Creatures of the night have long fascinated cultures around the world. They manifest from the dark imaginations that witness unexplainable terrors stalking the darkest hours of the day. While many immediately think of the popular vampire, witch, werewolf, or cryptid as the go-to entity of folk horror, an alternative source of extraordinary phenomenon has been making its presence known in the darkness of the night.

Yōkai are supernatural demons and spirits of Japan. The name Yōkai is a type of all-encompassing term for any type of haunting or otherworldly creature in Japanese folklore, with no direct, singular English translation. It’s a broad category featuring beings benevolent and otherwise. Many icons of popular culture—such as the well/TV inhabiting Onryō, Sadako of Ringu (the original Japanese version of The Ring), or the various Oni and Kappa featured in iconic Studio Ghibli films—are all examples of Yōkai.

They’re deeply rooted in Japanese tradition and culture, rising from villages to explain that which haunts generational lineages. Yōkai rise from the beliefs of Shinto, the oldest religion in Japan, where the ideals of animism and nature worship are heavily featured as a core tenet. Yōkai are believed to interact with us on both a spiritual and material level, crossing through the borders of dimensions, both avoiding and coexisting with humanity. One particularly haunting example is that of the Gashadokuro, a supernatural giant skeleton.

Night Stalker

The Gashadokuro (whose name is an onomatopoeia for the sound of rattling bones) is a being rooted in rage and anger. Dwelling near mass graves or battlefields, the Gashadokuro is a giant skeleton that wanders the countryside late at night, marked by its chattering “gachi gachi” sounds. A demonic version of the giant skeletons sold at big box home stores, these beings are several times larger than the average person, able to crush or consume a person with their titanic strength. Despite its namesake, the Gashadokuro is also capable of a shocking degree of stealth, with stories detailing its ability to move in complete silence as it hunts its prey.

Their origin lies in a tale familiar in many stories of Japanese supernatural horror: the death of soldiers. Warriors whose corpses litter battlegrounds (or victims of famine) who go without proper funeral procedures or rites manifest into ghosts or other creatures, longing for the ability to pass on. This wrathful, vengeful feeling gives way to the formation of an energy that grows stronger as the grudge against the living continues. These disturbed warriors eventually muster the strength to form into a gestalt being, the Gasadokuro. No spiritual rite will defend against this monster, which can only be stopped when the combined energy is spent and its malice burns out.

The specific origin of this creature comes from a folktale from over a thousand years ago, when the sorceress daughter (Takiyasha Hime) of a famous samurai (Taira no Masakado) manifested the Gashadokuro through black magic after he and his rebellion failed and all were killed. The Gashadokuro then attacked the Japanese city of Kyōto (as seen in the following image). The monster wreaked desolation upon the city until the samurai’s head was moved to a fishing village that would eventually become the famous city of Tokyo.

The Gashadokuro has popped up in a few different films, games, and stories across the years, including in the popular stop-motion film Kubo and the Two Strings by Laika. While not nearly as popular as other Yōkai (particularly the Mononoke brand, which includes spirits like those seen in previously mentioned Ringu and the Ju-On series), there’s still a particularly palpable terror when imagining a building-sized skeleton stalking you on a late-night walk in the Japanese countryside. Thankfully, with the arrival of the modern era, the circumstances that bring about the Gashadokuro have severely lessened to the point of being nearly impossible.

Though it probably doesn’t hurt to get familiar with Japanese funeral procedures. Just in case.

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Werewolf in Wisconsin?

But if you find yourself driving along a dark country road in southeastern Wisconsin, particularly around Elkhorn, there’s another possibility. That thing standing beside the road might not be wearing a costume. It might be the Beast of Bray Road.

The story begins in 1936 when a night watchman named Mark Shackleman reportedly encountered something very strange near St. Coletta, a school outside Elkhorn. Shackleman says he saw a large, hairy creature standing upright near a burial mound. It was tall, with a wolf- or bear-like appearance, and he later described its terrible odor and unsettling, low growl. The encounter reportedly happened on two successive nights.

Return of the Beast

Then the creature basically disappeared. For nearly half a century, there was little to add to the tale. Beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, reports began appearing with greater frequency. The sightings spread around Elkhorn and into surrounding areas. Soon the creature had acquired the name by which it’s known today: the Beast of Bray Road.

Witnesses reported a large, muscular, wolf-like figure covered in dark hair, sometimes walking on two legs and sometimes on four. Some described yellow or glowing eyes. Others reported long claws. Several encounters involved automobiles, including claims that the creature ran toward vehicles or even climbed onto them.

Then came Halloween night, 1991. Doris Gipson drove along Bray Road in the fog when she believed she struck something. She stopped and got out to investigate, but found nothing in the road. Then something came running out of the woods. She later said it was much larger than a dog and much faster than a person.

Gipson, who was just 18 years old, hurried back into her car. The creature reportedly chased her, leapt onto the trunk, and slipped off in the rain. Terrifyingly real? A Halloween hoax? No one knows, but the Beast of Bray Road isn’t the only wolf-like creature in American folklore. And it’s not particularly useful to insist that every similar report describes the same thing.

Witnesses’ Eyes Wide with Wonder

Theories have ranged from an unusually large wolf, bear, or feral dog to Bigfoot, a supernatural creature, or simply a case of mistaken identification. Even Linda Godfrey, the researcher and author whose reporting helped turn the Beast into a modern legend, acknowledged that different witnesses may have encountered entirely different phenomena.

We’ve encountered another werewolf-like creature here at Grimrose Manor. The Michigan Dog Man, whose sightings span decades, has become an important part of Michigan folklore.

Perhaps something is roaming the roads of Wisconsin that science has not yet identified. It’s possible that people have occasionally mistaken ordinary animals for something extraordinary. Maybe, as happens with so many legends, a few strange encounters became stories, the stories became folklore, and the folklore eventually became a creature of its own.

But the next time you’re driving through Wisconsin’s Walworth County after dark, you should keep your eyes on the road and know that the Beast of Bray Road doesn’t require a werewolf costume.

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After more than two years of opening the doors for you every week, we’re going to slow the pace a little. Beginning now, Grimrose Manor will publish every other week, at least through the end of the year. Between work, work that has recently ceased to exist, other projects, ordinary life, and the various demands of keeping a household from descending into complete gothic ruin, a weekly schedule has become rather more than we can reasonably maintain. Plus, we really need to find out what that muffled ticking sound is coming from under the floorboards. Can you hear it?

But we don’t intend to let the cobwebs grow unchecked. We’d like to use this change as an opportunity to think a little more carefully about what we bring you. So, to those of you who have continued to wander through the Manor with us, what have you enjoyed most? What would you like to see more of?

Leave us a comment and tell us. We may not have reached the number of visitors we once imagined would be rattling the gates by now, but we so appreciate the people who have stayed with us.

The lamps will remain lit. The door will remain unlocked. Just knock every other week.

“Demons to some, Angels to others.”

There is perhaps no better way to aptly describe the Hellraiser franchise than with a line delivered by its own star attraction, the Lead Cenobite/Hell Priest/Pinhead (as usually portrayed by Doug Bradley). It’s uttered by the Hell Priest as it and its “Order of Gash” are fearfully questioned by final girl, Kirsty Cotton (portrayed by Ashley Laurence), after she opens the famous “Lament Configuration” puzzle box in the first Hellraiser film.

Spanning 11 films, the Hellraiser franchise has a complicated reputation, mired by a string of panned direct-to-video releases. What began as a tale of flesh, desire, and otherworldly beings, the Hellraiser series quickly transitioned into the more profitable (and generic) slasher genre as the films progressed.

What’s worth examining, however, is just what exactly was at the core of the first two Hellraiser movies, and the 2022 reboot, that makes them so special, as well as the dark and macabre topics hardly touched in such exquisite detail by their contemporaries.

Tasting Pleasures

The first Hellraiser film, based on the novella The Hellbound Heart by horror master Clive Barker, is, for all intents and purposes, a haunted house film. The primary crux of the story revolves around family patriarch Larry Cotton (portrayed by Andrew Robinson) as he moves his family into the abandoned home of his brother, Frank Cotton (portrayed by Sean Chapman). With him are his daughter, Kristy, and second wife, Julia.

Unbeknownst to the family, Frank’s disappearance was brought about by his summoning of franchise villains, the Cenobites, and their promise of the greatest pleasures conceivable. Of course, in standard Faustian bargain tropes, the so-called “greatest pleasures” are, in fact, a sensory-overwhelming mixture at the most extreme limits of sadomasochism. At the same time, the film reveals that Larry’s wife, Julia, had in fact been having an affair with Frank to accommodate her own sexual thrills and desires.

Julia takes on the role of the obsessive, nearly sadistic housewife, feeding hapless victims to the ghoulish Frank as he hides in the attic, more a hunk of viscera and muscle than of human. Indeed, the primary antagonist of both Hellraiser and its immediate sequel is much more domestic than the franchise’s reputation may let on. The Cenobites are relegated to haunting ghosts in the background, observing the chaos and occasionally toying with Kirsty as Julia and Frank’s plot unfolds in a dark manor.

The dark corners and crevices of the manor ooze gothic themes as blood, flesh, and other hidden sexual desires swell to the surface (sometimes literally). Barker’s concept for the novella and film paints classic themes of Edgar Allan Poe and contemporary Gothic writers as Hellraiser reveals its characters’ taboo pursuits, the blurring of horror and twisted romantic passions, and monstrous decay.

The second film doubles down and introduces Lovecraftian Eldritch elements through the reveal of the Cenobites home, a grand and endless labyrinth ruled by a titanic spinning diamond-shaped entity known as the Leviathan, the God of Hell. Even the score by Christopher Young gives off a much grander, more sophisticated, haunting vibe than one would expect, almost more fitting for a Phantom of the Opera film than a story of homely murders.

These themes continue into the sequel, where Julia takes the leading role as a villainess once again alongside Dr. Channard (portrayed by Kenneth Cranham). The Cenobites’ role, while slightly expanded through the examination of the Hell Priest’s backstory, is yet again pushed to the side as more of an occasional hindrance to a returning Kirsty Cotton than the film’s frontmen/women. Julia was intended to become the main antagonist of the Hellraiser franchise itself before the Hell Priest’s lingering popularity drew executives to push for their promotion.

This concept of humanity and exceeding beyond the limits of flesh being the heart of the cruelty and bloodlust sets Hellraiser aside from the more simplistic genre competitors of Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, or Halloween. There is an artistry, a quiet intrigue that draws in concepts and ideas at the back of our minds into the story. We’re not rooting for the killer to skin brainless teens or waiting for the next classic quip, but instead asking ourselves how far we would go to achieve our subconscious, hedonistic urges.

And yet, Hellraiser found itself far less popular than its brethren. Outside of the recognition of “Pinhead” (a name creator Clive Barker openly expressed disdain for), Hellraiser never quite found a footing in terms of ultra-popularity. Even when the series pivoted to openly focusing on the Hell Priest as the main antagonist, the returns never came. Indeed, one could view it as a “waste of good suffering.” But Hellraiser did find itself with an enduring legacy thanks to a few well-aging factors.

Legendary, Even in Hell

Horror as a genre has always been a welcoming space for marginalized individuals. Some of the most popular and iconic horror films, novels, games, comics, etc. have found success through their ability to tackle or portray social issues or concepts in a way other genres are unable to. Hellraiser and its themes of sexuality and carnal desires are blatantly depicted through the Cenobites and their extreme BDSM aesthetic.

The original pair of films’ willingness to let a woman’s sexual desire take center stage was practically unheard of, with few exceptions; even now, the topic is much rarer than other themes. Hellbound even shows Julia dismissing Frank, literally tearing his heart out, as he had more figuratively done to her at the climax of the original film.

Even themes of gender come into play, depicted through a stunning performance by trans actor Jamie Clayton as the Hell Priest in Hulu’s 2022 reboot of Hellraiser. As hinted at in the original novella—but never addressed directly in the initial run of films—here the Cenobites are shown to be genderless beings, removed from the concept entirely to more fully indulge in their pleasure.

While many were skeptical of the role being played by anyone other than series icon Doug Bradley (as seen in the failed attempts of some of the later Hellraiser films), Jamie Clayton perfectly captured the haunting and terror of something that is truly otherworldly and devoid of human ideals and limits. The same film also introduces the horror of drug addiction into the series, pairing sexual and substance desires as similar vices sought through the power of the Cenobites.

Even with the well-received attention of the 2022 film, it seems a niche reputation continues to dominate Hellraiser and its success. Hellraiser may be overshadowed when considering the vast library of iconic horror media, but its themes and scares have lasted well into the present.

“Elevated” horror films of A24 and recent hits like Obsession or Sinners have all become bolder in presenting an unfiltered, yet still sophisticated view of how horror and the lusts of flesh (both sexual or otherwise) can resonate with audiences. The success of films like 2024’s Nosferatu also demonstrated the staying power of gothic horror as a genre.

With a new video game on the way, one can hope Hellraiser can once again receive its time in the spotlight and awaken the appeal and fear of what lies beyond sensation.

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And then there’s the Chupacabra, which is, frankly, a bit of a newcomer.

The modern legend of the Chupacabra appeared in Puerto Rico in 1995. With National Hispanic Heritage Month running Sept. 15-Oct. 15, why not pay homage to this cryptid that got its start on the island some 31 years ago and then mysteriously moved to Texas and the American Southwest, along with other Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas?

A Monster Is Born

The word chupacabra translates rather wonderfully and ominously as “goat-sucker” in Spanish. And goats weren’t the only animals supposedly falling victim to the creature.

During 1995, reports began circulating in Puerto Rico about livestock being found dead under mysterious circumstances. Deaths of goats, sheep, chickens, rabbits, and other animals were blamed on a strange new predator. Some were said to have puncture wounds and to have been drained of blood.

Then people started claiming they had seen the thing responsible. And this is where the story gets interesting. The original Chupacabra was not the creature most of us picture today.

The earliest descriptions from Puerto Rico weren’t of a mangy, hairless dog skulking along a roadside. Witnesses described a roughly 3- to 4-foot-tall creature that stood upright, with large dark or reddish eyes, thin limbs, and spines running down its back. In other words, less the “sickly coyote” image that a lot of us have and more “somebody’s nightmare after watching too much science fiction.”

One of the most famous witnesses was Madelyne Tolentino of Canóvanas, who reported seeing an unusual creature in 1995. Her description helped establish the image of the original Chupacabra as something almost alien.

Did Hollywood Invent the Chupacabra?

The summer of 1995 also saw the release of Species, a science-fiction horror movie starring Natasha Henstridge as an alien-human hybrid named Sil, who had a very distinctive feature. Spikes down her back.

According to cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, the timing is suspicious. The film opened in Puerto Rico shortly before the first wave of Chupacabra reports, and the resemblance between Sil and the creature described by some of the original witnesses is hard to ignore.

That doesn’t mean somebody watched a movie and immediately invented a monster. It does, however, provide a fascinating possible explanation for why the earliest Chupacabra looked so dramatically different from the one we know today.

As always, there’s another possibility. Maybe something really did wander through the Puerto Rican countryside in 1995. Maybe it was something we’d never seen before. Maybe it was some sort of goat-sucking creature. Who’s to know?

The Chupacabra Gets a Makeover

By the end of the 1990s, the Chupacabra had undergone something of a rebranding.

The bipedal, spiny creature gradually gave way to a hairless, four-legged animal with leathery or scaly-looking skin, prominent teeth, and a generally unpleasant disposition. And then people started finding them. Or, more accurately, people started finding dead animals they thought were Chupacabras.

Dogs. Coyotes. Animals suffering from severe sarcoptic mange.

Mange is caused by a microscopic mite, Sarcoptes scabiei, which burrows into the skin. In severe cases, the disease can cause an animal to lose much of its hair, develop thickened and damaged skin, become weak and gaunt, and look rather abnormal.

Look at a healthy coyote. Now take away most of its hair, cover its skin with lesions and scabs, make it skinny and exhausted, and drop it into the darkness at the edge of somebody’s pasture. You just may have a Chupacabra.

Scientists who have examined alleged Chupacabra specimens have overwhelmingly found ordinary canids suffering from severe mange. National Geographic, likewise, reported that the mangy-coyote explanation accounts for many of the modern sightings.

But there’s a wrinkle. That explanation doesn’t necessarily account for the original Puerto Rican reports, whose witnesses described something decidedly unlike a dog or coyote.

And so the Chupacabra became two monsters at once. The strange, upright, spiny creature of 1995 and the hairless canine of the American Southwest. Both are Chupacabras. Neither cryptid has been proven to exist. Naturally, this has done nothing to stop us from talking about them.

Does the Chupacabra Really Drink Blood?

Here’s where we need to separate the legend from the evidence.

The traditional story says that the Chupacabra kills livestock and drinks their blood. That’s essentially baked right into the name. But there’s no scientific evidence that a mysterious animal has been systematically draining livestock of blood.

In fact, University of Michigan entomologist Barry O’Connor, whose research into the mite responsible for mange helped explain the appearance of many alleged Chupacabras, has suggested that the blood-drinking part of the story is probably just that, a story. As he told National Geographic: “I think that’s pure myth.”

And there is a perfectly ordinary reason a sick predator might attack livestock. An animal weakened by severe mange may have difficulty catching its normal prey. A chicken, sheep, or goat isn’t exactly an Olympic sprinter. And dinner is dinner. The fact that the resulting carcass might inspire tales of a vampire beast is apparently just a bonus.

Thirty-One Years of Chupacabra

Here’s the truly delightful thing about the Chupacabra. Unlike many of the creatures in our cryptid cabinet, its origin isn’t buried in some foggy medieval manuscript or an Indigenous legend passed down through generations. We can watch this particular monster being born.

The first modern reports emerged in Puerto Rico in 1995. The stories spread. The descriptions changed. The monster crossed borders. Soon there were reports from Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and the United States. Eventually, the Chupacabra had wandered as far north as Maine and beyond the Americas. The Chupacabra went from a series of strange animal deaths and frightened eyewitness accounts in Puerto Rico to one of the most recognizable cryptids in the Americas in the course of three decades.

With cryptids, we’ll possibly never know the truth. But if you’re walking past the goat pen after sunset tonight, perhaps don’t whistle. Just in case. After all, the Chupacabra might just be a modern legend. But nothing is saying it has to stay that way.

For further reading:

The Campaign

The campaign was launched by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi on International Women’s Day in 2020, with three goals:

1. securing a legal pardon for nearly 4,000 people—an estimated 85% of them women—who were accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736;

2. obtaining a formal apology from the Scottish government; and

3. establishing a national memorial to honor the victims.

In 2021, they started the Witches of Scotland podcast, sharing the untold stories of those accused under the Witchcraft Act of 1563.

The Apology

In response to the campaign, on International Women’s Day in 2022, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon delivered an official apology from the Scottish Parliament. You can watch the full speech here or read it here, but here’s a quote I found particularly poignant:

While here in Scotland the Witchcraft Act may have been consigned to history a long time ago, the deep misogyny that motivated it has not. We live with that still.

Today it expresses itself, not in claims of witchcraft, but in everyday harassment, online rape threats and sexual violence.

All of it intensified by an increasingly polarised and toxic public discourse, and amplified each and every day by social media.

It is no wonder that more women than ever before, certainly in my lifetime, are now questioning whether politics and public life are safe environments for women.

The Book

In 2025, Mitchell and Venditozzi published the book, How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women. As with the podcast, they share their research to outline these historic injustices, and to detail the humans whose wrongful deaths have nearly been forgotten.

The book’s conceit of a “manual for the patriarchy” is pretty brilliant as well, because it allows them to imbue these tragic tales with a sense of humor and wit (often through footnotes)—and who doesn’t need some comic relief with a topic as bleak as this? I admire their continued emphasis on connecting the threads of misogyny and control to the events of present day.

The Memorial

It was only when the Witches of Scotland announced that they were commissioning a memorial tartan via Kickstarter that I learned about the campaign. To make it a “living memorial,” each thread has a symbolic meaning—squares made of 173 black threads marking the number of years of the Witchcraft Act, gray and black thread counts incorporating the years 1563 and 1736, red and pink symbolic of the legal tapes used to bind papers, and white check of 3 threads, representing the campaign’s objectives. (A mini-documentary by filmmaker Eva Weinstein about the making of the Witches of Scotland tartan is included below.)

Knowing that the tartan was made to order makes it all the more special. (You can still pre-order scarves and kilts, but know that it will take a while to arrive.) I also feel a certain sense of ancestry and kinship with my Celtic roots. But it’s also meaningful that a modern clan of “quarrelsome women” around the world now proudly wear this official tartan to commemorate those who had been forgotten for so long. Together, we say never again.

It pains me to acknowledge that we are unfortunately living in an era where injustices like these seem to be on the rise rather than on the wane. So it seems all the more important to remember this: it is possible to live in a way that centers the righting of wrongs. Let us all aspire to do just that.

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It’s an unlikely place for one of the most remarkable animal memorial grounds in America. There are no grand mausoleums, marble statues, manicured lawns, or imposing gates. Instead, there are trees, red dirt, hand-painted signs, weathered stones, and hundreds of graves, all of them supposedly belonging to hunting dogs.

The cemetery began in 1937, when local hunter Key Underwood buried his beloved coon dog, Troop, on a ridge in the woods of Colbert County. Troop had been Underwood’s hunting companion for nearly 15 years. He was the first dog buried there, and eventually other hunters began bringing their own dogs to the same place.

Today, hundreds of dogs are buried throughout the cemetery, their graves marked by everything from professionally engraved stones to homemade monuments. Some inscriptions are elaborate. Others are heartbreakingly simple.

The names tell their own stories: hunting dogs remembered not merely for their ability in the woods but as companions whose lives mattered to the people who knew them. There’s Squeak and Lulubelle, Bozo, and George. In addition to the original, Troop, there’s one that died in 1989 whose marker reads, “He wasn’t the best but he was the best I ever had.”

Paul Koudounaris, author of Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion, has visited animal cemeteries around the world. He considers Coon Dog Cemetery something special.

“Coon Dog Cemetery is truly one of the greatest animal cemeteries in the world. Nothing about it is fancy, but that’s exactly its strength: it’s absolutely, beautifully honest. The expression there is pure, the moments speak humbly yet unequivocally about the bond between dog and man. I love that place, as a memorial ground it’s simply perfect.”

“Beautifully honest” may be the best description of the place.

There’s no attempt to disguise what these graves represent. These were working dogs. They belonged to hunters and families. They spent their lives following scents through the woods, waiting beside campfires, riding in trucks, disappearing into the darkness after raccoons and returning again.

You may not think of Southern hunters as the most caring, empathetic, emotional types, but that’s one of the reasons this is such a special place and an indicator of just how much our animals mean to us.

A lot of what we’ve come to understand about pet grief involves the extraordinary place animals have come to occupy in our domestic lives. We call them family. In Memorializing Our Animals, we learned that we photograph them, celebrate their birthdays, preserve their paw prints, keep their ashes, and make memorial videos when they’re gone.

Coon Dog Cemetery reminds us that this bond is not new. People have been grieving animals for generations. What makes the cemetery particularly poignant is that these dogs were not necessarily the sort of animals that would have appeared in a modern ad for Chewy or PetSmart. Their purpose was practical. They were working animals, valued for their particular abilities. But usefulness doesn’t preclude love.

In fact, perhaps the cemetery demonstrates that love doesn’t require an animal to be perfect, beautiful, famous, or useful. It only requires that two lives become intertwined. And the people who visit this place continue that tradition of remembrance.

Annual Celebration

Every Labor Day weekend, Coon Dog Cemetery becomes a gathering place for an event that brings hunters, dog lovers, local residents, and visitors together at the gravesites for food, fellowship, music, remembrance, and a celebration of the dogs buried there. The cemetery’s annual gathering has become a longstanding Colbert County, Alabama, tradition. On Sept. 7, 2026, the music line up will be Patrick Tetreault and The Pride of the North Bank and Joseph Baldwin. Join the celebration from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. if you’re in the area.

Grief is rarely only about the moment of death. It’s also about what happens afterward. Who remembers? Who tells the stories? Who displays the photograph? Who visits the grave?

At Coon Dog Cemetery, the answer is simple. We do. And we do it together every Labor Day weekend. The dogs may be gone, but their names remain beneath the trees. Their stories exist in the memories of the people who hunted beside them. And once a year, people gather in the woods to celebrate lives that otherwise might have disappeared entirely.

I’ve spent this series thinking about why we grieve animals, whether animals grieve one another, and why humans go to such lengths to memorialize creatures whose lives are so much shorter than our own.

Maybe Coon Dog Cemetery offers the simplest answer.

Because they were here. Because they mattered. Because somewhere along the way, a dog became more than an animal someone owned. It became a companion, hunting partner, member of the family. And when that life ended, someone thought it was worth stopping for a moment and acknowledging that it was a good dog.

And perhaps, in the end, that’s enough.

For further reading:

At the Manor, we keep the cremains of two cherished dogs—displayed in wooden boxes with engraved plaques bearing their names. I made memorial videos for each dog, Holly and Timber, collections of photographs and video clips set to music. Four years later, I still get choked up watching them. Sometimes I get emotional simply thinking about them.

But people have always found more unusual, more elaborate, more tangible ways of keeping their animals with them after death. And perhaps that isn’t so strange after all. Maybe we memorialize because we are trying to make an invisible relationship visible.

Giving Meaning to Memory

Paul Koudounaris, author of Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion, has spent years documenting the ways humans memorialize the animals they’ve loved. He sees something larger in the practice than simply wanting a keepsake, and he regularly memorializes unknown animals on his Instagram @hexencult.

“Let’s keep in mind that these animals maintain no tradition of visual or written culture, so an animal that dies stray on the side of the road is doomed to be erased from the record of the world. There will be no lingering memory or testament of this once beautiful being that our time overlapped with, that might have crossed any of our paths while living, and save for a cruel twist of fate might have wound up as one of those sitting beloved in some living room, with a full belly rather than protruding ribs. So offering some kind of elegy or memorial is a way of paying witness: this creature existed, this creature’s spirit was no less than any other, so let us please stop, if only a moment, in remembrance and respect.”

I love the phrase “paying witness” because a memorial doesn’t change the fact that the animal is gone. It simply says that the life was here.

Holding On To Love

There’s something deeply human about transforming part of a beloved creature into an object that can remain. Cremated ashes can be incorporated into hand-blown glass, creating pendants, paperweights, sculptures, and other pieces of art. Some artists make glass cats or dogs, while others create abstract pieces in which the ashes become part of the color and texture of the glass.

Others turn ashes into jewelry, including rings and pendants, or even incorporate a tiny amount of cremains into tattoo ink. Memorial tattoos made with pet ashes have become an increasingly available way of carrying a physical trace of an animal permanently.

Dejah Kirksey of Waterford, Michigan, keeps her childhood dog’s ashes in an urn and her paw print in her room. These are simple gestures, but no less meaningful.

Morgan Carey of Richmond, Virginia, chose an especially unusual form of remembrance for her dog Pablo, a terrier/dachshund mix. She reached out to Rest in Pieces, a Richmond oddities shop that offers custom preservation services alongside its work with taxidermy, skeletal articulation, wet specimens, and other forms of natural-history preservation. Custom work can include things as unusual as preserved hearts, mummified paws, whisker collections, and skeletal preservation. Here’s her experience in her own words.

Saying Goodbye to Pablo

by Morgan Carey

In Pablo’s death, there was an absence of choice. I knew it was coming, but thought it would happen differently. What I didn’t get in his last moments, I gave myself after.

I picked up his frozen body from the emergency vet where he passed, a place he frequented in his last few years. I decided to look at him one last time before bringing his body to RIP, and I’m completely convinced there’s never been a cuter corpse.

The owner handled the memorial himself and was compassionate and communicative throughout the process. The only part that hurt was how long it took to get him back. Almost three months after his last day, I got a piece of him back. A preserved paw I get to kiss and hold whenever I want. A heart that was too big for his small body, and now the most expensive thing I own. Not because the memorial was so costly; it was only $200, but after almost four years living with heart disease, his heart was worth over $10,000 and still completely priceless to me.

I don’t know where his spirit spends its days, but his heart lives on my shelf.

We used to spend our mornings with him getting belly rubs, and I would get a paw on my chest whenever the rubs stopped. That paw has always told me, please don’t stop, please stay, please be with me.

Always, Pablo.

Just Shy of Reincarnation

Others take preservation to an entirely different level. ViaGen Pets offers genetic preservation and cloning for dogs and cats. Genetic preservation can begin while an animal is still alive, preserving cells that could potentially be used for cloning later. The company currently charges $50,000 for either canine or feline cloning. What emerges isn’t the original animal returned to life, of course, but a genetic twin born later.

That’s where memorialization begins to blur into something else entirely, an attempt to preserve some possibility of what came before. But perhaps the most interesting memorials are the ones we don’t wait to make.

Olivia Wells of Panama City, Florida, has a dog named Whitfield who is very much alive. She is already creating a memorial of sorts, however, by having the nose print of her beagle mix turned into a ring through an imprint kit from Le Mela. The resulting piece will preserve something uniquely his while he is still here to leave that impression.

Paying Witness

Maybe that’s the lesson in all of this.

We don’t need an urn. We don’t need a tattoo. We don’t need a glass sculpture or a preserved paw or a genetic sample frozen in a laboratory. We simply need to remember.

The more odd and elaborate memorials fascinate, but they and the simpler ones reveal the same truth: We know these animals will not be here forever. Eventually, that collar will hang empty and that favorite chair will be vacant.

So we take photographs. We save paw prints. We make videos. We put ashes in boxes. We press noses into rings and memories into glass. We make something that says, “You were here. I knew you. I loved you.”

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At dusk on Sept. 12, 1952, a group of small-town West Virginians went looking for something that had fallen from the sky. What they found became yet another of Appalachia’s strangest legends.

A group of boys were playing football in the schoolyard at Flatwoods, a small community tucked into the wooded hills of Braxton County, when they saw something streak across the evening sky. It appeared to be a bright, fiery object, descending toward a nearby hillside.

Naturally, they went to investigate. What happened next is the reason that 74 years later, people are still talking about the Flatwoods Monster.

The boys returned with Kathleen May, the mother of Ed, 13, and Freddie, 12, along with several other youngsters and 17-year-old National Guardsman Eugene Lemon. As the group approached the hilltop, they reported seeing a strange pulsating light. Then, in the darkness, their flashlights revealed something even more strange.

The witnesses described a figure nearly 10 feet tall, hovering above the ground. It had a round, reddish face surrounded by a pointed, hood-like shape that has often been compared to the ace of spades. Its body appeared green, its arms were spindly or claw-like, and some witnesses reported a hissing or shrieking sound. There was also a peculiar, unpleasant odor in the air.

The group fled down the hill and reported what they had seen. The small-town story quickly appeared in newspapers and on radio programs far beyond West Virginia. The U.S. Air Force eventually investigated the incident as part of its UFO investigations, later associated with Project Blue Book.

And then came the inevitable question:

What, Exactly Did They See?

The bright object crossing the sky was likely a meteor. In fact, a broad portion of the eastern United States reported seeing a meteor that evening. As for the creature itself, investigators suggested that the witnesses may have mistaken a large owl perched in a tree for a strange humanoid figure. In the darkness, with the owl’s shape partially obscured by vegetation and shadows, its eyes could have appeared to glow while its body seemed much larger than it really was.

Fear, darkness, an unexpected animal, and a spectacular meteor would make a fairly convincing recipe for a monster. But that explanation never quite killed the story.

The witnesses remained convinced that they had encountered something extraordinary. Physical evidence included reports of a strange odor, trampled vegetation, charred and broken trees, plus marks on the ground. No creature was ever captured. No spacecraft was recovered. And the Flatwoods Monster has never been reliably reported again.

Perhaps that should have been the end of this tale. Instead, the mystery became folklore.

Today, the creature is variously known as the Flatwoods Monster, the Braxton County Monster, the Green Monster, the Phantom of Flatwoods, and, more recently, Braxxie. Its peculiar silhouette has found its way into books, artwork, games, music, and even Japanese pop culture.

And Flatwoods, like many small towns with cryptid sightings, has learned to make the most of its most famous resident.

In nearby Sutton, the Flatwoods Monster Museum preserves newspaper clippings, artifacts, artwork, memorabilia, and other pieces of the legend. The museum also serves as the Braxton County Visitors Center. Around the county, enormous Monster Chairs offer visitors the opportunity to climb into the creature’s embrace for a photograph.

It’s a familiar Appalachian transformation: something once feared becomes something worth celebrating. A strange story becomes community identity. A mystery becomes a museum, a souvenir, a road-trip destination, and a reason for curious travelers to stop in a place they might otherwise have passed by. A movie about the Flatwoods Monster was released in 2018:

Perhaps that is the real legacy of the Flatwoods Monster. We may never know what the Mays, Eugene Lemon and the others saw on that dark hillside in 1952. Perhaps it was a meteor and an owl, their perceptions distorted by darkness and fear. Perhaps there was some other explanation that has slipped away as the decades passed.

Or perhaps, on that September evening, something truly unearthly came down among the hills of West Virginia. The evidence leaves the door ajar. And sometimes, for a good story, that is exactly where the door should remain.

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But as the trail grew in use, the more dangerous it became. Inns, known as “stands,” sprung up to provide weary travelers a modicum of comfort—but armed highwaymen were known to lay in wait to attack, with some coming to call the Trace the Devil’s Backbone. At least one famous explorer died under mysterious circumstances…

Today, the Natchez Trace Parkway is known as a scenic drive and historic road maintained by the National Park Service. Spanning 444 miles, the Trace stretches from Natchez, Miss., runs through Jackson, Tupelo, the northwest corner of Alabama, and ends in Franklin, Tenn., just south of Nashville. To a modern sensibility, it’s a slow-paced drive featuring pleasant views and a conspicuous lack of billboards.

Grimrose Manor has included many haunting stories from stops along the Natchez Trace—covering ghost tours and cemeteries in Natchez, Jackson, Florence, and Franklin—in part because we were researching our recently published travel book, Guide to the Natchez Trace Parkway.

But you needn’t leave the Trace itself to walk amongst the dead: there are at least 10 cemeteries to be discovered along the way. Here are some brief details you may not find in official guidebooks.

Old Trace Exhibit Shelter (milepost 8.7)

Behind an unassuming shelter with informational panels about the Old Trace footpath, you’ll find the Brandon Children’s Cemetery. Under the branches of eerie oak trees, with elaborate monuments surrounded by ornate iron fencing, seven siblings are buried. Their former home, known as Brandon Hall Plantation, is now one of many bed and breakfasts found in Natchez, Miss.

Mount Locust Historic Inn & Plantation (milepost 15.5)

Built around 1780, Mount Locust is one of the oldest structures along the Trace. Originally an inn, it became a cotton plantation owned by five generations of Chamberlains. In addition to a small family cemetery surrounded by iron fencing, a wooden marker now commemorates the 43 enslaved laborers buried there; however, only 10 of their names are known.

Grindstone Ford Trail (milepost 45.7)

If you take the short hiking trail at Grindstone Ford—the site of an old mill—you’ll come upon a handful of tombstones scattered in the woods. Unfortunately, the graves of these pioneers have not been well maintained. Many of the markers are broken, but several are still standing and legible.

Rocky Springs (milepost 54.8)

This place is worth a visit if only because it’s a literal ghost town. Once home to several thousand people, the town of Rocky Springs was plagued by war, yellow fever, a boll weevil infestation, and finally, the death of the spring itself. Today, Trace travelers and campers can walk the hiking trail to learn about the hardships the original inhabitants faced. Eventually the trail makes its way to an 1837 church building (still used on occasion) with a lovely fenced-in churchyard beside it.

Deans Stand (milepost 73.5)

Technically this grave site requires leaving the Trace about a 10th of a mile down an old side road, but according to folks who were more explorative than we were, a small cemetery can be found just past a rickety bridge. (Images at the link.)

Cowles Mead Cemetery (milepost 88.1)

This one is no surprise, as cemetery is in the name, and a short paved path takes you to the spot from the parking lot. In this family plot you’ll find the graves of Cowles Mead (a former acting governor and U.S. Representative who once ordered the arrest of Aaron Burr!) and his wife, Mary. Their nearby home was burned down during the Civil War.

French Camp Historic Village (milepost 180.7)

This stop is a special one because there’s a lot to explore: a museum, pottery studio, blacksmith shop, carriage house, and one of the only restaurants you can find on the Trace. Established in 1812, French Camp was re-opened in the early 1980s and run by a boarding school. In recreating the historic village, they relocated the 1846 cabin belonging to Col. James Drane, which was originally 12 miles away. In 1991, the gravestone markers belonging to the Drane family were also moved here; however, they were not re-interred, so it’s more of a memorial.

Old Trace and Confederate Graves (milepost 269.4)

Of course, in these rolling Southern hills, you’re never far from battlefields where the Civil War was fought. Visits to the Vicksburg or Shiloh National Military Parks, the Battle of Raymond, or the Tupelo or Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Sites make excellent side trips off the Trace. But not far from Tupelo, just a five-minute walk along the Old Trace you’ll find to the graves of 13 unknown Confederate soldiers. (Read our Statement on the Confederacy here.)

Meriwether Lewis Site (milepost 385.9)

On October 10, 1809, Meriwether Lewis—of Lewis & Clark fame—came to a tragic end at just 35 years old. He was staying at Grinder’s Stand on the Trace, and the debate continues even today about whether his wounds were self-inflicted or not. Attorney Tony L. Turnbow, author of Jefferson’s Spy: The Secret Life of Meriwether Lewis, makes a strong case for murder. Lewis’ monument is a broken shaft that symbolizes the untimely death. The site is also home to a pioneer cemetery of about 100 gravesites; however, the original stones have been replaced with a flat markers near the flagpole.

Tobacco Barn & Old Trace Drive (milepost 401.4)

Last, but not least, if you drive past the Tobacco Barn down an old, rutted 2-mile segment of the Old Trace, you’ll find the Kennedy-Cathey Family Cemetery. With an estimated 4-6 graves (photos here) it may not seem notable. But some additional research uncovered that these plots belong to the family of former slave Levi Albert Kennedy, who took his owner’s name after emancipation and became an evangelist. According to a bio on Find a Grave, Levi and his wife had 11 children, with 7 surviving into adulthood. His daughter Sadie married into the Cathey family and several of her children are buried in this cemetery.

These are just a few of the stories to be rediscovered along the Natchez Trace Parkway. We hope this taphophile collection will inspire you to explore further, given the opportunity.

For further reading:

Do Animals Grieve Each Other?

Scientists have documented elephants standing vigil and even lingering around the bones of deceased relatives. Crows gather around fallen members of their flock in what appears to be a communal response. Primates, whales, dolphins, and other species have displayed behaviors suggesting that death is not merely noticed but experienced as a meaningful disruption.

One especially vivid example came from collared peccaries in Arizona. Also known as javelinas and skunk pigs, these are indeed small pig-like animals. A motion-activated camera captured herd members returning to a dead peccary repeatedly over the course of several days. They nuzzled, sniffed, bit, stared at, and even slept beside the body; when coyotes approached, they chased them away. A biologist who reviewed the footage said it was “pretty amazing” that the response did not stop after an initial reaction, and noted that the behavior fit the scientific definition of an animal’s response to loss.

What exactly those animals understand remains a mystery. Do they comprehend mortality as humans do? Or does their response emerge from something older, something more fundamental than conscious understanding? Perhaps it’s a recognition that an absence has occurred in their community? Maybe grief doesn’t require language or the elaborate human apparatus of meaning-making. Mourning might simply be what happens when one living being recognizes that another has gone away.

Perhaps grief is not exclusively human because attachment itself is not exclusively human.

That possibility feels spiritually significant. It suggests that our sorrow over animals is not misplaced sentimentality but recognition that another being shared our space, shaped our days, and occupied a place in the community of our lives.

After all, grief may simply be the shadow cast by attachment. Wherever bonds exist, loss leaves an imprint. Wherever community exists, death creates an absence.

Perhaps mourning is not exclusively human because love itself is not exclusively human.

Do Animals Grieve Us?

I reached out to Paul Koudounaris, who has written books on death, pets, and pet death, including Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion. (You can also find his photography on Instagram, @hexencult, but take note that his images may include recently deceased animals or long-deceased humans.)

Paul started his explanation about pets grieving humans this way:

“We love them, in our terms. We grieve them, in our terms. It is fair to assume they do the same—but in their terms, and this is where we run into trouble, because we tend to project and personify the animals, turn them into reflected personas, and apply human motives and feelings.”

Humans naturally want to believe that animals think like us. Paul wants to point out that’s simply not the case.

“Grief and even love, in fact, may not be the best words to describe animal behavior, because those are human emotions,” he says. “Animals feel animal emotions. That doesn’t mean they lack them, but this is a very tricky topic, because how much of what we believe they feel is simply projection. Their brains are different; they won’t feel things the same way. Overall, yes, I believe they miss us, the loss confuses and even pains them, but in their terms, not in human terms, and we simply cannot possibly understand how a canine or feline brain processes loss, and I think we err when trying to draw equivalencies in human terms.”

Registering Loss

We may never know whether animals understand death in the human sense, but the evidence suggests they register absence, disruption, and the altered shape of a familiar life. And when the loss is ours, the same mystery returns to us: pets’ distressed attempts to nudge, lick, or wake a deceased human companion suggest that losing us can be traumatic for them.

Maybe as close as we can get to a true answer lies not in certainty, but in recognition. Wherever attachment exists, loss leaves its mark. Wherever love is real, something in the living notices when it is gone.

We’ll continue with this series in a few weeks, so stay tuned.

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Before the famous sighting, stories were already attached to these waters. Samuel de Champlain recorded a creature the native peoples called “Chaousarou,” though many historians believe he was likely describing a garfish rather than a lake monster. The lake had been dressed in legend long before the 19th century provided a headline.

The modern Champ tradition, however, is usually traced to July 24, 1819, when the Plattsburgh Republican printed a report about Captain Crum’s sighting in Bulwagga Bay.

The Captain’s Account

According to the account, Crum was aboard a scow the previous Thursday morning when he encountered something that defied reasonable explanation. He reported a black monster, some 180 feet long with a seahorse-like head, rising more than 15 feet above the water. The details preserved in that report are wonderfully grotesque: three teeth, eyes “the color of a peeled onion,” a white star upon the forehead, and a red band about the neck.

What followed was the usual chain of monstrous things: more sightings, wider circulation, and a swelling body of local lore. More than 300 alleged sightings have been recorded since that July morning, with Champ becoming a regional icon often employed to promote tourism. Even in the age of cameras and sonar, the creature has remained elusive, which is perhaps precisely why it endures.

Rational Explanations

Skeptical explanations have always accompanied the legend, as they must. Historians suggest Champ is probably a garfish, a class that includes lake sturgeon still found in these waters today. De Champlain’s famous early account aligns more closely with such a creature than with any cryptid. This does not end the matter, of course. Shadows, waves, and unfamiliar wildlife glimpsed in poor light have started many a monster.

The lake is deep without necessarily being supernatural. Champ belongs not only to cryptozoology, but also to that long human habit of making ceremony out of wonder, of transforming mystery into meaning through ritual and repetition.

Festival and Folklore

Each August, the Moriah Chamber of Commerce celebrates Champ Day in Port Henry, New York, turning the lake monster into a seasonal civic emblem. The 2026 festival takes place on Aug. 1, promising the annual blend of music, vendors, family amusements, and waterfront spectacle. It’s a tidy modern answer to an old rural mystery: If the creature cannot be found, then at least the story may be honored.

And honor it they do. Monster imagery adorns the town. Local historians recount the sightings. Children search the waters with the sort of earnest hope that belongs only to those who have not yet learned to doubt. One suspects Capt. Crum himself might find the transformation remarkable. His terror is now afternoon entertainment.

What Endures

So the old account still stands, bright as a lantern in the dusk: a July morning on Bulwagga Bay, a witness in a small boat, and a creature said to rise from the water in a shape too long and too strange for comfort.

Whether garfish, misidentification, or the birth of a regional dragon, Champ’s first great appearance has had the lasting effect one associates with the best legends. It left behind no settled answer, only a lake full of questions.

And on warm summer evenings, when the water lies still and the mountains darken against the sky, one may stand upon the shore and wonder whether something ancient still moves beneath the surface. Whether those ripples spreading across the bay are merely wind and wave, or something larger, older, and altogether less explainable.

The lake keeps its secrets well. It always has.

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Of course, we could not have reached this milestone without our co-conspirators. It was a thrill to host our first ever in-person event, graveyard poetry with Shannon Milliman, the inaugural Poet Laureate of Florence, Ala.

We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to our beloved contributors for year two: pop culture maven Keeley Brooks, funereal expert Patricia Hartley, and horticultural guru Gabriella Smith. Similarly, musical marvels Charming Disaster have our eternal devotion for entrusting us with a second world premiere video, Haunted Lighthouse.

Lastly, a heartfelt thank you to our subscribers, who allow us invade your inbox each week with another contemplation on mortality, a cemetery tour, a mysterious cryptid tale ,or whatever else we explore together.

As word of mouth is the best way to increase subscribers and keep a good thing going, we’d be honored if you would consider taking the following steps on our behalf:

1. Subscribe if you haven’t already, or forward this to a kindred spirit and say you telepathically know they’ll enjoy it.

2. Follow along on Instagram @grimrosemanor and Facebook @grimrosemanor. Share your favorite article on social media and blame, er, tag us.

3. Leave a comment on this post mentioning the Grimrose article you found most memorable!

Our Top 10 from Year Two

Below, each of us has chosen a favorite article from each of Grimrose Manor’s five stately wings—consider it a guided tour of our thoroughly haunted house:

Alchemy: Dark academia reins in this celebration of literature, art, film & music

Curio: Homage to an aesthetic—from dark home decor and goth gardening to collecting extraordinary objects

Esoterica: An exploration of mystical traditions and folklore

Macabre: A taste of dark tourism for those seeking haunted places and cemeteries

Mortem: Observations about death and mourning

For further reading;

That spell became permanent in 1956 with “I Put a Spell on You,” a recording that transformed him from a hardworking blues and R&B singer into something altogether more mysterious. The song sold millions, and has since been covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson. But no reinterpretation has quite captured what the original contains: lust, rage, longing, and mischief rolled into an ecstatic, unholy howl. It sounds like something summoned rather than sung.

The Theatrical Séance

And then came the theatrics. Hawkins did not merely perform the macabre, he dressed it in bone and shadow, dragged it onstage, and let it grin back at the audience with gleeful malevolence. Famous DJ Alan Freed reportedly encouraged him to emerge from a coffin, and soon Hawkins was making spectacle with skeletons, voodoo imagery, skulls on sticks, rubber snakes, and all manner of dread-soaked props. He painted his face. He moved like something possessed. He transformed the concert stage into a graveyard, and audiences loved him for it.

That was not mere novelty. It was a new language entirely. It told future rock and rollers that danger, humor, and horror could coexist beneath the same spotlight. It said that a performer could be both entertainer and enchanter, both showman and shaman.

The Shadow He Cast

That is why his influence stretches so far and so deep. Hawkins was far more than a one-hit wonder. He was a blueprint. The shock-rock descendants are easy enough to name: Alice Cooper, David Bowie, KISS, The Cramps, Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, Gwar, and the whole lineage of black-leather, fire-and-brimstone theatricality that followed in his wake.

But the deeper inheritance reaches beyond any single gimmick. Screamin’ Jay proved that a singer could become a character, that a stage could become a graveyard, and that the grotesque could be glorious. He did it before the formulas became established, before the imitators arrived, before “shock rock” had a name anyone could quite agree on. In the middle of the last century, when rock and roll was still learning how to misbehave, Screamin’ Jay showed it how to haunt. Hawkins is truly a gothfather to many who followed.

What made him different was not merely costume or theatricality. It was that he seemed to genuinely believe in the magic he was performing. He was not winking at the audience, he was beckoning them into something darker, stranger, and infinitely more interesting than what rock and roll had offered before.

And while his personal life was as outlandish as his stage presence, we’re choosing to gloss over his many marriages and dozens of children born in or out of wedlock to instead pay homage to his mark on music and pop culture.

The Birthday Remembrance

So for his birthday, July 18, we tip our black hat to the man who made the scream theatrical, the macabre musical, and the cursed little corner of rock and roll permanently more interesting. He showed us that entertainment could be transgression, that music could be witchcraft, and that the grotesque, when performed with enough conviction and joy, becomes transcendent.

The grave was not always his destination, but he certainly knew how to dress for the occasion, and to make us all want to join him there, if only for the duration of a song. And technically, Hawkins never made it to the grave. He died in France at age 70 back in the year 2000 and was subsequently cremated, with his remains scattered in the Atlantic Ocean. His legend and influence, though, live on.

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This weekend marks another 250th anniversary: the semiquincentennial of the “great experiment” that is United States of America. Setting aside how we may feel about its current trajectory (…) its birth as an independent nation was bravely fought. (If you slept through history class like I did and need a refresher, I highly recommend Ken Burns’ American Revolution series on PBS.)

Charleston played a significant role in the Revolution and was the site of both a major victory and a major defeat for the Patriots. So it comes as no surprise that each of our featured churchyards serve as a resting place for at least a few Revolutionary War soldiers (according to Find a Grave, which has a new search feature and 1776 badge for indicating these graves on their site).

Finding side-by-side churchyards is pretty special regardless, and while these were both primarily active during the 1800s, they couldn’t be more distinct from one another in flavor. The Lutheran side is a bit more quaint and more tidily kept. While the church building was completed in 1763, the congregation dates back to a group of German immigrants in 1742, and many of its pastors and parishioners fought as Patriots in the Revolution.

The Unitarian Church of Charleston is the oldest Unitarian Church in the South, but when the building was completed in 1774, it was first used by Americans as barracks during the War. Originally called the Independent Church, it was led by a Unitarian minister starting in 1817. The churchyard was added around 1831 and designed by Caroline Howard Gilman, a poet and author, as well as the wife of a Harvard-educated Unitarian minister who served in Charleston for 40 years.

Today, the pathways are kept clear but the monuments and markers have been left to nature. According to one source, this is “in keeping with Unitarian beliefs about the web of creation,” while others note that this aspect may not be everyone’s cup of tea. If you’re a historian or genealogist looking to read the inscriptions, I can see it being a challenge, but if you’re there for sheer vibes, it makes for a pretty incredible visit.

If ambiance alone doesn’t get your juices flowing, the Unitarian churchyard may also be the resting place of Edgar Allan Poe’s lost love, the one who inspired his poem, “Annabel Lee.”

Poe was stationed at nearby Fort Moultrie and fell for a young lady named Anna Ravenel, but her parents forbade the relationship so they met clandestinely in the graveyard. When he was transferred to Virginia, Anna sadly died of either a broken heart or yellow fever (believe what you will). The family supposedly dug six graves and cruelly left hers unmarked so he couldn’t come to mourn her.

While her name isn’t listed in the churchyard’s records, there have long been whispers that a lady in white stalks the grounds at night, seeking her lost love.

If you get the opportunity to visit Charleston, we highly recommend the Gateway Walk. These are just two of five or six stops along this historic trail, including yet another cemetery.

But remember to pause for a few moments in the Unitarian churchyard and perhaps read a stanza or two of that heartbreaking poem:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

from “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe

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So to give our readers the opportunity to suffer in their own way, we’ll be taking a break from our usual fare this week.

If you must go to the beach to appease your family, we hope your visit is less like 2Shadows’ Goths in Ungothly Places: The Beach or the Portlandia “Weirdo Beach” sketch…

…and more like Johnny Depp & Helena Bonham Carter in Sweeney Todd.

Until next week, friends.

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Perhaps it’s beneath a backyard oak tree. A former resident of our house says a chihuahua is buried in a tiny wooden coffin somewhere in our backyard. Perhaps it rests at the edge of a pasture, marked only by a fieldstone. Perhaps it occupies a place on a shelf in the form of ashes sealed inside a wooden box. We have two of those. Wherever it is, that small memorial often serves as our first sustained encounter with a truth that will follow us all our lives: love does not spare us from loss. In fact, it may be the very thing that makes loss possible.

Very recently, our last fish died.

That sentence feels almost absurdly simple compared to the emotions attached to it. Fish are rarely granted the same cultural status as dogs, cats, or horses. We are not expected to grieve them deeply.

Yet this particular fish had been part of our household for the last seven years(!) Along with four companions—Whitney, George, Luther, and Prince—he arrived a year after we moved into this home. His name was Adam (aka MCA), after Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. (I’m saying “he,” and “his” but who knows...)

On Saturday evening, I noticed something was wrong. He was swimming at an odd angle. Faster than usual. Restless. When I approached the tank, he ignored me. That may sound insignificant, but after years of feeding a creature, you learn its habits. Adam usually reacted when I came near.

I sprinkled food into the water. He didn’t eat. Standing there in the glow of the aquarium light, I found myself thinking what many pet owners have thought before me. I believe this animal is in its final hours.

By Sunday morning, he was gone.

The Architecture of Attachment

With his death, the entire original group of Glo-Fish purchased all those years ago had now died. And what surprised me most was not the sadness itself, but what the sadness represented. Adam had been here through so much. He had survived changes in routine, seasons, holidays, celebrations, disappointments, and grief. He had lived with me longer than some dogs I’ve loved.

For years, he occupied a small corner of our attention. Yet he occupied it continuously. That continuity matters.

We often underestimate how attachment forms. We imagine love as something dramatic: a grand declaration, a defining moment, a conscious choice. But more often it accumulates quietly through repetition. The dog greeting you at the door. The cat claiming the same patch of sunlight each afternoon. The rabbit waiting for lettuce. The fish appearing at the glass every evening when you turn on the aquarium light.

Eventually, affection settles into the architecture of daily life. Then one day the routine remains, but the creature does not. The absence arrives before the grief has words for it.

I have thought about this often over the last four years. That year we lost two dogs, Timber and Holly, as well as our rabbit, Kiwi, within a span of months. The deaths came so quickly and hit so hard that we gave away our dog supplies and declared we wouldn’t have another pet for a long while.

The house had other ideas.

Before long, Maple arrived from the shelter. A year later came Ginkgo. Life returned in the form of wagging tails, muddy paws, and the familiar responsibilities that somehow become privileges.

Through all those changes, Adam remained. A tiny survivor in a glowing aquarium, swimming steadily through one chapter after another. Now he is gone as well.

What Names Preserve

A name transforms a creature from a category into a relationship. And relationships deserve remembrance.

Recently, a small fish named Adam died. His tank feels strangely empty now. It’s not merely the absence of movement but the absence of routine, of daily acknowledgment, of the small ritual of turning on the light and watching for his response.

And somewhere between that emptiness and memory lies one of the oldest lessons any animal has ever taught us: that every life entrusted to our care, no matter how small or humble, eventually leaves us with the sacred burden of remembering.

This is the first of a three-part series about the death of animals—and in the months ahead, we will write about one of the most remarkable places in Northwest Alabama: Coon Dog Cemetery. Might you have your own story of dealing with grief after the loss of a beloved pet? Tell us about it in the comments.

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The story of this video begins, as the best stories do, with something a little strange. Before there was a film, there was a crankie, which is a niche and wonderfully anachronistic art form in which a scroll of hand-drawn sequential illustrations is cranked by hand to tell a story, typically accompanied by live music. Charming Disaster collaborated with Brooklyn’s BoxCutter Collective, a puppetry and performance ensemble, to create a “Haunted Lighthouse” crankie for the 2025 “Crankies Take New York!” Festival. It was a singular, handmade thing: intimate, flickering, alive.

But the song demanded more.

Enter director Zolomon Zelko, a longtime collaborator whose fingerprints are already on some of Charming Disaster’s most visually striking work, including the videos for “Trick of the Light” and “New Moon.” Zelko brought the crew to Jalopy Theatre in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a venue with deep roots in the band’s own history. Filmed in black and white, shadow and light do the heavy lifting. The result weaves hand-drawn animation, special effects, and full ensemble performance (BoxCutter Collective members, now costumed as a ghostly crew of pirates) with the original crankie itself, folding the art object into the film like a memory inside a dream.

“We wrote ‘Haunted Lighthouse’ during the pandemic, when we were isolated in our studio,” says Charming Disaster’s Jeff Morris. “Making music felt like sending out a beam of light into the darkness.” Bandmate Ellia Bisker adds, “Jalopy is a really special place, and some of our earliest shows as Charming Disaster took place there, so it felt right to cast this venue as the lighthouse where our characters are trapped for eternity.”

That sense of place—hallowed ground, chosen with intention—runs through everything Charming Disaster does.

Bisker and Morris formed the duo in 2012, drawing inspiration from the gothic whimsy of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, the narrative tradition of American murder ballads, and the theatrical voltage of the cabaret stage. Their songs are small, precise chambers of darkness: myth, magic, and mortality, delivered in two voices that complement and complicate each other. There is always something playful lurking beneath the macabre, and something genuinely mournful beneath the wit. Is it any wonder why they’re a Grimrose Manor favorite?

Watch the video for “Haunted Lighthouse” below. Then watch it again. We’ve got all of eternity, right?

For further viewing:

On a humid June night in the hills of West Virginia, something broad-shouldered and headless was said to wander beside the road.

In certain corners of Appalachia, the stories linger in the air like coal smoke. Here, folklore is not treated as just entertainment. It’s preserved like pressed flowers between the pages of local history.

So it is with the creature known as the Grafton Monster.

The Reporter’s Account

In June of 1964, the quiet town of Grafton, West Virginia (about 100 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), became host to yet another of Appalachia’s strange legends. On the evening of June 16, reporter Robert Cockrell claimed to have encountered a massive creature standing near Riverside Drive while driving home after dusk.

He said that the beast was immense and pale, with slick gray skin “like a seal.” Most disturbing of all, it appeared to have no head whatsoever. Instead, its eyes seemed set directly into the center of its chest.

Cockrell described the creature as broad and muscular, vaguely humanoid in shape, though lacking any recognizable features that might place it among known wildlife. It reportedly emitted a terrible bellowing noise before disappearing into the darkness near the riverbanks. Two days later, the story appeared in the Grafton Sentinel, and the town’s uneasy curiosity swiftly ripened into full local lore.

Before long, others came forward claiming sightings of the same being. Some witnesses described a hulking figure lurking near the woods. Others insisted they heard strange cries echoing across the valley at night. A small posse of local men ventured out armed with flashlights and rifles, though nothing definitive was ever found. No carcass. No tracks of scientific value. No photographs sufficiently clear to silence skepticism.

And yet the story endured.

The Ancient Terror in Modern Form

Perhaps that endurance is the most fascinating aspect of the Grafton Monster. It emerged during an era when America increasingly trusted cameras, laboratories, and modern certainty. The space age had arrived. Men spoke seriously of reaching the moon. One might imagine there was little room left for roadside horrors and impossible beasts.

The notion of a headless creature is deeply ancient, however. Medieval legends spoke of the Blemmyae, strange men whose faces rested upon their chests. Similar imagery appears in folklore scattered across centuries and continents. Whether coincidence or some darker inheritance of imagination, the Grafton Monster seems to awaken something old and primitive in the human mind: the terror of seeing a shape that is almost human, yet not quite.

Skeptics have offered explanations over the years, including a large escaped animal or wildlife badly misidentified under poor lighting. Human memory, after all, is notoriously poor and prone to buy into mystery. Yet the description remains peculiarly unsettling, and the tale refuses to die.

The Festival and the Folklore

Today, Grafton—like Point Pleasant with its Mothman—has embraced its peculiar visitor with a mixture of humor, pride, and affectionate unease. Each June, the town hosts the Grafton Monster Festival, drawing cryptid enthusiasts, paranormal investigators, artists, and curious travelers to this Appalachian community where the story first took root.

The 2026 festival takes place on June 13, promising the usual blend of monster lore, local vendors, live music, and regional storytelling. Monster imagery will adorn shop windows. Speakers will recount regional folklore beneath summer skies that grow dark over the hills, much as they did in 1964.

And perhaps that is the true fate of many American monsters. They begin in fear but end in folklore, becoming woven into the identity of a place until the line between history and legend softens like mist above a mountain road.

Still, should you find yourself driving the backroads near Grafton on a warm June evening, you may discover the imagination behaving strangely. The woods lean close. And every so often, when headlights sweep across the edge of the trees, one may briefly wonder whether some enormous pale figure stands waiting just beyond the reach of certainty.

If so, it will likely vanish before you’re certain you saw it at all.

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Depending on your source, Alabama alone has anywhere between 6,000 and 8,000 burial grounds. So we were excited to hear that a new volume was just released by Reedy Press called Historic Resting Places of Alabama: Cemeteries and Graveyards Around the State. We were eager to get a copy and perhaps unearth some bucket-list burials (forgive the pun) to visit.

We were even more pleased to have the opportunity to interview the book’s author, Mollie Smith Waters. Aptly known online as That Cemetery Lady, when not traipsing through cemeteries, Mollie is also a college instructor at Lurleen B. Wallace Community College in Greenville, Ala., where she teaches American literature, composition, public speaking, theater, and humanities. Mollie also occasionally uses her storytelling and acting abilities to share the stories of Alabama residents who have passed.

To write the book, Mollie spent hours researching—planning which cemeteries and specific graves she should include. On her trips, she might visit up to 17 cemeteries in a single day. In addition to locating the cemeteries and braving all manner of weather to take photographs for the book, she occasionally faced off with wildlife, including rattlesnakes, turkeys, wild hogs, and stray dogs. Not to mention random people looking into her vehicle or interrogating her on what she was up to. (Taking a friend along is highly recommended!)

An additional challenge Mollie gave herself was to avoid repeating any burial sites that were included in Donna Booth’s Alabama Cemeteries book, which was published in 1999. This was not a simple feat, as some are quite historically significant, like Huntsville’s Maple Hill Cemetery (which Grimrose Manor covered previously).

In addition to narrowing down which 75 cemeteries would make the final cut, and which photos would be most representative, Mollie also had the difficulty of describing each one concisely, in under 375 words. A daunting task, but clearly a labor of love—one that underscores how deserving she is of her monniker.

One of Mollie’s favorite cemeteries (which thankfully is included in the book) is Magnolia Cemetery in her home county of Butler. Among Magnolia’s oldest graves is the Peagler family plot, which includes an exedra (a semi-circular bench-like structure with rounded ends). The plot also includes a vase-shaped marker topped with a sun dial, which is actually the last photo in the book. Its inscription reads:

Hours fly, Flowers die, New day, New way, Love stays.

Mollie loves cemeteries for the histories they hold, for the architecture, the symbolism, and the epitaphs. As many Grimrose Manor readers do, she feels strangely “at home” in them. She also hopes younger people will be inspired by the book to explore and learn more about cemeteries.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “Show me your cemeteries and I will tell you what kind of people you have.” This is the lens through which Mollie has illuminated Alabama for residents and visitors. And it’s a must-have for taphophiles exploring the deep South.

For Northwest Alabama residents, Mollie Smith Waters will be stopping through Florence, Ala. next month for the following presentations and book signings:

• on Saturday, June 27, at Court Street Books from 2–4 p.m., and

• on Sunday, June 28, at the Unitarian Congregation of the Shoals from 11 a.m.–noon.

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