Mt. Pisgah Cemetery (dialupers order a pizza)

F.Gordon

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Mon Aug-01-05 09:53 AM
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Mt. Pisgah Cemetery (dialupers order a pizza)

Located near Cripple Creek Colorado. I took over 90 snapshots here. Hopefully the few that I’m posting will give you a sense of what this place is like. Guarantee it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Not your garden-variety “golf course type” cemetery.

The Entrance. Still had a wide angle on the camera from earlier shots I was taking. I’m standing almost directly below the gate when I took this.

Same snapshot. Since the perspective is one that makes it appear that the cemetery is pulling you in I made a half-ass attempt for the effect to be more haunting. Cripple Creek has the reputation of being the most haunted town in Colorado. I’m working on a like effect that I want to apply to a series of snapshots. Start the spooky music……

The West Side. Mt. Pisgah is still a “working” cemetery. Newer graves mixed in with older graves. This is another “spooky” :eyes: wide angle shot I’m working on. It shows the side of the cemetery where more of the newer digs are plus some different group burial areas.

The Lost Markers. Back to using a "normal" lens now. Many of the old wood markers are long gone but thankfully someone has kept an “inventory” and has placed small gray markers to indicate the spot of the various burials.

Lonely John. There is some order to the way most the graves are placed but there are actually burial sites scattered about everywhere. Either John wanted to be buried in a favorite spot or the towns people didn’t care much for the guy and dug a hole for him away from everyone else.

The Baby Graves. A little sad but very interesting. Sad because there are so many baby graves at Mt. Pisgah but interesting because of the many different wooden and metal fences put up around them.

More single baby graves. What’s unique about this cemetery is that nothing is really “maintained”. The grave marker in the foreground will eventually become part of the earth.

Mix of nature and graves. One more snapshot of some baby graves. You can see that the older one to the left actually has a bush growing out of it. An interesting one I found (not in this thread) is where an old wooden pull toy set had been placed at the base of the wooden marker. I didn’t see it at first because it was covered by the weeds that had overgrown around it.

They’re everywhere. There were some graves in this small grove of trees. I started to walk up to these but stopped for two reasons. First; there was an unknown critter moving in the undergrowth that I couldn’t see that was following my movement as I walked around the grove trying to find a clear way in. And second; when I went to walk in my foot sank a little in the ground. I looked down and saw that I had just stepped in a grave. I didn’t see it because I was too busy looking for the unknown critter and it was marked only by a very small stone next to a tree.

Landscape shot of East End. This is group of “newer” and older grave sites at the east end of the Cemetery. At the base of Mt. Pisgah.

And finally. At the very back of the cemetery at the top of the hill are a few “newer” digs. I’m not a seasoned Cemetery walker but I don’t recall ever seeing anything like this. Not sure if Hannah wanted to “look” out over the mountains from her grave or if this was done for the benefit of those that came to visit her?

That’s it. A very small taste of this interesting place. Hope a few of ya’ enjoyed seeing them.
:hi:

I was going to post this in a private gallery just for the benefit of a member of the "mutual admiration society" since it is her old childhood stomping ground and I wanted her to see what it looked like today, but I decided to let others see them.
:evilgrin: