Chicago's Graceland Cemetery

- Henry Honore family crypt

My latest book from the library is another novel about wizard Harry Dresden by Jim Butcher - Ghost Story ... it has 224 five star reviews at Amazon :)

While the books are about magic, there is a lot about Christianity in them too ... one of the recurring characters is a Catholic priest at St. Mary of the Angels church ....



In the novel I'm reading now, Harry has been killed, has become a ghost, and must return to the world to find his murderer and save civilization as we know it. He spends some time at his gravesite in Graceland Cemetery .....

Graceland Cemetery is a large Victorian era cemetery .... The cemetery is typical of those that reflect Queen Victoria's reconception of the early 19th century "graveyard". Instead of poorly-maintained headstones, and bodies buried on top of each other, on an ungenerous parcel of land; the cemetery became a pastoral landscaped park dotted with memorial markers, with room left over for picnics, a common usage of cemeteries. The landscape architecture for Graceland was designed by Ossian Cole Simonds .......

Many of the cemetery's tombs are of great architectural or artistic interest, including the Getty Tomb, the Martin Ryerson Mausoleum (both designed by architect Louis Sullivan, who is also buried here), and the Schoenhofen Pyramid Mausoleum. The industrialist George Pullman was buried at night, in a lead-lined coffin within an elaborately reinforced steel-and-concrete vault, to prevent his body from being exhumed and desecrated by labor activists. Along with its other famous burials the cemetery is notable for two statues by sculptor Lorado Taft, Eternal Silence for the Graves family plot and The Crusader that marks Victor Lawson's final resting place.


- Schoenhofen Mausoleum