AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Around Halloween, a trip to a cemetery can be part of a spooky adventure, a place where people gather to tell ghost stories. As Julie Denesha of member station KCUR reports, for some, visiting a graveyard is a way of preserving history.
JULIE DENESHA, BYLINE: It's a sunny fall day, and the leaves are just beginning to turn on the trees at Kansas City's historic Union Cemetery. About 20 people have gathered at the caretaker's cottage, a white clapboard house near the entrance.
HEATHER FARIES: Thank you so much for signing up for taking the class today. We're going to go on a little bit of a hike because we're going to go over to an area that's called Founders Row.
DENESHA: Heather Faries is vice president of the cemetery's historical society, which helps preserve the city's oldest public burial ground. There are 5,000 marble and granite markers here. Faries will be teaching the group how to clean the gravestones without damaging them.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
FARIES: There's quite a few larger stones up there that we're going to work on today. If the stone has an orange flag, it's good to go. You can clean it. You can scrub it.
DENESHA: Earlier this year, the cemetery was awarded a grant to help preserve the tombstones. So far, volunteers have cleaned more than 300 of them. This group totes buckets and brushes as they pass the graves of John Calvin McCoy, often called the father of Kansas City, and Pony Express operator Alexander Majors. One volunteer, Savannah Jones Beachy, is not cleaning headstones. She works on the weekend to help digitize cemetery records.
SAVANNAH JONES BEACHY: For me, it's very meaningful. I really enjoy getting to look up the facts about the people so they're not just a stone. Sometimes, these people's names haven't been spoken in hundreds of years.
DENESHA: Kaelyn Whitt co-hosts a dark history podcast called "Ghouls Night In" that explores the culture and traditions of all things spooky. For her, there's nothing scary about being in the cemetery. She kneels in front of a marble tombstone decorated with carved scrolls and flowers.
KAELYN WHITT: I picked this one 'cause it's really beautiful.
DENESHA: The epitaph is obscured by a thick layer of lichen.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLUID SPRAYING)
DENESHA: Whitt sprays the marker with a biodegradable cleaning fluid that loosens the lichen without damaging the stone.
WHITT: This is a very young person who was 18 years at the time of their passing, so I just want to give him some extra special attention today (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF SCRUBBING)
DENESHA: Whitt gently scrubs away years of dirt with the bristles of a brush.
WHITT: I've just always been fascinated by keeping people's memory alive and different ways that we do that as humans. It's such a human thing that we all do.
(SOUNDBITE OF SCRUBBING)
DENESHA: And as she scrubs, more details and carvings start to become uncovered.
WHITT: So we can now see that this is a McCoy (laughter).
DENESHA: Turns out, it's the gravestone of Spencer C. McCoy, the only son of the founder of Kansas City. Spencer McCoy was born in 1844. He joined the Confederate Army and died during a Civil War battle in 1863.
(SOUNDBITE OF SCRUBBING)
DENESHA: Both Union and Confederate graves can be found here, resting together. For Savannah Jones Beachy, working in the cemetery is her way of engaging with people from the past.
JONES BEACHY: I like to talk to the person as I clean their stone. Some people might find that creepy or weird, but I think it's just very endearing to know that people are still here caring about you even when you left the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF SCRUBBING)
DENESHA: There's nothing scary or ghostly at all about the work they're doing. It's all about preserving history and honoring the dead. For NPR News, I'm Julie Denesha in Kansas City.
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