You’ll find thousands more with a quick Google search. For example, here’s a list of the spookiest cemeteries in the UK, and here are five graveyards around the world that offer guided tours. I was utterly mortified and had to spent the next ten minutes working out which grave he’d taken it from.īeyond your local graveyard, you can look up lists of the best graveyards to visit in your town or country. Once, I was halfway out of the cemetery when I noticed my son was carrying a teddy bear. Don’t touch or lean on headstones or pick up items left on a grave.Keep your voice down so you don’t disturb people visiting friends’ and relatives’ graves.Give people their space, particularly if there’s a funeral taking place.It’s never okay to take pictures of anyone without permission. Don’t stare at mourners or funeral processions and definitely don’t take their photo.Usually pedestrians and drivers share the same path so go slowly and watch out for people If you’re going by car, drive carefully.Only attend during visiting hours (these will be posted online or on the cemetery gate).There may be mourners visiting relatives’ graves or even burial ceremonies taking place, so follow some basic etiquette: You don’t need to feel guilty about visiting a graveyard for research if it’s open to the public - I often walk around my local cemetery with my toddler because it’s such a peaceful spot - but you do need to be respectful. I love the old-fashioned names in particular. And I always read the names on headstones and make a note of the ones that grab me (not literally - arghhh!). I saw some graves with dead flowers that obviously hadn’t been visited in years, next to gleaming headstones adorned with freshly placed roses. When I was researching for a middle grade novel I was writing, I walked around my local graveyard and noticed how a lot of the graves were grouped together by date or country there’s one row of headstones, for example, that were all erected in the 1890s - the Victorian patch - and another row where mostly Irish people have been buried. You’ll spot things you’d never discover just from looking at photos. Walk around and make notes, not just about what you can see but how it makes you feel. No amount of second-hand advice can beat first-hand experience of a location. The number one port of call when you’re trying to describe a setting is to go there and see it for yourself. How do you do that? Here are a few tips and resources for fleshing out your middle grade or YA cemetery setting. Just give them enough so they can feel the hairs stand up on the backs of their necks and imagine walking through that dark landscape with your characters. Most children and teenagers will have been to a graveyard at some time and they’ll have a picture of it in their mind straight away, so you don’t need to describe every detail. First you need to be sure it makes sense as a setting in your story (why are your characters there? What does it add to the plot?), and then you’ve got to paint that setting for your readers. But that doesn’t mean you should be lazy about it a flimsy graveyard backdrop isn’t enough to build atmosphere and tension on its own. There’s a literary and cinematic heritage attached to graves that acts as shorthand for terror - think Pet Sematary, Night of the Living Dead, Carrie, The Woman in Black - so they can get people shuddering from the offset, even without a paranormal encounter. They’re dark and shadowy, spookily silent and totally empty - you hope!Įverybody knows cemeteries are a breeding ground for ghosts seeking closure (you knew that, right?) but they can make a fantastic setting for your middle grade or YA story even if you’re not writing supernatural horror. Hey, horror fans! We all know that not much beats the eerie atmosphere of an empty cemetery in the middle of the night.
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