There are few things in life less modern than a cemetery.
The basic concept hasn’t changed in hundreds of years, the clientele tends to be comprised mainly of those whose generation has been passed by the break-neck pace of society’s march toward progress, and in general one doesn’t expect there to be anything particularly hip and cool about a place to store dead people.
Photo credit: flickr/araxnoullis
Updated 9/19/2019 – Calvary Catholic Cemetery, located in San Jose California, near Alum Rock, begs to differ with this concept, despite having been there since 1882.
In addition to the beautiful layout of their expansive cemetery – which includes everything from headstones to actual walk-in crypts – they have a website.
You can chat online with an associate, who will point you in the right direction if you’re looking to make arrangements.
They even have a blog.
Through an online or in-person visit, you can connect with just about anyone you need to help you in the process of either shuffling off this mortal coil, or taking care of someone who already has.
You may also be able to connect with some people you wouldn’t want to connect with.
Know Terror At The San Jose Calvary Catholic Cemetery
Local legend speaks of the Owl People – a curious set of caretakers who roam – or perhaps prowl – the grounds of Calvary Cemetery during the aptly-named graveyard shift.
Although most people who brave the terrors of walking through a scary cemetery at night do so without the need of a guide to get them to this or that gravestone, this is apparently the duty which the Owl People perform.
The few witnesses who have come forward and spoken about it – most are teenagers or young adults who have entered the San Jose cemetery illegally at night on a dare – say that there is an entire family of them, from adults down to children.
“They all have these glowing eyes,” says one witness.
“And they’re dressed funny, like they’re from a different time or something.
The creepiest thing about them,” she says, her teeth clamped on cigarette after cigarette as she chain-smokes her way through our interview, “is that they don’t talk to you.
They just smile, raise their hands, and they all point toward the same part of the cemetery.”
This particular witness, on the night she encountered the Owl People, did not hang around long enough to find out whether or not they were all pointing at the same grave, but other accounts seem to indicate this.
Some are fanciful and a few are clearly misleading, but more than a few of them have the ring of frightening truth to them.
One witness – Robert M. – speaks of being out on a ghost-hunting tour of the cemetery (which, again, is against the rules) in the middle of the night.
After splitting up with his friends (is that ever a good idea?) he found himself in an older section of the haunted cemetery, where the gravestones carried years going back a century and more.
“It took me a minute to realize the lights were their eyes,” he says.
“I’ll never forget it.
They just looked at me, smiled, and began pointing all in the same direction.
I looked at the grave they were pointing at,” he says, “and the dirt was moving.”
I ask him what he did at that point.
“I ran,” he says.
Who are the Owl People?
What do they want, and why do they never speak, but only smile?
And what, one wonders, lies hidden beneath one – or perhaps more – of the graves in Calvary Catholic Cemetery?