Quoth The Raven

Here’s a true story.

One of the things I did in Baltimore was visit Edgar Allen Poe’s grave. Mr. Poe is resting in downtown Baltimore’s Westminster Burying Grounds and Crypt. If you’re in Baltimore, stop on by for a visit.

Besides Poe, there are a lot of dead people buried here. 

There’s also a crypt. I’m not going to lie. It was creepy. If you like creepy, go visit the crypt.

There was also this weird bendy slab of limestone. I was, like, why is this limestone so bendy? Limestone’s not bendy. It’s, you know, stone, and stone is not bendy. Just saying.

So I took a lot of pictures because, besides being way creepy, it was also pretty fascinating. You can learn a lot about a culture by the way they honor their dead. Like I learned that Baltimore had the same problem as New Orleans, with a high water table and bodies floating out to the bay after a bad storm. Also, they buried a lot of people alive here… not intentionally, but supposedly people would lapse into a death-like coma and it was all “bring out your dead,” and they’d wake up buried.

That would suck, by the way.

Also, in the 19th century, the medical school down the street had their own Resurrection Man (grave robber) who stole corpses for the medical students to practice on. Because that’s a thing they did back then.

Here’s another fun fact. The cemetery is also surrounded by University of Maryland classrooms.

You like studying? You like dead people? You like studying around dead people? Consider the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

All in all, it’s a fascinating place to visit. I give it a thumbs up. As a side note, though, I gotta say, I’ve been to plenty of cemeteries in my life, and I don’t remember being creeped out as I was by this one. I’ve even been to Stepp Cemetery in Indiana, which is full-on Blair Witchy, and I still didn’t feel as creeped out as I felt here… my point is, it definitely has a vibe to it.

Oh, and one last thing. So I’m taking pictures and whatnot, and I get home and find this weirdness in a series of images I took of the tower: 

The picture on the left has a black mark on the face of the clock. The picture on the right doesn’t. I was using my Rebel, and while I don’t think I was using continuous shooting, I have a habit of taking three or four pictures back to back, because. Also, I’m not really a photographer.

So I get back to the hotel and I’m looking through the pictures, and I’m like, WTF? I immediately send them to everyone I know, because I’m like, SUPERNATURAL.  Then I get home and I realize it’s a bird.

It’s still weird, though, right? Kind of cool I got photobombed by a raven visiting E.A. Poe’s grave.

For more information on Westminster and E.A. Poe’s grave, see Charm City Baltimore: Edgar Allen Poe’s Grave and SyFy’s Scariest Places on Earth.