The Dead Shall Rise Again
Why aren’t the dead in New Orleans buried underground as they are in most of the rest of the country?
Tour guides are fond of explaining (and sometimes embellishing) the practice to shocked tourists. The
main issue, they explain, is that New Orleans is actually located slightly below sea level. Because of this,
the water table is quite high. When early European settlers put coffins under six feet of earth, they found
that the water level would often rise above them, especially during the city’s frequent floods. Since the
coffins were filled with air, the water sometimes pushed them up through the earth, causing both a
gruesome sight and a health hazard. To keep the coffins underground, holes were drilled in the lid to let
air escape, and the coffins were weighted down with rocks and sand. But this was only partially
successful, and in any case the saturated corpses did not decompose properly, leading to unsanitary
conditions. The only solution was to bury the dead above ground.
Tour guides seldom mention that above-ground burial was a common practice in both France and Spain,
where many of the early settlers were from. Even without the resurfacing coffins—which, by the way,
were the exception rather than the rule—this practice may well have been adopted simply to keep with
tradition. In any case, this method is still widely used today, even though the water table has dropped
considerably over the past two centuries as nearby marshes and swamps were drained.
A Bone in the Oven
The first cemetery in New Orleans designed for aboveground burial was the St. Louis #1 cemetery, which
opened in 1789. Some accounts claim it was modeled after Paris’s famous Père-Lachaise cemetery, and
there can be no doubt that the two bear a strong resemblance to each other. But Père-Lachaise wasn’t
used as a cemetery until 1804, so that resemblance may be coincidental. Be that as it may, there is a
significant difference that goes beyond the superficial similarities. At Père-Lachaise, the visible
structures are, for the most part, just monuments; the bodies themselves are usually placed in vaults in
the floors of the tombs. In New Orleans, however, bodies are usually placed inside the walls of the tombs.
Because of the hot, subtropical climate, the tomb then effectively becomes an oven, and the high heat
causes the body to decompose rapidly in a process that has been compared to a slow cremation. Within
about a year, only bones are left.
Just as an oven would not be constructed to bake a single loaf of bread, the tombs in New Orleans
cemeteries are used again and again. The specifics vary depending on the exact design of the tomb, but
a typical scenario is that after a year, the bones of the departed are swept into an opening in the floor of
the tomb, which is then ready for its next occupant. It is a common practice to bury all the members of a
family—or multiple families—in the same tomb, with names and dates added to a plaque or headstone as
necessary. This procedure is not only sanitary and efficient; it also avoids the problem of growing real
estate needs as time goes on.