Headboards of Stone- Rabbit Holes

Headboards of Stone
Rabbit Holes by Angela L.














I spend a great deal of my time in cemeteries. photographing, documenting and investigating.
I am a paranormal investigator, a volunteer headstone photographer and a history researcher. I have a great love for cemeteries and working with cemetery documentation and preservation.

I never get tired of going, in fact I prefer to be there. Not that I'm ready to be buried or live among the ranks of the deceased, but because I find peace, beauty and tranquility in cemeteries.

They are full of history, mystery and charm. They are sacred places that calm my nerves and bring me closer to my own spirituality. They have not only become my hobby but also one of my passions. I look for them, drive down country back roads and crawl through thick underbrush and tall weeds, just to photograph them. Many people who know me, think I'm crazy and that I prefer to be among the dead, rather than among the living. They don't understand why I talk about them with excitement and spend every chance I get walking among them.

But recently, I've noticed that nearly every cemetery I have visited in the past two years, has had a rabbit hole. A simple hole in a tree, obviously, some too high off the ground for a rabbit to jump into, but in my mind they have always been rabbit holes. Like the story of Alice In Wonderland, I've often wonder where they lead. And why on earth I am so drawn to them.

Are they portals to the spirit world or just my crazy imagination? Am I loosing my mind? Why do I feel compelled to photograph every one I see. Why can I not pass one up, without taking a peek inside? What do I hope to see? This has been a perplexing question for me for quite some time.

I mentioned my feelings to some friends recently who said , that I was truly crazy and that if I looked around, rabbit holes are every where and then my friends all laughed and asked me what I had been smoking. So, I went home and took a walk in the woods behind my house..contemplating my sanity and my inability to understand myself and my own
weirdness......but, I saw no rabbit holes in the woods behind my house and finally after walking for about an hour I returned to my normal routine.




I have become so fascinated by these holes , that now every time I see one, I have to take a picture. I have wondered many things about rabbit holes in cemeteries, are they portals to another plane, a doorway to the underworld, or just plain old holes in the walls of nature? It's funny that something so trivial as a hole in a tree could capture my attention the way they do.

Do you believe in signs, random things in life we barely notice that are sometimes clues to directions we need to take in life ? When I was a little girl, my grandmother read Alice In Wonderland to me. It scared me to death to be honest, giant caterpillars, shrinking houses, mad hatters, and crazy queens. My grandmother would try to comfort me by telling me this,
"not every rabbit hole has to be scary, sometimes they are doorways that lead to magical places, you have to be brave enough to trust the white rabbit."


Just this past week, while reading in bed , my fiance' was watching the movie, The Matrix. While deeply engrossed in my book, I heard the lines from the movie, "follow the white rabbit", It got my attention immediately, drawing me away from my book, which is not easy to do, and gave me the shivers all over, still I did not understand why it caught my attention or bothered me so much. I shook off the feeling and went back to my book.

Then last night, out of the blue, while doing some cemetery research, I came across a website that nearly floored me. The Association of Graveyard Rabbits. If you don't know what a graveyard rabbit is then you need to visit this website: The Association of Graveyard Rabbits. It's free to join and if you love cemeteries, well this is a great place to read and write about them. It became very clear to me what I was suppose to be doing. A question I've had in my mind for some time now, answered by a hole in a tree. I cannot count the times I have seen and photographed these holes, never really understanding my own fascination with them or understanding what I was suppose to do with the pictures of them that crowd my computer files.

So, I am starting this blog and signing up for membership with The Association of Graveyard Rabbits, in order to write on the subject of cemeteries & graveyards, in celebration of my sudden awareness of why I have been so drawn towards, and perplexed by these Rabbit Holes. Isn't it strange how our minds work and what a big impact, something that seems so very silly to some, can have on someone else?

I am dedicating this blog to the subject of cemeteries and the research and preservation of our sacred burial grounds, because it is a subject I love to write about and what better way to share my experiences and stories of cemetery research in both the history and paranormal fields.

I have many stories to tell and pictures to post, so I hope you will bookmark my blog and and come back often to venture with me, on a trip down a cemetery rabbit hole.