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Sonoran Paranormal Investigations
Proud TAPS Family Member & Arizona Representative for International Paranormal Investigators
Greenwood Memory Lawn Mortuary and Cemetary
By Dave Webb
One of the great things about Arizona is that it's generally sunny, so when you've got to go and hang out in a graveyard for a while you're more or less certain to get a nice day to do it in. That's important because the word "graveyard" is full of ominous overtones.
Greenwood Memory Lawn is a nice example of how the Americans do it. The cemetary is bordered by freeways and part of the industrial part of Phoenix. Outside the gates, it's busy and dusty and loud. Inside, you want to use words like peaceful and tranquil. Even serene wouldn't be out of place. Somewhere in this huge spread of grass and trees there are people who work very hard to keep it this way.
The cemetary itself is huge. The locals use cars to get around it but if you're of a mind and not in any hurry you can walk from one side to the other and enjoy the peace.
It's about as far from the rather grim English term "bone orchard" as you can get.
So why are we there? Put simply, to take pictures.
Graveyards are an odd place to look for ghosts. Conventional paranormal wisdom says that if anywhere is haunted then it won't be a graveyard. Hollywood and old ghost stories say otherwise, of course, and there's a body of thought that says you're as likely to find ghosts in a graveyard as you are anywhere else. Putting the metaphysics of the place aside for a moment, we're here to take photographs. This is the training part of the day. We're here to get used to cameras, practice taking photographs and also practice looking at the results. Greenwood is full of interesting looking monuments, trees, patterns of light and shade. In fact, it's a great place to do slowly what we might need to do quickly when we're somewhere more active.
The process itself is pretty simple - find something that looks interesting, stop, take a breath and hold it, take a picture, count to nine and take what's known as a control shot. Control shots are important; they give you a comparison picture to refer to. We amble about, looking at interesting gravestones and taking pictures at our own pace. Nothing leaps out, which is good when you're in a graveyard.
It's also fun to hang out with other investigators. People with common interests generally get on well but under these circumstances just being able to talk about differences of approach and method is as relaxing as the surroundings. One of the oddities of the field is that if you put a dozen investigators in one place you'll get a dozen different reasons for being there, perhaps half a dozen methodologies and philosophical standpoints too. Discussing these things whilst on an investigation might be countreproductive - you may feel strongly about the use of dowsing rods or psychic impressions but you wouldn't want to distract yourself going over the pros and cons when there are more important things to be done. Sitting in a graveyard with the sun out and a cooling breeze blowing over the headstones just seems like the right place to share ideals and old war stories. We should have brought a picnic and, were it not for the potential to get odd looks, it might have been a good idea. No one, least of all the residents, is in much of a hurry.
The conversations turn to psychics - which is pretty much what you'd expect; the field attracts all kinds of people, from those who have as much psychic potential as a housebrick to those who say conversations with dead people is a fact of their everyday lives and there's plenty of lively debate about how to evaluate those claims - and the various sceptics reveal themselves with grins or raised eyebrows whilst those who've had experiences to the contrary also grin and raise eyebrows at the sceptics. It's all superbly good natured and it raises questions that are interesting rather than controversial. If you listen to the conversation something slowly becomes apparent; we've gathered because we have similar questions. We might want to use different tools to find the answers, we might even disagree on what an acceptable answer is, but the thing that has drawn us together is that the questions need to be asked. Mainstream science is catching on, slowly and surely, but right now this is almost frontier stuff. It's still the place where the amateur can make a contribution. Those of us without hard science backgrounds are learning about protocols, methodologies, evidence and peer review. Even for a subject as irrational as the paranormal, even when some of the investigators are using tools that science doesn't recognise as being tools at all, the underlying current is made of questions like "can I get independant corroboration of this?" and "is this something I can replicate? Can I debunk this? What are the other potential causes for this experience?"
A graveyard is a very human place to be. We've been disposing of corpses in a caring and respectful manner for as long as we've been people, so when you set foot in a graveyard you're part of a continuum of tradition that goes back not a hundred years, or five hundred, but hundreds of thousands of years. The forms change but the feeling that we need to do something to mark the passing of those we care about doesn't. Greenwood shows this in the sheer variety of headstones and markers. Some bear pictures of the departed, others just a name and a date. Others still have curious symbols on them, from the masonic square and compass to baseball caps and confederate flags. Little things that tell us about the people they represent, that were important enough to them in life to be memorialised.
It's sobering to think that the part of us moving around and taking pictures or sitting in the sun and laughing will end up in a place like this one day. What happens to the other part, the part that asks the questions and feels it might be a good idea to seek out what might be remnants of those who have already died, is one of the questions we're looking for the answer to. Years from now, will someone be wandering a graveyard looking for signs of us?