Classic Hearse Show

We attended a Hearse Show at the Laurel Hill Cemetery last weekend.  Beautiful event on a breezy summer day.  So many gorgeous hearses, so many hilarious decorations.

We entered a raffle to win a full-size heavy metal casket - bright orange with black handles.  The real deal for any Halloween-loving corpse.  I have never been so relieved by not winning something.  In theory, a heavy orange casket seems appealing and exciting.  But then you try to imagine where it'll live in your house.  Using it as a coffee table is always a neat thing, but I already have one (a coffee table) that I dig, and this was the kind with a rounded lid (not a coffin)...  my drinks would slide onto the carpet.  Plus, at 220 pounds, it'd be a pain to move around.  Not to mention anything about getting it home from the cemetery without a hearse.  Or pallbearers.

Sometimes I'm a buzzkill.

Here are some photos we took at the event. 

Market Of The Macabre 2021

In late 1835, John Jay Smith, a Quaker and librarian, recorded in his diary: “The City of Philadelphia has been increasing so rapidly of late years that the living population has multiplied beyond the means of accommodation for the dead…on recently visiting Friends grave yard in Cherry Street I found it impossible to designate the resting place of a darling daughter, determined me to endeavor to procure for the citizens a suitable, neat and orderly location for a rural cemetery.”

Smith’s very personal experience ultimately had very public implications, as less than one year later, this grieving father founded Laurel Hill Cemetery with partners Nathan Dunn, Benjamin W. Richards and Frederick Brown. When Smith conceived of Laurel Hill, he envisioned something fundamentally different from the burial places that came before it, and the site has continued to hold an important place of distinction as one of the first cemeteries of its kind. Key concepts to Laurel Hill’s founding were that it had to be situated in a picturesque location well outside the city; that it had no religious affiliation; and that it provided a permanent burial space for the dead in a restful and tranquil setting.

On May 21, 2022, I attended my first Market of the Macabre.  The street air temperature was 103 degrees.  The complaining was abundant and often.  But it was a market, in the middle of a beautiful cemetery.  And it was a ton of fun.  And I walked away with some cool stuff.

Here's a photo dump of the experience.  I'd definitely go again.  

My new stuff...

Laurel Hill Cemetery's site.