One of the things I promised the Kickstarter backers for Still Wish You Were Here was that I would create a table of contents that interleaved the essays in both volumes of the Adventures in Cemetery Travel books. That way, if anyone was interested, they could follow along on my cemetery adventures in chronological order.
The following list contains the titles and cemeteries from both books. If you’d like to assemble your own omnibus, the books are available from my bookstore or on Amazon, with more vendors coming soon.
Wish You Were Here focuses a little more on cemeteries that are tourist destinations: Pere Lachaise, Gettysburg, the Hiroshima Peace Park and the USS. Arizona Memorial, but it also includes some of my favorite personal essays, especially the visit to the Bethany Lutheran Indian Cemetery, St. Louis, Michigan, when my mom drove us through the outskirts of a tornado.
Still Wish You Were Here leans a little more toward personal or travel essays. It begins with discovering the glorious garden cemetery in Ann Arbor and ends with burying my dad. It also includes tourist cemeteries in Rome, London, Barcelona, Paris, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and the California Gold Country. It includes the story of going to the Bone Chapel of Kutna Hora for my birthday.
The master table of contents:
Summer 1988:
Ann Arbor’s Forest Hill Cemetery
It All Began at Night (**)
Forest Hill Cemetery, Ann Arbor, Michigan
January 1991:
Where Does One Start? (*)
Highgate Cemetery, London
January 1991 & October 1991:
Ornamental Cemeteries (*)
Cimetière du Père Lachaise and Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris
The Empire of Death (*)
Municipal Ossuary, Paris
March 1991:
A Graveyard in the Sky (**)
San Estevan del Rey Churchyard, Acoma Sky City, New Mexico
April 1994:
Curiosity and the Cat (*)
Hasedera Shrine, Kamakura, Japan
April 1994 & Easter Day 1997:
Days of Infamy (*)
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima and USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor
June 1994:
Storybook in Stone (*)
San Francisco National Cemetery, San Francisco, California
May 1995:
Evanescent Heroism (**)
Postman’s Park, London, England
Detail of the Heroes Wall
February 1996:
Short was My Life, Long is My Rest (**)
Iowa Hill Cemetery and Saint Dominic’s Cemetery, Iowa Hill, California
April 1997:
Deep in the Middle of the Sea (*)
Seamen’s Cemetery, Wainee Churchyard, and Keawala’i Churchyard, Maui
August 1997:
Natural Progression (*)
Pioneer Cemetery, Yosemite National Park, California
Heroes of Filmland (*)
Hillside Memorial Park and Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, California
November 1997:
What’s Wrong with Forest Lawn? (*)
Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California
January 1998:
In the Dark (**)
Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California
Basin Street Blues (*)
Saint Louis Cemetery #1, New Orleans
March 1998:
With Folded Wings (*)
Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery, North Hollywood, California
May 1998:
The Great Wallace Shows (**)
Lovejoy Cemetery, Durand, Michigan
October 1998:
Those That Have Graves and Those that Have None (*)
Old Jewish Cemetery and Pinkas Synagogue, Prague
The Ghetto and the Small Fortress (*)
Národní Hrbitov v Terezíne, Terezin, Czech Republic
Loren and Mason in the Bone Chapel
So Shall You Be (**)
Sedlec Ossuary, Kutná Horą, Czech Republic
Although Dead, They Still Speak (*)
Vysehrad Cemetery, Prague
March 1999:
Code of Conduct (**)
Aoyama Reien, Tokyo, Japan
Japanese Ghost Story (*)
Zoshigaya Reien, Tokyo
August 1999:
What I Did on My Summer Vacation (**)
Saint John’s Cemetery & Pioneer Cemetery, Marshall Gold Discovery Park, Coloma, California
September 1999:
Not Fade Away (*)
Jack London State Historic Park, Glen Ellen, California
November 1999:
A Bus Named Cemeteries (*)
Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans
August 2000:
Young Souls and Old Stones (**)
Old City Cemetery, Sacramento, California
Tombstone Tales (*)
Post Cemetery, Sainte Anne’s Catholic Cemetery, and Protestant Cemetery, Mackinac Island, Michigan
Love is Stronger than Blood (**)
Pleasant View Cemetery, Monroe County, Michigan
September 2000:
Good, By God, I’m Going to Bodie (*)
Wards Cemetery, Masonic Cemetery, Miners Union Cemetery, and two unnamed, Bodie State Historic Park, California
April 2001:
What a Piece of Work is Man (**)
Capuchin Catacombs, Church of the Immaculate Conception, Rome, Italy
The Glories of Ancient Rome (**)
The Pantheon and the Mausoleum of Augustus, Rome, Italy
Half in Love with Death (*)
Il Cimitero Acattolico, Rome
The original Angel of Grief, Protestant Cemetery, Rome.
The Original Catacomb (*)
Catacombe di San Sebastiano, Appian Way, Rome
City in Amber (**)
Pompeii Archeological Site, Pompeii, Italy
Permanent Florentines (*)
Il Cimitero degli Inglesi, Florence
A Dream of Melancholy (*)
Il Cimitero di San Michele, San Michele in Isola, Venice
June 2001:
Shades of Forever (*)
Hollywood Forever, Hollywood, California
August 2001:
Piecing History Back Together (*)
Rose Hill Cemetery, Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, Antioch, California
April 2002:
Spooked (**)
Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois
Garden of Graves (*)
Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Here Rests the Dust (*)
King’s Chapel, Granary and Central Burying Grounds, Boston
Death and the Sculptor in Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston
Sculpture Garden (*)
Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston
Morning in Sleepy Hollow (*)
Old Dutch Burying Ground and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, New York
Idyll (**)
Chestnut Hill Cemetery, Glen Rock, Pennsylvania
These Honored Dead (*)
Soldiers’ National Cemetery, Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania
Bringing History to Life (**)
Christ Church Burial Ground, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
“Let Us Have Peace” (*)
General Grant National Memorial and the World Trade Center site, New York City
A Cemetery that Once Rivaled Niagara Falls (*)
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn
June 2003:
Cradle to Grave (*)
Bethany Lutheran Indian Cemetery, St. Louis, Michigan
April 2004:
Celebration Day (**)
The Stanford Tombs, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California
July 2005:
“Such a Pretty Girl” (**)
Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California
June 2011:
The Napoleon of Cemeteries (**)
Napoleon’s Tomb, Les Invalides, Paris, France
November 2011:
Sunny Days and Cemeteries (**)
Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland, Ohio
May 2013:
Shards of History (**)
Mission Dolores Churchyard, San Francisco, California
August 2013:
The Magicians’ Cemetery (**)
Lakeside Cemetery, Colon, Michigan
June 2014:
Wandering to the Gate of Hell (**)
Chinko-ji Rokudo-san Temple, Kyoto, Japan
October 2015:
Surviving the Old Christian Cemetery (**)
Old Christian Cemetery, Singapore City, Singapore
May 2016:
Haunted by the Past (**)
Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison, Wisconsin
June 2016:
In Glorious Highgate Cemetery (**)
Highgate Cemetery, London, England
The Kiss of Death in Poblenou Cemetery, Barcelona.
Kiss of Death (**)
Poblenou Cemetery, Barcelona, Spain
July 2016:
Cemetery Birds (**)
Two Rock Valley Presbyterian Churchyard, Two Rocks, California
August 2016:
Morning in the Churchyard (**)
Saint Mark’s Churchyard, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada
June 2018:
Little Angels (**)
Newtown Village Cemetery, Newtown, Connecticut
February 2019:
Every Day Aboveground (**)
Saint Mary Magdalene Mission Churchyard, Bolinas, California
October 2019:
Visiting Carrie Fisher (**)
Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, Hollywood Hills, California
June 2022:
Relics and Memory (**)
The National AIDS Memorial Grove and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California
March 2023:
The Wayfaring Stranger (**)
Bendle Cemetery, Genesee County, Michigan
(*) Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel by Loren Rhoads
(**) Still Wish You Were Here: More Adventures in Cemetery Travel by Loren Rhoads
In Virginia, we don’t just live among history, we’re steeped in it. You’ll find it on the battlefield trails, woven into the names of streets and towns, and etched into weathered headstones shaded by oaks and dogwoods. Cemeteries here are more than places of mourning; they are places of memory, connection, and, yes, ghost stories.
Gothic Beauty said: “Part history, part travel diary, Rhoads brings the cemeteries she visits to life, peppering historical facts throughout her personal observations. Each of the 36 entries stand alone and can be read in any order, making it an easy book to dip in and out of.”
Booklife said: “Rhoads carves out an unexpected niche by blending travel memoir with ‘cemetery tourism.’ The result is charming, substantive, and surprisingly moving.”
The book opens with me prowling through Forest Hill Cemetery in Ann Arbor and ends with me burying my dad in the spring of 2023. Still Wish You Were Here collects essays I wrote for Gothic Beauty, Gothic.Net, Morbid Curiosity magazine, Cemetery Travel.com, and a dozen that are original to this book.
