Creepy Cemetery Photos To Inspire Your Halloween Writing

I take a lot of photos, not as many as Max does, but a LOT.  I also travel a lot.  And, for some reason, I take pictures of cemeteries.  A lot.
I have photos of band members on our dance tours climbing into unused graves in Italy, pictures of them lying supine on gravemarkers at Whitby Abbey (the famous graveyard mentioned in Dracula), shots of lonely, neglected headstones in the ghost town of Sego, Utah, shots of skulls in a neolithic tomb in the Orkney Islands, and some really odd graves in the Salt Lake City Cemetery.  I don't even remember when I started photographing stuff in graveyards; I've just done it for over 2 decades.
So, this week is Halloween, and I know there are other writers (and photographers) who read this blog. So I thought I'd share a few of my spooky photos with you this week.  (Maybe one of them will even inspire someone who plans to do NANWRIMO.)

To start off, here's this lovely faux-vintage number:

Spooky looking, isn't it?
It's actually a shot of an angel in the Mt. Olivet Cemetery near East High School in Salt Lake City.  I just used picmonkey to turn it into a pseudo-daguerreotype.

Here's another for your writing inspiration:

This is a shot of the interior of the ruins of Timoleague Abbey in Ireland.  The ruins are interesting enough, but the fact that I was greeted at the entrance with a large warning sign about the dangers of unlicensed gravedigging really blew my mind.  All around and about the abbey and the ground are centuries' worth of graves, modern ones on top of older ones.  And, apparently, there must be a significant problem with people digging graves by hand and just burying their loved ones without permits.  Freaky.

These 19th and early 20th century markers in the Heber City Cemetery in Utah remind me of giant chess pieces, waiting for -- possibly -- the Hand of God to move them.  Eerie.

And this grave in the Salt Lake City Cemetery is part of an urban legend.  Supposedly, if you visit this grave at midnight and walk backward around it three times, the face of the man buried there will appear in the little opening of the door.  Every high school kid knows someone who knows someone who has a neighbor/cousin/friend who swears s/he knows someone who did this and it worked.  (Personally, I've never tried it, but I bet that a visit to this tomb on Halloween would be very frightening -- if only because of the drunk/stoned people there trying to scare themselves into wetting their pants.)  But it's still rather creepy to see a grave that's supposedly haunted.


This concludes today's set of Halloween writing inspiration photos.  Check back again tomorrow for more spookiness!