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This weekend is Halloween (Observed)!
The joke being, of course, that Halloween Night is a Tuesday this year (boooo — and not in the fun way).
So, all of the cool stuff — like All Hollows East in the Five Points neighborhood, The Belcourt Theatre’s sold-out screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and The Lipstick Lounge’s annual costume/karaoke contest — is really spanning the weekend.
There is a lot happening around town. So what I really want to spotlight — or rather, lantern light — is one of the lesser-known events this Saturday.
Guided lantern tours
When WNXP’s Justin Barney was looking at the massive Halloween events list to decide what to feature in this week’s What Where When-sday, he came to me like, “There’s a lot of the same.”
And I had to agree with that sentiment, nodding, until he went, “But…” (Journalism pro tip: Most, if not all, good story pitches begin with that “but…”).
And what Justin told me about was not the typical block party or ghost tour, but the walk through Nashville’s City Cemetery learning about the real-life, lesser-known mysteries and murders of those buried there. Like, yeah, I’m in.
What he learned while reporting is that the cemetery was originally established in 1822 as the first public cemetery. The records between then and 1845 were lost in the Civil War, but there have been 23,000 burials there since.
Ashley White is a board member for the Nashville City Cemetery Association and the chair of the October Events Committee. The self-proclaimed “data nerd” decided who to feature on this tour thanks to a Nashville.gov spreadsheet of everyone buried there.
“I sorted it, and I looked for the people whose causes of death were either confusing or questionable, or it outright said, you know, ‘murder’ or ‘poisoning’ or something like that. I looked for those people specifically, and then, I took that shortlist and went to the censuses and the newspapers and the city directories and anything Google could provide me to try and fill out their life,” Ashley told Justin.
Ashley pointed out how Nashville is currently, and has always been, made up of mostly regular, everyday people, but we tend to talk about the top 1%.
“We don’t talk about the people who actually built Nashville literally with their hands and made it a great thing,” she said. “I’m a huge fan of this Ernest Hemingway quote that there are two deaths in life: There’s the death of your physical body and the last time that anybody ever says your name.”
What Ashley wants to do on these last couple tours is say those names — “Isaac Spotswood and Johnnie Burnett and Flossie Cable Steele” — and share their stories.
You can hear Justin and Ashley’s whole conversation, plus get tour details, here.
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