08/02/2026
It's pretty rare to spot a skull in a Chicago area cemetery, but this one at Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery is definitely one of the most spectacular! But why are craniums so uncommon in Midwestern burial grounds?💀
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Skull grave imagery is popular in early American graveyards along the eastern coast, driven by colonial Puritan theology and "memento mori" traditions which frequently utilized iconography of human decay⚰️
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By the time Chicago's own major cemeteries began to be established in the mid 1800's, cultural attitudes toward death had undergone a dramatic transformation. The Victorian beautification of death and the rural garden cemetery movement replaced the bare, brutal warnings of the colonial era with a romanticized, beautified vision of death as a peaceful rest or doorway to another world💐
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Because of this shift in culture, Chicago's families (and their monument makers) favored symbols of hope, memory, and spiritual resurrection such as weeping willows, draped urns, sleeping cherubs, clasped hands, and winged angels- some of which were also represented in those earlier East coast graveyards🪦
