Once or twice a week after the workday is done, I will go upstairs, get in bed, open up TikTok on my phone and scroll until my brain begins to moulder and rot like a sandwich left out in the rain.
While ping-ponging between videos of mini donkeys, Indian recipes and drag queens earlier this summer, an unusual video popped up: a guy walking through Treat Point Cemetery in Frankfort, Maine, pointing out the interesting graves and idyllic surroundings in well-maintained old burial ground. It’s tucked away down a little woodland path, up the side of a steep hill, about 15 miles outside of Bangor. No one’s been buried there in more than a century.
Most of the people there are my ancestors in one way or another; My mom’s a Treat via her father, which makes me a Treat. Her whole side of the family are Treats, going back hundreds of years. At one time, we were merchants and soldiers and explorers, a prosperous clan from an old English family that first came to North America in the 17th century. There are lots more Treats buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Winterport. The local history and family-manifested lore is so deep that a relative once called it the “Valley of the Kings,” as if we were pharaohs and princes to be venerated. Those days are, as you might suspect, pretty much over.
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This was a startling find on my For You Page on TikTok. I left a comment saying hello, I’m a Treat, and correcting the creator on his pronunciation of “Frankfort,” because I’m a bit of a jerk.
The images of the graves of centuries-old distant relatives stuck with me. They’re always there, sleeping, their granite headstones slowly eroding in the rain and snow and wind, their bones laid out a few feet below the surface, their stories locked away in the soil. That they’re now on TikTok is both hilarious and oddly poignant to me. Few things get me more excited than a striking juxtaposition.
A few weeks later, Bill Day, the creator of the video, and I were standing in Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, amid the gently swaying oak trees, the large flocks of Canada geese and the areas made famous by Stephen King. Day has visited cemeteries all over Maine, as it turns out, making TikTok posts about the history of those cemeteries and the people buried in them. Though he still has a regular job, earlier this year Day launched his own genealogy business, It’s All Relative, offering assistance to people curious about where they came from, who their relatives were and, perhaps, why their family is the way it is.
As a child growing up in Houlton, in 1989, Day witnessed an 86-year-old woman get struck by a truck and die in the middle of the street. The image stuck with him all his life - who was she? Where did she come from? What led her to the point of her grisly demise?
“It also kind of spawned a lifelong interest in the macabre and morbid stuff. I like hanging out in cemeteries. Find A Grave is one of my favorite websites,” Day said, referring to the volunteer-run website that, as of 2024, has more than 250 million individual gravesites around the world documented.
More than 30 years later, Day began to dig into her family history. He methodically unearthed the fascinating, sad story of Lizzie Penn and her deep roots in Newfoundland and Maine, her abusive husband, the loss of four of her six children to childhood illness, and the more than 30 years she spent institutionalized at Pownal State School (later Pineland Center) in New Gloucester, the infamous facility where for more than 80 years Maine held thousands of people with developmental disabilities and mental illness, until it finally closed in 1996. It affected him deeply, he said.
“It was this incredible saga laid out in front of me,” Day said. “I was absolutely hooked on genealogy after that… I've added about 2,000 entries to Find A Grave, not just from death records, but by physically walking old cemeteries, getting on my hands and knees to transcribe what’s on the marker.”
The TikTok page helps promote his genealogy services, but it’s also part of a larger community on the app obsessed with all things cemetery. #GraveTok encompasses a wide variety of creators, the most famous of which is likely Rosie Grant, who turned her project making the prized family recipes featured on gravestones in cemeteries all across the country into a cookbook deal. Others are fascinated by the symbolism found on old graves, like the anchors for sailors, the lamb for infants and small children who died too early, or the sheaf of wheat for someone who died at a very old age.
Many #GraveTok creators are engaged in the occasionally contentious practice of grave cleaning - sprucing up old headstones and resetting memorials that, in some cases, haven’t been touched in 50 or more years. It’s contentious because some TikTok creators - well-intentioned though they may be - aren’t using the right cleaning products to clean the stones, or are actually knocking over other stones as they try to fix others.
Maine is full of old cemeteries, many of which date back to the 18th and even 17th centuries. While those in cities like Bangor and Portland have staff and lots of foot traffic that ensures nearly all the graves are well-preserved, in smaller, more rural towns there may be tiny cemeteries hidden down trails or off quiet country roads that haven’t had a new interment in decades - or even centuries. Those places are prized by “tombstone tourists” and people eager to post about them on social media.
“It has often been said that more damage is done to cemetery stones by people with ‘good intentions’ than by vandals,” said Walter Guptill, president of the board of the Maine Old Cemetery Association, who like Day came to get into cemeteries from an abiding love of genealogy. “In my ten years of hands-on cemetery conservation work, I’ve unfortunately seen many well-intentioned but damaging attempts at cleaning or resetting stones — not only by volunteers, but sometimes even by commercial memorial companies. That’s why training and guidance are so critical.”
Despite the popularity of #GraveTok and sites like Find a Grave, the care of and attention to old cemeteries and the stories of the people buried in them is not typically something undertaken by people in their 40s and younger. Local cemetery boards and organizations and historical and genealogical societies have traditionally led the charge on maintaining those places and archives - but those organizations are aging rapidly, with the average age of core membership often well into its 70s.
The Hermon Historical Society has no active members. Last year, the Brewer Historical Society disbanded outright. This year, Evergreen Cemetery in Caribou held its first board meeting in 55 years, so its 80-something-year-old caretaker could finally step down. The board had no members. Most of the people previously on the board were interred at the cemetery.
That’s why, despite there being some concern about people potentially damaging stones, Guptill thinks any interest by younger generations about old cemeteries, family history and local history is generally more of a good thing than a bad thing - and he and his fellow volunteers are more than happy to educate people about how best to care for these sacred places.
“I do believe that this type of content can inspire younger people to get involved in cemetery preservation. If that interest is paired with proper education, it could be very positive,” he said. “The enthusiasm is wonderful to see.”
As Americans are less interested in burial and more choose cremation upon their death - nearly two-thirds of Americans are cremated instead of buried, a number that’s continually rising - cemeteries will likely become less about active use, and more about preservation and even recreation, as evidenced by the number of walkers and runners in places like Mount Hope. There’s already precedent for that; garden cemeteries were specifically created to be parks as well as graveyards.
One can easily envision a future where there’s only a few burials in different cemeteries every month, with people opting to scatter ashes, go for green burials, or to be interred in high-rise buildings, purpose-built columbariums or other futuristic options, as they already do in other parts of the world.
Cemeteries become, instead, a kind of history park; a monument to the past, to the stories of communities as they grow and change, and to the people that came before us. Maybe they already are - especially ones like Treat Point in Frankfort, or any of the other tiny little cemeteries that dot the tangled, wild landscape of rural Maine. There’s a cemetery in the tiny town of Wayne that’s laid out in a concentric circle around a center monument. There’s a cemetery in Windham that, if I were a person that truly believed in ghosts, I would say is 100 percent haunted. There’s even a tiny, ancient cemetery right in downtown Ellsworth. Nobody is using them for much of anything except to appreciate their beauty, the people buried there, and what they represent.
There’s a whole other conversation to be had about how modern societies view death; how, as we live longer and our cultures change, we are less connected to the cycle of birth, life and death, and run away from talk of our lives ending, as they all eventually will. I think that’s connected, in some way, to our disconnect from the past - to be constantly stuck in the now, scrolling the endless scroll on our phones, reacting to stimuli and never stopping to think about why things are the way they are.
Cemeteries, then, exist as a direct counterpoint to that. By design, they are places where people that are dead are, somehow, still alive; they may not talk, but they do tell stories. Just like digging through libraries, museums, town records and newspaper archives in search of new information and revelations, exploring and preserving these places let us feel like we’re part of something bigger – a family, a community, a shared history. That’s certainly something worth preserving.