Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, under the watchful gaze of
Speaker 1: crumbling marble saints and baby faced cherubs, you hurry down
Speaker 1: a path lined with mausoleums. You pass crops of headstones
Speaker 1: glinting in the moonlight, each engraved with the cliff Notes
Speaker 1: version of a dead person's life. You practically run past
Speaker 1: sunken graves and dying bouquets of flowers, hoping upon hope
Speaker 1: that the sound you hear is just the wind, and
Speaker 1: trying to shake the feeling that something is following close
Speaker 1: on your heels. All right, So, maybe you've never taken
Speaker 1: a midnight shortcut through the local cemetery, but if you
Speaker 1: have ever set foot in a graveyard, you've likely felt
Speaker 1: a hint of the fear and uneasiness that is their legacy.
Speaker 1: Maybe you were attending a family funeral, a touring historic graveyards,
Speaker 1: or simply fleeing flying silver spheres, or whatever your reason
Speaker 1: for strolling amongst the tombstones, you probably felt something noteworthy
Speaker 1: about the experience, something different from all the other spaces
Speaker 1: and places that fill our lives. After all, graveyards are
Speaker 1: the final resting place for many of our dead, and
Speaker 1: people say their last goodbyes there, sometimes returning year after
Speaker 1: year to leave flowers or say a few words. No
Speaker 1: matter where you travel in the world, cemeteries often are
Speaker 1: silent and solemn settings, Whether the grounds are finely manicured
Speaker 1: or left the weeds, Graveyards exist as the place where
Speaker 1: the living contemplate the mysteries, traumas, and heartbreaks associated with death.
Speaker 1: But why are so many people so spooked out by graveyards?
Speaker 1: Is it the thought of all those decaying bodies under
Speaker 1: the dirt, or the idea of a bony arm emerging
Speaker 1: from the soil to grab your ankle, or is it
Speaker 1: something deeper To answer that, we'll have to travel to
Speaker 1: a place full of dark secrets and hidden skeletons the
Speaker 1: human brain. To us humans, graveyards represent the mystery and
Speaker 1: the outrage of mortality. Like it or not, we're all
Speaker 1: gonna die. You may think you've accepted that fact, but
Speaker 1: it's an issue humanity has struggled with for as long
Speaker 1: as there's been humanity. Unable to avoid it, We've tried
Speaker 1: to figure out what lies beyond its doors. Will we
Speaker 1: haunt this world? Live forever in another be reincarnated or
Speaker 1: simply ceased to exist. We've pined for understanding in the
Speaker 1: shadows of the pyramids and stared into the blinking eyes
Speaker 1: of guillotined heads, hoping to glimpse something other than the
Speaker 1: emptiness of non existence. Biologically, fear exists as a response
Speaker 1: to stimuli that threatens our survival. As a species. We're
Speaker 1: programmed to fight or to run from anything that might
Speaker 1: cause death, and we approached death itself with the same attitude.
Speaker 1: We flee from it every day by distancing it from
Speaker 1: our thoughts and lives. In many parts of the world,
Speaker 1: we've handed the duties of entering the dead over to
Speaker 1: religious or mortuary professionals, thus limiting our personal intimacy with death.
Speaker 1: Fighting death is trickier. To avoid staring down mortality, we
Speaker 1: often redefine what death is. We choose to see dying
Speaker 1: not as something our bodies eventually do, but something that
Speaker 1: eventually happens to our bodies. We cast ourselves as the
Speaker 1: victim of death, which is the reason grim reapers and
Speaker 1: other death dealing spirits permeate world beliefs. If death is
Speaker 1: a natural counterpart to life, there's nothing we can do
Speaker 1: about it in the end. But if it's something inflicted
Speaker 1: on us by an outside force or being, then perhaps
Speaker 1: we have a fighting chance. Modern society often sets aside
Speaker 1: the angel of death and instead chooses to practice what
Speaker 1: sociologists Sigmat Balmann called the deconstruction of mortality. That is,
Speaker 1: we break down the insurmountable mystery of death into smaller
Speaker 1: pieces that we can digest easily, of biological functions, diseases,
Speaker 1: and mental dysfunctions. If prayer or bribing the reaper doesn't work,
Speaker 1: maybe multiple organ transplants will. But though you can pray
Speaker 1: and philosophize about death all you want, it's still going
Speaker 1: to happen. Disposing of a body isn't technically difficult. You
Speaker 1: can bury it in the forest, cremate it, or just
Speaker 1: leave it out for vultures, right that Zeoastrians in India
Speaker 1: still practice. Not only are these methods cheaper than buying
Speaker 1: a fancy casket and obtaining a plot in the local cemetery,
Speaker 1: but they also allow the environment to reclaim the decaying
Speaker 1: organic matter faster. The use of stone mausoleums, coffins, and
Speaker 1: embalming procedures only slows down natural decomposition. Some of these
Speaker 1: procedures are based in religious beliefs that the dead may
Speaker 1: need their bodies down the line, but these procedures aren't
Speaker 1: entirely about the dead. They're also about the living. A
Speaker 1: funeral is the last rite of passage we can take
Speaker 1: a loved one through the same way that a prom
Speaker 1: or kin signera or bar mitzvah is a rite of passage.
Speaker 1: So as a funeral and at funerals, we generally do
Speaker 1: our best to stave off some of the unsightly properties
Speaker 1: of death for our own sakes, and we build tombstones
Speaker 1: and monuments to serve as long lasting markers of the
Speaker 1: life that was. A cemetery stonework also serves to encourage
Speaker 1: a sacred atmosphere, enforcing notions of afterlife and further establishing
Speaker 1: the site as a kind of sacred ground between life
Speaker 1: and death. The humans instinctively fear death, yet we work
Speaker 1: hard to maintain hallowed spaces where the dead are memorialized
Speaker 1: and at least partially preserved. On top of that, we
Speaker 1: have religions heaped full of resurrection prophecies and thousands of
Speaker 1: years worth of superstitions, folk tales and ghost stories. We're
Speaker 1: constantly repressing our feelings about death or magnifying them to
Speaker 1: tremendous proportions. Maybe you avoid cemeteries in nursing homes, or
Speaker 1: maybe you actively try to speak to the dead through
Speaker 1: a psychic medium. Both cases are somewhat avoiding the real,
Speaker 1: plain relationship that exists between life and death. All that
Speaker 1: is to say that we humans have poured a lot
Speaker 1: of sacrament, superstition, and fear into our graveyards, which makes
Speaker 1: for quite a powerful atmosphere. Graves have long been a
Speaker 1: frequent haunt of legendary and mythical creatures, sometimes their spirits
Speaker 1: of the dead, other times nefarious beings who like to
Speaker 1: hang out near the dead, like ghouls. In extreme cases,
Speaker 1: people may experience cometrophoe, be the fear of graveyards. The
Speaker 1: condition involves a heightened anxiety of graveyards that actively interferes
Speaker 1: with a person's life. Like other phobias, Therapy can help
Speaker 1: patients cope with and overcome the fear, because, for the
Speaker 1: most part, the only things you really have to fear
Speaker 1: in graveyards are collapsing tombstones or falling branches. And besides that,
Speaker 1: living breathing humans are responsible for more graveyard assaults than
Speaker 1: all the vampires, zombies, and ghoules combined. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: based on the article what makes graveyards Scary on how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com, written by Robert Lamb. Brainstuff is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio in partnership with how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
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