Episodes

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. "Hang down your head, Tom Dooley Hang down your head and cry Hang down your head, Tom Dooley Poor boy, you're bound to die." The murder ballad, 'Tom Dooley', made famous by the Kingston Trio in 1958, is the tale of a twisted love triangle that culminated in two sensational trials that both captivated and disgusted the people of North Carolina in the years following the American civil war. Dianne...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. "Come all good people, I’d have you draw near, A sorrowful story you quickly shall hear; A story I’ll tell you about Omie Wise, How she was deluded by Lewis’s lies." From the ballad Omie Wise. This week Jennie and Dianne begin a two part series exploring three folk songs that originated out of North Carolina. Each song relates a tragic narrative that has been spun out of real life events. In this...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne are joined by the delightful Kathleen Maca who shares the stories of the Broadway District cemeteries on the island of Galveston off the gulf coast of Texas. Kathleen is a member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, a cemetery historian, cemetery restorationist, Certified Tourism Ambassador, genealogist and just completed a two-year project for ancestry.com...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode, Jennie and Dianne are joined by Annalisa Heppner, Cemetery Director of North Burial Ground in Providence, Rhode Island. North Burial Ground was officially recognized as a burial ground in 1700 and is the largest municipal cemetery in the region at around 110 acres and with more than 40,000 gravestones. From its inception North Burial Ground has welcomed all people of the Providen...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Join Jennie and Dianne as they delve into the intriguing world of Fisk metallic burial cases, also known as Fisk coffins. Unearth the remarkable story of Almond Dunbar Fisk, the visionary behind the cast iron coffin, whose innovation forever changed the way we lay our loved ones to rest. From first lady Dolley Madison who made the cast iron coffin fashionable among the leaders in Washington D.C. ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. A Google search for Martha's Chapel Cemetery will lead you down a reportedly haunted road where any number of ghostly spirits and demons are said to roam unsettling the living who pass through this desolate corner of Eastern Texas. But what happens when a cemetery’s main attraction is only about its ghosts and otherworldly atmosphere? We tend to lose sight of why the cemetery even exists, as a bu...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Children in many parts of the U.S. gathered their supplies and donned their backpacks, as they headed back to school. Many more will be doing so in the next coming weeks both here in the U.S. and around the world as summer comes to its official end. This inspired us to share the stories of some teachers from the past and some of the challenges they faced. Join us for the Ordinary Extraordinary st...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. On the western side of Paris, France, not far from the Eiffel Tower, is Cimetière de Passy, a small cemetery where a simple mausoleum whose doors are topped by an owl sits among its fellow graves in a most unassuming manner. Yet the story of the man who rests inside this mausoleum is one straight from the Gilded Age and had fate delt him a different hand, his remains may have been laid to rest in...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined this week by a favorite returning guest, Dr. Sharon Pajka, to discuss her new book being released on August 21st, The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe: Graves of his Family, Friends and Foes. In her book Sharon helps readers to visit the graves of the people with whom he worked and socialized, who he loved and at times loathed and gain a fuller understanding of Poe's li...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined by first time guest Dr. Joy Giguere to learn how American burial grounds changed from merely Ordinary Extraordinary places of interment, to rural landscapes meant to appear natural and ease the burden of grief, to the streamlined lawn cemeteries we often see today. Dr. Joy M. Giguere is an associate professor of history at Penn State York where she teaches courses in ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. "Be kind, be kind because kindness may always help out someone who is suffering." These words of advice were written from a mother to her daughters when she feared that her time on earth was growing short, that mother was Mary "Queen" Mellen Palmer. She was mother to three daughters whom she adored and loving wife to the founder of Colorado Springs, General William Jackson Palmer. But she was so ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. The New York Times called him "the foremost citizen of Colorado." William H. Spurgeon said he was "the soldier, the builder of an empire, the philanthropist, the friend of the people, whose life was a blessing." At his funeral in 1909 Colorado College president William Slocum told more than 3,000 mourners that gathered in the snow at Evergreen Cemetery, "A great man has passed, but the influence ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. This week on the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast...Nestled in the Bitterroot Valley beneath St. Mary’s Peak, a mountain in the northern portion of the Rocky Mountain range that runs through the state of Montana, is a small, simple churchyard where rests the body of Father Antonio Ravalli alongside approximately 329 other souls whose resting place is part of historic St. Mary’s Mission. Je...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined by Rick Hendricks, PhD to learn about a series of fascinating witch trials that took place not in New England, but in the border town Abiquiu, New Mexico beginning in 1756 and spanning over the course of ten years ending in 1766. Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupin had a plan to bring peace to the early settlers of New Mexico by granting land to the Genizaros, who were indi...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne continue their exploration of Colorado cemeteries that will be visited by members of the Association for Gravestone Studies during their week-long conference in Denver, Colorado. First they take members to the tranquil grounds of Evergreen and Fairview Cemeteries in Colorado Springs. Nestled beneath the majestic beauty of Pike's Peak, these hallowed grounds showc...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. This week Jennie and Dianne prepare to welcome members of the Association for Gravestone Studies to colorful Colorado for the annual AGS summer conference. This will be the first time the conference has been hosted in the state of Colorado. The conference will take place June 20-25th, 2023 and members from all over the United States and around the globe will be attending. The conference will focu...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined this week by returning guest, author and historian Pamela McColl, as they unravel the life and death of Ellen Clapsaddle, the remarkable American illustrator and commercial artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose postcards have become highly collectable in recent years. Ellen Clapsaddle's art featuring charming and whimsical children and holiday themes ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. "I want to play a real man in all my films, and I define manhood simply: men should be tough, fair and courageous, never petty, never looking for a fight, but never backing down from one either." - John Wayne Jennie and Dianne are joined by Drifter and Gypsie of the Rebel at Large Adventure Podcast to explore the life of the man who became known to the world as John Wayne. For more than 50 years ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne journey through the intertwining worlds of music, storytelling, history, and cemeteries. This week the ladies are joined by musicians Patrick Dyer Wolf and Avi Vinocur from folk rock band Goodnight, Texas. Together they explore the connection between music and storytelling, discussing how the melodies and lyrics of many of their songs serve as vessels for untold ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne conclude their series on fraternal organizations in this episode, where they explore a distinctively American fraternity formed with the purpose of assisting veterans of the Union army after the American Civil War. Known as the Grand Army of the Republic, or simply G.A.R., it served as a social and political platform for Union veterans and their families. The GAR passionately ad...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Join Jennie and Dianne as they dive into the origins of the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal organization founded on the values of Friendship, Charity, and Benevolence. Discover how the story of Damon and Pythias inspired Justus H. Rathbone to create this organization and how it became the first fraternal organization in the United States to be chartered through an Act of Congress. Tune in to hear...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Fraternal organizations have a long and rich history throughout the world and especially in America. This week Jennie and Dianne begin a new series of episodes dedicated to the many fraternal organizations whose symbols often grace headstones and who even have cemeteries of their own. In this episode they discover the secrets and history of one of the world's oldest fraternal organizations, the I...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined this week by special guest, author and historian Doris McCraw, who wrote the book "Under the Stone: Early Women Doctors in Evergreen Cemetery". They discuss the pioneering women doctors from the 1800s who made an impact on the field of medicine despite facing incredible challenges and obstacles. Seven of these Ordinary Extraordinary women are buried at Evergreen Cemet...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. This week Jennie and Dianne stray from the cemetery to explore the gruesome and shocking details of the Burke and Hare murders that gripped Scotland in 1828. These two notorious murderers are responsible for one of the most infamous killing sprees in history. Learn about how they lured their victims to their deaths, how they sold the bodies to a prominent doctor for dissection, and how they were ...