These days it seems like everybody wants to get close to celebrities.
Not Jim Tipton.
He wants to get close to what’s left of them.
Tipton, 32, is a hunter of headstones, a connoisseur of crypts – the creator of a mournfully masterful Web site, www.FindaGrave.com.
The site is a giant, online cemetery – a necropolis with a search engine, instantly providing photos and information on the final resting places of the famous, infamous and anonymous.
If you’re dying to know where Frank Sinatra is buried (Cathedral City, Calif.), how Sylvia Plath met her end (suicide – turned on the gas), or longing to visit the grave of Lon Chaney Jr. (you can’t – his body was donated to science), Find a Grave has the answers.
The site offers a final word on 8 million graves. New ones are being added at the rate of 100 an hour.
“It’s a surrogate visit to a cemetery, and we all know what a visit to a cemetery means,” Tipton says. “You’re there to remember somebody’s life.”
Academics who study the media say Find a Grave, as well as obituary sites like Legacy.com, is more than a roll call of the dead. It represents a continuing shift of real-life activities onto the Internet. Americans can do more than shop and date on the Web – they can mourn.
Always loved James Dean, but can’t afford a trip to Indiana? On Find a Grave you can call up a photo that puts you three feet from his headstone. You can leave flowers – virtual, of course – and even a note proclaiming your eternal devotion.
“You know that place between sleep and being awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you,” writes a fan, Lindsay Irvine.
She and 1,288 others have left notes at Dean’s site.
“Going through a Web site to visit the grave site of a movie star is not so weird,” says Temple University communications professor Carolyn Kitch, who studies public grief. “People have gotten used to feeling genuine empathy through the media.”
The visit to the grave may be virtual, she says, but the gesture of sympathy and remembrance is real.
And Find a Grave is more than a celebrity catafalque. Ordinary people build cyberspace shrines to loved ones there, creating places where friends, relatives and even strangers can pay their respects.
Typical memorials resemble the one for a Wisconsin soldier named Douglas Daane, who was sent to Vietnam in April 1970 and killed two months later, at age 21.
The memorial is a montage of photography and biography, created by a high school classmate.
On an average day Find a Grave gets about half a million hits – a big number, but not surprising to people who research American society.
“It’s a safe way to explore a topic that causes us both fascination and fear,” says Anne Skleder, who studies death at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa.
Call up the Web site, and you’re greeted by a traditional gray headstone – inscribed with a question mark. (The home page used to feature a photo of a tombstone bearing the name “Waldo,” Tipton’s answer to the popular question, “Where’s… “)
The graphics are shaded in lavender and rose, the texts respectfully upbeat. Tipton allows no gruesome crash pictures or autopsy shots. The site is practically cheery, a reflection of its creator’s lifelong interests.
As a young man, Tipton says, he loved to collect things, particularly if they were worthless. (He used to collect hash-brown sleeves from McDonald’s.) He loved computers. And most of all he loved exploring cemeteries – the architecture of the mausoleums, the artistry of the statues, the way he could learn the history of a town just by reading the headstones.
Then he began seeking out specific graves – Al Capone, Lucille Ball, physicist Richard Feynman. “I liked the thrill of the hunt,” Tipton says.
The Web site debuted in the mid-1990s, but back then it was strictly a bare-bones affair. Tipton posted photos of graves he visited on weekend expeditions. People started sending him their own grave-site pictures.
More recently, Internet companies – from Ask Jeeves to Apartments.com – have begun to advertise on the site. Find a Grave opened its own store, selling logo T-shirts and books like “Hollywood Remains to Be Seen: A Guide to the Movie Stars’ Final Homes.”
As a result, Tipton has been able to quit his job – he operated the computer system at a cancer institute – and run the Web site fulltime from his home in Salt Lake City. He long ago lost track of exactly how many graves and cemeteries he’s personally visited. Hundreds of the latter, thousands of the former.
Contributors have sent him information on millions more. The enormity of the endeavor has led him to organize whole categories of deceased, among them 3,454 actors, 1,962 actresses, 739 members of royalty, 194 mobsters, 186 animals, 44 suffragettes and six magicians.
He’s collected favorite epitaphs: “Go away – I’m asleep,” on the crypt of actress Joan Hackett. “Do Not Disturb,” on the marker of a man named Robert Randall.
He has a headstone for Poe fans: Alan Edgar Raven.
Another for children: Lillian May Tickle.
Even one for cannibals: Louisa Canby Eaton.
Tipton doesn’t need to travel much these days. An army of 200,000 volunteer headstone-hunters sends him data on individual graves and entire cemeteries.
Still, he devotes a couple of days of every family vacation – he has a wife and daughter – to searches. In Hawaii, while others delighted in the sand and scenery, Tipton drove to the Palapala Ho’omau Church Cemetery, where Charles Lindbergh is buried. It’s a simple grave, the chiseled stone bearing a passage from Psalms 139:9 – “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea …”
On Find a Grave, everybody can visit for free.
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