Episode 243 - Haunted History: Exploring Virginia's Cemeteries with Sharon Pajka

🔮 Prepare yourself for the séance… 🔮

Cemetery Travel Royalty Returns: Loren Rhoads Launches Kickstarter for New Book!

I’ve been a fangirl of Loren Rhoads for years, long before I could call her a friend. Her writing, her insight, and her fearless curiosity made me feel seen. She showed me that it’s okay, even beautiful, to explore cemeteries not just for research, but for recreation and reflection. 

Loren is truly the queen of cemetery travel. She runs CemeteryTravel.com, an incredible resource and community hub for taphophiles, historians, travelers, and the merely curious. And now, she’s back with a brand-new book! Still Wish You Were Here: More Adventures in Cemetery Travel 

This new memoir collects 35 essays from Loren’s journeys through more than 50 burial grounds worldwide from California’s Gold Country to the streets of Singapore, Tokyo, Rome, and beyond. Fifteen of these stories are brand new and exclusive to this book!

Whether she’s tracking down the graves of cultural icons, getting wonderfully lost in foreign churchyards, or meditating on mortality, Loren’s stories are vivid, thoughtful, and deeply inspiring.

Kickstarter is live! and runs until August 8, 2025
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/still-wish-you-were-here-more-adventures-in-cemetery-travel

If cemeteries call to you the way they do to me, if you’ve ever wandered through one feeling connected, curious, or just at peace, this is the book to support.

Thank you, Loren, for making this strange and sacred form of travel feel like home.

Breakfast with the Presidents

Morning Coffee at Hollywood Cemetery

This morning included dropping off my husband at work. Since his office is just down the street from Hollywood Cemetery, I couldn’t resist a detour. With my travel mug of coffee, my yogurt for breakfast, and my journal, I headed down the road, telling myself that I was going to wait out the morning traffic before heading home.

I made my way to one of the overlooks perched above the James River, where the sound of water and the steady hum of cicadas offered a loud, living backdrop. It was one of those perfect early summer mornings, humid but not too hot, buzzing with life, and full of stories waiting to be discovered. There were some fallen limbs and leaves from last night’s storms, and the grass was heavy with morning dew that soaked through my shoes as I walked. I didn't mind, though. 

After journaling, I wandered into some parts of the cemetery that I rarely make time to explore when I'm giving guided tours. There’s something so different about visiting a place without a plan, just letting the place guide your way. 

This morning, they led me to the Crenshaw plot not far from President’s Circle, where I caught a delicate and distinct fragrance on the breeze: the Musk Rose, or Rosa moschata. This particular rose is something special. Once believed to be extinct, the Musk Rose was rediscovered right here in the Crenshaw plot some years ago. Since then, it’s been found in other locations, all tied to the same family. Thanks to the foresight of folks like Connie at Hartwood Roses, cuttings were taken, and the rose now grows in nurseries and gardens, safe from vanishing again. You can read more about its journey on her blog: hartwoodroses.blogspot.com.

This morning, the bush held only two blooms. This rose bush is unique for having two different types of flowers. Apparently, one form is a mutation of the other. It’s a rare and lovely thing to see in person (but mostly to smell!), and even more special knowing its story.

As I was getting ready to head out, I ran into two women walking through the cemetery, sisters with one visiting from Savannah, Georgia. Naturally, the conversation turned to cemeteries. We chatted all things Savannah: Bonaventure Cemetery, the infamous Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and the meandering paths of Colonial Park that cut through the city. We even touched on Laurel Grove Cemetery, the final resting place of Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts. I love Savannah cemeteries, but you just cannot beat the breeze of the river, which helps keep those pesky gnats away. I bought a mesh head net for the next time I visit Savannah.   

I gave the sisters a quick impromptu tour of Presidents Circle and pointed out John Tyler and James Monroe, the Lloyd family plot (What happened to Frank? If you are familiar with the grave, you know what I'm talking about), and, of course, I had to introduce them to the Musk Rose before parting ways.

There’s something incredibly grounding about mornings like this, feet wet with dew, cicadas singing, unexpected conversations blooming among the graves. History isn’t just in books or plaques; it’s in the plants, the stones, the people you meet, and the stories you pass along.

And sometimes, it starts with a cup of coffee and a slight change in your morning routine. 

For those who couldn't get out to the cemetery this morning, here's a short video of part of my morning stroll. 

“Writing the Dead”: A Creative Reckoning with America’s Last Taboo

Black Beauty rosebud currently blooming

This morning, I read "The modern taboo that Americans just can’t seem to break," Sara Youngblood Gregory’s timely piece in Vox on the persistent silence around death in American culture. It’s a moving exploration of how, despite our thoughts often turning to mortality, we struggle to give voice to our grief, our fears, and our hopes about what comes after. From families that sidestep the subject altogether to a culture shaped by euphemism and for-profit deathcare, the result is clear: we are left ill-equipped to process loss or live fully in its shadow.

That’s why I’m offering a new six-week course this fall through the Transformative Language Arts Network: “Writing the Dead.” This course is not about resolving the mysteries of mortality. It’s about embracing them openly and together.

Black Beauty rose from my garden

Like Gregory’s article, this course begins with the premise that our reluctance to speak of death carries real emotional, psychological, and even societal costs. And yet, there is a powerful antidote in the act of making meaning. When we write and create in the wake of loss, or in conversation with it, we don’t just face death, we build a relationship with it. We connect to memory, to community, and to what it means to be alive.

Over six weeks, we’ll gather to explore death, grief, and remembrance through creative writing, visual art, and dialogue. We’ll read short texts, examine art, and create our own responses to profound questions. Writing letters to the dead, crafting rituals of remembrance, and sharing our stories will become tools for deep inquiry, healing, and transformation.

As the Vox article makes clear, most Americans think about death regularly, but only a third ever talk about it. This course offers a space to break that silence. Not in isolation, but in community.

Together, we will:

• Explore cultural and personal narratives around death and dying.

• Use writing to process grief and affirm connection.

• Learn from traditions that treat death as an integral part of life—not a forbidden subject.

• Approach our creative practice not as escape, but as a meaningful confrontation.

If you’re curious, if you’re grieving, if you’ve ever whispered to a loved one who’s no longer here, or wished you could, this course is for you. Let’s step into the conversation that matters most, and discover how writing can become a living dialogue between what’s lost and what remains.

“Writing the Dead” begins this fall through TLAN. Join us—and let’s talk about what no one talks about.

There’s something truly haunting about Cedar Hill Cemetery in Covington, VA

Covington Virginian, July 2, 1930.

With just a couple of weeks to go before Haunted Virginia Cemeteries is released, I find myself both counting down the days and diving even deeper into the stories that inspired it.

This project has never just been about ghost tales, though there are plenty of those to share. This research has been about honoring memory, tracing forgotten histories, and paying attention to the places where the veil between worlds feels just a little thinner.

On Wednesday morning, I’ll be leading a Meandering Among the Markers writing event in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery. We’ll be walking, talking, and listening closely to the quiet echoes of the past. And later this week, a few friends and I are preparing for a séance. These are the ways I stay close to the material, and how I continue to be reminded that these stories don’t always stay on the page.


One site that continues to haunt me is Cedar Hill Cemetery in Covington, nestled in the Alleghany Highlands. With more than 10,000 burials stretching back to 1816, the cemetery is a striking landscape of stone and shadow. But it’s more than just historic. Cedar Hill pulses with the kind of eerie energy that makes even skeptics like me hesitate. Strange lights have been reported there for nearly a century. In a 1930 article from Covington Virginian, witnesses described blue flames flickering over a single plot, vanishing when anyone tried to get close. Others reported seeing them on the same night, describing them as ghostly, bluish will-o’-the-wisps. No source was ever found. No earthly explanation ever confirmed. And yet, they’re said to appear still.

Folklore has long warned us about blue fire. In European traditions, it’s often a sign of spirits or hidden treasure. Bram Stoker’s Dracula featured them, too, glowing mysteriously in the Carpathians. In Cedar Hill, they may just signal the presence of a soul that never found peace.

And then there’s the legend about the statue, a marble woman forever frozen mid-step, said to represent a young bride who died tragically on her wedding day. According to local legend, she fell down the church steps and broke her neck. Her grieving husband commissioned the statue in her image, but visitors claim she mourns still. Some even say the statue bleeds but only on Halloween. Journalists have gone out to witness it. None have succeeded. But the stories persist.

Nearby lies another grave, and another story, one that chills me every time I think about it. A young mother buried in 1848, was thought to have died of grief after losing her child. When the cemetery moved her grave decades later, workers discovered her remains face down, one hand raised near her head. It’s believed she had been in a coma, mistaken for dead, and awoke after burial. Her final moments must have been pure terror. Some say her spirit still lingers, her anguish imprinted in the ground itself.

Cedar Hill is not a place you simply visit. It’s a place that lingers with you. Those who walk among the graves at Cedar Hill don’t always leave unchanged. 

Sometimes, they carry a little of the place with them.

Two Weeks Until My Book Release—A Reflection on Pocahontas Cemetery

In just about two weeks, Haunted Virginia Cemeteries will be released. As I count down the days, I’m also deeply immersed in the work that led to this book: honoring memory, summoning stories, and yes, even preparing for a séance later this week (more on that soon). 

This week is a full one. I’ll be leading the TLA Community Circle via Zoom tomorrow evening and leading a Meandering Among the Markers event in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery on Wednesday morning. 

As I think about conjuring spirits, my thoughts return to my own family story—my grandfather, Stanley Pajka, a coal miner in Luzerne, Pennsylvania, who died of tuberculosis at forty-four. My father was just a child, unable to hug his “Pop” during those long, isolated months in a sanitorium. 

That history echoed strongly during my trip to Tazewell County, Virginia, where I visited Pocahontas Cemetery, established after the tragic 1884 mine explosion that killed at least 114 men. Walking among the graves, I saw inscriptions in Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Italian, and English, reminders of the immigrant labor recruited to Appalachia by coal barons, far from the American dream they were promised. 

Like the towns I visited in my childhood, Pocahontas is steeped in memory and haunted by loss. Ghostly sightings and unexplained phenomena persist in the cemetery. With recent state funding for restoration, including ground-penetrating radar to locate lost graves, perhaps the spirits are stirred by our renewed attention. 

A century after the disaster, Historic Pocahontas Inc. erected a memorial near Centre Street. Every year, the town holds a candlelight vigil to honor the miners. The dead are not forgotten, and their presence, I believe, is still felt. 

Stay tuned as I share more stories from the road and behind the veil. The ghosts are ready. Are you? 

🪦 Meet the Author – Book Signing Event 🪦

On Saturday, August 9, 2025, I’ll be at the Richmond Public Library Main Branch (Lobby Table) from 9:00am to 12:00pm with a selection of my books—come say hello!

I’ll have copies of:

• Haunted Virginia Cemeteries 👻
• The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe: Graves of his Family, Friends, and Foes –winner of the 2024 Saturday 'Visiter' Awards presented by Poe Baltimore
• Women Writers Buried in Virginia 🪦

While Richmond welcomes the wonderfully weird at the Oddities & Curiosities Expo that weekend, I’ll be just a few blocks away offering a literary detour for those who love history, mystery, and the macabre. The Richmond Public Library is committed to supporting local writers, providing a relaxed setting for readers to discover new voices.

Stop by, browse, chat, and grab a signed copy—I’d love to see you there! 🖋️📚