A couple of days ago I went on Exeter City’s tour of churchyards and the city’s Catacombs. I had long wanted to tour the Catacombs because I sometimes cut through St. Bartholomew Cemetery, where they are located walking home from the city center and at night it can be a foreboding place. It was built right up against the ancient Roman city wall on a mound of dirt looking down upon the terraced cemetery below. It was quite an engineering feat for its day. It was built in the 1800s during the surge of the Victorian death obsession and its purpose was to protect the well to do of the city from the ‘Resurrection Men’. It was not a success in the monetary way that the church who built it thought it would be. For in the Victorian period here in the UK, death was a major obsession with the public, and capitalizing on its popularity was rampant. So much so that Acts of Parliament were passed to protect the consumer.

I learned a lot on this free tour supplied by the City Council about the culture of death in Exeter over the ages, beginning in the Roman occupation to present. We began the tour on the grounds of the Exeter Cathedral, a public green space where people meet, Goths gather, Skaters rail, lovers profess their love and families have picnics. It is a lovely open area surrounded by ancient storefronts backed by modern shopping areas. I myself have gone there many times to relax during shopping trips in the city center. But what I didn’t know, and neither did the scores of people sitting on the ground enjoying the somewhat rare sunny weather for this time of the year, was that underneath them lay buried the bodies of over a quarter of a million of Exeter’s dead.

The Exeter Cathedral Grounds as known today

The cathedral was built in the 1200’s and burying people was a major income for the cathedral because they were the only churchyard within the city walls. Over the years the cathedral administrators had gotten greedy and they had literally begun to bury the cathedral itself. The ground’s surface level had risen to the point that the lower windows of the cathedral were no longer visible by the 1500s and all burials were ceased. Approximately a quarter of million more bodies where dug up to lower the ground level and the bones were moved to beyond the city’s walls into mass graves.

Exeter Cathedral west façade, known for the medieval sculpture covering the whole lower section of the facade

Now, I am thinking as the tour guide speaks, about a previous blog I had written titled ‘Can A Cemetery Be Haunted?’   and the comments I had received from IAH members. I began wondering if the ‘haunted atmosphere of a spooky cemetery with overgrown tombstones’ did have something to do with people thinking that a cemetery is haunted, as mentioned by some in my responses.

For here I am on an open cheerful green area with no tombstones in site, standing on layers upon layers of hundred of thousands of bodies with no spooky atmosphere anywhere, except for the serious Goths who had gathered over in the corner. Is this area haunted because of these graves?

The night before I had gone on the City’s ghost tour, and we learned that there are sightings of ghosts on the cathedral green. There is a girl seen running across the green, as she is being chased by her murders; there are the two men who fell to their deaths trying to steal the copper roofing off the cathedral; there is the nun seen in July of every year walking from the cathedral towards the rectory and there is a topless female ghost that used to walk the walkways along the ancient storefronts dating back to the 1500s.

This topless enitity was murdered and buried in a sewage ditch that used to surround the green. It seems she was probably murdered by the shopkeeper of the smallest building in the image below and dumped just outside his door and covered over with garbage. They found her body about 15 years ago while digging up a sidewalk and moved her skeleton to the museum. From that moment on, her ghost has no longer been seen walking in front of these quaint shops.

These are the store fronts where the ghost of the topless woman was seen walking. You can see how much higher the cathedral grounds are from the street level. A wall had been built to contain the burial ground, which used to be much higher than seen in this photo before moving the many feet of graves.

Ok, so now I am thinking… the physical moving of the skeleton stopped the haunting by this particular woman’s spirit... isn’t that strange. She wasn’t buried in a proper grave so that could not have been the reason the haunting stopped. Maybe it was because she was finally found, that stopped her nightly walk. But the point is, the body was moved, the haunting stopped. So is this a direct connection to the body of the deceased and the haunting itself? Some of the comments on my blog on haunted cemeteries stated that ‘why would a ghost haunt a cemetery, hauntings are caused by the emotional imprinting of an event, so ghosts would hang out where their death or murder took place or where they had fond memories or strong connections more likely than where their body was buried’

Now, what is going through my mind is… if that was the case, why did this ghost sighting stop after they moved the body? Is this woman’s ghost now haunting the museum where they removed the body to? I will have to ask a friend of mine who is a curator there if this topless ghost now walks the halls of his building?

This is an image of the location where the spirit of a Nun is seen walking during the month of July. This image was not taken in the month of July but during the night of the lunar eclipse 2006

The follow day on the catacomb tour, my head is still reeling with questions regarding, Can Cemeteries Be Haunted? Some of the comments from the blog mentioned above stated that maybe the ‘hauntings of the cemeteries are from the living that came to visit the graves of their loved ones, an emotional imprint of grief left behind by them, who return to the grave of their loved one to grieve even after death'.

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