I was raised to love graveyards.

I was raised on classic horror movies and their eerie graveyards, filled with rolling mist.  My parents bought me horror comics and introduced me to Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King in elementary school.  We had the full encyclopedia of Man, Myth, and Magic, and I would lean against the bookshelf for hours, reading and marveling over the illustrations.

I was also raised to appreciate the beauty of cemeteries and to collect the data on the monuments.  My mother taught me the etiquette of walking between graves.  She taught me to see patterns in the death dates when a war or sickness ran through a community.

There is a stillness to graveyards.  There is a sense of a place ruminating on its past.  And it’s a lovely place to spin tales.