A Pink birdhouse and a Different Kind of Sightseeing Tour

Saturday is my favorite day of the week when I was in school and it still is. It's becasue I get to flaunt some pinks and get to see other people's lovely pinks. And I get to take everybody on a tour. So come along and get ready. You may join me for Sightseeing Sat. I decided against uploading Mr. Linky cause I feel so bad for him looking very lonely but if you want to share some travel or sightseeing experiences, please email me or leave me a comment. And please copy my SS button into sidebar if you ever want to participate now or in the future. It will serve as a reminder. Thanks.

Pink Sat. is hosted by Beverly of http://howsweetthesound.typepad.com/my_weblog/ and check out everybody else's pretty pinks. What I want to share today is a pink and blue ceramic bird house. You know I only bought it last week but I cannot remember where anymore. What happened to my brain? LOL! I think I am losing it. I remember I bought it really cheap, like $3.99, that is why I got it. Maybe it was from TJ Maxx.

I think it is so pretty, don't you?
Thanks Beverly for hosting another week of Pink Saturday.


Now, let's go on a different kind of tour. How about touring Natchez Cemetery? I tell ya, we have the most interesting cemetery. The cemetery was establised in 1821 but graves date back to the 1700's. It's huge, about 95 acres in size. It's not scary nor boring at all because people always go there to tour it. In fact, every Halloween they have an Angel of the Bluff presentation, where people wearing period costumes do a reenactment of the lives of their family buried there.
Wouldn't you want to have those ornate iron fences around your house? Sadly, a lot of the gates are missing because looters take them and sell them to antique stores.
John contacted a tourist guide to give us a private tour. The guide was very good, she gave us so much information but how could I remember all of them when I cannot even remember where I bought the bird house from last week? I do remember a few that I thought are very interesting stories though.
There we are taking the heat with our tour guide, just to tour a cemetery.

This green sign indicates that a soldier from the North and South Revolution is buried here.

A Confederate General was buried here.

Lots of unknown Civil War Confederate soldiers.

Do you know what the cloth draped on the cross mean? We were told that it indicates that the person buried had a life cut short. The same meaning is given to monuments erected with broken columns.

Out of all the grave sites here, I am most touched by the story of this one below. Florence Irene Ford (Sept 3, 1861 - Oct 30, 1871) died of yellow fever. Her family was distraught over her death, but her mother was especially devastated. She had a special coffin constructed for her daughter that had a glass window to display her body. Furthermore, when the grave was dug, Mrs. Ford had a set of concrete steps constructed so that she could go down and look into the grave through a special glass window that she had installed. Her daughter , when she was still alive was terrified of thunderstorms so every time it would rain, Mrs. Ford would go down the steps and sit by her daughter's coffin, separated only by the thin glass wall, to keep her company. She could also gaze at her deceased child through the glass of the coffin. After the mother's death, the glass wall was covered by concrete to prevent vandalism.

Due to vandalism, the grave site had to be sealed off but you can still go down but won't see anything but a solid wall.

Here's another one with a touching love story. The husband was so in love with the wife so that when she died, he vowed to visit her every single day and bring her flowers. He did that every single day until he died. He would stay there for hours and eventually he brought in a park bench where he would often fall asleep. After the husband passed away, the children continued to bring the flowers.

Enlarge the picture and you can see from the inscriptions how much the deceased was loved.

Not everybody here has a good story. This particular one was a prostitute who worked in a brothel down "Under the Hill" so that when she died of tuberculosis, nobody wanted to claim her body until somebody felt bad and paid for her burial. They did not even put her full name and she was just identified here as Louise.

More unknown soldiers of the Confederate Army buried here.

The Turning Angel
"Erected by the Natchez Drug Company to the memory of the unfortunate employees who lost their lives in the great disaster that destroyed its building on march 14, 1908." The five girls who were killed are buried under the watchful gaze of the angel. The Natchez Drug Company commissioned the statue, and the artist carved it in such a way to form an optical illusion. Approaching the statue from the correct angle makes it appear to turn as you grow nearer.
Greg Iles, a NY best selling author wrote a book titled "Turning Angel". If you have not read it and you like mystery novels, it's really a "must read".

I hope you enjoyed this tour. This cemetery is one of the tourists' spots in our city because it has so many interesting stories. I forgot to take a picture of the guy who was buried in his rocking chair, which he requested before his death.

Thank you all for coming!!