When Rosie Grant made ice cream to share with Marian
Montfort last month, her biggest challenge was getting it to her.
She had flown from Shreveport, Louisiana., to Portland,
Maine, where Montfort was waiting. There she sprinted to her Airbnb, purchased
an ice cream maker, gathered, and combined the ingredients — dried apricots,
apricot preserves, sugar, double cream, and a sprinkle of nutmeg — and
transported her concoction without its melting through heavy summer rain.
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It was tough doing it all alone, but Montfort couldn’t help
her — she had been dead for 16 years. Grant had followed the recipe inscribed
on her headstone.
Grant is one of many TikTok influencers on the hashtag
#gravetok, a space with more than 1 billion views. Creators post videos of
themselves following cooking advice, visiting burial sites, and cleaning
gravestones. As demand for cremation increases in the United States, they are
hoping to inspire a new generation of cemetery enthusiasts, or taphophiles, who
can help conserve the country’s past.
Since 2021, Grant, 33, has traveled across the country to
dine at the burial sites of those who left behind recipes on their tombstones.
She finds them through a combination of research and help from her followers
and travels to each one armed with a meal she has tenderly prepared.
“On some level it just felt like a really nice gift for
these people to leave a recipe behind,” said Grant, an archivist from Los
Angeles who films her graveside meals on her account @ghostlyarchive. “It just
felt like the natural progression to go and visit them.”
Among her creations are fudge, snickerdoodles, and chicken
soup. For Grant, each of these meals is special, including the ice cream she
shared with Montfort, which she described as “a beautiful moment of calm.”
A deep interest in death rituals is nothing new, said Cole
Imperi, a founder of the School of American Thanatology (as in the scientific
study of death) and a former board president of the Historic Linden Grove
Cemetery and Arboretum in Covington, Kentucky. Cemeteries are often preserved
as both historical sites and gardens that are open to the public, she said.
Imperi believes the surge of interest in grave tourism is a
symptom of modern life. “Social media needs bite-sized pieces of content, and a
headstone is a bite-sized story of a person, so those two things are in perfect
alignment,” she said. “There’s a sense of rootedness and meaningful heritage
from learning about the people that have come before us.”
It’s a quality that other creators have noticed, too.
Caitlin Abrams, 37, a software curriculum developer from
rural Vermont with the TikTok account @manicpixiemom, believes her 3 million
followers prefer the stories of the everyday person to those of the famous. In
her videos, she restores graves that are centuries old and narrates the clips
with details about the deceased person’s life, including family lineage and
tragedies of child loss. “We all love to see how other people live,” she said.
It’s hard to say exactly what viewers are looking for on
#gravetok. Some describe the community as a pocket-size oasis. “I find walking
through cemeteries to be very peaceful,” said Enocha Edenfield, a 42-year-old
tour guide and #gravetok follower who lives in Savannah, Georgia. “It gives me
a chance to think away from the noise of the city while also learning a little
about its history through the headstones I pass.”
In the comments under these videos, viewers also share their
feelings of satisfaction from watching graves being cleaned or of hope that
they might one day be remembered in this way.
The videos sometimes reach the families of the dead people
featured in them, said Grace Waronker, a 26-year-old plaster artist from Los
Angeles who shares videos through her TikTok account, @grace_goodnight. “When I
put up a video of a grave that I’ve come across, a lot of the time the family
or friends will see it and say it’s a sign,” she said. “They take it as a
signal that that person is OK.”
But creators said there was still work to be done to make
#gravetok more inclusive. “Graves only tell us part of the story, because the
people who were middle-class and upper-class would have been able to access the
stones that still remain,” Abrams said. “Most of the graves I clean are for
white people because mostly white people had access to gravestones.”
Grant cited America’s history of demolishing Native American
burial sites and African American cemeteries as another reason she continues to
post about her work — to inspire a new generation of taphophiles who can
protect and care for overlooked cemeteries.
“It’s really important for a local community to be connected
to their local cemeteries and to care about them on some level,” she said. “It
sounds like a weird way to put it, but any amount of support can help to keep
the cemetery itself alive.”
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