PHILADELPHIA — Dozens of people listened intently as tour guide Sarah Hamill stood in front of a plot at Laurel Hill East Cemetery, recounting the story of one of the men buried there — and his out-of-the-ordinary death.
“Poor Charles Vansant,” as Hamill described him, was a 25-year-old stockbroker with a fiancée who met his sad fate at the Jersey Shore in the summer of 1916. The Philadelphian bled to death on the beach after a shark bit off part of his leg as he swam in the ocean. He was the first victim in a string of attacks that shook the public and instilled a still-enduring fear of sharks among humans. (Some have speculated that the incidents may have inspired Jaws, but novelist Peter Benchley has denied that.)
Other stories Hamill shared on this “Dearly, Yet Oddly Departed” tour — like that of a man who died after drinking rat poison and a driver who flipped his vehicle over after his passenger swatted him with a baseball cap — weren’t exactly as “Wikipedia-worthy.”
Rather, Hamill, like other Laurel Hill guides, pieced together the life (and death) stories of the departed by digging through old cemetery files, local newspaper archives, and genealogical websites.
A longtime cemetery lover, Hamill has been crafting and leading tours at the 19th-century Philadelphia burial ground and arboretum — and its companion site in Bala Cynwyd, Laurel Hill West — for about 13 years. In a way, it’s led her to feel close to the strangers whose graves she so frequently visits.
“I feel very protective of them and their stories,” she told PA Local. “It’s like I get attached to them.”
The Friends of Laurel Hill, a nonprofit formed in 1978, has been offering tours since the group’s inception as a way to raise funds as burials slowed and maintenance suffered at Laurel Hill East, David Gurmai, tour and volunteer manager, said.
These days, the historic Victorian-era cemeteries rely on an “army of volunteer tour guides” to lead both public and private walks focused on “just about any topic you can imagine,” he said. The events, typically priced between $15 and $17 for adults, draw locals and tourists alike.
Themed tours, which typically last between 90 minutes and two hours, may highlight war veterans buried there; friends and foes of famous figures like Edgar Allan Poe or Thomas Jefferson; or people with particularly scandalous life stories. On general tours, guides aim to balance sharing life stories about a diversity of Laurel Hill inhabitants with showing visitors the final resting places of some of the cemetery’s better-known occupants.
The nonprofit hosts programming year-round, and topics shift with the seasons. For example, in February, there’s usually a love stories tour at Laurel Hill East, Gurmai said — and a companion tour at Laurel Hill West that shares tales of “love gone wrong.”
Leading the tours requires dedication. Typically, it takes about a year of training classes, shadowing, and practice tours before someone becomes a full-fledged guide, according to Gurmai. (People sometimes “self-select” out during the process once they realize the level of commitment, he added.)
There’s a “significant amount of scholarship” that goes into learning about the people buried at Laurel Hill “to give them the respect that they’re due,” he told PA Local.
Once fully trained, docents often put “hours and hours and hours” into researching and scripting, Hamill said. As a longtime “nerd” about cemeteries and the stories they hold, she thinks that’s “the fun part.”
“If it’s what you like to do — and that’s why we’re all guides here, it’s what we like to do — it doesn’t seem like a chore at all,” Hamill said.
Some of the two cemeteries’ 168,000 inhabitants lived lives that are already quite well-documented, like Civil War general George Meade, Phillies announcer Harry Kalas, and R&B musician Teddy Pendergrass. The process of uncovering the stories of the lesser-known deceased, however, is more involved.
It can begin with noticing an interesting burial year in cemetery records, seeing a notable cause of death listed on old “return of burials” lists, or a family member coming forward with information about someone’s life, Gurmai said.
Guides then tap into other resources to get a fuller picture of the person’s life, which may include military muster rolls, libraries, newspaper archives, city records like birth and death certificates, or genealogical websites like Ancestry or FamilySearch.
While October’s “Dearly, Yet Oddly Departed” tour focused on how people died, Hamill said that most other tours focus primarily on the actual lives of the deceased — “their accomplishments, their shortfalls” — rather than the incidents that landed them in the cemetery.
Did the souls at Laurel Hill sign up for this level of attention when they chose to be buried there?
In a way, the answer is yes, Gurmai posited.
Laurel Hill East was founded in 1836, right at the start of the United States’ burgeoning rural cemetery movement, and before the expansion of Fairmount Park. (Laurel Hill West in Montgomery County was founded later, in 1869, when East was running out of space.) The spread-out, landscaped design — it was also an arboretum, open to the public — made the cemetery an appealing place to just take a stroll, Gurmai said.
“There was an expectation that people would be coming by here, and the people choosing this spot as their burial, they were fully cognizant of that,” he said. “They knew that their place of burial would be, to some extent, a tourist spot.
“Now, did they expect us to give tours about them?” he continued. “Mostly, probably not.”
The guides’ primary loyalty on the tours is to the truth, Gurmai said, even if it’s not so flattering for some of the more infamous people who are buried there.
The way Gurmai sees it, giving “the facts the most respect” translates to “respecting the people themselves.”
And in Hamill’s view, “every headstone has a story.”
“Some of them are good, and some of them are not so good,” she said. “Some of them are bad. And that’s what built Philadelphia. It’s the good stories and the bad stories. And I think it’s important for people today to connect with that.”