Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel

Second edition

by Loren Rhoads


“Loren Rhoads started visiting cemeteries by accident. It was the start of a love affair with cemeteries that continues to this day.” — American Cemetery magazine

Nearly every tourist destination has a graveyard. Yosemite National Park has a graveyard. The Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park: both graveyards. The #1 tourist destination in Michigan has three cemeteries. America’s best-preserved Gold Rush ghost town has five. Gettysburg is a National Park because it has a graveyard. Some graveyards are even tourist destinations in themselves: the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague, the colonial burying grounds of Boston, and Kennedy’s eternal flame in Arlington National Cemetery. Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery ranks in the top five tourist sites of Paris and draws a million visitors a year.

Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel contains 35 graveyard travel essays, which visit more than 50 cemeteries, churchyards, and grave sites around the world.

Published July 2017.
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9636794-6-8
e-Book ISBN: 978-0-9636794-7-5


Over the past two and a half decades, Loren Rhoads has visited literally hundreds of graveyards. She is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die. She edited the books Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries and Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues. Now she blogs about graveyards as travel destinations at CemeteryTravel.com.

wish you were here