One-Star Review

Biddison Cementary is at the end of my block. It is HISTORIC LANDMARK..I brought my home seven years ago and I have never seen ANYONE COME OUT and up keep the grounds.if there are any FAMILY MEMBERS out there Please show respect and contact the city to Help keep up the grounds… Its a Eye sore.

I have never been afraid or unsettled in graveyards. In recent years, I’ve loved them for the fact that they force me to be peaceful. During the day, living people in a graveyard are washed-out and quieted. Funeral voices are black-toned murmurs. Dog-walkers and joggers exercise mutely. Visitors solemnly offer flowers to graves and bread to pond ducks. And I, scatter-brained and the middle-child-of-six-kids kind of talkative, can sink into that quiet with no acknowledgment. No demands on my presence. I also love them for their history, and not just in names of the deceased. The space of a cemetery itself carries a story. That feels especially true in abandoned ones—cracked stone, fading epitaphs, and the reasons why people leave graves to crumble.

This Google Maps review is one of only seven left for Biddison Family Cemetery, a small, abandoned green space in northeast Baltimore, Maryland. At the junction of Forrester Avenue and Oaklyn Avenue in the Waltherson neighborhood, this little pocket hosts at least fifty-five dead.

And the above reviewer is correct: it is an “Eye sore.” Many of the graves are cracked or fully separated from their plinths, sprawled against tree roots or the dirt. When I visited Biddison on July 14th, 2020, I’d expected to see that much. What I didn’t expect to see was a pile of brown paper bags piled against the south side of the fence, overflowing with recycling and flies. The words NATTY DADDY shouted from a blue aluminum can at the top of one of the bags, and a fly plodded idly along its rim. I later tried to find out if the intersection of Biddison Lane and Forrester Avenue is a designated recycling drop point, but nothing I found from Baltimore City Public Works indicates that it is.

On the outside of the northwest section of the fence, an intact white sink bowl rested upside-down on the sweating cushions of a once-white, now-forgotten couch. Grass encroached slowly around their bases. The headboard of a bedframe leant over them both, resting against the face, and from a distance its shape was not unlike that of a historical marker sign. Less than ten feet from it all, tombstones touching one hundred years old and more gathered moss. I framed pictures with the household bits in the foreground, fence in the middle ground, graves at the back.

There isn’t a gate, merely an opening in the fence, and the bags were piled in such a way that they didn’t block it at all. Access to Biddison Family Cemetery is unfettered, though you wouldn’t know its name just by being there—there’s no sign, no marker. You’d have to check Google Maps on the site itself to get a name, or perhaps search one of the names of the dead. On Maps, you can read all seven of the reviews, which average 3.4 out of 5 stars. A couple of them say that the site was kept up by neighbors twenty and more years ago, but complain that there’s been no organized effort in recent years to keep the cemetery clean.

Douglas firs, red maples, and black walnuts grow in and outside the cemetery, casting a welcome shade that stands in stark contrast to the sunny neighborhood sidewalks. In the thick, humid carpet of Maryland air on a summer morning, I was certain it was already in the upper eighties, and I was glad of the cover. Swarms of gnats chased each other through dusty sunlight.

Before I started scribbling any notes, I texted my mother a screenshot of my Google Maps location, explaining where I was—something I’d neglected to do when I left the house in the wake of sunrise. The unspoken message was: “in case something happens.” I knew roughly where I was—Bel Air—and I didn’t expect anything from this quiet street. But I grew up spoon-fed the notion that Baltimore is not safe, so I texted my mother.

I knew why I was there: I wanted to write about cemeteries. Mostly abandoned ones. I didn’t know what I wanted to say yet; I was there as a journalist, documenting my own fascinations. Grass and branches crunched underfoot as I wandered among the tombstones, and I stepped around a few water bottles caked in dirt, plastic crunched into leaves. I snapped careful pictures of every headstone, giving special care to the toppled ones, the cracked ones, the ones so worn it would be a challenge to read the words even with digital enhancements.

Other than the majority of Biddisons, there were Forresters, McCauleys, Barbers, a knit set of white families marrying and descending down to the most recent: Eva Biddison, buried in 1961. As far as I could read, the oldest plot belonged to John L. Burgan, born in 1771 and deceased in a year obscured by vines. I thought I read a “15” under the leaves, but I didn’t want to tear the growth away. I didn’t want to disturb anything in this still, pocketed breath of space. The decay simultaneously saddened and fascinated me, and I saw myself as an observer—a kind of journalist—there to document the strange wonder of graves left to topple mere yards away from single-family homes built in 1930.

The fencing there seemed almost to have a life of its own—in many places the iron twisted and bent in bulbous, wild shapes. At the north end of the cemetery, the side facing Forrester Avenue, the fence broke away from the northwest corner post and leaned out toward the road, leaving a gap big enough to walk through. The buckled metal gestured drunkenly toward the street, toward the homes, beckoning me to leave the dead and get on with my day. I didn’t. Not immediately. I tread back among the graves and took more notes, determined to find a story.

I respect this place a lot. It is a peaceful place to ride your bicycle and enjoy the beautiful pond with deer which regularly can be seen here. The graves are well maintained. There is older graves which goes back to the early 1911’s which is the oldest i have seen. The only problem is the roads which are very bumpy and need to be repaved.

In a different summer, before my senior year of undergrad, I fell spiritually in love with graveyards—for the first and only time. On a buggy Friday afternoon in late August 2018, a friend invited me to hang out as a sort of last hurrah before my fall semester started the following week. A self-identified night witch, he owned multiple tarot decks and had hexed at least one of his exes. He wanted to show me “his” cemetery: Parkwood Cemetery in Parkville, Maryland, a hilly expanse holding, I’d guess, at least several thousand graves. The place doesn’t have a website so I can’t even say its acreage, but it’s huge by the standards of someone who’s lived in jammed-up suburbs all her life. This was his safe place, he told me. He’d read the cards under the stars there.

We meandered through lanes named after trees. Some areas of the cemetery were churned-up masses of pale brown earth littered with dirt and rock piles, empty work machines left to rest until the next work week began. Signs that people still worked there, that others were yet to buried. Muddy tire tracks streaked across some of the paved walkways. But it was easy, with all the hills and rolls of the landscape, to crest over a rise and block the view of these eyesores.

We ended up sitting together under the boughs of a tree I wish I could name. There were no plots on this patch of grass, and nearby there was a semi-stagnant pond moved only by the spray of a single fountain at its center. Charming, but still not otherworldly. I don’t know why we elected not to sit in the white gazebo at the pond’s edge, with its dulled white paint and black roof shingles.

We settled into the knotted roots, bark at our backs and hundreds of graves rolling before us. We smoked marijuana out of an apple, his idea, a feat I hadn’t known was possible. As he expertly dug a bowl into its flesh with a pocket knife, I watched a man throwing a frisbee to his dog the next field over, certain he’d see—what? Two white twenty-somethings eating an apple under a tree? I picked at my cuticles and waited to get high so that I wouldn’t fear anymore. I knew the likelihood of a white man noticing two kids smoking, much less doing anything about it, was slim to none. Still, I bit my nails.

With a couple of hits, I forgot about the man and the dog and left my ragged nails alone. More aware of the wood knots pricking my skin, but more grateful for them. The afternoon thickened around us and though I don’t remember much of what we talked about, I’m certain it was all dreamy, dusky conversation about Life. The kind where you’re certain you’ve solved the world’s problems in the moment, only to find with sobriety that you were just high and thinking of society as a sandbox dream.

At the peak of my high, I pulled a small lined notebook and a pen from my purse and doodled. Many months later, when I wanted the notebook for more practical reasons, I ripped out that page and tossed it. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I hadn’t destroyed the wide-eyed deer I drew, its antlers mantled in vines and flowers, inspired by the woods behind us and the almost godly feeling that made my fingers itch to create.

His cemetery, he said. I wanted to feel it was mine, too.

No more deep lines for the / Marble brow, / Do sorrow no bitter awakening /Now, but the strife and pain / And grief will cease, / For nought can disturb that / “Perfect peace.

Biddison Family Cemetery is in the Waltherson neighborhood of Baltimore, consisting of some 2,500 homes with a reported population of 6,965 people, which astounds me. It’s about 0.657 square miles of Baltimore, and when I look at a map of its streets it just doesn’t make sense that so many people fit there. The houses I saw on those streets were mostly smaller, three bed, two bath, and when I pulled up before 8:00, they were mostly still blanketed in sleep. The Amazon truck and the woman who greeted me were the only signs of waking life.

At the time I visited in July, only fourteen of the neighborhood’s homes were listed on Zillow as foreclosed or in pre-foreclosure. The highest listing price for any home was 270k, the lowest 130k. It’s a 67% majority black area with a pretty even distribution of all age groups, and apparently a lot of dog walkers. It’s a quintessential “nice, quiet neighborhood” in a city, really—what real estate sites might call “sparse suburban,” a phrase that makes me feel a bit twitchy. But jargon aside, it was nice, and even if anyone had been awake to see me poking through the Biddison Cemetery, I truly don’t think they would have cared. I’d been taught to feel instinctively nervous in most parts of Baltimore, but neither the dead nor the living there made me feel afraid. I was discomfited by graves left to crumble in the middle of the suburbs, but that discomfort was, at first, academic.

In sobriety, I don’t consider myself religious/spiritual. I feel totally at peace among tombstones because I believe the dead are fully, completely gone. I’m deeply skeptical of ghosts, don’t truck with demons, and refuse to believe in an afterlife because the concept of eternity terrifies me. I’m not really that afraid of death; I fear the pain that may accompany dying, not the departure. I walk through a graveyard and though I know each grave may come with its own story of grief, I’m happy believing that the dead are free of that pain. I’m happy knowing the living have a place to visit and process their losses.

Those hard lines started blurring for me in Biddison. It was harder to tread clean lines around graves when at least half the stones had cracked from their foundations and lay in the grass. It wasn’t fear or superstition that pricked the back of my mind—it was not knowing where grave boundaries were. Every spare inch of earth could have been a resting place. Time had taken over and no one had stepped in. As I studied names from the 19th century and tried to find a narrative, the research corner of my mind kept asking—why had they been left behind?

Graveyards can be exhumed because city planners approve construction projects on sites with cemeteries, and the bodies must go. Or, construction workers are laying foundations and discover human remains, which calls up legal questions about how to handle unidentified, unexpected bones. Flooding can churn up the earth and send coffins floating down streets, and plots are moved to higher, drier ground. And in some cases, historical cemeteries are moved and preserved because they can be better maintained in a different location.

That last reason likely comes with a much higher bill than the others. State laws on moving graves differ. For much older sites, or for ones with possible historical significance, dig teams might be legally required to bring in a team of archaeologists before anything can be reinterred. They have to carefully disinter and catalogue each remain and stone and submit a report of findings. All of these people get a paycheck.

In the case of the Biddison Family cemetery, it would probably have fallen to one of the family to foot that expense if they’d wanted to take their ancestors elsewhere. Eva Biddison was the last to be buried in the cemetery in 1963, and the last of the family estate was sold off around that time. I can only assume the rest of the Biddisons had already scattered. That would be no surprise—a lot of white people left Baltimore in the 1960s and 70s, as industrial jobs collapsed and families fled for true suburbia. As the city changed around the cemetery, somebody would have had to step in to see it maintained over the decades. There were apparently no Biddisons left to do it, no McCauleys or Forresters, or if there were, they didn’t care to.

Human remains, by right, belong to next of kin. When the last of the Biddison estate was sold off, the family had no property claims left in Baltimore, but I wonder if they could have made claims for the bones or for the headstones. I wonder if they would have wanted to foot that bill, or if they couldn’t afford to.

I don’t know who actually owns Biddison Family Cemetery, but at first, that didn’t bother me. I was fascinated that centuries of history could fall apart, with only a badly warped fence and some bags of recycling as a barrier between graves and Amazon delivery trucks. I wanted someone else to appreciate the romance of old tombs with me.

I’m happy believing that graveyards are spaces for the living, spaces that invite contemplation and a suspension of whatever business haunts us outside. I still prefer to walk between graves rather than cut across them. But that’s out of deference to how American society regards graves, not out of my own superstition; as far as I’m concerned, the dead are dust. Yet I still keenly felt the lack of care in each broken headstone at Biddison, because that meant the living had given up on them.

Played in this cementary in the 60s.Love the old tomestones.Wish I knew more history of the area.I grew up in Gardenville and remembet the old mansion on Biddison Lane before it burned down.I heard from some of the older residents that it was farms and the Biddisons and Foresters owned alot of the land.I knew Mr.Buck Henninger whose wife had been born in their housr on Belair & Biddison Ln.She remembered when Belair Rd was a dirt road and a stream went thru it

At home in the safety of my computer chair, doing site research about Biddison Family Cemetery, I ran into a problem.

There was nothing interesting to say about it. Not from a historical perspective, anyway.

There were a couple of factoids I thought I could spin into a narrative. One of the oldest Maryland Biddisons, Abraham—born 1789, died 1834—owned the land between what we now know as Harford and Belair Road. A piece titled “Men in the Street: The Biddisons” from the February 5, 1950 edition of the Baltimore Sun alleges that Abraham allowed Native Americans to pitch tents on his land and use the springs as they passed through. It’s a nice thought.

Abraham’s son, John Shrim, was allegedly such a strong Confederate sympathizer during the Civil War that he was locked in Fort McHenry in Baltimore for its duration. He was described as an “unconstitutional rebel” right up to the end of his life, in either 1895 or ‘96. John S. Biddison, his grandson, was a Maryland State Senator.

But none of these items made the story I wanted, was convinced I’d find. I let snippets and paragraphs gather dust after hours spent poking through online archives of The Baltimore Sun, searching keyword “Biddison” and begging for something amazing. I tried the essay again from a different angle, writing about Baltimore City itself, and that didn’t work either because I don’t entirely belong to it. I’ve lived outside it all my life in the cushion of majority-white suburbs. My childhood and teenage trips there were limited to art museums, concerts, and the Inner Harbor. I love Baltimore, but that love isn’t colored by enough personal conflict to make a point.

I wanted, I think, the mysticism I felt inside a tunnel of grave markers—I wanted to convince myself of spirits and lost, transcendent history. But if the trick to that is apple smoke and buying into ideologies that aren’t mine, I can’t touch that place again.

The inhabitants of Waltherson, specifically on Forrester Avenue, may enjoy the cemetery for the bit of green space it offers. Or, they may consider it an eyesore. But its history isn’t their own. I may love the trails of moss on weathered stone and grieve for cracked epitaphs, but no one else has to. The white family that once owned all the land of the neighborhood, centuries ago, pulled up their roots and left bones behind. The people who live there aren’t obligated by any law or emotions to take care of that green space.

Cemeteries are businesses. Groundskeepers, office workers, funeral directors. There is a cash flow to keeping weeds away from grandparents’ graves, to renting the forklifts that lower caskets into the earth. There is no money in maintaining Biddison for the people who live on Forrester Avenue, there are no emotional ties. There are only two reasons, I think, that anyone in Waltherson might begin to bother about Biddison: general respect for the dead, and that it’s an eyesore.

Neither of those motivations seem to be strong enough—at least right now. The more I dug and twisted into Biddison’s existence and abandonment, the more I kept asking myself: why should they be?

Respect for the dead is for the benefit of the living, I think. Don’t speak ill of the dead. Don’t walk over someone’s grave. It’s beautiful to honor someone’s passing and to continue to honor their memories; that is a very personal responsibility. But in public and privately owned cemeteries, we’ve opted to share that responsibility; we’ve created strange gardens that depend on employed personnel to function. Our deceased have to go somewhere.

My dad was buried there 8 years ago. The forklift battery was not charged the night before. My fathers casket swayed in the air until my husband assisted to fix it.
My mother’s chapel ceremony was yesterday. We followed the office personnel along with visitors for the burial, following a car which advertised “chocolates and nail salons” down to the chapel. So unprofessional. They did not even have a professional vehicle. We could not drive to the sight, because the roads were so muddy. We had to walk from the chapel to the burial area….
I will look into having both my mom and my dad removed from this cemetary.

My comfort in graveyards, I now realize, depends largely on their sense of order. I love the abandoned ones, but they set me vibrating with curiosity and a desperate need to search old census records—less peaceful, more manic. The peace of lines upon lines of headstones, dotted with flags and flowers rustling in quiet breezes, depends upon a clear line of ownership. A state, a church, or a private company owns and maintains a graveyard, creates a deliberate atmosphere, cultivates a place of rest and contemplation. Groundskeepers pull weeds, trim hedges, keep nature at bay so that the names of the dead stay prominent.

And when they don’t, people complain. When I began my cemetery project, it struck me as almost funny that you can review a cemetery in the same way you do a restaurant, a store, or a doctor’s office. But of course, death is a business. It makes sense.

On that evening in Parkwood Cemetery, I thought I touched something transcendent. Sitting next to a self-identified witch, drugged thoughts chasing my pen, I was special, gleaning insight from the dead. I was scribbling their last names in my notebook in the hopes that later, I could use those names in stories. I didn’t have cuticle skin in my teeth anymore. Now, I don’t know if I actually understood what he meant when he said Parkwood had a safe, welcoming energy to it—that the spirits there were friendly—or if I was just riding his wave for a little while. Either way, I was gloriously alive.

We eventually brushed the dirt from our legs and went walking as the sun set. I scratched more names into my notebook as evening draped around us, telling my friend that I was sure to write something with those names soon. I never have. I tore out the list along with my doodles.

We wandered to the memorial wall for veterans and a tunnel that had arches at either end. Their wrought iron gates were unlocked, the bars threaded with bouquets of flowers, and we slipped through along with shafts of gold-orange sunlight. The walls there are squared off with dozens of names, each section with a small iron ring in the bottom right corner that is tempting to yank even though the stone is all sealed. I still don’t know if the sections hold ashes, coffins, or nothing.

My friend insisted that the energy in there felt wrong almost immediately. He waited for me outside while I turned in circles and took pictures. Then I agreed that I felt an unwelcome, clammy sense of darkness where I stood—I conceded to a spiritual energy that didn’t even make my hair stand on end, and I left. I still have those pictures. There’s nothing sinister to me now in sunset light over the names of the dead; I agreed because I was coasting down the tail end of my high and I wanted to hold onto a mysticism I could already feel fading. In truth, I could have stayed there until darkness and felt perfectly safe. But then, I would have been the logical, easy skeptic, and I didn’t want that. I wanted the magic.

I went to visit my grandparents today after not being on the state for a few years. The graves are so overgrown and unkempt that I could barely find them. Others have all but been taken back by the weeds and are completely buried. It’s disgusting. I shouldn’t have to dig my grandfather’s grave out from under weeds!

I’ve returned to Parkwood Cemetery several times since that high August night. My college campus is less than fifteen minutes from the grounds, and on a few days when I had many hours to kill between or before classes, I went there to wander, read, and decompress on my own.

Though my friend called Parkwood “his,” it’s privately owned. On my sporadic visits I see the evidence of that—the construction machines, the lack of dead bouquets around graves. Whether it’s owned well is another matter. Quite a few people are indignant about the treatment they’ve gotten from the office staff, the way their deceased relatives were handled, the way the grounds are maintained.

They have someone to complain to. Even if those complaints are never resolved, there is a chain of command and ownership towards which the bereaved can direct their anger.

Biddison lacks such a steward. People still complain about the place, but to no one. The keepers of that cemetery are long gone, and with that, they gave up taking care of their families’ graves, and the stories that went with them. That responsibility, I guess, doesn’t just pass on to the next people, the ones who happen to live nearby. I can try to dig a story from the cracked stones left behind. I can grieve for the neglect and wish others would care, but in the end, the romantic in me concedes to the logical. There isn’t, I think, any inherent spirituality in an abandoned grave or an intact one—Biddison just lost the people who cared for it, and so the graves lost their importance. No one to foot the bill for cleaning the graves or removing the bones.

The last time I went to Parkwood, it was on a brisk day in late February 2019. Warm enough to be outside with a coat and gloves on, but nippy enough that my nose still turned red and got runny. I had a couple of hours before my evening graduate class about the theory of creativity. So, I bundled into the gazebo that my friend and I had scorned on that night and I read the assigned essays for the night on my phone, but not before drinking in all the names and jokes that had been scribbled and carved all over the gazebo’s benches and beams. How many couples had kissed here, giggled here, whispered in sunset light? Or how many strays like me had wandered in and left a name just to prove they were there?

When I got too chilly to stay sitting, I creaked to my feet and began the walk back to my car. At the top of one of the hills, I looked down saw a fleet of cars parked on an empty stretch of grass, a white tent, and a huddle of people in black. Under the gray sky, I watched. I felt no grand sense of spiritual communion, no sense that my soul owned a part of those grounds. The haunting strains of Taps lofted up to where I stood, and I was rooted to the spot long after the last trumpet note died away.