The Ordinary, Extraordinary Cemetery

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Dive into a remarkable journey through time on the latest episode of "The Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery" podcast with Jennie and Dianne. This Thanksgiving, we're especially thankful for the wit and humor of Will Rogers. Join us as we celebrate the laughter-filled legacy of this...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne share three captivating stories of headstones found in unusual places and how they were restored to the cemeteries where they belong. They begin with the story of a WWII veteran's headstone discovered in a backyard in St. Petersburg, Florida. Next they journey to Pennsylv...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne honor Veterans Day and celebrate National Native American Heritage Month along with guests Charlie Johnson and Connie Kellwood Pitt. Connie's father, Joe Hosteen Kellwood was one of the renowned Navajo Code Talkers of WWII. Connie has made it her mission t...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Happy belated 3rd anniversary to the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast! In this episode Jennie and Dianne take a stroll down memory lane, celebrating three years of stories and inspiring discussions. They reminisce about how far the podcast has come, discuss some of their favorite episode...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Join Jennie and Dianne for this very special Halloween edition of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast. Grab your favorite warm beverage, turn the lights down low, and curl up with a cozy blanket as we delve into the enigmatic world of Bram Stoker, the genius behind the legendary novel &...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Just in time to help kick off the third annual Beyond the Grave: An Evening with Bram Stoker, Dianne and Jennie engage in a captivating conversation with Stanley Stepanic, an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia who teaches a VERY popular course...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. It's officially October which means many of us are feeling a bit spookier than usual! In this episode Jennie and Dianne  unravel some of the secrets of omens and taboos lurking in the shadows of our minds. They delve into the Ordinary Extraordinary world of cemetery lore, uncovering eerie...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. "Hang down your head, Tom Dooley Hang down your head and cry Hang down your head, Tom Dooley Poor boy, you're bound to die." The murder ballad, 'Tom Dooley', made famous by the Kingston Trio in 1958, is the tale of a twisted love triangle that culminated in two sensatio...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. "Come all good people, I’d have you draw near, A sorrowful story you quickly shall hear; A story I’ll tell you about Omie Wise, How she was deluded by Lewis’s lies." From the ballad Omie Wise. This week Jennie and Dianne begin a two part series exploring three folk songs that originat...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne are joined by the delightful Kathleen Maca who shares the stories of the Broadway District cemeteries on the island of Galveston off the gulf coast of Texas. Kathleen is a member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, a cemetery historian, cemetery restorat...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode, Jennie and Dianne are joined by Annalisa Heppner, Cemetery Director of North Burial Ground in Providence, Rhode Island. North Burial Ground was officially recognized as a burial ground in 1700 and is the largest municipal cemetery in the region at around 110 acres and with more...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Join Jennie and Dianne as they delve into the intriguing world of Fisk metallic burial cases, also known as Fisk coffins. Unearth the remarkable story of Almond Dunbar Fisk, the visionary behind the cast iron coffin, whose innovation forever changed the way we lay our loved ones to rest. From f...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. A Google search for Martha's Chapel Cemetery will lead you down a reportedly haunted road where any number of ghostly spirits and demons are said to roam unsettling the living who pass through this desolate corner of Eastern Texas. But what happens when a cemetery’s main attraction is only...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Children in many parts of the U.S. gathered their supplies and donned their backpacks, as they headed back to school. Many more will be doing so in the next coming weeks both here in the U.S. and around the world as summer comes to its official end. This inspired us to share the stories of some...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. On the western side of Paris, France, not far from the Eiffel Tower, is Cimetière de Passy, a small cemetery where a simple mausoleum whose doors are topped by an owl sits among its fellow graves in a most unassuming manner. Yet the story of the man who rests inside this mausoleum is one straig...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined this week by a favorite returning guest, Dr. Sharon Pajka, to discuss her new book being released on August 21st, The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe: Graves of his Family, Friends and Foes. In her book Sharon helps readers to visit the graves of the people with whom...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined by first time guest Dr. Joy Giguere to learn how American burial grounds changed from merely Ordinary Extraordinary places of interment, to rural landscapes meant to appear natural and ease the burden of grief, to the streamlined lawn cemeteries we often see today....

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. "Be kind, be kind because kindness may always help out someone who is suffering." These words of advice were written from a mother to her daughters when she feared that her time on earth was growing short, that mother was Mary "Queen" Mellen Palmer. She was mother to three d...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. The New York Times called him "the foremost citizen of Colorado." William H. Spurgeon said he was "the soldier, the builder of an empire, the philanthropist, the friend of the people, whose life was a blessing." At his funeral in 1909 Colorado College president William Slocu...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. This week on the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast...Nestled in the Bitterroot Valley beneath St. Mary’s Peak, a mountain in the northern portion of the Rocky Mountain range that runs through the state of Montana, is a small, simple churchyard where rests the body of Father Antonio Ravall...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined by Rick Hendricks, PhD to learn about a series of fascinating witch trials that took place not in New England, but in the border town Abiquiu, New Mexico beginning in 1756 and spanning over the course of ten years ending in 1766.  Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupin had a...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne continue their exploration of Colorado cemeteries that will be visited by members of the Association for Gravestone Studies during their week-long conference in Denver, Colorado. First they take members to the tranquil grounds of Evergreen and Fairview Cemeteri...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. This week Jennie and Dianne prepare to welcome members of the Association for Gravestone Studies to colorful Colorado for the annual AGS summer conference. This will be the first time the conference has been hosted in the state of Colorado. The conference will take place June 20-25th, 2023 and...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined this week by returning guest, author and historian Pamela McColl, as they unravel the life and death of Ellen Clapsaddle, the remarkable American illustrator and commercial artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose postcards have become highly collectab...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. "I want to play a real man in all my films, and I define manhood simply: men should be tough, fair and courageous, never petty, never looking for a fight, but never backing down from one either." - John Wayne Jennie and Dianne are joined by Drifter and Gypsie of the Rebel at Large Adv...