Eli5 what happens if a cemetery runs out of space to bury bodies?
In: 3565
As people have said, it varies from place to place but in my part of the world (Sydney), the practice was often just to close the cemetery and build another one.
[Central station was built over the city’s first major cemetery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_railway_station,_Sydney). When they closed the cemetery they gave families of the deceased two months if they wanted to exhume and rebury remains. Any uncollected corpses were built over. A new necropolis was built and named Rookwood to accommodate new deaths.
Near where I live [the local churchyard cemetery was mostly rededicated as a public park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camperdown_Cemetery). The church built some new walls around a smaller yard and moved the headstones inside that but not the corpses.
In both cases subsequent works have scared hell out of people [when they start digging up skeletons](https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/human-bones-to-delay-sydneys-light-rail/news-story/4732e12eb512b2aa8dd6f5f52f1829fc).
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