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The Pet Cemeteries

Yes, there are two. Imagineer Kim Irvine (daughter of "Madame Leota" Leota Toombs) came up with the idea for the first one in the early 1980's. Not a lot of time and effort went into the project. Kim just purchased off-the-shelf yard statues of a dog, cat, skunk, and frog (complete with mouth hole for squirting water) and had Imagineer Chris Goosman compose some macabre epitaphs for the pedestals. They were put in the vacant yard on the north side of the HM, alongside the wheelchair access path, reportedly to give them something to look at over there.

(pic by Monstersgoboo)

BIG JAKE Here lies my good dog Jake. Chasing a toad down a well was his one mistake. In memoriam MISS KITTY After losing eight lives you still had no fear. You caught a snake in your ninth and that's why you're here. R.I.P. BULLY You didn't drink, you didn't smoke. I just can't figure what made you croak. In loving memory of our pet STRIPEY You may be departed, But your presence will always linger on. Everyone seemed to like this little HM secret, so in 1993 they put another one in the front yard.

It has proven so popular that they subsequently added similar pet cemeteries to the WDW and Tokyo HMs. And so on. Those are the well-known facts, familiar to most Mansionites, if not to the general public. Beyond that basic history, no one has bothered to say much. But Long-Forgotten readers are a tough and discriminating audience. They ask, nay, demand more. Pry up those rocks and see what's crawling around underneath. A new addition came to the original pet cemetery in the summer of 2016. They needed to add another exhaust vent for the train tunnel going behind the HM and decided to make a virtue of necessity by disguising the vent as a crypt. So far so good, but the crypt is in the pet cemetery, and they made it up as a goofy, elephant grave. The crypt itself is tolerable, falling within the wide embrace of Victorian eccentricity (which, after all, gave us elephant foot umbrella stands), but that trunk looks absolutely awful. How can anyone over the age of eight, let alone Disney Imagineering, look at the exterior and landscaping of the Anaheim HM and conclude that it is an appropriate venue for this sort of zany kookiness? Barf. This looks like a refugee from the execrable queue in Orlando, disaffectionately known in these parts as PLQ:

Sometime around October a plaque appeared on the front:

More cutsie-wootsie stuff, ill-suited to the dignified exterior of the HM. And I hadn't noticed the mouse in previous photos, so I'll point to it now as part of the whole package. Anyway, bleahh. I'm only glad all of this is in a place generally unseen and easily ignored. I look forward to spending a lot of time forgetting it exists. As I said in the last post, I'm not a huge fan of the PC. I think most purists and traditionalists see it as an unwelcome intrusion of sheer fantasy before the attraction even begins and would happily see it gone. That's more or less been my position too, and yet I can't get worked up about it. Something about the pet cemetery is okay, and it's time to figure out why. Let's take a closer look. Much of the front yard version simply repeats the formula of the old one. Once again you've got a lot of store-bought statuary sitting on pedestals with macabre epitaphs. In fact, two of the statues (the frog and the skunk) are virtually identical to their back yard counterparts, although they have new names and texts. The main difference out here is that some dates are attached. The frog is "Old Flybait" ("He croaked, August 9 1869") and the skunk is "Beloved Lilac" ("Long on curiosity...Short on common scents, 1847"). There's also "Rosie" ("She was a poor little pig, but she bought the farm, 1849") and a dog named "Buddy" ("Our friend until the end"). The latter may be a long-overdue tribute to Buddy Baker, the musical genius behind the HM score. The dating formula is obvious in the case of Old Flybait; it's exactly 100 years before the HM opening day, and this suggests that the other dates are really cryptic references to 1947 and 1949, probably the birth years of the Imagineers involved. There's nothing terribly out of place in any of these examples. They are all of a piece. We can easily imagine one or several family members in the mansion's long history being animal lovers and burying their pets out front, complete with whimsical epitaphs. Even if the choice of animals is eccentric in some cases, there is nothing surreal involved, not even anything supernatural. In one case, however, these conventional statues are arranged in such a way as to suggest that the animals involved have business to conduct in the afterlife.

There is a clever thematic continuity between this cluster and some of the relationships you encounter inside the house. Imagine the graveyard executioner, a man who in life wielded the power of death but who has now followed his victims into the grave. It's called irony. Better still, imagine the cat as Constance and the birds as her husbands, and you can feel the same chemistry at work. No one forms a partnership with Death so powerful and so lasting as to avoid the same fate as Death's other victims. It's a classic statement, made at least three times in the attraction, starting with this tableau. I think the cat-and-bird set is perhaps the high water mark of the pet cemeteries. There is, however, a whole other set of grave markers. These are original WDI designs, and they have a more fantastical flavor. I suspect that it is these that rub some fans the wrong way. There's Fi Fi the dog, with her cruciform tombstone made of crossed bones and her portrait with crossed-X eyes (like in the funnies). This piece is significant for reasons that have nothing to do with the intentions of the designers. It represents a change in the general culture between 1969 and 1993, but that will be the topic of another post. For the moment, I'll simply note that it is the only cross-shaped headstone in the entire attraction, including all of the scale models and all of Marc Davis's concept art. The other weird monuments are for a snake, a bat, a rat, a fish, and a spider. The pieces are nothing if not stylish.

It's a good deal harder to imagine these as simply the products of animal lovers in the Mansion's history. The style of the monuments themselves is too bizarre. Perhaps we are to imagine not merely animal lovers, but insane animal lovers, if we want to keep these within the imaginative realm of a real house with a history of real occupants—which is the starting point of the HM voyage. If imagining these pet monuments as items designed by crazy family members seems a stretch, then these freaky-deaky things simply don't belong here. For me, there are enough tales of nutball Victorians to keep it all just barely within bounds. As if to illustrate exactly that point, Craig Conley sent me in November of 2016 the following clipping from a 1913 edition of Popular Mechanics,noting an 1855 grave marker for a fish.

Okay, even if we are not necessarily in the realm of fantasy, you still wonder what the original Imagineers were shooting for. In one of the Long-Forgotten threads at Micechat, someone argued that pieces like Freddie the Bat were inspired by Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, which would eventually take over the whole Mansion every Fall and Winter, of course. If you compare concept art for Freddie with typical NBC artwork, the similar look and feel is indeed striking.

But the dating is against it. NBC was released the same year the pet cemetery was installed: 1993. Better to look elsewhere for inspiration for this fantastic and surreal streak. [Edit: But see new evidence below.] As a matter of fact, the original HM Imagineers did kick around some lunatic pet ideas for the HM. Ken Anderson toyed with having a man-eating octopus in a pit in the middle of a room in his 1957 Ghost House. Which is pretty . . . out there.

Then there's this delightful but unused Marc Davis gag:

But if we're looking for justification for adding an element of the strange and fantastic to the Haunted Mansion, the obvious place to look is in Rolly Crump's unused "Museum of the Weird" designs. Do I detect a whiff of the Museum in the pet cemetery? (Or *sniff* is that just a dead fish?)

Very, very few people know this, but Rolly actually designed some bizarre tombstones for the HM. Where they would have been used, I can't imagine, but it must be admitted that Freddie the Bat has nothing on Velma Wingspan when it comes to eccentricity, and isn't the spidery lettering style used on the pet cemetery stones just a teeny weeny bit reminiscent of Rolly's "Museum" font?

"But even if Ken, Marc, and Rolly kicked these kinds of ideas around, they ultimately decided NOT to go in that direction, so even if the pet cemetery Imagineers were drawing inspiration from those guys, they also overrode their judgment by going ahead with this kind of thing." Yeah, I hear that, and it's a good point, but I still take some comfort in the idea that the newer Imagineers respected and revered the original masters and sought to draw inspiration from their work. And anyway, since the pet cemetery, even at its most surreal, can be placed within the imaginative orbit of the Mansion, I've decided to call a truce on this one. New Evidence for Tim Burton's Influence One of our "Anonymous" commenters directs our attention to a short 1984 film by Tim Burton, Frankenweenie, produced by Walt Disney pictures. Reportedly, Disney fired Burton after making it, claiming he had wasted company resources and had produced a film too dark for Disney to use. It later had video and DVD releases. Well, SOMEONE at Disney liked the film. There can be little doubt that it was a direct influence on the front yard pet cemetery. The film is a parody/homage to Frankenstein, so there are important graveyard scenes—in a pet graveyard. It appears also in the film's opening titles.

Fifi's tombstone at Disneyland is obviously taken almost directly from this movie.

There are several bone-cruciform tombstones in the Frankenweenie cemetery, but "Sparky" is the main animal character in the film.

Even the shape of Fifi's head and the "X's" for her eyes may havebeen inspired by various other tombstones seen in the film.

Then there's "Earl."

There are also tombstones for a goldfish and a snake in the Burton graveyard.

This raises the distinct possibility that Imagineers (or at least Kim Irvine) were aware of Burton's work on Nightmare while it was in production and saw some of the models, and so possibly that artwork was an additional influence on the style of the 1993 HM pet cemetery. A big thanks goes to "Anonymous" for the tip.

Originally Posted: Monday, July 19, 2010 Original Link: [x]

#long forgotten #haunted mansion #graveyard queue #pet cemeteries

Statues on a grave in a pet cemetery

#Japanese cemeteries #pet cemeteries #cats in Japan #my photos

Today we celebrate… pet cemeteries!

🎉🥳 Hooray for pet cemeteries! 🥳🎉

#appreciation post #today we celebrate #positivity #pet cemeteries

Blarney Castle Horse Graveyard in Monacnappa, Ireland Located in a wooded area between the Blarney river and the fern garden is a family pet horse graveyard. Home to Folly, Snoopy, and Magic among others. Visitors are encouraged to take a moment of tranquility for themselves. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/blarney-castle-horse-cemetery

#pet cemeteries #death #horses #cemeteries #Atlas Obscura

Conyngham Hall Pet Cemetery in Knaresborough, England Hidden in the woods behind Conyngham Hall, in the historic market town of Knaresborough, lies a Victorian pet cemetery. Its 24 kennel-shaped graves date from between 1859 to 1932 and bear names such as Buncle, Kelpie, and Nero. Some believe that these are the graves of animals belonging to Knaresborough Zoo, which was once housed on the grounds of Conyngham Hall. But seeing as the zoo didn't open until 1965, this theory doesn't hold much water. A more likely explanation is that the cemetery was added by Basil T. Woodd, who was Knaresborough's Conservative MP between 1852 and 1874, and resident of the hall when the first graves were added. Alongside Basil's own pets are memorials to the companions of Conyngham's later occupants, with the most modern graves likely belonging to the pets of Sir Harold Mackintosh, the Halifax Toffee Magnate and creator of Quality Street. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/conyngham-hall-pet-cemetery

#estates #cemeteries #animals #pet cemeteries #Atlas Obscura

Fabius Page's Mule and Horse Graveyard in Morrisville, North Carolina Between a major highway and a new apartment development, there is a small patch of pine forest left over from a time when it was all farmland. There, between 1930 and 1946, tobacco farmer Fabius Haywood Page laid to rest his beloved horses and mules. There are 10 graves in all, very difficult to find but well-maintained. They display both practical and heartfelt memories (“Very gentle,” “Very Intelligent,” “3 White Feet”). Mules Maud, Kate, Lulu, and Rose are joined by horses Bessie, Nell, Prince, Starr, Ted, and Dan, named “Best of all” on a gravestone “erected by F.H. Page owner of the animals he loved so well.” F.H. Page lived on this land from his birth in 1889 to 1978, first with his parents and then with his wife Annie Lee Walton and their five children. He never owned a tractor and loved his animals so much that he swore to never sell a mule. He told a reporter that he stipulated in his will that the small graveyard can never be sold or traded but it’s unclear what the current legal status is of the plot. In the times before tractors, these draft animals would have been essential to the operation of a farm and the survival of the farmers. Everyone recognizes the importance of horses, but the mule—an infertile hybrid bred from a female horse and a male donkey—has been part of human history since at least 1000 BC. Their hybrid nature made them unable to reproduce, but mules are gentle-natured, hard-working, strong, long-lived, and, while not as bright as horses, they are considered smarter than donkeys. They are mentioned in the writings of Homer, Charles Darwin, and William Faulkner, among many others. George Washington bred them and they became widespread in the U.S. in the 19th century. They are named in the phrase “40 acres and a mule,” an early but unkept promise to compensate formerly enslaved people after the American Civil War, representing land and essential farm equipment to set them up for success. The mule is part of North Carolina history, especially for their important role in tobacco farming. Nearby Creedmoor, North Carolina, was known as “Mule Town” and was once the largest mule trading center in the world. As demand for mules fell thanks to widespread mechanization on farms, in 1949 Benson, North Carolina launched a Mule Days festival that still takes place each September. This little graveyard is unique, historic, and a sweet reminder of the love of a human for his animal companions. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/fabius-pages-mule-and-horse-graveyard

#pet cemeteries #animals #graveyards #horses #Atlas Obscura

22/2 is cat day (=^･^=)

The 22nd of February is known as "cat day" in Japan. That's because 22/2 can be read as ni ni ni (the Japanese word for 2) and that's supposed to resemble nyan nyan nyan and that's supposed to be the sound of a (Japanese) mewing cat. Hence, cat day.

The photos were taken in a pet cemetery at a temple called Ekōin (回向院) in Ryōgoku.