I recently heard a story about a late 19^th century hunting cottage deep in rural Northern California that doubled as an upscale brothel for the adventurous rich of Sacramento and San Francisco. According to my storyteller, many of the staff were young Native American women who, upon succumbing to the generally untimely deaths of prostitutes in that time period, were interred in a small cemetery in the town of Newville. According to the internet, Newville’s post office shut its doors in 1918 and just about everything else followed suit soon thereafter. Really, anytime someone mentions a hooker cemetery I’m going to have to check it out.

After driving deeper and deeper into country resembling less the working ranches I’d grown up around and more a forgotten set from Deliverance, my friend Matt (whose immediate decision to join me might raise a red flag for a normal person) and I found the cemetery a mile down the road from a ramshackle old house with a cluttered, stained set of stables straight out of a horror movie. The cemetery itself was a tiny fenced-in portion of a massive plot of grazing land, but it seemed relatively well-groomed for being more than a century old.

There couldn’t have been more than 100 graves in the whole place, and 15 or so of them were marked as “unknown”. In a small town with maybe 25 families (just guessing from the headstones) that’s a huge number of random folks dying. That is unless they didn’t want people knowin’ they had a bunch of dead prostitutes in their lovely little hamlet.

Other graves were marked with these little stamped steel signs that seemed to be lacking signs or much of any information. The rusted one was off on its own in a forgotten, unkempt area.

Unknown or not, a large number of the headstones had flowers laid recently. I just couldn’t believe how old everything was.

These were recent additions relative to most of the other sites. It was an odd feeling being in small fenced patch of a massive piece of grazing land.

There were a lot of children buried. Healthcare must have been unbelievably basic in 19th century rural California.

A lot of the headstones were in amazing shape for their age. I wonder if someone was keeping them up.

Then things got really fucking strange. This entire family, buried 70+ years ago, had been recently dug up and reburied. Reburied poorly.

It’s rare that I visit a cemetery recreationally, so this could be normal, but the sheer number of 70-100 year old graves that had been recently dug up and left with flowers was astoundingly creepy. It’s hard to explain just how backwoods the locale was because I was too frightened to take any photos of the houses, but this place seriously could have some family reunion skeleton hoedowns and no one would be the wiser.

It wasn’t just families either. The zombie effect was given to couples and singles as well. I seriously don’t have a clue who’d think of doing this, because I doubt graverobbers leave flowers and not every family in the area could be so completely batshit insane. I wish they’d at least done a better job of digging deeper holes.

I’ll never look at a whiskey label again after reading “Aged 1 Day” on a 114 year old tombstone.

I’m sure you could find some poignancy in a tree growing out of someone’s torso, but zombie graves and bone fragments lying around are fucking creepy. About that point we called it a day.

As far as the story of the dead hookers? Who knows, maybe they were there. With so many unknown graves they could have been anywhere. Hell, with the way things looked, maybe I’ll go back in a month and they’ll have dug themselves out like the rest.