Eli5 what happens if a cemetery runs out of space to bury bodies?
In: 3565
They dig the dead up and resell the plots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr_Oak_Cemetery
Other methods are mausoleums. In an area that would hold maybe 50 corpses, you put up a fancy dedicated building and, basically, warehouse up to 1000 bodies at a very premium rate. Part of your fee is put into a trust to pay for “perpetual care”, be it mopping the floor to plowing the driveways in winter, cleaning glass and mowing lawns, cleaning graffiti, or even repairing broken/stolen headstones and plaques. I learned this selling cemetery plots.
Years later, reading some old Old Farmers Almanac, I discovered that investors would buy hundreds of acres of land, but only develop about 10 to 20% upfront for immediate burials. Regular plots, a pet cemetery, a children’s garden, and a mausoleum or two on that original grounds. Next they hire a sales force to sell pre-need burial plots. They’d upsell by adding a marker, an eternal light or a vase for flowers. They also offered special urns for cremains, and a burial plot for the whole families ashes. Likewise, niches in the mausoleums. They would develop that part to handle the business for 10-20 years. Further away from the main cemetery, they put in a golf course or even apartments. Closer to the cemetery, they rent out to farmers for crop cultivation. Every acre the cemetery has generates some form of revenue. As the original part fills up, they start developing the farmland. More plots and more mausoleums. What golfer wouldn’t want to have his eternal resting place on the back 9? Golf course could be there for 60 years before it’d be turned into a cemetery. Or, at that age, the apartments would be next to be razed.
Currently, states are looking at another alternative for burials: composting. Body placed in the ground, covered with grass clippings, dead leaves and other compostable items, then covered with dirt. A year later, your body has decomposed to fertilizer. Bones gathered, crushed and added to the mix, or encased in jewelry for family members.
If Mom were still alive, she’d be checking out the cemeteries this weekend, as the f
So many talk about cemeteries that reuse plots. Here is how it goes if they *don’t*.
Every cemetery plot purchased, a portion of the money goes into a trust to keep the cemetery running indefinitely. So even when the cemetery is full and not brining in new money that trust will keep running things for decades. This pays for maintenance, land taxes, potentially some full-time or part-time staff. They then open a new cemetery to continue the process for new bodies. What happens if the trust runs out of money? Often nothing, quite litterally. No more money for services and the township doesn’t really want to seize land chock full of corpses.
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