The Corpse Kissers

PLUS: Dogman, Titanic grave, and the occult and/or military

We buried my grandmother last Saturday.

She had just turned 95.

There’s an old tradition in my family of kissing corpses at a funeral. I don’t know why, or where it originates from. And I haven’t witnessed it myself. My sister uncovered the stories years back while researching family history.

Were my ancestors just off, or is it a tradition they brought with them when they emigrated to Wisconsin from Prussia in the mid-1800s?

I haven’t figured it out yet.

Anyway, my grandmother wanted a closed casket.

And I know it’s because she didn’t want anyone to see her like that.

But maybe it was also to ward off any potential corpse kissers.

Though she likely outlived them all.

There’s not much to your funeral when you’ve lived longer than almost all of your friends and family. It was particularly heartbreaking to hear the brief “record of her life” broken down into just a few key moments because there was no one left to recall more: She was born, she played in an accordion band, she had one son, two grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and then she died.

She was so much more than that.

And the terrible truth is, there are a hundred thousand fascinating stories buried in every cemetery that are lost and forgotten a little more each day.

Fairview Mausoleum

My grandmother was buried with my grandfather in Graceland Cemetery, which also happens to be where the burials from Milwaukee’s condemned Fairview Mausoleum were moved to when it was torn down in the 1990s.

Fairview opened in 1912. One of the earliest interments was Captain Edward Gifford Crosby, a Milwaukee Great Lakes shipping magnate who died on the Titanic when it sank on April 15th of that year.

He helped his wife and daughter get to safety on the first lifeboat off the ship, but he died in the frigid waters of the Atlantic when the Titanic went under.

Now his cremains are buried at Graceland, marked with an engraving of the Titanic.

Since I was already going to be there, I thought a video of his gravestone would be something good to share in April on the Titanic’s anniversary.

Remains from the Fairview Mausoleum were moved here

But it turns out some of the markers have sunken beneath the soil and are barely visible. Others, maybe even Crosby’s, were submerged in standing water formed by the unseasonable meltdown.

I was unable to locate Crosby’s grave.

But there was a memorial by a tree on the outskirts of the Fairview plot dedicated to the Crosby family from the Titanic Historical Society:

---

Paranormal TV

It sounds like paranormal television may soon be getting a healthy dose of weird Wisconsin! I’ve recently spoken to two different producers from an upcoming series about various haunted locations around the state.

One of them is trying to gain access to the Witherell House for filming, which has been a personal interest and/or vendetta of mine since my experience there in 1999.

A writer/producer from Expedition Unknown also posted a message in the Strange Wisconsin Facebook group looking for people who have had recent Dogman encounters “near or north of Green Bay.”

A dogman, for the uninitiated, is a werewolf-like creature. Southeastern Wisconsin is home to the notorious Beast of Bray Road, which Expedition Unknown has covered in previous episodes.

“We're also looking for a separate witness with a Dogman claim that could make a connection to the military or government being aware of the creature,” the producer wrote.

Maybe they’re going for a Montauk Monster kind of angle, wherein the dogman was an experiment that escaped from a government lab or something. But I’d like to see the occult angle explored a little more, because when an animal control officer says he thinks it has something to do with occult rituals in the Wisconsin woods…that he personally investigated…I want to know more.