Graves for Rent – The Weird Side of the Internet

Grave for Rent – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I don’t give a lot of time to thinking about my inevitable demise. At my age, I’ve wracked enough virtue and vice to secure my ticket one way or the other. As far as my physical affairs, and by this, I mean what I want with my arrangements and all, because if you throw me on a garden and let nature take its corpse-, I mean course. Because I’m not going to be there. I don’t think. I hope not, anyway.

And you know there’s a reason I bring this up. The city of Paris, in an effort to give people a chance to be buried in a historic city cemetery, are offering people a chance to take over abandoned graves for themselves if they pay the restoration cost.

I can only imagine that a well heeled and well dead Parisian’s family had been sold the greatest bit of false advertising to ever hit the free market: “eternal rest.”

If you want to “ghost up” a cemetery, this is how you do it. And there are religions that worship ancestors who believe that if you’re forgotten, that’s like a second death. So we’re sort of killing these people again so someone can have a vanity grave.

Again, and I can’t say this enough, this is how ghosts are made. Ghosts having to share a mausoleum like brothers. Or maybe more like inmates sharing a cell. I’m picturing the end times in a Paris cemetery, a thousand years from now a hundred resurrected people just show up in a mausoleum designed for two. Epic. Freakin.’ Cage-matches to get out.

My dad watches television from his urn on our sideboard, so graveyards are probably not in my cards. And honestly if they’re long dead and the grave is abandoned, the ghost might welcome the chance to catch a roomie… and a glow up.

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