Technically, the name of this cemetery is a lie. It could more accurately be termed “Motel View Cemetery,” and as my photo companion pointed out, the presence of the hotel made the cemetery that much creepier. “I keep expecting Norman Bates to come around the corner,” he said at one point.

This cemetery is also just weird. It’s owned by the Rose Memorial Park Association, and it sprawls languidly across a huge chunk of ground, with graves interspersed seemingly at random. Some of the graves huddle together in nervous clusters like women at cocktail parties, and others are isolated alone in vast expanses of lawn. It created a very strange mood, let me tell you.

Take this obelisk, for example, which is covered in ornate lotus carvings. I think it might be a foundation stone for the cemetery, since there was nothing to indicate that it was a grave, but it was isolated off in a far corner of the cemetery. I like the lotuses, though, it’s a new motif for my cemetery flora collection.

This is an extremely image-heavy post, so I am putting it behind a cut to save those of you who have slow internet. But I encourage you to click through for more, because although this cemetery was small and very weird, it had some amazingly cool things hidden away inside.

Here’s a grave, all alone. I have a wider shot of this grave as well, and it is equally bleak.

This is an access road in the rear of the cemetery; it forms a kind of lazy loop which suggests that no funeral procession should be in a hurry.

The back of an extremely overgrown grave. I tried to shoot it from the front, and ended up with a face full of foliage, and not much else to show for it.

A new foreign language grave for my collection. I think this is in Finnish, but I am open to correction (and translation) from a more knowledgeable reader. Note the date; lots of 1920’s era graves here, like these:

As always, this cemetery had a number of hidden and interesting features skulking around the corners.

Kind of an upscale version of the moldering tin grave marker.

A screw on the cemetery’s lonely columbarium, which has a very groovy curvy bench. Alas, I showed up reflected in all of the photographs of the bench, and not in a hip “I did this on purpose” kind of way, so I didn’t upload any of them. But it was groovy. Trust me.

It was fascinating to see how eaten away this headstone was. Note to readers: for enduring headstones, pick enduring materials.

No set of cemetery photos is complete without an awesome lichen photograph.

In a way, I kind of dug this cemetery. It’s too bad that it is sandwiched between Waste Management and a hideous motel, because I think that it might be a sort of peaceful and nice place, otherwise. It feels like a place you would go on a picnic.