This Halloween week, you may be delighted to find some spooky trick-or-treaters at your door: skeletons, hobgoblins and zombies. But spending hours year-round communing with the long dead and departed might not be your idea of a good time.
Yet one local couple, Carlo and Betty Mencucci of Burrillville, is spending their retirement years undoing the damage and desecration at many of the most historic cemeteries so the deceased can rest in peace.
“A cemetery is like a library. ... with very heavy books!” Carlo says. “And it should be respected like a library because it’s a library holding the history of people that no longer exist.”
The couple handbuilt their log cabin in the northern Rhode Island town after marrying almost 50 years ago. Their retirement hobby is bringing back to life the final resting places of 130 historic cemeteries in town.
“In about 14 years now, we did 45,” Carlo says laughingly. “I don’t think we’re going to live long enough to do ‘em all”.
Betty is president of the Burrillville Historical & Preservation Society and Carlo is the vice president. Before retiring, Betty taught high schoolers computer technology and her husband had a career as an electronics technician. This grave business began while they visited the town’s historic cemeteries where many of Betty’s ancestors are buried.
“It looked like a bomb hit. Everything’s down, everything’s broken, everything’s smashed,” Betty says. “And it just seemed like ‘This is terrible.’”
“Disrespect,” Carlo calls it.
“And just from years of neglect and sometimes vandalism,” Betty adds.
“That’s the last vestiges of somebody that once lived on this planet that is no more,” Carlo says. “It’s scratches on a worn-out piece of marble or slate. That’s it. That’s all that’s left of that guy’s existence that ever was.”
“We went, ‘Ah, does it have to be like this? Can something be done?’” Betty says. “We knew nothing.”
Workshops teach volunteers how to care for tombstones
So they took classes at the Association for Gravestone Studies. Now they hold workshops and teach local volunteers in the proper care of historic burial grounds.
Rhode Island’s Advisory Commission on Historic Cemeteries says there are more than 3,000 family plots in the Ocean State, often abandoned and inaccessible. And, Rhode Island has a higher density, six to 10 times more, of these gravesites than any other Atlantic coast state.
“That goes back to Roger Williams,” Carlo says.
The founding of Rhode Island by Williams, grounded in religious freedom and separation of church and state, meant the principle was established physically as well as philosophically. There were no village commons in Rhode Island, with a town office sharing space with a church graveyard.
“People were buried in their backyards. So every time there’s a farm, there’s going to be a cemetery associated with it,” Betty says. “And it’s probably figured that there’s probably a cemetery almost every square mile in the entire state.”
However, many have disappeared when families left the farm and land was bulldozed for new construction.
The Mencuccis say it’s more than just moving rocks. It’s restoration and conservation. In addition to finding, researching and recording the graveyards, they first have to clear the brush and then wash the tombstones with a biological product.
“Then you have to assess the damage and what needs to be done,” Carlo says. “You kind of have to let the stone talk to you and it tells you what it needs.”
Betty uses her handmade probe to find missing gravestones. She says families were usually buried in a row, so if there’s a gap, that’s a clue.
“It’s kind of like finding treasures. I found somebody!!! You get all excited and try to figure out where things go,” Betty says. “So we spend a bunch of time figuring out what needs to be done. This needs an epoxy repair, this just needs a simple reset.”
It also takes muscles to keep these memorials in shape. Broken pieces are mended with special compounds that won’t mar the lettering or weaken the stone. Some have to be recemented on a new base, It may seem macabre, but it does require a little gravedigging.
“You’d be surprised (by) the things that are written on some of the stones that we’ve come across,” Carlo says.
He notes one tombstone they restored from the 1800s is that of a 16-year-old girl named Cinderilla, who died after being injured in a fire.
The historic cemeteries also contain a community’s history, as well as artistry and poetry, such as “When the day break and the shadows flee” and “Weep not for me.”
The plot thickens for Bathsheba
The Mencuccis say their work is heartwarming, not spine-chilling. Betty says she never gets goosebumps — even when caring for the tombstone of the Burrillville woman who could easily make “The Most Haunted List.”
Bathsheba Sherman died in 1885, accused of being a demonic, baby-murdering witch, causing scary episodes at the old Arnold Farm in Burrillville. That led to Andrea Perron’s 2011 book, “House of Darkness, House of Light,” and inspired “The Conjuring,” a horror film released two years later.
While she may have put Burrillville on the paranormal map, the Mencuccis say Sherman got a bad rap.
“We want her to rest in peace. We want her people to leave her alone,” Betty says. “She’s an ordinary woman, lived an ordinary life in an ordinary farmhouse in this ordinary town, and she wasn’t known by anybody until the book came (out).”
They say Bathsheba died of paralysis, probably a stroke at the age of 73 — and has been made an undeserving villain in death.
“If your grandmother’s name happened to be Bathsheba and somebody walked into the cemetery and ooh, there’s a satanic sounding name, and started this myth about your grandmother, how would you feel?” Carlo says.
Bathsehba’s simple marble tombstone was tipped over so many times, it severed. After extensive repairs by the Mencuccis, it was broken again into pieces. Now, they say it was been restored and is being hidden in an undisclosed location to protect the marker from thrill-seeking souvenir hunters.
Interest in Bathsheba’s tombstone was so intense that a GoFundMe page was started and raised $2,100 for a new granite marker.
The Mencuccis find their own enchantment with their hobby, sometimes spending eight-hour days with what they say are their newfound friends.
“It’s very, very peaceful,” Betty says. “We have a very peaceful picnic in every cemetery that we’ve ever worked in.”
As fate would have it, the Mencuccis have a historic cemetery on their own property, which they are currently restoring. As for their own final plans, they say they wish to be buried as they have lived, side by side.
