Why Are Graveyards Scary?

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 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 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 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?

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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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, 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 stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.