Disneyland of the Dead
July 22, 2025 at 03:30PM
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Ralph Jones | Longreads | July 22, 2025 | 4,187 words (15 minutes)
“A cemetery’s a really bad idea,” said Ian Dungavell. It’s not a sentence I expected from someone paid to run one. But Dungavell, chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, is just as idiosyncratic as the site he presides over. The pair of us were walking around North London’s Highgate Cemetery in late February, as the snowdrops were beginning to flower and rain threatened overhead. As we walked, visitors approached to ask Dungavell, who knows more about the cemetery than perhaps anyone else alive, about specific graves. One woman wanted to know exactly where 19th-century artist Lizzie Siddal was buried. Dungavell tried to explain the route. “It’s slightly tricky if you turn left too soon,” he said. “Then if you turn left too late, we might not see you till tomorrow.”
Dungavell, who is 58 and speaks with the calm precision of an English head teacher, wasn’t speaking ill of his beloved Highgate when he said that a cemetery is a bad idea. He meant that the business of running one has become almost unsustainable. Highgate is the only cemetery in the United Kingdom to charge the public for entry, yet upkeep remains a struggle, costing at least $1.9 million a year. Highgate Cemetery is particularly fascinating because its fortunes have run the gamut—from high to rock bottom, back to high again. It isn’t as easy as it looks, keeping people in the ground.
I was visiting Highgate at a crucial juncture in its history. More change is afoot for this most famous of cemeteries; this “Disneyland of the dead,” in the words of Kenneth Greenway, the cemetery park manager at nearby Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. To put it bluntly: Highgate, which hosts the bodies and ashes of around 173,000 people, is running out of space. What do you do when you can’t create new graves? You reuse the old ones. In March 2022, the UK Parliament granted the cemetery the right to “disturb human remains”—dig up graves to make space for new bodies—in its mission to combat this problem.
We’ve been here before. Accommodating the dead, like accommodating the living, has always entailed a head-on collision with the awkward reality that we have a finite amount of physical space. Bodies take up room—the very reason Highgate Cemetery exists in the first place. In England before 1832, you didn’t own the space in which you were buried. Virtually everyone was interred in churchyards, where vicars had total control over where you were buried, and with whom. “The Church was very, very much concerned to be as involved as possible in all aspects of burial,” said Julie Rugg, director of the Cemetery Research Group. When your body needed to be moved, it was moved without your knowledge or permission, as anonymous as a block in a game of Tetris.
What do you do when you can barely dig any more graves? You reuse the old ones.
In the first quarter of the 19th century, things took a turn for the worse. Urban populations weren’t just expanding, they were exploding. Between 1801 and 1831, the number of people living in London almost doubled. With cremation not yet an option, burial had reached a grim state. In one burial ground in central London, bodies were piled so high and so carelessly that they raised the level of the ground. People living on the bottom floor of nearby apartments had to erect wooden defenses outside their windows to prevent coffins from crashing into their houses. In others, bodies began to ooze liquids into the water, or pop out of the ground after being buried too shallowly. Sometimes bodies were disinterred before they had begun to decompose fully, the flesh chopped up and thrown into bone pits, while the parts of the coffins that could be preserved were reused. Vaults and burial grounds were becoming foul pits of disease. As quoted in Lee Jackson’s Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, one gravedigger said, “I [have] emptied a cesspool, and the smell of it was rose-water compared with the smell of these graves.” With constant bouts of cholera, typhoid, and smallpox, the living were dying thanks to the dead.
Finally recognizing that they couldn’t continue to let the population drop dead unnecessarily, Parliament passed a bill in 1832 allowing private companies to build large cemeteries on the outskirts of London, far from the chaos and stench of the center. (In the early 18th century, a proposal by Christopher Wren to do exactly that was rejected by the City of London.) Seven private “garden cemeteries” were set up: Nunhead Cemetery, Kensal Green Cemetery, Abney Park Cemetery, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, Brompton Cemetery, West Norwood Cemetery, and Highgate Cemetery. They would later become known as the “Magnificent Seven.”
The Magnificent Seven didn’t solve London’s body crisis—the first Burial Act in 1852 helped establish burial boards that would create many cemeteries over the next century—but they were symptomatic of a radical change. The Church of England, once the arbiter of the afterlife, “lost its monopoly on burial,” in Dungavell’s words. While the beginning of the 19th century also saw a vast expansion in burial space in the country’s churchyards, cemeteries introduced a potent idea. “It’s the ability to control the land that’s the massively important thing,” said Rugg. If you were wealthy enough, a private cemetery company gave you the option to die safe in the knowledge that your body wouldn’t be chopped up or thrown around. With the arrival of the cemetery came the idea of perpetuity burial, a “massive, massive shift,” according to Rugg. Victorians would have been reassured by the security that Highgate and other cemeteries provided. For a fee, which in 1840 ranged from $2 to $20—between $100 and $950 today—they could now be buried safely with their families. (Currently, burial of one’s whole body, not cremated remains, starts at almost $44,000.) With this security came the promise, enshrined in the Burial Act of 1857, that your dead body wouldn’t be removed without a specific licence.
People living on the bottom floor of nearby apartments had to erect wooden defenses outside their windows to prevent coffins from crashing into their houses.
Although you always had to pay a small amount to be buried in a churchyard, cemeteries solidified something important: the business of death. Not only could you pay for a secure burial spot, you could make it as large and as ornate as you pleased. At this point, these cemeteries were empty and space was no issue. You were free to erect a monument wherever you liked, if you paid for it. Where once death may have been something of a leveler, now the middle classes could be commemorated in a far more extravagant way than the working classes. One of the many remarkable sights at Kensal Green Cemetery is the tomb of Major General Sir William Casement, who died in 1844 and took size particularly seriously: Four statues of men dressed in Bengali clothing, each perhaps nine feet tall, hold the roof of his monument on their heads.
Cemeteries, and the Magnificent Seven in particular, have always favored the wealthy. “It’s not really a reflection of all of society, it’s only a reflection of the people that could afford it,” Peter Humphries, head of planning and projects at Kensal Green, told me as we walked around. But this age of decadence is long over—there is no longer space to sell. Back at Highgate, as we stood by the graves marked for reuse, Dungavell explained the thinking for grave sharing: The cemetery needed to ensure “a cyclical use of the land.” Continuing to reuse graves helps prevent death from moving farther and farther away. This way, local residents can still be buried near their homes. The minimum requirement for reusing a grave is that there has been no burial there for at least 75 years. Ideally, to minimize any potential upset, there is also no memorial, and the bodies are deep enough that they don’t need to be moved in any way. (It seems that those who splashed out on a nine-foot memorial are pretty safe.)
The problem would be much worse if Britain were not a nation of cremation enthusiasts. Only around 20% of the population chooses to be buried. Other countries, where burial often occurs at a higher rate, have been facing their own versions of the space issue for some time. Germany already reuses graves, with locations purchased for between 15 and 30 years. In Singapore, remains are cremated after 15 years so that grave space can be reused (unless prohibited by the person’s religion). And why go down when you could go up? In Oslo, a “cemetery skyscraper” was one proposed solution. Vertical cemeteries already exist in Japan and Brazil, and, in New York, Green-Wood Cemetery is considering developing its receiving tomb—the cavernous underside of a cliff it uses for bodies awaiting burial—due to a lack of space. Meanwhile, cremation companies use the rising cost of burial in overcrowded cities to push customers toward cremation. Interviewed in a piece for The Guardian, Rugg imagined an all-too-likely near future where burial is more like the property market: We rent graves on a short-term basis from large, private companies, making perpetuity burial the preserve of the wealthy.
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Highgate announced the list of graves for potential reuse in January 2024. It contacted the descendants who could be reached, and published notices in the cemetery and in the British newspaper The Times. The news attracted international attention. Reusing grave space can be a sensitive subject in Britain, which underlines how far we have come since it was simply the default practice. (As Rugg said, churches have no theological objection to reusing graves. Indeed, the quick turnover has always made burial more lucrative for them.) When one objector pointed out that there was space for more graves in various corners of the cemetery, Dungavell explained that they might want to put shrubs there. Guarding against slow erosion in cemetery space is important, as Highgate is so much more than a place in which to dump dead bodies. “We’re not quite back to the Victorian ‘People are digging up your mother’ situation,” said Rugg, “but we are moving into a situation where these landscapes are beginning to lose what makes them attractive.”
To run a cemetery is to know that you can never please all the people all the time. But, so far, objections for reuse have been limited, and if anyone does oppose a particular grave being used, the cemetery won’t touch it. Highgate has quite the reputation to protect, after all. Home to Karl Marx, George Eliot, Douglas Adams, and George Michael, it is arguably the most famous cemetery on Earth. (Demonstrating its sense of humor about its most well-known resident, the cemetery boasts a famous two-word sign that guides you to the left for “Toilets” and straight ahead for “Marx.”) But everyone thinks their cemetery stands out for something. Humphries thinks Kensal Green is the most beautiful, and the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery call it “Britain’s most prestigious cemetery,” while the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery boast that theirs is the “most attractive” of the Magnificent Seven.
When I walked around Highgate, I was bewitched by it. The winding walkways of the east, an extension of the cemetery that opened to the public in 1857, stand in stark contrast to the darker, more overgrown configuration of the west. Dungavell has outlawed black granite in the cemetery, considering it too garish, especially when coupled with gold lettering. Indeed, Highgate specializes in spectacularly original graves. The headstone for the artist Patrick Caulfield simply spells out “DEAD.” Elsewhere, a gravestone for an 11-year-old boy named Sonny Anderson is the most moving I have ever seen. It is made entirely of stone, all but for one corner, where a wall of multicolored LEGO blocks burst out, underlining the age of the body below. Liz Fuller, chair of the board of trustees for the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, said of Highgate, “People will become drawn into it . . . . It gets their hooks into them.” I have no hesitation in calling Highgate the most beautiful of the Magnificent Seven, conscious as I am that I’m taking sides in one of the most pointless competitions imaginable.
The struggle to maintain Highgate’s beauty has gone on for many decades. When it opened, there were 25 gardeners devoted to beautifying the grounds. The cemetery was, at that point, well-tended, safe, and manicured—although the London Cemetery Company (“the ghastly London Cemetery Company,” in Dungavell’s words) charged plot owners for grave-tending services. Later, the cemetery’s gardeners were called up to fight in the First World War, and expensive monuments slowly became more unfashionable, partly because of the way that same war had made death banal. By the 1950s, the cemetery was filling up, labor was becoming more expensive, and babysitting thousands of dead people had lost its novelty. The company began asset-stripping the cemetery, selling land for housing, among other things. In 1960, the company was declared bankrupt.
By the 1950s, the cemetery was filling up, labor was becoming more expensive, and babysitting thousands of dead people had lost its novelty.
As the cemetery’s financial woes mounted, tree maintenance was abandoned, and trees began to disturb graves as they grew, forever altering the cemetery. “It’s really interesting talking to people when they’re laying out new cemeteries,” Dungavell said. “They calculate the loss of income that every tree will cost them.” One of the beguiling things about Highgate is that it exists in a perpetual state of irony: This land of the dead would be so much easier to operate if it weren’t bursting with so much life. “It’s almost like the whole cemetery is a living organism,” novelist Audrey Niffenegger told me. Tracy Chevalier, who, like Niffenegger, wrote a book about the cemetery and led tours around it, explained over the phone that the tension between the forest of gravestones and the forest of trees has existed for a long time.
In the late 1960s and ’70s, the gnarled trees and disheveled, overgrown greenery lent the cemetery an occult air. Filming began to occur on the site to raise much-needed revenue, and films like Taste the Blood of Dracula, helped make Highgate Cemetery synonymous with “spooky,” ultimately damaging its reputation. As the ’60s drew to a close, there were more and more alleged sightings of mysterious beings in and around Highgate. A man named David Farrant, a Wiccan who made a name for himself investigating paranormal phenomena, went to investigate. He remarked that there were various dead foxes on the premises and a skeleton that had been taken out of a coffin inside a vault. He even reported seeing a strange “black mass” with red eyes in the cemetery. “These eyes were not human,” he wrote, “rather reflected some ‘alive presence;’ they were dull and penetrating like some hungry wolf.”
In February 1970, Farrant wrote to The Hampstead & Highgate Express to report his experience. Others then claimed to have seen strange figures, including a petrifying, tall, dark figure with hypnotic red eyes. “I think they’re nutcases, actually,” said one of Highgate’s gravediggers. The press latched onto the story, and it wasn’t long before people were claiming that the figure was a vampire—a conclusion Farrant rejected until his death in 2019. (He said, however, that it was “quite feasible to assume that the cemetery phenomenon was an evil entity that had been summoned up as the direct result of a Satanic ritual.”) Meanwhile, a rival of Farrant’s, Sean Manchester, claimed that a “King vampire” of the undead had been awakened. In March 1970, a mob of around 100 people, some with makeshift weapons, made their way into the locked cemetery to witness a vampire hunt (in vain). A few months later, a disinterred woman’s remains, headless and burnt, were found in the cemetery. Close to midnight on August 17 that year, Farrant was arrested in the cemetery, holding a stake and a crucifix. In 1973, Manchester claimed to have driven a stake through the heart of the Highgate vampire, solving the problem once and for all. But whether the vampire was dead or not, the publicity had made Highgate a magnet for vandalism and unwelcome attention.
Perhaps because the government does not consider cemeteries important enough to justify their lack of profit, it fell to voluntary organizations to keep the Magnificent Seven sites from completely falling into disrepair. In 1975, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery was established, gradually renovating the site—so well, in fact, that while Camden Council (the local council) secured permission to buy the cemetery, it decided against the purchase. The next couple of decades were tied up in complicated discussions between organizations with confusingly similar names. At one point, there were three organizations: the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, the Highgate Cemetery Trust, and the Highgate Cemetery Charity. (The Friends of Highgate Cemetery, having merged with the Highgate Cemetery Trust, is now the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust. Obviously.)
A few months later, a disinterred woman’s remains, headless and burnt, were found in the cemetery. Close to midnight on August 17 that year, Farrant was arrested in the cemetery, holding a stake and a crucifix.
One woman looms large over conversations about the cemetery during this era: Jean Pateman, the founder of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery. Under Pateman’s jurisdiction as gatekeeper of the Cemetery, phones were confiscated, and women with strappy tops were given shawls to wear. “She was absolutely vile,” said Dungavell, who remembers her shrieking at him for leaning on a colonnade when he visited as a young man. Pateman, who admired right-wing UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, helped save Highgate by arranging public meetings and recruiting volunteers. Dungavell acknowledged that she was “phenomenal.” But her protectiveness came at a cost. Visitors felt like they were coming face to face with “the dragon at the gate,” as she came to be known. If, as Fuller said, Highgate gets its hooks into you, Pateman was there to then breathe fire on you.
The novelists Audrey Niffenegger and Tracy Chevalier both met Pateman up close. Chevalier got there first. She has lived in North London since 1986, but only visited Highgate in 1996. “I just looked at it and thought, ‘This place is insane,’” she said. “‘I have got to set a novel here.’” She joined the volunteers and began leading tours. She found Pateman to be both patrician and scolding—“a horrible combination.” She joked that she was like the cold shower one had to endure to get to the warm water.
Undaunted, however, Chevalier set her novel Falling Angels in the cemetery. She told Pateman that she’d like to acknowledge the people who work there. “You will do no such thing,” Pateman said, according to the writer. “This is ridiculous. I want no names in the book. How dare you.” Wanting to stay on her good side, Chevalier abided by Pateman’s wishes, refraining even from mentioning the word “Highgate” in the novel. She did, however, set a sex scene in the cemetery—meaning Pateman remained rather upset.
In the spring of 2002, Niffenegger sought Pateman’s permission to write her own novel about Highgate. “She’s the only person I’ve ever met who was as obsessed with the cemetery as I was at that time,” Niffenegger said. The two became close. Pateman okayed a sample chapter of Her Fearful Symmetry and gave permission (as though it were hers to give) on two conditions: one, that there was no swearing, and two, no sex in the cemetery.
Dungavell became chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust in 2012, a few years after Pateman was deposed in a “coup.” For the last decade, the conversation has been about ensuring the cemetery steers a steady course forward. In a recent talk, Dungavell said, “We’re looking to the future rather than escaping into the past.” There is a long-term master plan in place, encompassing a swath of improvements. In January 2024, Highgate announced that it had been awarded $140,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for the cemetery’s Unlocking Highgate Cemetery project. In May this year, families reported being upset by the cemetery’s plan—as part of this project—to erect a gardeners’ building that would spoil the view of the graves next to it. Some are so upset they have applied to have their loved ones exhumed. “In the circumstances, it would be fair to expect you to repay us for these expensive graves,” said one woman. One said he was planning to sue. “It’s a graveyard for us. It’s not a tourist site,” said another, underlining the tricky tightrope that Highgate continues to walk.
The money has also provoked some bickering among the Magnificent Seven. Jeff Hart, of Nunhead Cemetery, told me that some might be thinking, “Wait a minute, Highgate has got this huge grant from this body or that body or whatever else. It would be better if that money were spent more equitably among more sites in London than trying to ‘improve’ Highgate Cemetery to the nth degree.” (It might, of course, be that Highgate’s current business sense is what keeps it operational at all.)
Some are so upset they have applied to have their loved ones exhumed.
The Trust believes that Highgate requires $24 million to operate and upgrade over the next six years, effectively meaning the cemetery will still need to raise millions in donations. The modern maintenance of Highgate is often described as “managed decay.” It is impossible to simply return the cemetery to its unspoiled Victorian origins. One reason is practical. “If you pull up those trees, all the gravestones are gonna fall because the roots are all entangled,” Chevalier said. But the other reason is aesthetic. In his talk, Dungavell said that he would probably be “strung up” if he proposed taking Highgate back to the comparatively barren landscape of yesteryear. Visitors love the privacy Highgate’s trees offer and the communion with nature that they represent. “Other cemeteries are much less nature-tolerant than we are in this country,” Dungavell said. Choosing Melbourne, Australia as an example, he pointed out that its suburbs have more tree cover than its cemeteries. For Highgate, it is the reverse. “You wouldn’t know you’re on the edge of a big city,” Chevalier said. Some of the other Magnificent Seven cemeteries that have tried to live side-by-side with nature have become parks as much as graveyards, with burials less of an active concern. Kensal Green does host burials (and has its own crematorium, to which about 11 people ask directions when I visit), but Humphries underlined its value as a recreational space: “Some people come here to run; some people come here just to walk; some people come to look at the flora and fauna; we’ve got a bat community; we’ve got foxes . . .” He thinks this has been an organic change over the years. “That’s not to say that I haven’t thought about the possibility of monetizing it,” he added.
When I walked around Highgate with Dungavell, I wanted to find the grave of Raphael Samuel, the late husband of my mother’s best friend, Alison Light. I was seven years old when Raphael died. My mother remembers him bobbing me up and down as a baby, his knees bending in an exaggerated manner. To find him, Dungavell consulted a digital map of the cemetery’s graves. Standing before Raphael’s grave, I noticed a space underneath his name, presumably intended for Alison (who has since remarried). I thought about how the dead are powerless to the world changing around them, and how cemeteries become custodians of their legacy.
Humphries doesn’t want to be buried, considering it “a needless waste of resources.” Working in a cemetery has proved to him that people today aren’t remembered in the way their ancestors might have once imagined. Who is the more selfish: the relatives who no longer visit, or the dead grandfather who assumed they would? The graves in these cemeteries are as much for the public as they are for the deceased’s families. They are, arguably, less about how we feel about the individual and more about how we come to terms with our relationship with history. “Every generation creates its own version of the past,” Dungavell told me as we walked through the east side of the cemetery. Highgate is defined by this constant conversation between its here and now, and its there and then. In marching onward, it must choose the elements of its history that feel crucial to its future.
“I think Highgate is an idea, isn’t it, often?” said Rugg. “It’s an idea of a place. It’s an idea of a place that relates to a lost landscape.” Highgate is a museum of the dead, but it is a museum out in the elements, operating in a landscape forever evolving around it. While that is true to some extent of all cemeteries, it is thrown into sharp relief at Highgate. The melodrama, the politics, the messy work of dealing with human bodies—all of it is endlessly fascinating for anyone interested in how we remember one another. Because, even for those of us who don’t believe that anything happens to you when we pass away, in a very real sense, something always does. As far as ideas go, a cemetery, of course, happens to be a great one.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
Ralph Jones is a journalist and comedy writer. He has written for publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, GQ, and Wired. He is soon to publish his third book, all about the microphone.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/22/problem-of-burying-dead-bodies/
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