What's in a name?

gothcieasociety.com

This headstone always gets a second glance.

This is from Bohemian National Cemetery in Illinois.  More photos of this beautiful place can be found HERE 

Gravestone of the Roman Gladiator Diodorus

The Gothic Tea Society

www.gothicteasociety.com

This 1,800 year old tombstone and epitaph tell a story.

  An enigmatic message on a Roman gladiator's 1,800-year-old tombstone has finally been decoded, telling a treacherous tale.

The epitaph and art on the tombstone suggest the gladiator, named Diodorus, lost the battle (and his life) due to a referee's error, according to Michael Carter, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. Carter studies gladiator contests and other spectacles in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

 Click HERE to see the whole story!

Duffy's Cut~ Mass Grave Site

I have been following this story for a while, fascinating!

Grandfather's ghost story leads to mysterious mass grave By Meghan Rafferty, CNN Malvern, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- "This is a mass grave," Bill Watson said as he led the way through the thick Pennsylvania woods in a suburb about 30 miles from Philadelphia. "Duffy's Cut," as it's now called, is a short walk from a suburban cul-de-sac in Malvern, an affluent town off the fabled Main Line. Twin brothers Bill and Frank Watson believe 57 Irish immigrants met violent deaths there after a cholera epidemic struck in 1832. They suspect foul play. "This is a murder mystery from 178 years ago, and it's finally coming to the light of day," Frank Watson said. The brothers first heard about Duffy's Cut from their grandfather, a railroad worker, who told the ghost story to his family every Thanksgiving. According to local legend, memorialized in a file kept by the Pennsylvania Railroad, a man walking home from a tavern reported seeing blue and green ghosts dancing in the mist on a warm September night in 1909. "I saw with my own eyes, the ghosts of the Irishmen who died with the cholera a month ago, a-dancing around the big trench where they were buried; it's true, mister, it was awful," the documents quote the unnamed man as saying. "Why, they looked as if they were a kind of green and blue fire and they were a-hopping and bobbing on their graves... I had heard the Irishmen were haunting the place because they were buried without the benefit of clergy." When Frank inherited the file of his grandfather's old railroad papers, the brothers began to believe the ghost stories were real. They suspected that the files contained clues to the location of a mass grave. "One of the pieces of correspondence in this file told us 'X marks the spot,'" said Frank. He added that the document suggested that the men "were buried where they were making the fill, which is the original railroad bridge." In 2002, the brothers began digging and searching. They found forks and remnants of a shanty and, in 2005, what Bill Watson calls the "Holy Grail" -- a pipe with an Irish flag on it. They knew they were close, but Bill said they knew they needed "hard science" to get them to the next step. The science came from Tim Bechtel, a geophysicist, who learned about the project from a colleague at the University of Pennsylvania who had heard the Watson brothers speak. The friend knew Bechtel could provide the missing link in the brothers' excavation efforts. Bechtel's work included earth scans, which can help detect what's underground without digging or drilling. By shooting electrical current through the slope, Bechtel said he learned there were "oddball areas" or places where the current wouldn't pass through. "We saw areas in the slope that were very electrically resistant," Bechtel recalled. This was an initial indicator something might lie beneath the surface. After further digging, Bechtel and the Watsons detected "air bubbles above the coffins," he said. Bechtel helped pinpoint key areas to dig and on March 20, 2009, Bill Watson said the team made a startling discovery. "One of my students came running over at about 2 in the afternoon with something that was a clearly discernable human bone," Bechtel said. It was just the beginning of the many puzzle pieces to surface at Duffy's Cut. The pieces led them to suspect that something other than cholera was responsible for the deaths. You Can read the entire story HERE

Famous Prostitute's Gravestone Deemed Too "Slutty"

The 77-year-old artist Tomi Ungerer’s parting gift to his friend Domenica Niehoff was to be a gravestone featuring two ample pink marble boulders in homage to her famously top-heavy figure. But those responsible for the Garden of Women cemetery, resting place of Hamburg’s most famous women, turned his design down, the paper reported.

Ungerer, who declared his interest in designing her gravestone immediately after her death, reacted bitterly to the decision.

“Domenica would have liked my design. She was not ashamed of herself,” he said.

Ungerer and Niehoff were friends for decades, and even shared a flat for a while in 1984. He published drawings of Niehoff and her colleagues in a book entitled “Guardian Angels of Hell” at the time.

But the cemetery officials are not alone in criticising Ungerer’s memorial. Photographer Günther Zint, another friend of Niehoff, told the newspaper, “There was a bit of a debate among her friends whether Tomi needed to emphasise her breasts like that. They were after all a bane of her life.”

Niehoff, who gained fame for advocating the rights of sex workers in the 70s and 80s, died at age 63 in February 2009.

Originally from Cologne, Niehoff lived through drugs, child prostitution and desperate attempts to get out of the sex trade. She grew up in an orphanage before slipping into prostitution, when she married a brothel owner, who committed suicide ten years later.

She worked as a prostitute in Munich and Hamburg and had her own brothel before she began to push for the legalisation of prostitution in Germany in the 1980s. She then became a social worker to help women to get off the street.