Growing up, Marion would visit his maternal family's Albany, N.Y., plot, where lay his grandfather, great aunt and others.
"As a very little boy," he says, "that's how I got to know the family."
Marion, 67, now kills time in the graveyards that he takes living people through and writes about. He is the author of Famous and Curious Cemeteries (Crown, 1977), out of print but available at libraries, and the sort of thing you might want to curl up with this weekend. His tours of Laurel Hill this holiday weekend were sold out at press time, but you can join him on others or simply take your own look around, in preparation for Tuesday's celebration of Halloween.
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Laurel Hill came to be in 1836 when John Jay Smith, a wealthy Philadelphian, sought a peaceful gravesite for his young, dying daughter. He did not want her to be buried in the "clay" of Philadelphia. "Feelings should not be harrowed by viewing the bodies of beloved relatives plunged into the mud and water," Smith said at the time.
Up to that point, the city's main burial grounds were always just outside its most populated areas. As the city grew away from the Delaware, cemeteries were eliminated and built over. Thousands of people were at one point buried beneath what are now the Italian Market, 30th Street Station and the south side of Lombard Street, between 10th and 11th Streets. The main squares - Washington, Franklin, Rittenhouse and Logan - were freely used as graveyards.
When the yellow fever devastated Philadelphia in the late 18th century, mass graves, or potter's fields, were created as close to the carnage as possible. As late as 1950, when Ronaldson's Cemetery at Ninth and Fitzwater Streets, at the edge of Queen Village, was made into a park, cemeteries were still routinely done away with.
