Speaker 1: Monster House Presents.
Speaker 2: Let's clean a random grave.
Speaker 3: Who do you think is buried here? Let's clean it
Speaker 3: and find out.
Speaker 4: I have so many questions.
Speaker 2: How old is this grave? It looks like it's been
Speaker 2: here for five hundred years? How this gravee gets so dirty?
Speaker 2: We there's a tree growing out of it.
Speaker 5: I love plants.
Speaker 2: This transformation is extremely hard for me, but I believe
Speaker 2: everyone deserves a beautiful grave.
Speaker 4: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 3: A giant, hairy creature.
Speaker 4: Part eighte part mass in Luckness, a twenty four mile long,
Speaker 4: bottomless lake in the Highlands of Scotland.
Speaker 5: It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 3: Monster Talk. Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
Speaker 3: I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 4: This episode deals with death and cemeteries. The audio at
Speaker 4: the top of this episode was from a YouTube video,
Speaker 4: one in a series and of an entire class of
Speaker 4: cleaning videos that we'll be discussing in today's chat. The
Speaker 4: title of the episodes a play on the original title
Speaker 4: of Edwoods film Plan nine from Outer Space. The original
Speaker 4: title was Grave Robbers from Outer Space. And since we'll
Speaker 4: be discussing grave rubbing and the Internet, I decided to.
Speaker 3: Call it grave rubbers from cyberspace.
Speaker 4: Now, you may find the term cyberspace sounds a bit dated,
Speaker 4: and before we started calling it the Internet or the
Speaker 4: net or that digital hell that I can't escape, it
Speaker 4: was also called the Information super Highway, and of course
Speaker 4: cyberspace and the term cyberspace was coined by William Gibson
Speaker 4: around nineteen eighty two. But that word itself is derived
Speaker 4: from cybernetics, which was coined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener
Speaker 4: in the nineteen forties to describe a field of study
Speaker 4: of communication and systems control, and that got a lot
Speaker 4: of content overlap with Claude Shannon's information theory. Now, Wiener
Speaker 4: was naming the idea after the Greek word kibernetes, which
Speaker 4: means a ship's helm or governor, which is also where
Speaker 4: we get the word gubernatorial. And if you're in it,
Speaker 4: you'll know there's a popular software package called Kubernetes which
Speaker 4: is used to manage our govern server instances of what
Speaker 4: we call containerized applications. You don't need to know any
Speaker 4: of that for the episode, but I always find it
Speaker 4: interesting to see a word rise and fall in usage,
Speaker 4: and to note how the meaning changes over time. For instance,
Speaker 4: right now everyone in the media is calling large language
Speaker 4: models by the letters A and I, but AI researchers
Speaker 4: would not.
Speaker 3: Classify them this way.
Speaker 4: It's sloppy and misleading, and there is nothing we can
Speaker 4: do to fix it, because that's how language works. Language
Speaker 4: does not bow before leaders. It does not stay in
Speaker 4: tidy containers. It describes the ebb and flow of ideas
Speaker 4: an effort to constrain it, or like ordnance against storm
Speaker 4: or earthquake. But I love dusting off a formerly popular
Speaker 4: word and taking it around the block, or maybe scrubbing
Speaker 4: it down with pink foam and then creating it around
Speaker 4: TikTok hmm, maybe not mobstrtal.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us all tonight. Hey Matt, welcome back.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Karen.
Speaker 4: As always, you know this is this is your topic.
Speaker 4: I'm excited and I've sort of put I put peanut
Speaker 4: butter in the chocolate, or I put chocolate and the
Speaker 4: peanut butter.
Speaker 3: Because as soon as you said that you wanted to.
Speaker 4: Talk about this online culture around grave cleaning.
Speaker 3: I immediately went to and what about grave rubbing?
Speaker 4: Because I did that in the eighties and that's really relevant.
Speaker 1: Oh you did. I didn't know you ever did it.
Speaker 1: I know it was.
Speaker 5: It's been a thing on and off, and there could
Speaker 5: be some confusion here. So yeah, we're going to talk
Speaker 5: about a couple of different things. So grave cleaning and
Speaker 5: grave rubbing, but not robbing.
Speaker 1: That's another day, exactly. No grave robbing.
Speaker 3: I'm planning grave rubbers from cyberspace. That's my plan. Nine tie.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's good.
Speaker 1: T lovely lovely.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, this is a kind of complicated topic. But
Speaker 5: I came across an article in The Conversation and it
Speaker 5: was about people who clean the Conversations. Okay, so it
Speaker 5: is a kind of an online magazine, I guess, and
Speaker 5: they say something about their journalistic flair and academic rigor.
Speaker 5: So it is that there are articles written by scholars academics,
Speaker 5: but they are written for a general audience.
Speaker 1: So I do tend.
Speaker 5: I've written for them before, not about this topic, and
Speaker 5: so this article came up for me and I thought
Speaker 5: this sounds interesting. And we've treated a lot of cemetery
Speaker 5: law and topics surrounding cemeteries in the past.
Speaker 2: So I'm sorry, Can I interrupt for one second? Karen,
Speaker 2: I'm so sorry. I just need to ask Blake. When
Speaker 2: a statement such as academic rigor is said in a
Speaker 2: topic about cemeteries, do you have any puns that come
Speaker 2: to mind?
Speaker 1: Because, oh, don't encourage him.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I was sitting here waiting to do something
Speaker 4: with rigor mortis, if that's what you're asking.
Speaker 2: Yes, I just couldn't find it. I couldn't find a
Speaker 2: clean way to do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, no, rigor mortis was I was just sitting
Speaker 4: here waiting. It was loaded up, ready to go. No,
Speaker 4: you're absolutely on point there.
Speaker 6: Okay, I'm so sorry with this stupid.
Speaker 3: She's stiff delivery.
Speaker 5: There it has begun. So yeah, this article, i'd encourage
Speaker 5: people to go and read it. Grave cleaning videos are
Speaker 5: going viral on TikTok. Are they honoring the dead or
Speaker 5: exploiting them? So, yeah, this is a trend and there
Speaker 5: are a number of people who are doing this, but
Speaker 5: they're doing this in different ways. So the article cites
Speaker 5: a woman named Alicia Williams of Virginia, and so her
Speaker 5: angle is more as a kind of historian. She restores
Speaker 5: headstones and she cleans them.
Speaker 1: So we're going to get into that shortly.
Speaker 5: But the other side of the coin is a woman
Speaker 5: by the name of Kaylee Mae McEwan. So her style
Speaker 5: it's a little bit more click bait.
Speaker 1: I guess we can say yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: Now she's known as the clean Girl. And it's so
Speaker 5: funny because I read this article and I said, hey, Matt,
Speaker 5: we're going to watch the Clean Girl on YouTube, and
Speaker 5: so we've got off one of her videos and then
Speaker 5: blade nine year old walks past is like the clean Girl.
Speaker 1: So this is such a thing.
Speaker 5: That even nine year olds know who'she she is. And
Speaker 5: she has four point two million followers on TikTok and
Speaker 5: her video that she puts out she gets millions of views.
Speaker 5: I mean upwards of seventy million views per video. So
Speaker 5: this is a real thing. So her technique, it is
Speaker 5: a little bit questionable. So again, this Alicia Williams, she
Speaker 5: does consult with the families, I believe, and she works
Speaker 5: in with them, gets their permission, works in with the
Speaker 5: caretakers at the cemeteries as well. But this Kaylee McEwan,
Speaker 5: the Clean Girl. She has a kind of pink spiky ball.
Speaker 5: Now did you watch any of these videos?
Speaker 3: Like I can never get that time back, Yes I did.
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm going with it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, did you notice that she had no disclaimers
Speaker 2: about I talked to the cemetery, I told, oh, yeah, yeah, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: there was no disclaimers at all.
Speaker 4: And I mean to be to be fair to her.
Speaker 4: She is the clean girl, not just the graveyard clean girl.
Speaker 4: So she also cleans bathrooms and other stuff, you know,
Speaker 4: a really nasty job, which is fine, but when you
Speaker 4: get into cemeteries and people's remains, there's a lot of
Speaker 4: cultural norms, you.
Speaker 3: Know, that that can be violated here.
Speaker 4: And I think something about her tight fitting exercise gear
Speaker 4: and bright pink soap and the rolling the ball to
Speaker 4: find Whi's grave is going to be grace with her,
Speaker 4: you know, cleaning uh yeah.
Speaker 1: Magic foam. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I just fine, it just I I can't explain why
Speaker 4: I've been thinking about this for days now, why I
Speaker 4: find this so cringe worthy.
Speaker 3: But I totally find it cringeworthy.
Speaker 4: And part of it is I think I don't know
Speaker 4: what's in her soap, and like the preservationist to me
Speaker 4: is concerned that she's not using you know, cemetery safe materials,
Speaker 4: you know, But well that's just me.
Speaker 5: I don't know, well you are, You are right that
Speaker 5: she does clean things other than gravestones. And I saw
Speaker 5: a video that came up and it was her cleaning
Speaker 5: a public restaurant, a restroom in KFC for free. So
Speaker 5: she's really out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's another thing she says, though it's for free,
Speaker 2: and this video only got forty million views.
Speaker 4: Yeah, for free, except for you know free, She's okay,
Speaker 4: just not by the venue right now.
Speaker 2: So there was a lot of clickbait going on. But
Speaker 2: whatever it is, her business is working. You know, she's
Speaker 2: doing well with her business. But we do have to
Speaker 2: be a question.
Speaker 5: Well, she does have her outfit and everything, and we
Speaker 5: don't want to shame her or anything like that.
Speaker 1: That's not what we're talking about.
Speaker 5: But I think it's more a matter of that she
Speaker 5: doesn't seek permission from the cemetery. She doesn't seek permission
Speaker 5: from the families. Now, she has been accused of over
Speaker 5: zealously editing some of her work as well, so I
Speaker 5: guess we should go back to what she does. So,
Speaker 5: as you said, she's got the pink spiky ball and
Speaker 5: she goes to a cemetery and she just rolls the
Speaker 5: ball and it hits a particular grave, and so it's
Speaker 5: meant to be a random thing.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if that's reality or not.
Speaker 5: I don't know if she chooses a grave that she
Speaker 5: wants to work with, or chooses maybe a person or
Speaker 5: a family that have a story that she wants to treat.
Speaker 5: But she throws this ball lands there, and then she
Speaker 5: cleans the grave, and sometimes that can take her five
Speaker 5: six hours. Sometimes she's doing it in scorching hot sun.
Speaker 5: Other times she's cleaning at night at.
Speaker 3: Night, which is super weird to me.
Speaker 4: I mean, not because it's scary, but just because the
Speaker 4: implication is she's sneaking in there doing well.
Speaker 2: And we don't know how that's going to affect her soul.
Speaker 3: Oh well, I don't know that.
Speaker 5: You're right, Yeah, could get an attachment and leave and
Speaker 5: take a ghost home.
Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure that therapy that pink foam will take
Speaker 4: care of that.
Speaker 3: I'm sure. I'm sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it looks a little nuclear. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, Karen, you said something there that I was wondering
Speaker 2: if do we know this for sure? Do we know
Speaker 2: that she's not asking permission or is she just not
Speaker 2: promoting that she does?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I do not know that, and again she's accused of
Speaker 5: a lot of different things like questionable editing and people
Speaker 5: saying that there are lots of privacy issues surrounding this.
Speaker 1: So honestly, I don't know.
Speaker 5: Watching these, you would assume anyway that she's just doing
Speaker 5: this randomly because she talks about cleaning the graves of strangers.
Speaker 5: So I just don't think she's getting permissioned. And when
Speaker 5: she goes in and does this at night, she's jumping
Speaker 5: at every noise that she hears, so it just doesn't
Speaker 5: seem like she's got permission.
Speaker 1: I just heard something weird? Is that a ghost?
Speaker 3: It was not a ghost. I accidentally clicked the link.
Speaker 2: They would tell her. They would say, you could, you
Speaker 2: could clean these ones, but do not touch these ones.
Speaker 2: You can do this, but you can't do that, And
Speaker 2: they would be giving her, you know, a lot of
Speaker 2: rules and guidance that she probably doesn't even want to
Speaker 2: say that she you know, follows, you know, I we
Speaker 2: know how it is to be accused of things online.
Speaker 2: I know that my coworker accuses me of stealing his
Speaker 2: stapler every day, and it does not matter that my
Speaker 2: stuff is impeccably stapled.
Speaker 7: They've moved my desk four times already this year. And
Speaker 7: I used to be over by the window and I
Speaker 7: could see the squirrels and they were married. But then
Speaker 7: they switched from the swing line to the buston Stafler.
Speaker 7: But I kept my swing line stapler because it didn't
Speaker 7: bind up as much, and I kept the staples for
Speaker 7: the swing line stapler.
Speaker 2: The thing is is it doesn't always just because she's
Speaker 2: being accused of it doesn't necessarily mean that she's guilty.
Speaker 5: I think there are kind of indicators that she's not
Speaker 5: seeking permission. And again, because she talks about cleaning the
Speaker 5: graves of strangers, she's doing this at night, and I
Speaker 5: just don't think that she'd get permissioned from any cemetery
Speaker 5: or any council to go.
Speaker 1: And do that.
Speaker 5: I know in Australia there are some cemeteries that are
Speaker 5: just open all the time, but it seems to be
Speaker 5: more of a trend here that you have locks and
Speaker 5: gates and hours usually from I guess sunrise to sunset
Speaker 5: that cemeteries are open. So I just really can't talk
Speaker 5: to that, but it is I think the assumption in
Speaker 5: this article is that Alicia Williams is doing this, she
Speaker 5: does get permission. She tells the stories and the history
Speaker 5: of these people and their families and their life experiences
Speaker 5: and what happened to them. And we're not getting that
Speaker 5: with the clean Well. Instead, she's kind of cracking jokes
Speaker 5: and making assumptions about people, and I mean, I'm just
Speaker 5: really not getting respect from.
Speaker 2: Maybe we ought to keep an eye on this because
Speaker 2: of the fact that for someone who has four point
Speaker 2: two million followers, she's got a ton millions and millions
Speaker 2: of views on each video. That makes her a huge target.
Speaker 2: So if somebody wanted to come after her with any
Speaker 2: kind of lawsuit or anything like that, she is a
Speaker 2: prime target for that. And if she is doing things
Speaker 2: she shouldn't be, we will see that. So I would
Speaker 2: rise open too.
Speaker 5: I would add too that from the examples I've seen,
Speaker 5: we're talking about people who died quite some time ago
Speaker 5: to so we're not talking.
Speaker 1: About recent interments. We're talking about people.
Speaker 2: We're still talking about the cemetery.
Speaker 3: Well, the cemetery.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the fact that the graves she claims tend to
Speaker 4: be the most unkept, which implies there's no next of kin,
Speaker 4: there's no next to kin, nobody's taking a look at it,
Speaker 4: so you know, they don't care.
Speaker 3: It's interesting.
Speaker 4: I mean she her brand is perky and bubbly, I guess,
Speaker 4: and like quite literally bubbly with that pink stuff.
Speaker 1: She's very pink.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I mean she's got that girl next door
Speaker 4: in a you know, tracksuit, you know, or type fitting
Speaker 4: exercise gear kind of vibe. So I mean, I I
Speaker 4: don't think a cemetery in a cemetery, I don't think
Speaker 4: it's hyper sexualized or anything like that.
Speaker 3: But I mean she's definitely going for the cute thing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: she is.
Speaker 5: And I would venture to say that's why she has
Speaker 5: so many followers and so many of her videos are
Speaker 5: watched as.
Speaker 1: Much as they are.
Speaker 5: But that's a good point anyway. Talking about the magic foam, Now,
Speaker 5: it's funny. I always hear late he does something, he says, oh,
Speaker 5: that's so satisfying, and she does that too. She has
Speaker 5: this magic foam. She calls it pink foamy cleanser, and
Speaker 5: she has marketed this. So this stuff maybe it's twenty
Speaker 5: nine nine five, I think a pop and she is
Speaker 5: making a mozza from selling this and from all of
Speaker 5: her social media accounts.
Speaker 1: But it is this bubblegum pink.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 4: It's impressive that it doesn't stain the stone. Honestly, I'm surprised.
Speaker 4: So that's that's good.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the hell's in it.
Speaker 5: What I guess was outlawed by the government in this
Speaker 5: country a red dive sometimes. But the funny thing is
Speaker 5: she has been accused too of editing and that the
Speaker 5: foam is a different color blue or something like that.
Speaker 5: I've seen it using different colored lenses as well, and
Speaker 5: I don't know if that's I mean, she is doing
Speaker 5: layer upon layer of this, and that is another complaint.
Speaker 5: This conversation piece talked about how that could cause damage
Speaker 5: to the graves.
Speaker 3: Well, and I've.
Speaker 4: Seen her use pressure washer and scrub brushes and other brushes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's like, here's the thing, toilet cleaners.
Speaker 4: The stones themselves at cemetery areas are made out of
Speaker 4: different materials, and some of them are hard and sealed,
Speaker 4: and some of them are porous and soft, like limestone. Yeah,
Speaker 4: limestone marble, you know those are pretty and then granite
Speaker 4: is really hard. But you know that's they really needed
Speaker 4: to improve tools to make granite monuments, you know, pretty
Speaker 4: inexpensive so they had to have like really powerful sand
Speaker 4: blasters and other tools and stuff. So I guess my
Speaker 4: point is the older the tombstone is, the more likely
Speaker 4: that they are going to be damaged by a rough cleaning.
Speaker 5: And yeah, and they are filthy, as you say. I mean,
Speaker 5: they're covered in mold. They're covered in fungus and algae
Speaker 5: and lichen and things like that. And so one of
Speaker 5: her claims too, is that she is I'm just trying
Speaker 5: to find the quote that she says to do. She
Speaker 5: says that she's giving them their name back. So she
Speaker 5: because a lot of these you can't even read any
Speaker 5: longer because they're just so covered in endured and felt
Speaker 5: and they're that old.
Speaker 4: Ah.
Speaker 5: But you know, you do have a lot of culture
Speaker 5: around cleaning as well. So there is a lot of
Speaker 5: history of people talking about washing as a kind of
Speaker 5: ritual or a purification process or preparation for the afterlife
Speaker 5: and things like that. And there are a lot of
Speaker 5: people who are doing things that are similar to this too.
Speaker 2: There are even baptism, Yes, that baptism is a washing
Speaker 2: way of sins.
Speaker 5: Feats, that kind of thing. References to Jesus before he
Speaker 5: was crucified, but there are other creators who are doing
Speaker 5: similar things, and I guess they're less hands on. For example,
Speaker 5: there are a number of people who are very successful
Speaker 5: at making recipes found on headstones. I think that's such
Speaker 5: an interesting thing. I mean, I've been to a lot
Speaker 5: of cemeteries over the years in the course of the
Speaker 5: things I've done in skepticism, and I've come across a
Speaker 5: lot of headstones that have a recipe maybe for cookies
Speaker 5: or a cake that a particular person loved to bake and.
Speaker 3: Wanted to just the last thing, I ate, what could
Speaker 3: plus bigger wrong?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the salmon.
Speaker 2: Darling.
Speaker 3: You didn't use canned salmon, did you.
Speaker 5: I didn't even eat the salmon moves. So I think
Speaker 5: that kind of thing is really charming. And I've watched
Speaker 5: some of these videos and there was a lady who
Speaker 5: baked a recipe for cookies that was on a headstone.
Speaker 5: I thought that was really sweet and recorded the process
Speaker 5: was really honoring that the person who died so but again,
Speaker 5: that's not physically touching these headstones. I'm assuming this person
Speaker 5: too did have mission from the families. But again, it's
Speaker 5: this is a really tricky one because I'm sure that
Speaker 5: there would be that a lot of these people who
Speaker 5: are buried there would have living family members, and maybe
Speaker 5: others wouldn't have been the family line would have died
Speaker 5: out with that person or with subsequent generations, and so
Speaker 5: you know, who do you seek permission from?
Speaker 2: From what I've seen? Uh, you know, there there's a
Speaker 2: lot of issues around this when it comes to like
Speaker 2: I said that the Lichens and the fun guy and
Speaker 2: things like that that get on these weaken what.
Speaker 3: Do you think about werewolfs? A lot of Lichens are
Speaker 3: fun guys.
Speaker 1: A yeah, I was waiting for that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, wow, all right, it's it's it is one of
Speaker 6: those things that that that you know, you've got the
Speaker 6: it's a balance because you've got these these.
Speaker 2: Funguses and everything that all fun guy already causing damage. Uh,
Speaker 2: but when you clean all them off, you are clean
Speaker 2: taking off a bunch of that damage with it, and
Speaker 2: it looks like even more damage as being because I
Speaker 2: mean the stone is weakened and everything else. Now when
Speaker 2: it comes to you know, the cemetery, they if they
Speaker 2: see that there's these kind of problems going on, they'll
Speaker 2: reach out and try to locate the surviving family members.
Speaker 2: You know, from the records and try to let them
Speaker 2: know if they can't get a hold of them. Different
Speaker 2: cemeteries have different policies, but they might attempt to repair
Speaker 2: it themselves. If it's beyond repair, they'll probably just remove
Speaker 2: it and store it somewhere. So it's kind of one
Speaker 2: of those things that if it's in a situation where
Speaker 2: you know, the only other alternative is that they're going
Speaker 2: to remove it and store it, well, then maybe they
Speaker 2: might allow her. But if she's not even asking, then
Speaker 2: she is absolutely violating a lot of these cemeteries policies.
Speaker 2: But yeah, a lot of times that the cemeteries will
Speaker 2: replace headstones and stuff like that they can't reach anybody,
Speaker 2: And it just really depends on the situation and how
Speaker 2: involved the cemetery is, because you know, we've all been
Speaker 2: to cemeteries that have no one.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, well I've been to abandon you know, cemeteries
Speaker 4: lost in the woods, and that's where too. Now several
Speaker 4: of her videos she says I found a grave in
Speaker 4: the woods, and it's like, clearly she's at a.
Speaker 3: Cemetery that's like grown up, it's like it's.
Speaker 4: Got it literally has the sort of Stelli marking out
Speaker 4: areas of the cemetery. This is not in the middle
Speaker 4: of a forest that this is in a cemetery that's overgrown.
Speaker 1: Well, that's a.
Speaker 5: Good point too. She never states where she is. She
Speaker 5: doesn't say what town or city states, what the name
Speaker 5: of the cemetery is. It's really but she is promoting,
Speaker 5: you know, her work via on the back of these
Speaker 5: people and exposing their names, talking about references to when
Speaker 5: they died and whatever information is on the headstones too,
Speaker 5: So it is really exposing these people.
Speaker 4: It's it's such a conundrum for someone like me, who
Speaker 4: I don't think anything happens when we die except we
Speaker 4: stop living.
Speaker 1: Oh us too, And I just but I still have.
Speaker 4: A tremendous respect for cemeteries and as a representation of
Speaker 4: lives gone. I mean, I just because their dad doesn't
Speaker 4: mean they need to be forgotten.
Speaker 3: And so I mean it's history. Yeah, it's histortory right there.
Speaker 3: And if your work to.
Speaker 4: Preserve history also destroys it, that's really bad. So the
Speaker 4: vibe is one thing, but is she doing real damage
Speaker 4: as another? Now I don't know on this case, but
Speaker 4: I will tell you this. I did some research and
Speaker 4: I have a couple of pieces of advice if anybody
Speaker 4: in the audience wants to get involved in symmetry cleaning,
Speaker 4: because when you watch these videos, it will make you
Speaker 4: want to clean.
Speaker 3: It really does.
Speaker 4: And that video that you watch, yeah, I mean it
Speaker 4: looked extraordinarily satisfying. And I actually have family members in
Speaker 4: rural cemeteries who.
Speaker 3: Do need upkeep.
Speaker 2: Now we're just trying to sound young and hip.
Speaker 3: Gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 4: But well, I'll tell you the in your county, are
Speaker 4: your state, there are historical societies, and there are parks,
Speaker 4: governance organizations. You can just go to your state or
Speaker 4: local government and find organizations that deal with cemetery rules
Speaker 4: and you'll find there there are groups who already want
Speaker 4: to go help restore cemeteries or keep them maintain cemeteries.
Speaker 4: Now we're not talking about big modern cemeteries where people
Speaker 4: pay thousands of dollars and they have regular upkeep.
Speaker 3: These are small parcels.
Speaker 4: These are you know, we're again it's lost memories, lost
Speaker 4: history where these things are being overgrown.
Speaker 3: Right, They're all over.
Speaker 4: The place in every state as far as I know.
Speaker 4: But if you want to do this work, seek out
Speaker 4: the organizations that already have control of that because they
Speaker 4: are going to give you good guidance and help you
Speaker 4: avoid an ilegal.
Speaker 3: Problems, right, for that's one thing.
Speaker 4: Second of all, make sure that whatever you do is
Speaker 4: not going to harm what's still remaining. For example, in Atlanta,
Speaker 4: we have this huge symmetry called Oakland.
Speaker 3: It's really beautiful.
Speaker 4: It comes from that classic age of massive monuments, beautiful
Speaker 4: Gilded Age.
Speaker 3: It's amazing.
Speaker 4: Well, they have groups that preserve and protect the cemetery,
Speaker 4: but they don't let you just run around and start
Speaker 4: scrubbing stuff. So they have very careful, organized efforts along
Speaker 4: those lines. But one of the things they talked about
Speaker 4: is using a specific kind of cleaner. There's a substance
Speaker 4: it's literally called a graveyard cleaner. It's called d SLASH
Speaker 4: two biological solution, and it's designed to be ecologically safe
Speaker 4: for the monuments and the surrounding landscape. But it will
Speaker 4: break down and remove layers of moss like in dirt
Speaker 4: and other environmental pollutants from the air and the rain.
Speaker 4: You put it on there and then it takes a
Speaker 4: week to two weeks or sometimes even a month, but
Speaker 4: it will dissolve all that goo and leave a clean stone.
Speaker 4: And then they also recommend once you get it started
Speaker 4: and cleaned, you just come back and retreat it once
Speaker 4: a year. And I'll put a link to that in
Speaker 4: the show notes because Oakland, not to the cleaning solush,
Speaker 4: but to the story I took that from.
Speaker 1: It's easy.
Speaker 2: You have to find these slash too, But that sounds satisfying. Yeah,
Speaker 2: to have something clean like that without having to really
Speaker 2: do anything.
Speaker 8: Yeah, to be ecologically safe, ethically safe to preserving the stone,
Speaker 8: and relatively easy to just keep it going by coming
Speaker 8: back once a year. The stuff is fifty dollars a gallon,
Speaker 8: but you water it down so it's not pink.
Speaker 3: Sorry, yeah, never mind, never mind, Yeah, I forget, forget everything.
Speaker 5: Yeah, speaking about colors, I was going to say something, Matt,
Speaker 5: you want to I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: I was just going to say, Blake, you said that
Speaker 2: you had done grave rubbing.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, yeah, well it was a thing. I mean
Speaker 3: it was a thing. Yeah. I talked to my wife
Speaker 3: and she goes, oh, yeah, we did that.
Speaker 4: We went to Savannah and like you know, had to
Speaker 4: like rub old tombstones in one of the Savannah cemeteries.
Speaker 4: There's some beautiful ones in Savannah too.
Speaker 1: But bon a Venture we've talked about that.
Speaker 4: Yes, absolutely and unfortunately, well or maybe fortunately, depending how
Speaker 4: you look at it. Savannah has now banned that you
Speaker 4: have to get special permission to take a grave rubbing
Speaker 4: legally right. They basically just banned it completely. And the
Speaker 4: reason this led me down a rabbit hole and I
Speaker 4: never could find what I considered to be a satisfactorily
Speaker 4: definitive answer, because the question was is grave rubbing detrimental
Speaker 4: to the tombstone? And the answer it varies all over
Speaker 4: the country. There's different people who have different opinions. The
Speaker 4: general idea that you could take a piece of paper,
Speaker 4: put it on a stone and rub it with a
Speaker 4: crayon and that would somehow damage the stone sounds crazy
Speaker 4: to me, but I'm used. I'm used to newer stones
Speaker 4: that are not fragile, and where they've been banned pretty
Speaker 4: widespread is in New England, where the stones are often
Speaker 4: made out of much softer and much older stones like slate,
Speaker 4: you know, which is fading fast and you know old marble,
Speaker 4: these things, and they are thin upright stones, and if
Speaker 4: you're pressing on them, you could easily make them tip
Speaker 4: over and then break, which would absolutely be that you know,
Speaker 4: if you're dealing with slate in particular, that's oh my gosh,
Speaker 4: it's so fragile.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But so if you're in Massachusetts, I would say don't
Speaker 4: try this because it does appear to be illegal there.
Speaker 4: Same in Savannah, and there's take your local ordinances, is
Speaker 4: what I'm getting at.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say
Speaker 5: that you would want to chick in with local authorities
Speaker 5: about it because it's going to really be a state
Speaker 5: driven thing. And I looked into it in Australia to
Speaker 5: where a lot of those headstones for white people in
Speaker 5: terms of burial grounds, they're going to be no when
Speaker 5: you're as old as some of the ones that you'll
Speaker 5: have here in some parts of the country, so they're
Speaker 5: going to be going back a couple of hundred years.
Speaker 5: So it doesn't seem like there are any specific laws
Speaker 5: in Australia that's implicitly prohibit brave rubbing, but at the
Speaker 5: same time it seems to be considered to be disrespectful
Speaker 5: and it's really discouraged by a lot of cemetery authorities.
Speaker 5: So they want you to seek out prior mission and
Speaker 5: to document and photograph headstones and to do that instead
Speaker 5: of actually rubbing them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's been the alternative that I've personally gone for.
Speaker 2: It's been photography, and it's I think it's fantastic because
Speaker 2: you get a much better representation of it. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: not as satisfying though.
Speaker 4: I even saw sites recommending you get a higher end
Speaker 4: iPhone and do a light our scan. I'm like, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's not happening. But I mean it does sound very
Speaker 4: cool though, yeah it does.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I still I have mixed feelings about this because again.
Speaker 4: I did grave rubbing, and I know a lot of
Speaker 4: people who are into genealogy like to, and I used
Speaker 4: to be.
Speaker 3: You used to see it on people's walls.
Speaker 4: You'd come into their houses and they'd have framed, you know,
Speaker 4: stones from their own family or whatever, you know, these rubbings.
Speaker 3: And I haven't seen that in years.
Speaker 4: And I'm just wondering when it kind of died out,
Speaker 4: because it does not seem to be nearly.
Speaker 3: As popular as it used to be.
Speaker 5: But I'm wondering, well, this is still a popular thing
Speaker 5: to some extent. And what I find interesting is are
Speaker 5: the people who have websites about this, and they do
Speaker 5: this because.
Speaker 1: They're historians or folklorists or.
Speaker 5: Something like that, and when they do tell you the
Speaker 5: story of the person that is buried beneath. And some
Speaker 5: of these sites that I've looked at have been very
Speaker 5: touching too. And I remember reading about one little boy
Speaker 5: who was six years old and died on Christmas Day
Speaker 5: back in nineteen thirty five, died of meningitis. So we
Speaker 5: should probably put some kind of content warning in this
Speaker 5: episode too, some of the nature some of the things
Speaker 5: we're talking about. I do think it's really important. This
Speaker 5: is one thing that the clean Girl does not do,
Speaker 5: and that is she doesn't talk about the family. She
Speaker 5: doesn't talk about the history or to present these peoples
Speaker 5: as people any longer or who once lived lives. It's
Speaker 5: really just a kind of an object.
Speaker 1: She's kind of defined them and what.
Speaker 2: She's doing she does, but only if she can do
Speaker 2: it in acutey way.
Speaker 3: Right, I would just.
Speaker 4: Say this, I would be dead, so it wouldn't matter.
Speaker 4: But if she came in to change my bedpan or
Speaker 4: like help me in a nursing home and was that perky,
Speaker 4: I would lose my mind.
Speaker 2: Just go away, leave me to my misery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm old. I can't take your level of happiness
Speaker 3: stop it.
Speaker 5: I do think that the point with this should be,
Speaker 5: you know, no matter what you're doing, whether it's grave
Speaker 5: cleaning or rubbing, that you should be honoring these people.
Speaker 1: And Matt and I have had a lot of.
Speaker 5: Experiences dealing with various ghost hunting groups and going on
Speaker 5: cemetery tours that where they really do show some terrible disrespect.
Speaker 3: You helped me.
Speaker 4: Let me do your story just a second, give me
Speaker 4: just you gave me the perfect words. I've been trying
Speaker 4: to wrap my words around my feelings and I couldn't
Speaker 4: get there. It's performative and disingenuous. That's the vibe she
Speaker 4: gives me. Nicely said, yeah, you just helped me get
Speaker 4: those words wrapped around my feelings. So now I have that,
Speaker 4: you can go back. So I do want to hear
Speaker 4: your story.
Speaker 5: I think that really reflects our feelings too from watching
Speaker 5: some of her videos. But yeah, some of these dodgy
Speaker 5: cemetery practices that Matt and I have seen. We went
Speaker 5: on a ghost tour of a cemetery in Manitou Springs.
Speaker 1: It's kind of what near Colorado Springs.
Speaker 4: But Yes, and managecent Rings did a dwarf pop out
Speaker 4: of a lady's back and attack Tony Curtis with lasers.
Speaker 5: And again that's another episode, I think. But Matt, do
Speaker 5: you want to tell the story of how we came
Speaker 5: across this group?
Speaker 2: I really want to do a dotes on nine two.
Speaker 2: Anyway we should. Yeah. So, yes, we heard that this
Speaker 2: group was going to be doing these tours and we decided, well,
Speaker 2: let's sign up and go.
Speaker 5: Well, you were actually contacted by some of the members
Speaker 5: of the board, yes, of.
Speaker 2: The board, the cemetery board, yes, and they were concerned
Speaker 2: about what was going on, you know, while this group
Speaker 2: was doing this, because nobody from the cemetery was there
Speaker 2: at the time to really monitor them, and they were
Speaker 2: a little concerned. So they did let us know about it.
Speaker 2: So we went down there, and you know, we're allowed
Speaker 2: to come along. Of course, the people given the tour
Speaker 2: did not know who we were, which is always fun
Speaker 2: to be under cover. So we had to pay yes,
Speaker 2: well actually actually we didn't. We had tickets, but we
Speaker 2: didn't have to pay because they the Cemetery Board, took
Speaker 2: care of that. But we uh got down there. Karen's
Speaker 2: wearing flip flops and everything, and The first thing they
Speaker 2: let us know is about all the rattlesnakes that we
Speaker 2: could come across in the cemetery. So she is like,
Speaker 2: why the f am I here?
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we had to sign disclaimers to to say
Speaker 5: if we got bitten that we wouldn't.
Speaker 1: Sue them anything or die going downhill from here.
Speaker 3: I thought you would just fill at home, not with rattlesnakes.
Speaker 4: In Australia, we keep the rattlesnakes and check with our spiders.
Speaker 2: It was a brown snake or something to be fine'd.
Speaker 1: Be best friends. But rattlesnakes.
Speaker 3: They're so noisy.
Speaker 1: But we we were warned about that.
Speaker 5: And I mean there was absolutely no history on this
Speaker 5: tour whatsoever. It was just all ghost stories and the
Speaker 5: people people were recordings.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, there was a lot of the typical ghost
Speaker 2: hunting shenanigans going on. But they would come up to
Speaker 2: a headstone that had a name that sounded maybe the
Speaker 2: least bit ethnic, and they would say, oh, she was
Speaker 2: a witch.
Speaker 1: You know, and yes I forgot that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, get some kind of crappy thing there. And then
Speaker 2: you know, in between all this is there's there's no
Speaker 2: restrooms on the tours, so we just asked that you
Speaker 2: don't urinate on the graves.
Speaker 7: Mmmm.
Speaker 2: Okay, well yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 5: But yeah, we heard about people who were stealing as
Speaker 5: souvenirs trinkets that were left on graves, so things like
Speaker 5: little toys or flags or just moments too's other things
Speaker 5: and turning them around selling them on eBay e'ss that
Speaker 5: kind of thing.
Speaker 1: There's been quite a big market for that sort of
Speaker 1: thing for haunted supposed haunted objects. A lot of TV.
Speaker 5: Shows that we've discussed in the past where they do
Speaker 5: that kind of thing. So, yeah, there was they were
Speaker 5: allowing a lot of things to go on there that
Speaker 5: were doesn't matter what your religious beliefs are, we're extremely
Speaker 5: disrespectful and criminal.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well we talked about that on the stole Kansas grave
Speaker 4: where or the cemetery where they think there's the folklore
Speaker 4: has it there's a gateway to Hell there and people
Speaker 4: will go there there is no gate and they get disappointed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's Kansas. Are saying that there's some truth to it.
Speaker 4: What Kansas is No, No, kan It was a lovely town.
Speaker 4: It did leave me feeling a little flat, but I
Speaker 4: mean it was a lovely town.
Speaker 3: But no, they had it. They they were because of
Speaker 3: the folklore, really have trouble speaking. Because of the folklore.
Speaker 4: People were going there expecting Satan to appear on Halloween night.
Speaker 4: He never appeared, but they would get mad and they
Speaker 4: would break tombstones and steal tombstones and all this stuff.
Speaker 4: It was like it was a real It was an
Speaker 4: absolute nightmare because the town still had people who that
Speaker 4: was their relatives and these vandals.
Speaker 3: Were you know, it's heartbreaking.
Speaker 4: It's also economically challenging because those are very expensive. Uh
Speaker 4: and you know you don't put it in your budget.
Speaker 4: Don't forget to replace Grandpa's headstone when the looters come
Speaker 4: every Halloween.
Speaker 5: So yeah, but with this group anyway, there was a
Speaker 5: happy ending in that we had them banned wow from
Speaker 5: doing further to us. Sir, Yes, there we go at.
Speaker 3: That was cool.
Speaker 2: But you know, I have to say that, you know,
Speaker 2: just visiting cemeteries is you know, in all of the
Speaker 2: trips we take, we always liked to visit the local
Speaker 2: cemetery and just you know, cemeteries are just incredibly beautiful
Speaker 2: and it's such a connection with history that it gives you, it.
Speaker 4: Gives it gives you that interesting sort of snapshot. I
Speaker 4: mean it's not perfect, but it gives you a nice
Speaker 4: snapshot of how long have these people been here?
Speaker 5: You know, absolutely, and you might have some recipes as well.
Speaker 4: Well, do you have a recipe in mind, Karen, because
Speaker 4: I want to put that in the show notes if
Speaker 4: you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the cookies one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'll find that and send it.
Speaker 4: Well, this has been I mean, it has been an
Speaker 4: interesting topic. I mean, I normally we come down on
Speaker 4: this is real, this fate, but this is more of
Speaker 4: a question of taste, I guess, ethics, and I'd be
Speaker 4: interested to get some you know, thoughts from the listeners
Speaker 4: because we don't usually have these sort of thought provoking
Speaker 4: episodes where.
Speaker 3: What do you think? But here we are what do
Speaker 3: you think? I'm really curious, you know.
Speaker 2: Most of the episodes are just cracked.
Speaker 3: No, this one is great.
Speaker 4: I was on it.
Speaker 3: So a lot of.
Speaker 4: Times we're just trying to save people time, you know.
Speaker 4: You know, if you want to know the defendive answer,
Speaker 4: we may not know, but we'll sure do a good
Speaker 4: job of trying to dig it up.
Speaker 1: Yeah I got that one.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I think we've talked a lot in the
Speaker 5: past about visiting cemeteries and how they used to be
Speaker 5: more like parks and people would go to have picnics
Speaker 5: and that was the norm. So I think people still
Speaker 5: do things like that, and like Matt and myself, we
Speaker 5: like to visit these places. And it doesn't matter again,
Speaker 5: what your religious persuasion is or not. I think that
Speaker 5: you do need to respect the living and their memories
Speaker 5: of these people.
Speaker 4: All Right, I guess that's probably enough on this topic,
Speaker 4: don't you think I think we got I think we
Speaker 4: got this one covered pretty well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, let's bury it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, Well we've left our mark and we'll
Speaker 4: move on.
Speaker 3: Okay, Monster, you've been listening to Monster Talk, the science
Speaker 3: show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 4: You just heard a discussion with Blake and Karen and
Speaker 4: Matt Baxter about the ethics and best practices around cemetery
Speaker 4: maintenance and grave rubbing. I found it to be an
Speaker 4: interesting topic, an interesting discussion, interesting chat.
Speaker 3: But maybe you'd like to chime in yourself. We'd love
Speaker 3: to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 4: I'm sure there will be discussions on Patreon and Facebook
Speaker 4: as well as on our Discord server, and I look
Speaker 4: forward to hearing what our Monster talkers think about this.
Speaker 4: You're listening to the commercial supported version of this show,
Speaker 4: so I'm going to quickly plug some of the stuff
Speaker 4: that Karen and I have been working on. Don't forget
Speaker 4: Karen's latest book titled Bitch The Journey of a Word.
Speaker 4: It's out in bookstores right now. It's more than an etymology.
Speaker 4: And Joe nichols book The Science of Monsters, which was
Speaker 4: the first book produced by Monster House Publishing, that's out
Speaker 4: in bookstores or on Amazon. And the early bird sale
Speaker 4: for the Skeptoid Cruise the Bermuter Triangle, which I will
Speaker 4: be a guest talker on. That sale is over, but
Speaker 4: there are still a few cabine remainings, so check the
Speaker 4: show notes if you want to join us on that.
Speaker 3: That'll be fun.
Speaker 4: Monster talk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
Speaker 3: Oh, good grief. Another update to my editing software?
Speaker 4: Well what if I don't want to update us?
Speaker 5: M hmm.
Speaker 1: This has been a Monster House presentation