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Tag: cemetery

  • SpongeBob Headstone for Iraq Vet Banned by Cemetery

    A family is battling a cemetery after they were forced to remove a previously approved headstone for Kimberly Walker, an Iraq War veteran. The headstone, which is 7 feet high, is a smiling SpongeBob in an Army uniform. Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati said that they decided the headstone was inappropriate. The family of Kimberly Walker also had to remove a near-duplicate headstone that was set up for Walker’s living sister.

    “We’ve decided that [the headstones] aren’t appropriate for our historic cemetery and they can’t be displayed here,” cemetery President Gary Freytag said. Freytag also said that the SpongeBob headstones were approved in error and that they didn’t fit in with the cemetery’s stately appearance.

    Walker’s family is furious with the cemetery’s decision to remove the SpongeBob headstones. “They had no compassion for what we were going through,” said Walker’s mother, Deborah Walker. Kimberly Walker served two tours in Iraq and was found strangled and beaten to death this past February. The family had just gotten the headstones erected earlier this month when they were told they had to be removed.

    Do you think the cemetery was right to remove the headstones? Respond below.

    The cemetery has offered to reimburse the family, who prepaid $29,000 for their six plots in Spring Grove Cemetery, for each of the headstones as well as pay for new ones.

    “I feel terrible that it got to this point but I’m hoping we can come out at the other end of the tunnel with a solution,” Freytag said. Freytag said a possible solution to the issue may include using a more traditional gravestone with a small likeness of SpongeBob.

    The family doesn’t want new headstones, though–they want the other SpongeBob headstones back. Walker’s twin sister Kara Walker says that the lack of respect the cemetery showed by forcing them to take down the SpongeBob headstones is very frustrating.

    “They already brought enough grief and pain to the family,” she said. “We want what we paid for and what I know my sister would have wanted.” SpongeBob was Kimberly Walker’s favorite cartoon. “For them not to accommodate and respect what my sister sacrificed, not only for my family, but for everyone else in this country, really bothers me,” Kara added.

    Images via YouTube and Hulu

  • Vampire Cemetery Found in Poland

    Vampire Cemetery Found in Poland

    The idea of vampires has been romanticized in the United States for decades. While there is almost always the element of evil involved, time and again Hollywood enterprises have injected the notion of good vampires, vampires with souls, crime-fighting vampires, and vampire love stories into what had always traditionally been the story of undead servants of Satan, feeding upon the blood of the living.

    TV shows and movies like Buff the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Interview With the Vampire, True Blood, Blade, From Dusk tip Dawn, The Lost Boys, and the Twilight books and movies all have taken the fictional idea of vampires and run it to profitable ends.

    But in some places, vampires are taken very seriously. Like in Poland for instance, where construction workers building a road unearthed four bodies that were buried in a very unusual way. According to Spiegel, their heads had ben severed and placed in their own hands or between their knees. Archaeologists say this form of burial signals one thing: these people were seriously thought to be vampires; and this kind of burial was intended to prevent them from rising from he dead again.

    The bodies were buried with no clothes or jewelry on, and many times the skulls were weighted down with a stone. Which is still a better love story than Twilight.

    Archaeologists now believe that the bodies date from the 15th or 16th centuries, when the fear of vampires was widespread in Eastern Europe.

    In 2012 archaeologists in Bulgaria had found bodies of two other people who must have been considered vampires. They had been pierced through with stakes.

    Scientists are working to determine the cause of death for the bodies found. They were discovered not far from an ancient execution site, a gallows where prisoners were hanged.

    Much of vampire lore that is familiar to people nowadays has been the product of Hollywood tales of how vampires are made and how they can be killed.