Oak Grove Cemetery: Bones And Caskets Popping Out At Iowa Graveyard (VIDEO And PHOTOS)

That which is buried six-feet-under, should probably remain six-feet-under.

So when one Iowa woman visited her relatives in Lehigh's Oak Grove Cemetery only to find herself stepping onto the set of a horror film -- complete with exposed bones and jutted out caskets -- she felt nothing short of disturbed.

"To me it's just the lowest form of disrespect," Karen Long-Fladeboe, told Des Moines' KCCI-8.

The graveyard's resemblance to "Night Of The Living Dead" is now of public interest, but caretakers have actually known about the erosion problem for at least two years.

In 2009, heavy rains washed away the wall supporting part of the cemetery, leaving misplaced gravestones, bones, and coffins littered along the property.

"The whole hillside just dropped into the ravine, and there's nothing nobody can do about it," Phil Burgland, a township trustee, told local ABC affiliate WOI-DT. "The whole hillside just slid."

Burgland says that he and the other trustees "don't want a situation like this," but the protocol for moving the deceased isn't exactly cut and dry. Any relocating of a gravesite requires "cause of death, date of death, and next of kin," according to Burgland. With the cemetery in shambles and many of the headstones worn over the course of a century, finding that information is almost like catching a ghost.

Comments

[LearnToThink]

01:58 AM on 10/25/2011

Cremate me mix the ashes with soil and plant an oak sapling in it the end.

[Milrepa]

04:51 PM on 10/24/2011

American Indians find the rest of us ethically challenged because we don't honor our ancestors.

[WhatDaBleep]

10:00 AM on 10/24/2011

Looks like the dead are even trying to get out of Republican Iowa!

[Edward Wilkes]

11:51 PM on 10/23/2011

What goes down must come up, in an unstable graveyard---is the (Theory of Relative Grieve - ity) part of the overall theory of time being dependent on relative motion (The Theory of Relativity)

[jenn210830]

11:41 AM on 10/23/2011

cant beat mother nature.

[Kay Nicks]

12:59 AM on 10/23/2011

I've heard people are dying to get into cemeteries.........never dying to get out, tho....

[BannedInBoston]

12:09 AM on 10/23/2011

Now if the _dead start attending the Iowa Caucuses. (Oh, wait....)

[straightuptalker]

02:10 PM on 10/22/2011

At least, this Oak Grove Cemetery is recognized and has a caretaker, so they should handle the problem immediately and the owner of the property is responsible for repair and re-interment, if necessary. There's an abandoned cemetery in my area outside of town that nobody has a clue it even exists. The graves were hastily dug up to build the Public Library and dumped haphazardly and carelessly into a vacant plot of land outside the city limits., I found it completely hidden from view and the condition deplorable. Vandals have dug up bones, leaving gaping holes, mounds of trash everywhere, vines and trees have taken over, and vandals even toppled some of the larger, intricately carved tombstones, many dating back to the mid-1700's. It's no doubt that many prominent citizens from the city were re-interred there. I took photos of quite a few focusing on the inscriptions, but officials turned a deaf ear and a blind eye. There oughta be a law.

[vtmilitia]

01:33 PM on 10/22/2011

They had this problem,if you wish to call it that,in Rochester Vt after the floods from Irene. The biggest problem though was from Democratic operatives trying to sign up new voters.

[Newmom95]

10:21 AM on 10/22/2011

This is hilarious! I want to go there!

[Dean Peters]

07:23 AM on 10/22/2011

Dogs will pick up the bones and bury them at higher ground. Problem solved.

[lilliefaerie]

07:04 AM on 10/22/2011

If the cemetery is old enough there are (in better times, at least), funds state and federal for them. If not, it is a volunteer thing. In our town there is a huge cemetery, and I remember as a kid, on the Indian trails at the park next to the cemetery which is down a huge hill, there were gravestones that had fallen down the hill (and arrowheads). Then again, I was in Kentucky and had stopped at an unusually haunted cemetery, on old Kentucky Tollroad at the 13th mile marker. There was a cemetery within a cemetery on the top of a mountain. When we went over, there looked like either a tornado hit the place or it was severely vandalized by something otherworldly. There were baby markers sitting on the brick fence. There were markers lined up in markers, inside of markers, in the inside cemetery, sarcogaphi were broken in two, And a crypt had the side broken in. Place was a disaster and it just plain felt odd.There was a part that within the old center cemetery, I was in visual distance of my husband, actually quite close, and I called to him, and he never heard me at all, it was like the air stopped in front of us. A very strange experience anyway. We left and went to the next town, and the fire department was out washing their trucks. We reported what we'd seen. These were really old graves. They fixed the chaos.

[cebu98]

05:23 AM on 10/22/2011

A friend used to say "cremate me, put the ashes in an ash tray and watch me gain weight. Want me to lose weight, just blow in it!"

[cebu98]

05:19 AM on 10/22/2011

I like the idea of some of the so-called "green cemeteries" now, where the bodies are placed in simple wood caskets, or just wrapped in cloth, and it decomposes very rapidly. Its so stupid, these $5,000+ fancy air-tight metal ones to last 100 years or more. What, do they think they're going to wake up later, and want to get out?

[jenn210830]

11:47 AM on 10/23/2011

could you have this option at a regular cemetery? Thats how i want to be buried. Nothing fancy.

[PennsylvaniaPam]

07:57 PM on 10/23/2011

Yes. Research green burials in your area. In Philadelphia, West Laurel Hill Cemetery, final resting place for many of the city's historical finest, has a section in a wooded area for green burials.

[SarcasticFringehead]

04:48 PM on 10/25/2011

Don't forget the whole embalming process too.

They drain the deceased blood and then replace it with toxic, preserving chemicals.

What a ghastly and horrific thing to do.

I want to be cremated when I die.

[PaulInMiami]

06:12 PM on 10/21/2011

In the beautiful cemetery garden where my parents' remains await the resurrection, one tombstone's epitaph reads:
"As you are now, so I once was. As I am now, so you will be. Prepare yourself for eternity."

In England, one reads very similarly:
"As you are now, so I once was. As I am now, so you will be. Prepare yourself to follow me."
But, underneath it some wag had penned a note on a slip of paper: "To follow you, I have no bent--unless I know which way you went!"

[BannedInBoston]

12:17 AM on 10/23/2011

My favorite epitaph: "Her husband caught him with her\Though he was an old coot.\They say his last words were,\"Don't _shoot."