“I’ve always loved cemeteries,” Sheena Barnett says. “I’ve just always been that weirdo.” So, true to her character, Barnett began volunteering at Elmwood Cemetery a few years ago, but it wasn’t until May of 2020 that she began cleaning gravestones.
“I call this my sob story,” she says. “[In May 2020] my dad died of Covid, and a week later I was laid off. And it was these two back-to-back blows where I was just like, What do I with myself and my life?” So she went to Elmwood, where she was suggested to take up headstone cleaning. “I just fell in love with it. I was out there, not everyday but close to it, for about a month or so. And then I finally found a job again, and so now I clean about once a week. I’ve cleaned over 300 stones so far, and it’s really helped me with my grief. … It’s so peaceful.”
Research was another source of therapy in this endeavor, Barnett says. “Every time, I cleaned a stone I would research that person.” And her interest in true crime compelled her toward the stories of those who were murdered or were murderers. One of Barnett’s favorite stories involves Prohibition, tamales, and a one-armed broom-peddler. Barnett offers the gist: “Someone took time out of beating this couple to death to eat tamales,” but for the full story, you’ll have to head over to Elmwood Cemetery for Barnett’s True Crimes of Bygone Times tour.
“It’s 100 percent my baby,” Barnett says of the walking tour, in which guests will learn about, among other stories, a woman accused of lacing cookies with arsenic and another married seven times and accused of offing at least three of her spouses. The stories range from the mid-19th century through the 1940s. “We wanted to focus on telling older stories, nothing new, nothing fresh.”
Barnett led her first tour back in June, and it sold out. The subsequent tours in the fall followed suit in popularity. As such, this spring, Elmwood is offering two walking tours, one on March 19th and the other on March 26th, as well as an indoor, seated presentation based on the tour on March 26th at 11 a.m. Register at elmwoodcemetery.org.
True Crimes of Bygone Times: A Walking Tour of Elmwood Cemetery, Saturday, March 19, 2-3:30 p.m., $22.
