Cemetery Stories:

Haunted Graveyards, Embalming Secrets, and the Life of a
Corpse After Death

by Katherine Ramsland (published by HarperCollins)

Funeral Homes Chapter

While it was great to get a tour, I wondered what it must be like to
actually grow up in such a place. To my mind, it had to be strange.

Blair Murphy, the son of two funeral directors, was willing to tell me
something about that. "When I was a little kid," he said, "the school asked
each of us to write what our fathers did for a living. I wrote, 'My dad
paints dead people's lips,' and it got printed in the town paper. That was
my first press quote."

A filmmaker, he'd produced jugular Wine and Black Pearls, in which he
expressed his perspective on the attraction to spirituality and death.
Since his parents were both in the death-care business and his father was
the county coroner, discussions about corpses around the dinner table were
commonplace. Thus, Blair was exposed early to macabre subjects.

Blair, who is in his mid-thirties, has traveled extensively and now lives in
California. Meeting him was rather disarming. Despite a closely shaved
head that indicated a certain degree of social rebellion, his face was
rather wide-eyed and cherubic. To see his films, I accompanied him to his
apartment one October afternoon.

I was struck right away with the museum-like aura. On every wall and in
every corner I could see the evidence of Blair's trips to places such as
Egypt and New Orleans. I looked around at the exotic paintings, sphinx
tapestries, and framed poster of King Tutankhamen's golden burial mask.
>From his father, Blair had gotten a casket with a glass top that he used for
a coffee table. His mother had given him a stuffed coyote to enhance his
taxidermy collection of "low-maintenance pets."

Gesturing around the room, he smiled and asked, "Where do you think these
things come from?" Before I could answer, he said, "Obviously having been
raised among the dead has influenced me. And none of it's spooky to me. I
think of it all as beautiful...like the gleam of the gold by candlelight in
the night."

He invited me to sit down, and I soon learned that his father had been a
funeral director for almost forty years. It was all the man had ever wanted
to be, and he'd hoped that his son would follow suite. Like many an
undertaker's son before him, Blair had helped place bodies into coffins, but
ultimately the funeral trade had not gripped him.

"Being raised in a funeral home never seemed odd to me as a child," he
commented. "In my early teens, it got to be a drag because it was such a
conservative business. I was always being asked to smile and look nice for
the cameras when, really, I was ungodly angry and rebellious. All I wanted
to do was move to Los Angeles and become degenerate."

"But you don't seem bothered by it now," I pointed out.

"By my late teens I thought it was actually pretty cool and even a great
honor to have been raised in such a rare environment as a funeral home."

"So what about how you lived?" I pressed. "Wasn't it strange to know there
were bodies in the same building where you were sleeping?"

"The funeral-home aspect was just a house," he responded, "but embalming and
being around dead people was interesting. I can remember being alone often
with dead people and staring for long periods of time into the partially
cracked eyelids. I dared myself to see how long I could stare, with the
thought that if their eyes moved even for a speck, it would forever alter my
sense of reality. That was kind of thrilling."

Blair mentioned he had a sister, Donna, who was affected differently. "She
doesn't feel the same way about death that I do, but we've both had many
dreams where dead bodies wake up and speak to us or chase us or confront
us."

Rather than tell me he story, he introduced me to her, so I was able to
learn about growing up in a funeral home from both perspectives, male and
female, brother and sister. Nineteen months separates them, and Donna feels
that she's "all business." It was her father's position as coroner that
most influenced her, so after college she became a private investigator.

"The job of coroner was often high profile," she said. "It wasn't unusual
to see my father on television or in the newspapers. As a child, I took
great pride when I saw him being interviewed about a recent unattended
death. When I knew that he would be called into a case, I would comb the
newspapers and absorb everything I could get my hands on about the case."

She agrees with Blair that they could not have turned out to be more
different. While he ponders reincarnation and accepts a person's demise,
Donna feels that people who die have paid the ultimate price. "I cry for
the dead. I honor them by attending their funerals. I feel a genuine sense
of loss."

While growing up in that environment, certain experiences made a deep
impression, in particular the local murder of a child.

"There was this nine-year-old girl," Donna recalled. "She had been sexually
assaulted and murdered by a twenty-something-year-old neighbor. For days,
the girl's disappearance had been a top news story, and in typical media
fashion, the details of her life had been published at length. As an
eight-year-old, I was so fascinated by the story that I read every account
available. I remember reading about her favorite games and toys, about her
family and about the time leading up to her disappearance. I read so much
that I felt as if I'd actually known her. Then when her body was discovered
about a week later, my father was called on as the coroner to retrieve it
and then later, as funeral director. I couldn't believe that this girl, who
I knew so much about and whose death had been so publicly reported, was
being brought back to our house for preparation.

"When she was finally dressed and laid out, I recall that I stood over her
casket for a very long time. This was the first time that I had ever seen a
small white casket and I thought it was appropriate for her. She looked
beautiful in her pale pink dress and matching painted fingernails. but I
was also deeply afraid. I remember thinking that I did not want to turn
nine because I was scared that such a gruesome demise would happen to me."

It's clear Donna will continue to be fascinated with crime, while Blair
expects to move more deeply into innovative projects that involve themes of
death. He's even set up his own Web site, TheCemetery.Net, to put them on
display. "I'm delighted to have this mortuary background naturally in me,"
Blair said, "It's created me. And now I'm just taking certain aspects of
this culture in a different direction."

For me, it was quite interesting to see how two children from the same
death-care-centered environment had developed such contrasting, yet
complimentary lifestyles.