Amanda Sedlak-Hevener

Graveyards generally creep people out all on their own without any outside help. The strange shadows cast by the tombstones, the pressing silence, the dead people – all of this lends graveyards a sense of unease.

However, the living can provide their own bit of eeriness to a grave by leaving things behind. The stories included here, direct from cemetery workers and posted to Reddit, are about some of the weirdest, creepiest, and scariest things people leave at their loved ones (or not-so-loved ones) graves.

A Plastic Cup, A Burnt Baby Doll, And An Abandoned Corpse

My best friend and I worked at a cemetery as groundskeepers as juniors/seniors in high school. It was easy money, five-bucks-an-hour (in the late 1970’s), mostly for edging, trimming, and keeping the graves tidy. We tore around the place in a souped-up golf cart with our tools in back. It was annoying to work in the rain, and it rained often, but it was truly a gravy job. No pun.

There were a lot of dead flowers to remove, along with numerous empty liquor bottles and used condoms. There was a widow who left scribbled notes, torn from a reporter’s notebook, upon her husband’s grave – all completely illegible. On the graves of children, a lot of sodden stuffed animals, that were sometimes mysteriously muddy.

The creepiest thing I saw was a plastic drink cup and wet baby doll, nails stuck in its head and burnt as if someone went over it lightly with a blowtorch. I kept the head and hung it from my rear-view mirror like a graduation tassel.

But the worst thing I saw was the naked corpse of a young woman my age, a student at a neighboring high school, left neatly with her arms at her sides one foggy Saturday morning. She had been strangled right there, and her killer also punched her in the face several times before she was dead. Though she was identified quickly, her clothes were never found and her murder never solved.

My friend and I got grilled by the police over several sessions, but we didn’t know anything. My friend quit a couple of weeks later, but I hung on until I turned 18 when I was eligible to work in my uncle’s printing plant.

I’ll never forget the bruises and her open dead blue eyes.

There Was Human Hair At The Gravesite

Not really a “leave” per-se, but a relative of mine who worked in a cemetery told me this story:

It is a very old cemetery, a good few hundred years, and the church next to it existed before the 16th century. Considering the fact it is a remote place as well, most people back in the day were buried with wooden crosses and such. As time goes on, crosses rot away, new people get buried, etc. Nowadays, due to less people living in the countryside, that cemetery is pretty much growing over – a sad sight for such a pretty place.

Anyways, so someone was taking care of their relative’s grave and decided to expand the area around the grave (for some reason here we are not particularly fond of grass – rather a well-leveled ground with zen-garden-ish lines made with a rake). The person removed the grass, and tidied the place up with a rake when they raked up white hair from the ground. They freaked out and left, leaving my relative, the cemetery attendant to find this hair coming out of the ground. She reported it to the church and supposedly they reburied the body.

Not even sure how there could have been a body so close to the surface.

A Fetus In A Jar

For years in my home town, there’s been a fetus in a jar left at a grave site. It’s been there since I was a kid, and I should also say that if it is a fetus, it no longer looks like one. We’ve been told for years it is one, so the townspeople don’t touch it.

A Live Chicken

Once I saw a live chicken shackled to a headstone.

An Old School Flip Phone

I worked at a cemetery one summer as a grounds keeper. One thing I saw that seemed strange at first was an opened flip cell phone.

Upon closer inspection of the tomb stone, I realized it belonged to the deceased, who was in her late teens or early twenties when she passed away.

A very sad reminder to me that even though I was around her she when she had passed, I’m not invincible. Sometimes people forget that, especially when they’re younger.
Pink Fuzzy Handcuffs And Other Paraphenalia

I’ve never worked at a cemetery, but I once taggged along with a friend who did a while back.

He and I were walking around the whole site when we spotted something pink and feathery hanging off one of the statues situated above a grave. As we walk over we see it’s a pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs with matching panties just dangling off a statue. We both had a good laugh, but still never knew why someone choose to display those items on a loved one’s public grave. We figured it was just their way of showing their respects, or someone was having raunchy cemetery sex in the dead of night.

He Gave A Blanket

My best friend’s father works as a grounds keeper for a cemetery. He told us that he once saw a little kid leave a blanket on someone’s grave (presumably) his father’s. The mother and kid were alone. He heard the kid say ” he might be cold.”
Ritualistic Glass Beads And Candles

I am not a cemetery worker, but I once found candles and glass beads in circle around them on my father’s and a couple of other peoples’ graves. I had no idea if they stood for some sort of ritual, but I quickly disposed of them.

A Cat Food Dish And Other Weirdness

I worked as a grounds keeper over the spring and summer for my father-in-law, a grave-digger his entire life. Most of it is usually just balloons and fake flowers (I hate fake flowers).

I saw toys, unopened bottles, spare change, packs of unopened MTG cards, cigarettes, etc. One person even had a golf ball and golf tee hid under 3 inches of weeds that I hit with my weed eater.

That was nice.

On the grave of a cat lady who was buried with one of her cats, there was a food dish left by her family, who would fill it for weeks after. Wildlife is already a big problem in cemeteries and now someone is feeding them.

A Dead Body (And Not One In A Coffin)

I worked at a neighboring cemetery helping my grandfather cut the grass, and went for walks there as it was close to my house. During one stroll, I stumbled across someone who was murdered and dumped in the bushes.

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Junk That Turned Out To Be Worth A Fortune

Left Behind A Breakfast Sandwich

I worked at a Jewish cemetery during university, so it was common for people to leave things on graves. By far the weirdest was after someone came and ate McDonalds at a grave, they left a breakfast sandwich on the gravestone. People do realize someone needs to go pick that up, right?

Beads And Trinkets On An Unmarked Grave

Though not a cemetery worker, I was active in paranormal investigating/ghost hunting, and did walk-throughs of cemeteries. One grave site in particular had a bunch of trinkets on it: a handful of those glass beads people use in decorating, and a whole bunch of small toys that resembled a Happy Meal prize. I remember there being some “Wizard of Oz” toys, a couple of figures from Mulan, and a few others. There was also a small ring of stones, no marker, nothing, with a couple of tennis balls inside it.

I later learned that in the past, it was tradition the first body to be buried in a ground dedicated as a cemetery be a dog or some other animal, to “keep guard” while human souls transcended to their destination.

A Train Set With Full Compartments

My family and I used to volunteer at a cemetery, helping take care of the graves, edging the stones, and whatnot. A recently buried man had owned a hobby shop and his family put a train set around his tombstone. Each train compartment held a little token or something he liked. There’s was a handheld poker game, a scratch off ticket, a beer can, a deck of cards, and some other random trinkets. I thought it was a nice gesture and it was kind of funny watching the train go in circles with all of these little pieces.

The Half-Buried Brick

One of our company’s maintenance contracts was an old cemetery.

Though I only went there a couple of times, one aspect of it did stick out to me. A plain granite brick, out-of-line with any head or footstone, had fallen out a wheelbarrow while a retaining wall was being built, and no one touched it. For decades everyone passed this brick by, thinking it went with a grave, and so it slowly buried itself into the earth.

I sure didn’t move it.

Toy Cars, Pliers, And More

Though not a cemetery, Gregory Pacheo’s monument on Palomar Mountain outside San Diego has: several unopened beers, numerous keys (house and car), unopened junk mail (not the deceased’s), Hot Wheels, sunglasses, flatware, a handicapped parking pass (also not the decedent’s), a miniature sewing machine, pliers, a set of andirons, and a trove of other miscellaneous objects.