January brought us to a place that certainly need be spoken of in the context of Halloween... so we’ll save it for just that occasion. (Hint: it’s old, abandoned, creepy, reportedly haunted, the cause of possession & insanity, about to be resurrected, and now, sadly, in ashes). Stay tuned. I promise I’ll come back to this in October’s issue...

April sent us to Philadelphia, where there are plenty of dead people with lots of great stories and historical gravestones. Overall Philly is a highly recommended trip to one of our oldest cities with heaps of history everywhere you look (plus a fantastic tequila bar.) Besides the tequila, look at the décor and it becomes clear why we were there 4 out of the 5 nights of our trip). Their cemeteries are filled with founding fathers, great inventors, patriots & many other notables. We spent two days roaming around their historic graveyards!

Photos we took of Philly can be found at Flickr.

If great cemeteries weren’t enough, Philly also has the Mutter Museum. Originally a medical teaching facility to educate on human genetic and disease-induced abnormalities, this place is filled with enough damaged skulls, giant intestines, twisted spines, encephalitic babies and jars of pickled organs to keep you busy on a full day of exploration. The poor creatures that were once circus freaks, prisoners of asylums and social pariahs were brought to The Mutter (living or dead) to be examined, studied, preserved and used as educative tools to help ‘modern’ man and medicine of the 19th century understand the human body, it’s limitations, the cruelty of nature & dispel the myths and superstitions that surrounded medical oddities of the day. Not for the squeamish, but truly fascinating. Their motto is "Disturbingly Informative."

The main reason for the Philly trip was to visit a long-dead celebrity, King Tutankamun, who was on his second US tour in 30 years and appearing at The Franklin Institute. We met his purported grandparents, learned Egyptian ancestral lineage as it related to the building of pharonic dynasties, brushed up on embalming and mummification techniques as well as gasped at the gorgeous assortment of golden and alabaster objects created solely to accompany him on his journey to the next world.

The first four months of 2007 kept us busy. We went many places and learned many new and interesting things. Perhaps the biggest lesson we took away was from the long-dead boy king where one passage of hieroglyphics translated as: "To speak the name of the dead is to make them live again." This is why we spend so much time in the cemeteries and at attractions others may call morbid. It is in keeping with The Gravestone Girls motto: "Keeping Our Dead Alive!"

Memento Mori!

The Gravestone Girls -
Putting the 'Rave' Back in Grave