By JT Santana

Cemeteries are supposed to be solemn places. At least that is the cultural agreement most of us inherited. We lower our voices, walk carefully between the stones, read the names of people we never knew, and instinctively recognize that somebody standing quietly beside one particular grave probably does not want to hear us debating where to eat lunch.

Then you encounter a headstone shaped like a Ouija board, and the entire mood shifts.

Elsewhere, you might find an enormous bronze angel that has spent more than a century gathering a dark patina and an even darker collection of Iowa City legends. In France, Jules Verne appears to be physically breaking out of his own grave. One comedian arranged to leave a final punch line on his stone, and one grieving widower decided a single statue of himself and his wife did not adequately communicate his feelings, so he commissioned eleven.

At that point, cemetery restraint has clearly met resistance.

Humans have never been content merely to bury or cremate our dead and walk away. We mark the place, name the person, decorate the site, carve symbols, erect statues, preserve photographs, and write words intended to travel further into the future than we will. Early American gravestones carried skulls, winged faces, angels, hourglasses, flowers, hands, and other symbols tied to mortality, faith, resurrection, family, and the passage of time. Later cemetery sculpture grew into an avenue for grief, consolation, status, art, storytelling, and public memory (Mills, 2014; Neal & Parker, 1968).

A strange grave marker is more than a cemetery curiosity. At its best, it pushes back against what death can do to biography. A lifetime filled with childhood, mistakes, loves, jobs, obsessions, grudges, friendships, bad jokes, favorite songs, illnesses, private victories, and thousands of ordinary days gets reduced to a name, two dates, and a dash.

The people featured here, or the people who remembered them, appear to have looked at that arrangement and decided the dash needed help.

A Grave Marker Has an Impossible Assignment

A conventional headstone can be deeply moving. Simplicity does not mean emptiness, and a name accompanied by six words may carry tremendous emotional weight for the people who know the stories attached to it. “Beloved Mother,” “Devoted Husband,” or a short religious verse can hold layers of meaning invisible to a stranger passing through.

The difficulty begins when we expect the stone itself to explain a human life. It cannot. No slab of granite, regardless of size, can contain childhood, marriages, failures, private jokes, friendships, disappointments, work, grief, pleasures, habits, or the thousand contradictions that make a person recognizable.

That limitation has long shaped cemetery art. Smithsonian research on early New England gravestones documents an extensive visual language through which stonecutters expressed ideas about mortality, salvation, resurrection, and memory. These images were not merely decoration. They helped communicate beliefs about who the dead had been and what might happen after death (Neal & Parker, 1968).

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American funerary sculpture could become highly elaborate. Art historian Cynthia Mills describes Gilded Age cemetery monuments as objects connected to sorrow, consolation, artistic ambition, class, mystery, and public memory. The person occupied the grave, but the monument continued speaking to everyone who remained above ground (Mills, 2014).

Modern memorials have broadened the vocabulary further. Granite can now carry photographs, landscapes, vehicles, pets, hobbies, musical instruments, occupations, sports imagery, recipes, jokes, and scenes from ordinary life. The effect can look eccentric to someone outside the family and completely logical to the people who knew the deceased.

A fishing rod carved into stone may seem oddly specific until you learn that Saturday mornings on the river were where a father and daughter had their best conversations. A sewing machine may look unusual until you discover that the woman beneath the stone spent fifty years making prom dresses, wedding gowns, Halloween costumes, and emergency repairs for half the neighborhood. A tractor can look excessive to someone who never met the farmer whose identity was inseparable from the land.

That is where many unusual grave markers become interesting. Weird does not automatically mean meaningless, and unusual does not mean disrespectful. Some markers look strange precisely since the person being remembered never fit comfortably inside a standard template.

The family is not merely choosing a stone. They are trying to answer a far harder question: how much of this person can we keep visible?

Jules Verne Apparently Declined to Stay Dead Politely

If anyone was going to receive a grave that looked like an escape scene, Jules Verne was an excellent candidate.

Verne died in Amiens, France, on March 24, 1905, and was buried several days later. His grave initially carried a comparatively simple marker. His family later commissioned sculptor Albert Roze, who had known Verne, to create something far more dramatic (Amiens Métropole, n.d.).

The resulting work is titled Vers l’immortalité et l’éternelle jeunesse, commonly translated as “Toward Immortality and Eternal Youth.” The sculpture depicts Verne lifting the stone above him, emerging from his grave, and reaching one arm into the sky.

That is a considerable escalation from a rectangular plaque.

Roze first produced the work in plaster, and a marble version was placed on Verne’s grave in 1907. The monument has held protected historic status since 1995, and Amiens identifies it as one of the most striking memorials in La Madeleine Cemetery (Amiens Métropole, n.d.).

The imagery carries an obvious message about artistic immortality. Verne’s physical life ended, but his work continued. The author who spent his career carrying readers under oceans, beneath the Earth, across continents, and into imagined technological futures is shown crossing one final boundary.

Death, apparently, needed a better lid.

The memorial succeeds in part since it does more than tell us who Verne was. It interprets him. Someone who knows little about his biography can still read movement, ambition, imagination, and defiance in the sculpture.

That is one of the great strengths of highly personal cemetery art. A conventional inscription can identify a person, but a strong visual memorial can tell a stranger how the person was understood. The artwork becomes compressed biography.

There is another element that makes the Verne monument unforgettable. Cemeteries are usually defined by stillness, and grave markers reinforce that feeling through heavy materials, formal poses, and fixed architecture. Roze creates the opposite impression. Verne appears to be pushing, climbing, reaching, and moving through the stone itself.

For a writer associated with extraordinary voyages, impossible machines, and human curiosity, the theatricality feels appropriate. Jules Verne did not receive a tasteful little book carved into the corner of a marker. He received what looks remarkably like the opening frame of a resurrection adventure.

Iowa City’s Black Angel: When Grief Becomes Folklore

Iowa does not need to borrow all of its strange cemetery stories from somewhere else.

Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City contains one of the state’s best-known funerary monuments: the Black Angel. Oakland Cemetery dates to 1843 and now covers roughly 40 acres. Among generations of local residents, public figures, university leaders, and families stands an imposing bronze angel connected to the Feldevert family and surrounded by more than a century of legend (City of Iowa City, n.d.).

The documented story is already compelling without any supernatural additions.

Teresa Dolezal Feldevert was born in 1836 in what was then Bohemia. According to Iowa City’s cemetery history, she later became a physician and moved with her son, Eddie Dolezal, to Iowa City, where she worked as a midwife. Eddie died of meningitis in 1891 at only eighteen years old, and Teresa had a tree-stump-style monument placed at his grave.

She later moved west and married Nicholas Feldevert, who died in 1911. Teresa returned to Iowa City and commissioned Bohemian-born sculptor Mario Korbel to create a major bronze memorial associated with the burial place of her son and the ashes of her husband. The angel arrived in Iowa City by rail in November 1912, though historical accounts differ over whether it was installed immediately or remained in storage during a dispute between Teresa and the sculptor (City of Iowa City, n.d.).

Teresa died in 1924, and her ashes joined the family.

Then the bronze began changing color.

The dark appearance that eventually gave the monument its famous nickname developed through oxidation and weathering. Bronze exposed to the elements undergoes chemical changes that alter its surface color, and the once-lighter monument gradually took on the darker finish that now makes it visually unmistakable.

That explanation is scientifically sufficient. Generations of Iowa City students apparently decided it was not nearly interesting enough.

Over time, stories accumulated around the Black Angel. Versions of the folklore claim that touching it, kissing it, or interacting with it under particular conditions can bring bad luck, shortened life, or death. The exact details change depending upon who is telling the story, how old they were when they first heard it, and how close the clock happens to be to midnight.

The Daily Iowan documented versions claiming that touching the statue at midnight could leave someone with only seven years to live. Other stories turned Teresa herself into a sinister character, attaching accusations and supernatural motives that have little connection to the documented woman who lived, worked, grieved, married, and buried her child (Flair, 2014).

That transformation is one of the most interesting aspects of the monument.

The Black Angel began as an expression of grief and family memory. A mother lost her eighteen-year-old son and later commissioned an extraordinary object for the family burial place. Over time, weather changed the bronze, strangers supplied supernatural explanations, and folklore gradually obscured the woman behind the monument.

The Daily Iowan examined that problem directly, contrasting the sinister stories told about Teresa with historical evidence that presents a far more complicated person. Accounts of her charitable actions and provisions in her will sit awkwardly beside the mythology that eventually turned her into a frightening cemetery figure (Flair, 2014).

The result is a powerful reminder that memorials do not always preserve memory accurately. They can reshape it. A monument can outlive everyone who knew the people involved and begin generating stories that the deceased never intended.

The Black Angel now belongs partly to Iowa City folklore. Students hear about it, photographers seek it out, visitors stop to see it, and residents who may know little about Teresa Feldevert still recognize the monument. What began as private family grief became a public symbol with its own mythology.

There is something sad in that shift, but it is fascinating too. Teresa wanted a monument capable of enduring long after her own life ended. She received one, though the memorial acquired a personality no one involved could have predicted.

Elijah Bond Put a Ouija Board on the Guest List

Elijah Bond’s grave takes the connection between biography and memorial design in a direction almost too perfect to be true.

Bond was connected to the early commercial and patent history of the talking board that became known as Ouija. He died in 1921 and was buried at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. His grave remained unmarked for decades until Ouija historian Robert Murch located it in 2007 after an extended search and later helped arrange for a memorial with permission from Bond’s descendants (Bond, n.d.).

One side of the marker appears fairly conventional.

The other resembles a Ouija board.

Letters arc across the stone, numbers appear below them, and the familiar “Yes,” “No,” and “Good Bye” are worked into the design. For anyone aware of Bond’s history, the connection is immediate.

There are quieter ways to acknowledge a person’s involvement with an invention. An occupation could have been listed. A small symbolic engraving would have done the job. Instead, visitors receive what appears to be a communications interface installed directly at the grave.

I cannot decide whether that is brilliant, unnerving, funny, or all three at once.

The design works since it is connected directly to Bond’s life. Without the historical association, a Ouija-board headstone could look like novelty decoration. With the context, it becomes biographical shorthand.

A visitor who knows nothing about Bond can see the board and immediately ask why it is there. That question leads to the patent, the history of talking boards, Bond’s burial, the rediscovery of the grave, and the memorial created decades after his death.

A standard marker might identify Bond and end the encounter. This one starts a conversation.

That may be one of the best arguments for unusual grave markers. They can make strangers curious about dead people who otherwise would remain names in stone.

Just use restraint before asking Elijah for lottery numbers.

John Milburn Davis Chose Eleven Statues and Rejected Subtlety

Then we get to Kansas.

Mount Hope Cemetery in Hiawatha contains the Davis Memorial, created by John Milburn Davis after his wife Sarah died in 1930. A simple family marker apparently failed to satisfy Davis, so he commissioned something far larger.

The finished memorial eventually included a massive granite canopy and eleven marble or granite figures depicting John and Sarah at different points in their lives. The group includes seated and standing representations, an angelic figure connected to Sarah, and an empty stone chair that evokes absence (City of Hiawatha, n.d.; Kansas Historical Society, n.d.).

Eleven statues creates a different category of mourning.

At some point, the monument stops saying, “I miss my wife,” and starts saying, “We are going to need engineering drawings.”

The project became controversial during the Great Depression. Local residents and civic leaders encouraged Davis to direct some of his wealth toward community needs, including proposals associated with a hospital and swimming pool. Davis declined and continued spending money on the memorial.

Journalist Ernie Pyle later interviewed him, and local historical accounts preserve Davis’s insistence that the money belonged to him and that he intended to spend it as he chose. The story becomes more complicated when the same local history records accounts of Davis quietly providing financial help to people in need (City of Hiawatha, n.d.).

That complication makes the memorial far more interesting than a simple story about eccentric wealth. Davis can be read as extravagant, stubborn, grieving, devoted, difficult, private, or generous depending upon which evidence a person chooses to foreground.

The memorial preserves that contradiction.

One statue might have represented Sarah. Eleven figures attempt something different. They preserve multiple moments, ages, postures, and versions of the couple rather than reducing them to a single frozen image.

That strikes me as deeply connected to grief.

A person dies, and the survivors are immediately confronted with the impossibility of choosing which version of them to remember. Was Sarah the young woman, the wife, the older companion, the figure standing beside John, the person missing from the chair, or all of those at once?

Davis seems to have refused the compression.

His memorial was excessive by nearly any reasonable standard, but it attempted to make room for more than one moment. It turned the grave into a gallery of memory.

The historical irony is strong. A structure once criticized as an extravagance became a recognized historic site and remains associated with Hiawatha’s identity. The Kansas Historical Society lists it on the National Register of Historic Places for its artistic significance and uniqueness.

Sarah died in 1930.

People are still saying her name.

John Davis may have gotten precisely what he wanted.

Sometimes the Dead Get the Last Laugh

A memorable grave does not require eleven statues, a bronze angel, or a sculpted author escaping the ground. Sometimes a few words do the work.

Mel Blanc, the legendary voice actor associated with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and many other animated characters, died in 1989. His grave at Hollywood Forever Cemetery carries the phrase millions of viewers associated with the end of a Warner Bros. cartoon: “That’s All Folks.”

It is hard to create a more efficient epitaph.

Three words hold career, humor, cultural memory, and finality. Anyone familiar with Blanc’s work understands the reference immediately, and the sentence lands differently on a grave than it ever did at the end of a cartoon.

Spike Milligan managed something more mischievous.

Milligan wanted his headstone to carry the line “I told you I was ill.” Church authorities objected to the proposed English inscription, so the phrase eventually appeared in Irish: “Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.” The stone pairs the joke with “Love, light, peace” in English (Adams, 2004).

The church retained decorum, and Milligan retained the joke.

That feels like a fair settlement.

Humor around death can make people uncomfortable since many of us learned that respect requires solemnity. Research on bereavement complicates that assumption. A 2022 scoping review found that humor appears in grief experiences and can serve several roles for bereaved people, though context, timing, relationship, and personality shape whether humor helps or harms (Wilson et al., 2022).

A study involving recently widowed adults found associations between humor, laughter, positive emotion, and more favorable adjustment during bereavement (Lund et al., 2009). Those findings do not mean grief should be made funny or that mourners need to laugh. They do suggest that humor and sorrow can occupy the same emotional space.

Families already know this intuitively.

People gather after funerals and tell stories. Someone remembers the vacation disaster, the terrible cooking, the lifelong habit of losing keys, the Christmas argument that became funny ten years later, or the joke the deceased told so often that everyone could recite it along with them.

Laughter can be part of remembrance.

A humorous epitaph works best when the humor belongs to the person being remembered. Laughing at someone is different from recognizing the humor through which they understood themselves.

Mel Blanc did not become solemn merely by dying. Spike Milligan did not become conventional when his life ended.

A good memorial lets them remain recognizable.

Even the Dead Have Zoning Problems

At this point, someone reading this may be planning a twelve-foot granite monument featuring a recliner, three dogs, a television remote, a coffee maker, and a motion-activated recording telling visitors to stay off the lawn.

Check with the cemetery first.

Cemeteries are regulated spaces, and their rules can govern monument size, materials, inscriptions, foundations, benches, decorations, installation, maintenance, and placement. Standards vary among municipal cemeteries, private cemeteries, religious burial grounds, veterans’ cemeteries, historic sites, and family plots.

Arlington National Cemetery provides one of the clearest examples of strict standardization. Federal regulations prescribe approved monument types and materials, producing the visual uniformity associated with the cemetery (U.S. Department of the Army, 2016).

Private cemeteries can maintain extensive rules of their own. Some restrict memorial dimensions, require approved granite or bronze, prohibit certain freestanding objects, regulate benches, or reserve the right to remove unauthorized decorations. Maintenance, safety, appearance, drainage, mowing equipment, historic character, and neighboring plots all affect what can be installed.

Buying burial rights does not create a tiny sovereign nation.

The cemetery still gets a vote.

That fact explains part of what makes truly bizarre memorials unusual. A family may believe a six-foot granite replica of Dad’s pickup truck captures him perfectly. The cemetery may believe Dad must fit inside a forty-eight-inch monument envelope.

Neither position is automatically absurd.

A cemetery may serve thousands of families across multiple generations. Complete individual freedom could create maintenance problems, structural hazards, blocked access, conflicts between neighboring plots, or a burial ground that becomes visually chaotic. Complete uniformity, however, can strip away much of what makes remembrance personal.

The unusual grave marker sits inside that tension.

Families ask, “How much of this person can we put into stone?”

The cemetery asks, “How much of that stone are we willing to maintain for the next hundred years?”

Spike Milligan’s epitaph offers a small but wonderful example of negotiation. The intended joke survived, but the wording changed languages to meet church requirements. The restriction did not erase the personality of the memorial; it may have made the story better.

Apparently bureaucracy can occasionally improve a punch line.

And Then There Are People Who Make the Burial Itself the Memorial

Billy Standley does not technically belong in a discussion focused on unusual headstones.

I am keeping him anyway.

The Ohio motorcycle enthusiast spent years planning to be buried astride his 1967 Harley-Davidson Electra Glide. He did not mention it once at a family gathering and leave everyone guessing whether he had been serious. He prepared for it for years.

Standley purchased enough cemetery space for the arrangement. His sons helped construct a large transparent casket reinforced to accommodate both their father and the motorcycle. Funeral professionals prepared his body so he could remain positioned on the bike.

When Standley died in 2014 at age eighty-two, his family carried out the plan (Fields, 2014).

The resulting scene was extraordinary.

Standley was dressed in motorcycle gear, positioned on the Harley, and enclosed with the machine he had loved. Reports described extensive preparation, including the involvement of multiple embalmers and specialized burial arrangements.

Nobody watching could mistake motorcycles for a casual hobby in his life.

Standley’s burial raises the same question that runs through the stranger grave markers: who gets to decide what dignity should look like?

Funerals come with scripts. Certain clothing feels appropriate, certain music feels acceptable, certain containers appear respectable, and certain forms of grief are treated as more legitimate than others.

Those expectations can create comfort. Ritual gives people structure when life has become disorienting.

They can also flatten personality.

Standley rejected the standard script so completely that he took the Harley underground.

The burial can look excessive, absurd, touching, or all three depending upon the viewer. What cannot reasonably be disputed is that it reflected a wish he had expressed clearly and repeatedly.

His family listened.

That part matters more than whether strangers approve.

Funerals serve the living, but they are often shaped by the values and wishes of the dead. The best arrangements find some balance between those two realities.

Standley made his position unusually easy to understand.

The motorcycle was coming.

Dead People Were Weird. We Should Let Them Stay That Way.

The longer I spent looking at bizarre gravestones, the less interested I became in deciding which ones were tasteful.

Taste changes.

Memory changes too.

A symbol that once seemed ordinary can become mysterious to later generations. A monument viewed as profound in 1910 might strike someone in 2026 as theatrical. A motorcycle burial can look ridiculous to a person who has never had a machine, hobby, or object become part of personal identity.

Meaning moves through time.

The stone stays in place.

That may be what fascinates me most about grave markers. They are attempts to send information forward without knowing who will receive it. A person choosing an inscription can picture children, grandchildren, friends, or neighbors reading it. They cannot predict what a stranger a century later will know, believe, or misunderstand.

Jules Verne’s grave tells that future stranger to look upward.

Elijah Bond’s tells them to look at a Ouija board and ask questions.

The Black Angel tells a more complicated story about a mother, a son who died young, immigration, medicine, grief, bronze oxidation, folklore, and the way a community can rewrite the meaning of a memorial.

John Davis left so much sculpture behind that Hiawatha had little choice but to remember him and Sarah.

Mel Blanc left three words.

Spike Milligan left one last linguistic joke.

Billy Standley took the Harley.

The common thread is not eccentricity for its own sake. Each example pushes back against the way death can reduce a complicated human being to “the deceased.”

After death, belongings are sorted, accounts are closed, appointments disappear, homes change hands, photographs move into boxes, and routines vanish. Eventually, the people who knew someone directly begin disappearing too.

A monument cannot stop that process.

It can interrupt it.

A visitor sees something strange enough to make them slow down. They read the name, look again, smile, search online, ask a question, photograph the memorial, or tell someone else what they saw.

For several minutes, a dead person becomes specific again.

That is no small achievement for stone, bronze, marble, or a few carefully chosen words.

Traditional grave markers may provide exactly what many families want: quiet recognition, continuity, faith, dignity, and a physical place to return. There is beauty in that choice. There is equal humanity in leaving behind something that makes a stranger stop and wonder who you were.

The unusual markers remind us that people do not become generic when they die.

They were funny, irritating, brilliant, stubborn, generous, excessive, curious, creative, difficult, sentimental, ridiculous, and loved. They collected things nobody else understood, told the same stories too many times, kept cars longer than they should have, adored pets, argued over politics, ruined recipes, watched terrible television, overpacked for vacations, and had favorite chairs nobody else was allowed to use.

They were human.

I have no final design picked out for my own headstone, and there is no reason to rush the decision. There may still be considerable time available to become far more difficult to memorialize.

I do know one thing. If somebody eventually reduces me to a generic inspirational sentence that could belong to anyone, I reserve the right to object, and I expect whoever remains to know better.

If Elijah Bond’s memorial works as advertised, at least I know where to begin.

References

Adams, M. (2004, May 25). Milligan has last laugh from beyond the grave. Irish Examiner.

Amiens Métropole. (n.d.). Cimetière de la Madeleine: Jules Verne’s tomb.

Bond, E. J. (n.d.). Elijah Bond’s official biography.

City of Hiawatha. (n.d.). Davis Memorial.

City of Iowa City. (n.d.). Oakland Cemetery.

Fields, L. (2014, February 1). Biker buried astride beloved Harley in Plexiglas casket. ABC News.

Flair, J. (2014, November 13). Delving into the Iowa City Black Angel. The Daily Iowan.

Kansas Historical Society. (n.d.). Davis Memorial. National and State Registers of Historic Places.

Lund, D. A., Utz, R., Caserta, M. S., & De Vries, B. (2009). Humor, laughter, and happiness in the daily lives of recently bereaved spouses. Omega, 58(2), 87–105.

Mills, C. (2014). Beyond grief: Sculpture and wonder in the Gilded Age cemetery. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press.

Neal, A., & Parker, A. (1968). Gravestone carvings in early New England: An introduction to the exhibition of rubbings. Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library. (n.d.). Mel Blanc.

U.S. Department of the Army. (2016). Arlington National Cemetery rules and regulations, 32 C.F.R. Part 553.

Wilson, D. M., Bykowski, K., Chrzanowski, A. M., Knox, M., & Errasti-Ibarrondo, B. (2022). A scoping research literature review to explore bereavement humor. Current Psychology.