Missing graves and dark histories loom at Eastern Cemetery. Meet the group unraveling them

In the 175 years since Eastern Cemetery buried its first body, headstones have deteriorated, and in many cases, completely disappeared.

Sometimes vegetation grows up to your shoulders, concealing the monuments that have survived. From the surface, what’s been called the “most over-buried cemetery in the country” can feel deserted and grim.

Beginning as early as the 1850s, graves that already had bodies and coffins in them were resold, in some cases, several times. Initial archeological digs and testimonies from former employees during an investigation by the Kentucky Attorney General's office revealed that remains from eight or more individuals could rest in a single plot.

And that’s even before technology offers a glimpse of the turmoil below.

With the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities , a research team from the University of Louisville 's Center for Archeology and Cultural Heritage spent two years using surveying equipment, drones, and ground penetrating radar to better understand the necro violence that plagued the historic cemetery until a whistleblower came forward in 1989.

Until recently, grasping the true depth of the chaos underground without digging up the entire cemetery was impossible, but modern technology can offer a clearer picture. This research ― led by University of Louisville’s Kathryn Marklein, Thomas Jennings, Ashley Smallwood, and Angela Storey ― can use tools that weren't available in the 1990s to improve the mapping above and below ground in the cemetery.

But the mission to map the dead at Eastern Cemetery goes deeper than that. This arduous work is also about better illustrating the tragedy that happened on the 29 acres, and in some cases, locating individual graves without further disturbing the already devastated cemetery.

“We have not broken ground, nor do we have any intention to,” Marklein told the Courier Journal. “This is a good, nondestructive way of actually seeing over burial.”

About 1,000 graves can reasonably fit on a single acre, Jennings explained. Yet, more than 130,000 people are believed to have been buried within the 29 acres once operated by Louisville Crematory and Cemeteries Co.

Eastern Cemetery, essentially, ran out of room 100,000 burials ago, but bodies kept going into the ground. Headstones identifying the other occupants were moved.

Now, the team from the University of Louisville hopes to use the new technology to help ancestors find their missing family members, and piece together the dark and complicated history of Eastern Cemetery.

'We'll never be able to document every instance of over burial'

Historic maps of the grounds show, in some cases, gravestones from entire sections of Eastern Cemetery had been wiped out and then resold again as new. Ledgers indicate one area toward the back was once considered one of the oldest parts of the cemetery, but research assistant Codi Goodwyn says all that was “obliterated” in the 1960s or 1970s, and then reused for veterans’ burials.

News clippings and court records from three decades ago describe how gravediggers would place tarps over remains in freshly dug used graves to keep grieving families from seeing bones from other burials poking up from the dirt. When the authorities got involved in 1989, they found human remains in a trash can, a toolbox, a golf cart and even concealed in a fast-food bag.

Some graves were buried with just inches of dirt on top of them, so much so, that a bad storm alone could expose the coffins below.

In the years following the abuse claims, archaeologist and now retired University of Louisville professor, Phil DiBlasi, conducted forensic archaeological investigations on hundreds of graves as part of the fact-finding in the prosecution of the case against Louisville Cemetery and Crematory Co. Following a decade of high-profile court battles, nonsolutions, and ongoing cemetery looting, the University of Louisville Archeology Department took possession of Eastern Cemetery records in 2001.

Or at least, the ones that survived.

Over the years, the university has slowly digitized the information listed on 10,000 burial cards and handwritten ledgers in 19th and early 20th-century script. Some are so frail the bottoms and edges of the paper have started disintegrating.

Much of the paperwork is incomplete, and sometimes, whole years are missing, Goodwyn explained. For whatever reason, many files seem to have been stolen or destroyed. Wildly, some records have resurfaced in unexpected places, and once even a stack of 250 burial cards was mailed in anonymously.

Using ancestry.com and newspapers.com , Goodwyn has found several obituaries that list burials at Eastern Cemetery, but no trace of them appears in the official records. Often an answer to a question or a new fragment of information leads to another mystery, she said.

Initially, Jennings received some pushback when the department piloted using ground penetrating radar at the site. As far as he knows, it’s never been used on an over-buried cemetery before. Typically, it helps identify graves at old farms or plantations. When the lawn-mower-looking device rolls over the ground, it can send waves up to eight feet under that sense large obstructions.

Meaning, this technology can’t identify stray femurs or skulls. This research won’t unearth remains from eight different people in a grave, like the archaeological digs 35 years ago did.

“We’ll never be able to document every instance of over burial,” Jennings said.

But when it locates a three-by-seven-foot anomaly, logically, it's a coffin. In some cases, the radar picks up two or three anomalies near a standard-sized plot, but, the research team is quick to say, there is nothing standard about the way Louisville Crematory and Cemeteries Co. operated Eastern Cemetery.

The coffins in these over-buried plots were not meticulously stacked neatly on top of one another. Often, they’re crooked, with layers skewing partially into other plots.

Knowing that, the team is using the surviving records and maps to understand what the cemetery looked like across various decades, Goodwyn explained. Some were created with a dated surveying technique, and others are hand-drawn illustrations that aren’t necessarily done to scale.

“They’re a tough tool to use to help guide people to where they need to be finding their loved ones, so we can geo-reference those maps and see how inaccurate they are,” Goodwyn said.

To find a lost grave, the team needs the radar, records, and a detailed map of the current cemetery. With the funding from the grant, they’ve used surveying equipment and GPS to plot surviving grave markers on about 10% of the cemetery’s land.

The surviving stones act as a Rosetta Stone, of sorts, for it all. If Goodwyn can locate an existing neighboring headstone from the same decade as a lost one, she can identify a rough location of where the forgotten grave might be.

From there, the radar can prove more than one coffin is buried beneath that ground. Goodwyn can then draw rectangles on the maps near the plotted stones where those graves should be.

“It is very, very tedious and it takes a lot of time, but we’re finding so much that way, now that we have these new tools that they didn’t have in 1990,” Goodwyn said.

'Legal and social issues no one is prepared to deal with'

Outside the troubled cemetery’s gates on bustling Baxter Avenue, life and development have continued. Enough time has passed that reasonably the old court battle isn’t top of mind for the customers dining, drinking and even living in the five-year-old retail and apartment development directly across the street.

But the trauma lives on for many who still have family laid to rest there.

As a cultural anthropologist, Storey’s role focuses more on the living than the dead. She’s collecting in-depth interviews about the shockwave Eastern Cemetery caused into present generations.

Someone’s mother was buried on the grounds just months before the whistleblower came forward, Storey said. The team just recently returned ashes from the Eastern Cemetery’s columbarium to a woman who had spent decades searching for her sister’s remains.

Several mothers, who delivered stillborn babies, have come forward with stories about how a salesperson from Louisville Crematory and Cemeteries Co. offered to sell them a plot within hours of their tragic-ending labor. Many of those babies’ graves haven’t been accounted for, and the area of the cemetery that’s colloquially known as “Babyland” has seen similar abuses and defilements as the parts where adults were buried.

“Some of those individuals still feel very significant trauma from the experiences of the past,” Storey said. “And also, from the complexities that have risen from the current situation with the courts.”

After the story broke in 1989, many families petitioned the courts to have their loved ones disinterred from Eastern Cemetery. Several children and spouses of veterans, specifically, have been vocal about wanting to remove them from Eastern and relocate them to another cemetery.

Now, even 35 years later, the U of L archeology team still fields some of these requests.

And while some remains have been disinterred, digging into an over-buried plot presents challenges. Even placing a headstone to honor newly rediscovered remains in an over-buried plot can cause problems.

“Eastern has created a lot of legal and social issues that no one is prepared to deal with,” Jennings said. “So the question of putting multiple headstones over a single grave? There’s no precedent for that. The question of disinterring someone when you know it’s going to disturb three or four other bodies? That is something that no one is prepared to deal with.”

'People find this place and feel a connection to it'

For nearly two decades, the future of Eastern Cemetery looked even more grim than it might appear today.

The families that bought plots at Eastern Cemetery did so with the understanding that part of their plot fee would be placed in a trust that cared for that land for generations to come. The legal battle that ensued in the 1990s arguably left more questions than answers. No one knows who owns Eastern Cemetery these days, and it hasn’t had a leader at its helm in more than a decade.

The 29 acres are steeped in controversy, but in March 2013, a group of volunteers known as The Friends of Eastern Cemetery began cleaning it up. The work is cosmetic, but it’s essential to the University of Louisville team's research. In a matter of weeks, vegetation can overtake the surviving stones. If the research team can’t find them, they can’t map them.

“The soil moving, and (vegetation) moving in will obscure a headstone,” Goodwyn said. “We already have headstones totally covered again, and I don’t know if we’d be able to find them again if we didn’t already know where they were.”

Some of the volunteers have family buried there, but others feel a sense of responsibility to help. They mow the grounds every Sunday during the warmer months from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and place flags on graves on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. A documentary called “ Facing East ” was released in 2020 that brought even more attention to the abandoned cemetery and the people who care for it.

“People find this place and feel a connection to it, and then they spend a lot of their time and labor helping to maintain it,” said Storey, who is also collecting interviews with the volunteers.

The volunteers often tell Storey that some people think it’s odd they spend so much time in a cemetery, but many of the accounts she has recorded describe Eastern Cemetery as a peaceful place.

Someone even called it a “treasure chest.”

For all its problems, there’s so much more to Eastern Cemetery’s history than decades of abuse. The cemetery was among the first in this area to bury people from different backgrounds in the same place. These grounds are the final resting place for ministers, politicians, musicians, and formerly enslaved people.

The grant that funded the past two years of research only covered about 10% of the grounds.

Meaning the 175-year-old cemetery still has many more mysteries to share. The archeology team hopes to win another grant to continue its research both at Eastern and its smaller sister cemeteries, Greenwood and Schardein, that saw similar abuses.

While the research team knows it can’t right every wrong that happened on that land, it believes there’s power in the knowledge they’re gaining.

Sometimes, there’s even peace.

“I’ve definitely cried with people out here after they get the headstone placed,” Goodwyn said. “Now they have a permanent marker to visit and that comfort of knowing where loved ones are. Those are really exciting moments.”

Reach reporter Maggie Menderski at mmenderski@courier-journal.com.

Want to volunteer?

Friends of Eastern Cemetery is a nonprofit group that helps maintain the 175-year-old abandoned cemetery at 641 Baxter Ave. The group cleans up and mows the 29-acre property from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. most Sundays during the warmer months. You do not need to be a formal member or have a lawn mower to participate. For more information, visit facebook.com/Friendsofeasterncemetery .

Want to contact the U of L archeology team?

In partnership with the Circuit Court of Jefferson County and the Office of the Kentucky Attorney General, the University of Louisville Center for Archeology and Cultural Heritage curates historic burial records from Eastern, Greenwood, and Shardein cemeteries. For information about the cemeteries and individuals buried within them, please send requests to ceminfo@louisville.edu .

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Missing graves and dark histories loom at Eastern Cemetery. Meet the group unraveling them