Feelings of panic after visiting Highgate Cemetery

[Therunecaster]

Good evening

I visited Highgate Cemetery last summer and the catacombs have played on my mind ever since. Normally I love a wander round a cemetery but on this occasion it has left me feeling anxious about death. I don't know if it was the catacombs or the mausoleums or just the wildness of it but I wish I hadn't gone. Has anyone else experienced this feeling?

You have described this so well. It's the "passing of time" on such a grand scale.

I go there all the time with my little one and find it very peaceful. The kid loves it. Also loads of wild garlic in spring which I gather in heaps and make pesto from. I find it very peaceful and the kid loves running around the hills and paths and tunnel.

It’s very Victorian is what I’d say. So if you’re susceptible to that maybe it feels creepy. I suppose I see the Victorians as a bit overblown and so I take it all with quite a big pinch of salt. Not that I don’t love the incredible angels and the inscriptions and the whole feel of the place, but just putting it in a historical context makes it seem a bit OTT on some level. Beautiful, but of its time.

Visiting Highgate has long been on my daughter and my ' bucket ' list , as we ( maybe enjoy is the wrong word!) wander around graveyards a lot. Your experience will make me think twice!

You have got to be a professional writer. That is beautifully said

We lived about 80 yards away at one point for quite a few years

• I kind of loved it , but it always left me with huge melancholia whenever I went - it’s a very dramatic , gothic place .

I’ve never been to Highgate and it’s on my list when I get the chance to visit London. No connection to it personally. It sounds peaceful and beautiful.

I visited a cemetery when I was expecting my eldest, my mum had asked me to go on my way to somewhere else and take photos of the gravestones for a family history project she was doing. Off I went with dh. Not kidding, almost every gravestone in that place had my surname, all ages and going back to the 1800s and beyond. It was so strange. I felt quite ill. Dh went and took the photos while I just stood and stared. I guess it was the intersection of birth and death, and that those people were my ancestors, plus it was a calm and lovely day and it all just felt so weird.
I’ve not been back. Life can grab you like that I suppose. Hope you feel ok now.

OP, I don't think there's anything weird about finding it disturbing or lingering in your mind to see coffins and decay and things rotting away. I am quite at peace with the idea of dying and have seen several people die, but I still hate looking at mummies in museums, in fact, I don't think they should be shown, not their bodies wrapped anyway. I think it's because I imagine how much that person would not want to have been displayed rotting for everyone to see- I wouldn't and I'm guessing they wouldn't either. There's a publicness about what is a very private matter.

I don't think this is strange, or it's weird that it's lingering in your mind. Hospices themselves and graveyards with just the stones showing don't freak me out at all, our local hospice is a very calm and lovely place (I'd like to go there if/when my time is up and have a nice bed by the windows onto the garden).

Well there is a graveyard near me and it has a couple who were buried some years ago with the same first names of my husband and myself and it did give me a slight double take. I went to Highgate a long time ago, didn’t bother me but the house I grew up in was opposite an abandoned church with graveyard. One of my favourite books is called The Fireside Book of Death all about the customs and rituals of death. I read it when I was a teen and still have it.

I read this on holiday one year - -a book that stayed in my mind -intriguing and really really creepy !

sometimes in the woods in different parts of the uk ive had a strange feeling like your being watched but know theres no one there etc

Yes, once in Bodmin jail and once at Battle. I could feel what people experienced in both those places and was in floods of tears. There have been other occasions where I have felt similar but less.

However it didn't stay with me as it has with you. Once I'd left it was over, I remembered how I had felt but that's all.

Some of us are sensitive to atmospheres in places where things have happened, in this case unpleasant things, people suffering. The Jews call it 'shades', it's not like ghosts which I do not believe in. It came from within me.

I know there are places other people go to see which I would avoid.

@Crikeyalmighty must be amazing to live there. I'd be tempted to go to the pond at night and look for the shivering chicken!

There's another book that posters here might like. Fallen Angels by Tracy Chevalier. Really interesting on women's suffrage but also about Highgate Cemetery and the concept of cremation coming in.

I think another reason I liked Highgate Cemetery is I find Victorian stuff very comforting. I don't know why that is. Probably all the historical fiction I read as a teenager. I like being surrounded by history though.

I can’t even stand the word Victorian. It has to be the creepiest and most miserable period of history one could imagine. Endless suffering for poor people. Sepia tinged madness. Freezing and dirty. All those hideous photos of families and the ones with dead children dressed up. I find that whole area of London creepy. And that house in Luther. Makes me nauseous. I swear it’s in the air. I was taken there as a child and wouldn’t ever go again.

This is a great thread though. I find it so interesting to hear people’s descriptions of how places can make us feel.

I love graveyards, I find them really calming. One of my great grandparents is buried at Highgate, I’ve only been once and had some sort of plot coordinates or map or something, but the bit they were in was dark and overgrown and I couldn’t find it. One day!!

I've always wanted to go there but it's pia to get to from south London. It sounds beautiful and spiritual. I believe the fauna and floral is awesome.

I just visited Nando’s with my daughter before she set of for uni. Perhaps you would have been better doing something like that!

I visited Highgate Cemetery a few years ago and paid for the guided tour (highly recommended) and had the complete opposite experience and feelings from you, OP.

I found it absolutely mesmerising and fascinating. It was like an Aladdin’s cave for me, so much history, so many beautiful headstones. I could have spent hours longer there.

I absolutely loved this headstone though, I’d never heard of Patrick Caulfield before but I imagine he had a pretty wicked sense of humour.

I felt similar after visiting Dachau (one of the first concentration camps). I was visiting Munich with a friend and they suggested we go as it's not far to travel; I was interested and thought it would be educational (in fairness, it was). However, I wasn't at all prepared for the feelings it stirred up (I knew it would be a sombre day, but...). I felt troubled, almost haunted for weeks afterwards (and the memories don't feel pleasant even now, well over a decade later). Similar to another poster, it wasn't actually the place as such, more the feelings that came from within me.

I love Highgate and Brompton. Went to an.interesting little exhibition a few weeks ago about death and mourning at a museum in Yorkshire... lots of Whitby jet and Victoriana!
We are off to Paris catacombs later this year.

Litvinenko?
But I agree with you.

I visited Highgate during a wet, autumn day. A combination of the overcrowded graves, lots of mature trees and gloomy autumn light made it feel different to other cemeteries.

This thread has brought back memories of my youth. Back in my early 20s I moved to London for work, and my boyfriend and I moved into a shared flat in Highgate. We were both in our first jobs, so not much money, so we have fond memories of wandering round Highgate Cemetary and Waterlow Park, as both were free. This was in the 70s and there was no charge in those days. As well as Karl Marx's grave I remember graves of Stoney Smith, the inventor of Hovis, and Christina Rosetti. I think that you have to pay for a guided tour of the West side today, but back then you could just wander round. We are still together, and that sparked an interest in visiting old cemeteries and tombs wherever we go. I think the most moving we have been to is in Oradour Sur Glane in France where the whole village was massacred by the Germans in WW2. The memory of the family graves, with lines of photographs of the whole family, right down to babies, will never leave me. I think it is good to feel unsettled, I would be more worried if it didn't unsettle me.

My father was at Belsen c8 yrs after its liberation and said it was eerily quiet, as if life had deserted it. Not a single bit of bird song for miles around. I gather Highgate is the opposite, full of life in that sense, but the oppressive Victorian grandeur of the tombs I can’t imagine feeling anything but heavy and could provoke intense feeling. I’m not a fan of graveyards at all for that reason. With my own much loved mother I remember her in life, I remember her birthday, but I never visit her grave

OP, I would add that it's surely a GOOD thing, that you were absorbed into the haunting, evocative and atmospheric aura of the place, that PrizedPickledPopcorn expressed so well. It is normal to feel discomfiture in such a place; Highgate Cemetery embodies that long-lost, wild hinterland, of history and death. It shows you have a complexity of character to appreciate that.

I love it there. It's so beautiful and peaceful. However I did get locked in a couple years ago. Embarrassing.