Spend a day with the dead on Vancouver’s famous cemetery tour.
Vancouver’s famous cemetery spellbinds
One of Marcy Oakley’s neighbours survived the sinking of the Titanic. One of them lived to be 111 years old. Another one her neighbours is comfortably settled in – with her two husbands. Marcy particularly wanted me to meet Frank Rogers. Frank’s claim to fame has to do with him being a “union organizer and a socialist,” but there’s a lot more to that tale.
Every neighbourhood has its stories, but Marcy’s has narratives to rival Netflix, only with way more chill. Marcy lives across the street from Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery.
Mountain View Cemetery is Vancouver’s oldest – and only – cemetery. It’s owned and operated by the city and holds the remains of about 150,000 Vancouverites. It’s huge; the equivalent of about 80 football fields. It was opened in 1886 and, if you know where to look, holds a chronicle of history that includes maritime tragedies, epidemics and Canada’s worst avalanche disaster. It’s also a view into the human heart.
The cemetery is ringed by a cedar hedge with erratic chain link and other fencing. A few neighbourhood easyaccess points have evolved over the years, and “the rabbit hole” is the one that Marcy shows me. Up until about 10 years ago, you could drive into the cemetery at any time of day or night. Now, they lock up the vehicular entrances and a security company patrols the 106 acres.
The other side of the rabbit hole is another world. In the glancing late day sun, the unobstructed landscape and statuary recalls a Maxfield Parrish painting. Instantly, the thrum of the circling traffic falls away. It might be a prairie of dead people but it’s beautiful, just the same.
Marcy’s unofficial tour is a curated version of the cemetery through decades of dog walking and stroller pushing. We begin by visiting a sedate white marble corbel marker. This is the first interment at the cemetery, that of Caradoc Evans. He died in 1887 “aged 10 Mos.” Curiously, 129 years later there are four fresh, white roses laid atop the headstone.
A particular favourite of Marcy’s is that of Helen Ruth Landahl who died in 2011, predeceased by her “Loving Husbands” Norman H. Landahl, and Robert H. Edgett. Helen didn’t take her second husband’s name when she was widowed at age 62. We wondered aloud what the burial configuration might be.
There are stories that must have seemed important at the time:
“John Moffat of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp. who died at Vancouver, B.C. Dec. 9, 1892 on his way home on furlough from Shanghai.” He was just passing through, I guess.
Samuel Seford’s headstone declares how he met his untimely demise — Drowned; Age 35 years — and offers an indication of his current whereabouts with a finger pointing heavenward.
Robertha Josephine Marshall was 13 when she survived the sinking of the Titanic. She’s buried alongside her parents whom, I presume, were on board with her but whose markers make no mention of their passage on the doomed voyage.
Finally: Frank Roger’s headstone. It doesn’t mince words. “Frank Rogers; Murdered by a scab in a strike against the CPR.” Apparently, he was shot on April 15, 1903. He was just 24.
Many of the old headstones avow subservience to a greater power. Over the decades there has been a shift in sentiment from “Thy will be done,” to simple statements of bereavement, like “Much loved.”
One marker that Marcy loves to point out is grimly amusing. If a husband and wife plan on being interred in the same plot, it’s cheaper to use one marker and to have the information inscribed at the same time. That being the case, there’s a headstone that lists the birth and death of a husband with his surviving spouse’s name and birthdate already engraved, awaiting the final calculation. Her particulars were covered up with a piece of plexiglass, but it had been removed. It must be odd to visit a gravesite and see your name as a coming attraction.
Marcy recounts a day when, from her living room, she watched graveyard workers deliver a plywood coffin to a freshly dug site. The workers then headed off on some other errand. Moments later, a man materialized with a small crowbar and started prying off the lid of the coffin. Marcy got on the phone and the small-time tomb raider was thwarted. It seems the deceased was being buried with his cowboy boots on and this fellow wanted them.
The neighbours consider themselves stewards of the Mountain View and pay attention to developments in the cemetery. Bonnie Friesen is a warm-blooded neighbour of Marcy’s. Her house, being on the site of the old cemetery stable and yardworks, is almost within the cemetery. Bonnie and her family have lived there for 30 years.
Prior to locking the cemetery at night, Bonnie tells me it used to be a popular place for drug deals and backseat sex. Both Bonnie and Marcy say that they’ve come across their share of odd things. They both remain puzzled by the discovery a few years back, of a pig’s head in a burlap bag. Dead (sacrificial) poultry isn’t altogether uncommon around this time of year – weird, but they’ve happened upon them several times. Occasionally, they come across Wicca symbology, sometimes laid out in candles. And there are peculiar offerings: Remy Martin, pornographic materials and knick knacks.
On November 11th, someone will come, as they have for years now, and place a small Canadian flag on all the veteran’s graves within the cemetery. And every day – rain or shine – the cemetery will be filled with people walking dogs, taking babies for strolls and celebrating Ernest Hemingway’s words from The Old Man and the Sea: “Every day above earth is a good day.”