.

Cruisin’ Caskets

Take a stylish ride to your eternal resting place in a ‘Cruisin Casket,’ a car-shaped coffin with functioning wheels that can actually roll down the street. This company will make a custom casket shaped like any model car. It seems like a shame to bury something like this, but if you want to enjoy it for a while before you croak, you can get a cooler insert and use it to keep your drinks on ice.

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Bizarre Burial 20 Of The Worlds Weirdest Coffins