Why Are Graveyards Scary?

Cemeteries and other places where we inter or honor the dead are often at least a little unsettling. Learn about the psychology and philosophy behind this phenomenon in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/afterlife/scary-graveyard.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, under the watchful gaze of
crumbling marble saints and baby faced cherubs, you hurry down
a path lined with mausoleums. You pass crops of headstones
glinting in the moonlight, each engraved with the cliff Notes

(00:24):
version of a dead person's life. You practically run past
sunken graves and dying bouquets of flowers, hoping upon hope
that the sound you hear is just the wind, and
trying to shake the feeling that something is following close
on your heels. All right, So, maybe you've never taken

(00:44):
a midnight shortcut through the local cemetery, but if you
have ever set foot in a graveyard, you've likely felt
a hint of the fear and uneasiness that is their legacy.
Maybe you were attending a family funeral, a touring historic graveyards,
or simply fleeing flying silver spheres, or whatever your reason

(01:04):
for strolling amongst the tombstones, you probably felt something noteworthy
about the experience, something different from all the other spaces
and places that fill our lives. After all, graveyards are
the final resting place for many of our dead, and
people say their last goodbyes there, sometimes returning year after
year to leave flowers or say a few words. No

(01:28):
matter where you travel in the world, cemeteries often are
silent and solemn settings, Whether the grounds are finely manicured
or left the weeds, Graveyards exist as the place where
the living contemplate the mysteries, traumas, and heartbreaks associated with death.
But why are so many people so spooked out by graveyards?

(01:51):
Is it the thought of all those decaying bodies under
the dirt, or the idea of a bony arm emerging
from the soil to grab your ankle, or is it
something deeper To answer that, we'll have to travel to
a place full of dark secrets and hidden skeletons the
human brain. To us humans, graveyards represent the mystery and

(02:12):
the outrage of mortality. Like it or not, we're all
gonna die. You may think you've accepted that fact, but
it's an issue humanity has struggled with for as long
as there's been humanity. Unable to avoid it, We've tried
to figure out what lies beyond its doors. Will we
haunt this world? Live forever in another be reincarnated or

(02:34):
simply ceased to exist. We've pined for understanding in the
shadows of the pyramids and stared into the blinking eyes
of guillotined heads, hoping to glimpse something other than the
emptiness of non existence. Biologically, fear exists as a response
to stimuli that threatens our survival. As a species. We're

(02:55):
programmed to fight or to run from anything that might
cause death, and we approached death itself with the same attitude.
We flee from it every day by distancing it from
our thoughts and lives. In many parts of the world,
we've handed the duties of entering the dead over to
religious or mortuary professionals, thus limiting our personal intimacy with death.

(03:18):
Fighting death is trickier. To avoid staring down mortality, we
often redefine what death is. We choose to see dying
not as something our bodies eventually do, but something that
eventually happens to our bodies. We cast ourselves as the
victim of death, which is the reason grim reapers and
other death dealing spirits permeate world beliefs. If death is

(03:43):
a natural counterpart to life, there's nothing we can do
about it in the end. But if it's something inflicted
on us by an outside force or being, then perhaps
we have a fighting chance. Modern society often sets aside
the angel of death and instead chooses to practice what
sociologists Sigmat Balmann called the deconstruction of mortality. That is,

(04:06):
we break down the insurmountable mystery of death into smaller
pieces that we can digest easily, of biological functions, diseases,
and mental dysfunctions. If prayer or bribing the reaper doesn't work,
maybe multiple organ transplants will. But though you can pray
and philosophize about death all you want, it's still going

(04:28):
to happen. Disposing of a body isn't technically difficult. You
can bury it in the forest, cremate it, or just
leave it out for vultures, right that Zeoastrians in India
still practice. Not only are these methods cheaper than buying
a fancy casket and obtaining a plot in the local cemetery,

(04:48):
but they also allow the environment to reclaim the decaying
organic matter faster. The use of stone mausoleums, coffins, and
embalming procedures only slows down natural decomposition. Some of these
procedures are based in religious beliefs that the dead may
need their bodies down the line, but these procedures aren't

(05:09):
entirely about the dead. They're also about the living. A
funeral is the last rite of passage we can take
a loved one through the same way that a prom
or kin signera or bar mitzvah is a rite of passage.
So as a funeral and at funerals, we generally do
our best to stave off some of the unsightly properties

(05:30):
of death for our own sakes, and we build tombstones
and monuments to serve as long lasting markers of the
life that was. A cemetery stonework also serves to encourage
a sacred atmosphere, enforcing notions of afterlife and further establishing
the site as a kind of sacred ground between life
and death. The humans instinctively fear death, yet we work

(05:55):
hard to maintain hallowed spaces where the dead are memorialized
and at least partially preserved. On top of that, we
have religions heaped full of resurrection prophecies and thousands of
years worth of superstitions, folk tales and ghost stories. We're
constantly repressing our feelings about death or magnifying them to

(06:15):
tremendous proportions. Maybe you avoid cemeteries in nursing homes, or
maybe you actively try to speak to the dead through
a psychic medium. Both cases are somewhat avoiding the real,
plain relationship that exists between life and death. All that
is to say that we humans have poured a lot

(06:37):
of sacrament, superstition, and fear into our graveyards, which makes
for quite a powerful atmosphere. Graves have long been a
frequent haunt of legendary and mythical creatures, sometimes their spirits
of the dead, other times nefarious beings who like to
hang out near the dead, like ghouls. In extreme cases,

(06:58):
people may experience cometrophoe, be the fear of graveyards. The
condition involves a heightened anxiety of graveyards that actively interferes
with a person's life. Like other phobias, Therapy can help
patients cope with and overcome the fear, because, for the
most part, the only things you really have to fear
in graveyards are collapsing tombstones or falling branches. And besides that,

(07:23):
living breathing humans are responsible for more graveyard assaults than
all the vampires, zombies, and ghoules combined. Today's episode is
based on the article what makes graveyards Scary on how
stuff works dot Com, written by Robert Lamb. Brainstuff is
a production of I Heart Radio in partnership with how

(07:44):
stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
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