MARIANA ENRIQUEZ Somebody is Walking on Your Grave. Reviewed by Ann Skea

No casual tombstone tourist, Mariana Enriquez details her fascination with cemeteries, their histories and their famous residents. 

Mariana Enriquez is a self-confessed connoisseur of cemeteries: a taphophile. Since 1979, she has travelled the world, visiting cemeteries in Patagonia, South America, the USA, Scotland, London, Europe and Western Australia. But it is not just the tombs, the statuary, and the graves of famous people that interest her, she likes to delve into the history of these places and the people who established them, hear the stories that have grown up around them and, of course, discover the ghosts and vampires that haunt them.

Mariana is Argentine and knows well the famous Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. So well, that she had chosen her own grave there:

I can’t be buried in that fancy cemetery by my own rights, not through family or fame. But I want my friends – if I have any left by the time I die – to scatter my ashes inside one tomb in particular …. It has a barred iron door – scattering ashes through it would be easy.

Unfortunately, as she finds in a later visit, the pyramid tomb she had chosen no longer bears the plaque she so wants to be buried under: ‘Here lies Nothing. Only dust and bones. Nothing.’

Has it been sold? Had the plaque been taken off to be polished or restored? I feel desperate – this was supposed to be my home after death! I don’t want the pyramid without the plaque.

Perhaps this is just as well, since Recoleta , where Eva Perón is buried, is now a busy tourist attraction. Not only that but the amazing, complicated and gruesome history of Eva Perón’s body, which Mariana recounts, makes her horrify her friends by declaring that opening graves, kidnapping and relocating bodies is ‘a national characteristic’. Eva is now buried in her sister’s crypt, eight metres underground, crushed beneath concrete, to prevent any further mistreatment.

Mariana’s passion for cemeteries begins in Genoa. She is 25, travelling with her mother, when she sees a young man playing the violin outside the Palazzi dei Rolli. He is her idea of beauty, ‘bold and dissolute’. She falls instantly in love with him. His name is Enzo, and she persuades him to accompany her to the Staglieno Cemetery, where the sculptures of beautiful young women atop the tombs fascinate her. One, called ‘The Last Kiss’,

is naked, her beautiful young breasts exposed, her eyes are closed and her head is being supported, as if she were sleeping or unconscious, by a young man, who kisses her hair and holds her legs with his other hand, as if he is about to pick her up.

Other sculptures are even more sensual and suggestive, including sculptor Monteverde’s voluptuous Angel, which she finds copied in many other cemeteries. It is by this tomb that Enzo kisses her, and later they make love at a grave on which a sculpted young girl lies in complete abandon.

Some ten years later, Mariana remembers this as ‘a trip of madness and amour fou’ that she never wants to repeat, but ‘would like to repeat every single day’.

The grave sculptures are an essential part of this book and some of her photographs of them are reproduced between chapters. In Highgate Cemetery in London, she insists on being photographed wearing a leopard-print jacket (in honour of the Manic Street Preachers, one of her favourite bands) beneath the massive head of Karl Marx. And at the Poblenou Cemetery in Barcelona, she photographs the terrifying Kiss of Death:

fleshless Death, his skull bared, no hood or scythe, winged like a black angel, kisses a young man with strong arms and an exquisite torso, kneeling and half naked, who lets himself die. A scene of erotic surrender and abandon.

In Paris, at the Montparnasse Cemetery, she comes across a huge multi-coloured sculpture of a fat cat ‘sporting the name Ricardo on its belly’. She learns later that it was created by Niki de Saint Phalle, who is well-known in France and who built her Tarot Garden in Italy, sleeping each night inside her huge model of The Empress from the Tarot pack’s Major Arcana.

In Paris, too, Mariana traces the history of the Holy Innocents Cemetery, which was founded in the twelfth century and occupied the ground beneath Paris’s Les Halles neighbourhood. For eight hundred years the dead were brought there and thrown into grave pits. When the cemetery was closed, the bones and skulls were relocated and stacked in the catacombs of Montparnasse. Visiting the catacombs with a small group of people, Mariana manages to slip away and steal a bone, which she baptises ‘François’ and smuggles out in the sleeve of her coat.

Other histories are surprising. In Patagonia, in the nineteenth century, a group of Welsh people came from the United Kingdom to settle. They survived with the help of indigenous people. Epigraphs on many of the gravestones in their Trevelin Cemetery are in Welsh, there are still many people there who speak Welsh, and the school is bilingual.

At various cemeteries, Mariana ponders colonisation. And in the Rottnest Island cemeteries in Western Australia, on land which was once inhabited by the Whadjuk Noongar people, she is surprised when the guides speak only of the first colonists, the difficulties of living on the island, the shipwrecks and the native animals. However, she does find the island museum where the history ‘is explained well and not hidden’.

The Jewish cemetery at Vyšehrad in Prague prompts stories of Rabbi Loew and the golem. In Edinburgh, Mariana dodges Edinburgh Festival-goers and Harry Potter fans to visit Greyfriars Kirkyard – reputedly ‘the most cursed in all Europe’. There, old iron mortsafes cover many of the graves to protect them from grave robbers.

The Edinburgh stories of supernatural attacks, and her visit to the Black Museum, are scary, but not as bizarre as the history of the vampire in London’s Highgate cemetery. On a night in March 1970, after reports of ghostly hauntings and an ITV program about a vampire being detected in the cemetery, hundreds of vampire hunters flooded the cemetery, evading police and guards, and performed exorcisms with ‘holy water, salt and garlic’. The vampire was eventually found by an occultist, who had claimed a vampire king was buried in the cemetery. Conveniently, he found it in a coffin in a nearby mansion and drove a stake through its heart, whereupon it ‘disintegrated before his eyes’.

Some ghost stories are common to many cemeteries, as are graves where offerings and requests for help for the living are made. A bronze statue known as the ‘Tomb of the Little Indian’ in Punta Arenas in Chile, for example, is covered in flowers and surrounded by marble plaques ‘giving thanks for miracles granted’. Children’s graves are often covered with toys and other small offerings. One necro-tourist cemetery guide suggests that bad luck will befall those who do not contribute.

Necro-tourism is big business. Daytime and night-time tours, ghost tours, guided tours of the tombs of the famous, all are on offer and all are popular. Mariana has been obliged to take a guide in some cemeteries, including the Presbyter Matias Maestro Cemetery in Lima, Peru, where the guide terrified her by crawling into a grave and dragging out a skull which he said was that of a Dominican who had just been murdered by a local narco gang. He insisted that she photograph it.

You may not be a thanatophile like Mariana, fascinated by everything associated with death, but she does make an amusing, thoughtful and well-informed companion to accompany you around the cemeteries she has visited.

Mariana Enriquez Somebody is Walking on Your Grave: My cemetery journeys translated by Megan McDowell Granta 2025 PB 336pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Argentinian writers, cemeteries, grave monuments, Highgate Cemetery, Holy Innocents Cemetery, Mariana | Enriquez, Montparnasse Cemetery, necro-tourism, Recoleta Cemetery, Staglieno Cemetery, taphophiles, tombstones