Portraits of the past
CHARLEROI – A deteriorating tombstone partially covered in moss contains a photograph of a young girl with a haunting stare greeting anyone who decides to visit the grave in the abandoned Charleroi Cemetery.
The dead girl’s identity has been weathered into obscurity from the soft sandstone, and her ceramic portrait is cracked and chipped, giving the grave marker a creepy appearance in a trend that has come and gone only to return again at cemeteries in recent years.
“It used to be an ethnic tradition,” said George Chicora, president of Kurtz Monument Co. in Washington.
Chicora said many survivors are asking him now to install portraits of their loved ones on tombstones after the tradition all but disappeared from the market in the 1950s and 1960s.
“We’re selling more photographs than ever,” he said.
Local historians don’t know how this tradition began.
“I don’t have any idea,” said Charlie Talbot, historian of Monongahela Cemetery.
“After so many years they start to wear off,” Talbot said.
The older the portraits get, the creepier they become, he said.
The tombstone photos helped to make cemeteries a popular destination during the late 19th century when there was a huge American interest in the macabre and communicating with the dead, said Pete Stefansky, a member of the Bassettown Paranormal Society in Washington.
Some of the photos were done in the “mourning style” used when photographers captured images of the dead and then painted their eyes open for family keepsakes, Stefansky said.
“They were super popular and often the only opportunity to have a photograph taken,” he said.
The old tombstone portraits also have helped to make cemeteries a popular place to visit among modern-day ghost hunters.
“At night it’s a scary place,” Stefansky said. “You’re going there with a preconceived notion of where the dead are.”
Chicora said he knelt before one of his ancestor’s graves when he was young, kissed the tombstone portrait and then said a prayer for the Italian immigrant.
Monongahela historian and architect Terry Necciai said there is a row of graves of an Italian family in Monongahela Cemetery where the caskets were slid like drawers into a hillside from a granite facade that contains photographs of the dead.
“The portraits are common in Italy,” Necciai said.
The images are not a reflection of the everlasting vanity of the bodies that were buried under the tombstones, Chicora said.
Survivors now want an “everlasting image” of their loved ones as a show of honor and to remember their faces when they visit their graves, he said.
“It’s beautiful. It’s a lasting memory,” he said.
Chicora said the ceramic portraits he orders from Canada are made better than those from previous generations and are guaranteed and replaced if they deteriorate.
Many of his customers are now having portraits of the deceased etched into black granite tombstones.
“It’s phenomenal,” Chicora said.