Historical cemetery affected by metro

A local newspaper here in Denmark reports that the remains of 4-10.000 bodies are going to be excavated in connection with the construction of a new underground metro station in Copenhagen. The station will be located beneath the cemetery that I wrote about here. The excavation will not affect the graves of such world famous people as Niels Bohr and Søren Kierkegaard, who are buried there, but people have been buried here between 1805 and 1998, so it is certainly a piece of cultural history that will be affected by the work.

Apart from the unique and delicate nature of the work, it is interesting to read that a rule of thumb is that on average the bodies of 13 people can be expected to have been buried in each burial plot over the past 200 years, and that apparently few of these bodily remains have been removed. That is why the archaeologists who will carry out the work expect to find the remains of an unknown, but pretty large number of people.

'Zu vielen Schriften'

In my last post I mentioned my search for the 'ultimate' book on the subject of vampires, 'the vampire book to end all vampire books'. Curiously, as early as the 1730'ies people were complaining about the literature on the subject. E.g. in 1739 in his Bibliotheca, sive, Acta et scripta magica, Eberhard David Hauber (1695-1765), complains that too much had been written on 'the so-called vampires or bloodsuckers', and that most of it had turned out very badly:

Die nunmehro sattsam bekannte Historie von den so genannten Vampyren oder Blut-Saugern, welche sich vor einige Zeit in Ungarn wieder hervor gethan, hat bisher zu vielen Schriften Gelegenheit gegeben, die aber meistens sehr schlecht geraten sind.

He discusses three of the books published in Leipzig in 1732, two of which he thoroughly ridicules (Putoneus: Besonderes Nachricht von denen Vampyren and the anonymous Actenmäßige und umständliche Relation von denen Vampiren), and one that he praises (Eines Weimarischen Medicus muthmaßliche Gedankcen von denen Vampyren).

A few years after completing his Bibliotheca, Hauber was summoned by the Danish king to become priest at the St. Petri church, the church of the German congregation in Copenhagen. He stayed there for the rest of his life. Part of his book collection is now in the possession of the Danish Royal Library, where I recently read the few pages of the book devoted to vampires.

A haunted cemetery

A friend of mine asked me to join him for a special walk in one of Copenhagen's cemeteries yesterday evening. As part of an annual cultural event called in Danish Kulturnatten (The culture night), the old Assistens Kirkegård was open to the public, and on this particular evening a few eerie ghosts were haunting the cemetery! So we walked around in the dark and came pretty close to some female 'apparitions' dressed in white garments, one of them even being very tall with her shroud floating around her.

One may take the opportunity to reflect upon why a the people in charge of the cemetery arrange this kind of event. I suppose that some would even find it disrespectful of those who are buried there to make their graves the site of entertainment. I do, however, think it was done in a relatively respectful way, and the few people who were actually going around the cemetery seemed to act responsibly. For this reason I myself have no particular qualms about it, and of course, historically cemeteries have been used for various purposes, so why not a bit of 'haunting'?

First and foremost the event to me indicates that most of us are not really so afraid of meeting a revenant or ghost to avoid the opportunity to enter a cemetery by night. On the other hand, the question of 'what if' probably 'tickles' our imagination so much that it is attractive to go and see what happens.

The cemetery in question is the burial site of many well-known Danes, e.g. the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the author Hans Christian Andersen, and the physicists Hans Christian Ørsted and Niels Bohr. For those interested in vampires and magia posthuma, this is also the burial site of the Danish author Dan Turèll, who has written a book on vampires, and of the painter Nicolai Abildgaard whom I wrote about in an earlier post.

It is also the cemetery where an interesting incident concerning premature burial occurred in the late 18th century. Tradition has had it that when grave robbers came to steal from the corpse of a young woman called Giertrud Birgitte Bodenhoff, they found her alive and killed her. This tale had been retold for about 150 years when it was decided to exhume the remains of the corpse and examine it to ascertain whether there was any truth in the stories of grave robbers and premature burial.

Viggo Starcke who was in charge of the examination, concluded that the tradition was true, and wrote a book on the mystery of Giertrud Birgitte Bodenhoff that was published in 1954.