Bonaventure Cemetery

Bonaventure Cemetery Obituaries

Meet Boise's top 'taphophile' - Idaho Statesman (blog)

Kuala Lumpur that plays a perpetual recording of the pianist buried beneath it. During a recent visit to Georgia, he explored Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery, home of the statue of a young girl, famously featured on the cover of John Berendt’s celebrated book, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” While there, Habben took some 640 photographs for his collection.Habben also works part time at Cloverdale Funeral Home and Cemetery, the Boise home known for the pet reindeer that graze its grounds. At Cloverdale, Habben helps with “everything that doesn’t require a funeral director’s license,” he said, including transporting bodies, setting up for services and handing out programs.More history than ghostsHabben, a Chicago native, said his love for cemeteries started with his hometown love for blues music. He started visiting favorite musicians’ graves and quickly realized that cemeteries were rich with history, art and intrigue.He believes people find cemeteries fascinating for one of two reasons. Some are drawn to the paranormal. People often ask Habben if he has seen wraiths wandering among the monuments. He hasn’t.“If I were a spirit and could go anywhere, why would I hang around a cemetery?” he quipped.As an experienced photographer, he’s often the “bad guy,” the one who has to tell people that the “ghost” they think they’ve captured on film is really a dust mote or the reflection off a mirror. He notes one spirit photograph that no one has been able to disprove. It’s of a woman in 1800s garb. “The Lady in White” is sitting on a stone at Bachelor’s Grove, a legendarily haunted cemetery outside Chicago not far from a pond where mobster Al Capone dumped the bodies of his enemies.Other lovers of cemeteries are like him, Habben said, “Interested in history.”“Every time I give a tour, I get people who say they’ve lived in Boise their whole lives, but didn’t know the stories they learn in the cemeteries,” said Habben.At Pioneer, one of the oldest cemeteries in the Treasure Valley, that might be a story about Orlando Robbins, “the Wyatt Earp of Idaho” during the 1800s, or about young Carrie Logan. She was a five-year-old girl who died as her pioneer parents were nearing the Valley in 1864. They waited to bury her until they got to Boise. Her stone is the oldest legible marker at Pioneer.Cemeteries are rife with symbolism that represents a whole visual language. In the past, even if someone...