"Mist... cemetery... Halloween. Should end well."
— Giles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Cemeteries have long held an air of creepiness about them. They are, after all, the places where we bury the dead, and our deceased loved ones in particular. Places that consequently remind us of unpleasant things. Places that can sometimes manage to creep us out simply because of the way they look.
Little wonder, then, that so many Dark Fantasy and Horror works like this setting. In one of these graveyards, it is Always Night, or occasionally twilight. Most often the moon is full, for extra supernatural points. Clouds may also be present, or fog, or snow. Cawing ravens are heard by day, and howling wolves by night. And, most importantly...it often turns out that the dead people there aren't really dead.
This is the usual birthplace and/or home of The Undead. In a Zombie Apocalypse, you can expect every grave to be a Clown-Car Grave. If you're lucky, the local vampire coven failed to get the memo about this not being the best place to sleep, so you'll just need to locate their Ancient Tomb and hope there isn't a night guard (and that they're heavy sleepers).
May be part of a Corpse Land. May also be part of the exterior of a Haunted House. Big Boo's Haunt overlaps when it takes place in a cemetery. See also Elephant Graveyard and Indian Burial Ground.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- An episode of Ojamajo Doremi takes place in a local cemetery handled by the family of a boy in Doremi and Co's class, where the kids perform their Kimodameshi. It's not that creepy at first sight, but Hazuki (who really hates the supernatural) begs to disagree and her terror is Played for Laughs. It turns out to have a ghost... who happens to be that of the late local Buddhisst priest and the grandfather of the girls' classmate; his grandson wasn't there when he passed away and he wants to see the kid one last time...
- In episode 79 of Yu-Gi-Oh! Bakura and Bonz duel in a graveyard and bring the creepy crawlies to match.
Comic Books
- Lunar Girl and Scarlet Sparrow: The Toronto Necropolis where Angelo Ombra's body was buried after his death is always shown against a pitch black sky with torrential rain.
- Magic Trixie: In "Magic Trixie Sleeps Over", when Trixiee goes to the vampire twins' sleepover, she's dropped off at a cemetery that is devoid of colour.
- Wonder Woman (1987): When Maxie Zeus makes a pact with Eris, Deimos, and Phobos to recreate the Areopagus at a Gothic Chapel in Gotham he and some blank eyes cultists manage to sneak up on and attack Artemis and Huntress in the eerie dark cemetery.
Fan Works
- Adventures in Alola:
- Hau'oli Cemetery becomes this when Unbound Hoopa and his team of Dark- and Ghost-type Pokémon appear in it during "The Ghost Orphan."
- Memorial Hill becomes this when a Marshadow lurks among the graves in "The Emissary."
- Fairy Friends: Near the end of "Fright Fest," Jermaine and his friends approach Dimmsdale Cemetery during their trick-or-treating on Halloween night. Fog sways and swirls around the graves. As the children walk past the burial ground, a horde of zombies rise up from out of their graves and slowly advance towards the kids. A gaggle of ghastly, gruesome ghosts materialize in the cemetery. Several spooky, scary skeletons creep out from their graves. Finally, a lone vampire appears in a cloud of black and red smoke. Thankfully, the undead creatures don't actually attack Jermaine or his friends, with the zombies performing a minutes-long, 1980s-style dance routine that they invite Jermaine to join in on. The ghosts, skeletons, and vampire just stand back and watch.
- Galar Grapples: The Old Cemetery, complete with Ominous Fog. In "The Mourners," the Ghost-type Gym Leader Allister and two actual human ghosts appear in the burial ground. In "The Grim Neigh," Jermaine battles and captures a wild Spectrier there.
- Kalos Quests: Dormez Bien Cemetery is haunted by the ghosts of both people and Pokémon. Ghost-type Pokémon also reside there. In "The Lure," Ominous Fog sways and swirls around the graves as Jermaine and Serena explore the burial site on the night of a full moon. Not long after arriving, the two Trainers battle a Rogue Mega Chandelure and a Rogue Mega Froslass. Once they return to the cemetery's entrance, the Ghost-type specialist Gwynn (who enjoys the darkness, silence, and solitude of the cemetery) appears from out of the fog and challenges Jermaine to a battle when she senses their shared love of ghosts and Ghost-type Pokémon. He accepts. He wins their battle. After the battle, Gwynn disappears back into the fog without saying a word. He and Serena are creeped out by this, but he also thinks Gwynn's sudden disappearing act is cool.
- Paldea Plays: In "The MC of RIP," the Ghost-type Gym Leader Ryme invites Jermaine to a cemetery on the night of a full moon for a friendly rematch. Fog sways and swirls around the graves. A cold wind blows. Juliana tells him that she feels creeped out.
- Tournament Time: Appropriately enough, there's a cemetery behind the haunted mansion being used for the Spooky Cup.
Films — Animation
- Watership Down: The rabbits cross through one, mostly for the sake of atmosphere.
- The Pagemaster: The "Horror" section of the library is a giant graveyard with books shaped like tombstones.
Films — Live-Action
- Death Screams: The cast decide to head for a cemetery for the best atmosphere to tell scary stories to each other.
- Freddy vs. Jason: This is where Lori ends up in her first nightmare and finds the spectres of Freddy's child victims playing and singing his warning rhyme.
- Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives starts with Tommy Jarvis (with a friend) going to one to symbolically kill Jason Voorhees. The opposite happens.
- Gates of Heaven: Nothing frightening happens in the pet cemetery that is the focus of documentary. But it's still vaguely unsettling to see shot after shot of pet headstones, as well as statuary of fake deer and swans and the like, as well as an abandoned outdoor chapel.
- The Haunted Mansion (2003): When the Evers family arrive, they find that Gracey Manor has a private cemetery...that stretches out into the distance as far as the eye can see. It's difficult to imagine how even all the generations of the Gracey family combined would have been able to fill it. Megan even lets out a Big "OMG!" upon first seeing it. Sara plays it off, saying "Well, some people have pools, some people have private cemeteries. It happens."
- Haunted Mansion (2023): The film's climax takes place in one of these. It's full of ghosts, including the Big Bad, Alistair Crump.
- Hocus Pocus has a graveyard, but relies on elements from the rest of the movie to add the creepiness factor. In fact, the film establishes that the cemetery is the safest place to be as being hallowed ground, witches can't set foot on it lest they be turned to stone.
- Night of the Living Dead (1968): The opening scene (and first zombie attack) takes place in one of these. Subverted somewhat in that a.) it all happens in broad daylight and b.) we never actually see said zombie emerge from a grave. Or any zombie, for that matter, since it's eventually established that only the recent, unburied dead are re-animating.
- The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill: There's a decrepit cemetery near the church, which contains a few graves where someone named Sophia was buried, making it hard to determine which one was the body desecrated in the 1963 black mass.
- The Return of the Living Dead: The punks use a cemetery as their stomping ground. This is a bad idea.
- Return of the Scarecrow: The intro credits of the movie are played over a POV shot of someone being chased through a cemetery by the scarecrow before it catches and kills them.
- The Return of the Vampire: Dr. Tesla's initial hiding place is a decrepit, fog-covered graveyard outside of London. When he is revived, he moves to an abandoned church.
Gamebooks
- Lone Wolf: In the first book, Flight from the Dark, the Graveyard of the Ancients near Holmgrad is a gloomy, forbidden place. It is always shrouded in mist and cloud blocking the sun, the place is unnaturally chilly, covered in thorny graveweeds, with foul gases seeping from the open crypts and distant whispering echoing into the ears of anyone foolish enough to venture there. Worse, its underground necropolis hosts evil forces, dangerous traps and magical guardians.
Literature
- Anita Blake: Anita's occupation is to raise zombies from graves, so she often goes to cemeteries. If they aren't creepy before she arrives, they become creepy when she does her thing.note
- Discharge! (gelefant): Gina/Ghost Girl and Jermaine spend most of "Haunted Heroine" in two of these. Both cemeteries are frequented/haunted by ghosts and attacked by Zila and her shadow minions. There's also Ominous Fog present in the first cemetery.
- The Sixth Circle of Hell in The Divine Comedy is a cemetery filled with fiery tombs that hold arch-heretics and their followers. The tombs are destined to remain open until the Last Judgement, allowing the rare passerby to hear the "sorry cries" the heretics create for the rest of the eternal life many of them denied.
- Dracula: Van Helsing and Dr. Seward keep vigil at the cemetery where Lucy was entombed and from which her body has disappeared, discovering she had become a vampire. They ultimately dispatch her with a stake through the heart after she had returned to her coffin.
- Earth's Scariest Monsters!:
- The cemetery in which Dr. Victor Stein goes Grave Robbing for the parts for his monster definitely qualifies.
- The cemetery Isabelle and Jermaine walk through at the beginning of "The Undead King" also counts since they visit it on Halloween night under a full moon. There's even Ominous Fog. The cemetery becomes even creepier after Dracula shows up.
- Cemeteries and graveyards are the most common areas for ghost portals to appear.
- The Scaredron have a private cemetery that takes up half of their big backyard. A dirt path winds through the burial ground. In "Halloween Haunts, Part Two," fog sways and swirls around the graves. The cemetery is home to a few Friendly Ghosts and a trio of Friendly Zombies.
- Necropolis, in Galaxy of Fear: City of the Dead. Zak makes friends with some local boys who dare him to go into the deepest part of the local cemetery. He's used to cultures where the dead are incinerated, and the idea that he's surrounded by rotting people freaks him out. Then the zombies show up...
- Ghost Girl (2021): Zee and Elijah regularly visit one. It becomes even creepier when Scratch's hounds begin to haunt it.
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Voldemort did his little forbidden ritual in a graveyard. You know, the usual "bone of father, flesh of servant, blood of enemy" rebirth routine.
- Henry Kuttner:
- The Graveyard Rats: There are several cemeteries in Salem that are very old and very poorly maintained and suspected to hide secrets. One of these is home to a horde of invasive rats the size of cats and their undead master, a remnant or survivor of the witch hunts several centuries ago. The group generally isn't a bother to the living, who hardly know of their existence, because all they do is steal corpses to eat the flesh from, but they aren't harmless. If for whatever reason they need someone dead, they have the numbers and organization to make that happen. At least two cemetery caretakers, Old Masson and his predecessor, have disappeared. It is certain that the rats have eaten Masson alive when he invaded their tunnels while their involvement with the previous caretaker's disappearance is likely but unconfirmed.
- It Walks by Night (1936): The village's graveyard is home to a ghoul as far as the villagers know and over a dozen ghouls in truth. As long as there are corpses being interred, the ghouls largely keep to themselves and only occasionally make a victim out of a lone traveller. The reason that the village doesn't turn their backs on the cemetery is because they already burned rather than buried the deceased once during the plague. As a result, the ghoul came to the village and made many victims before the villagers conceded to resume burying their dead. As far as they hadn't already accepted that the cemetery just has a ghoul roaming around before, they certainly did thereafter and no one wants to be anywhere near the cemetery at night.
- The Hound (1924): In the 15th Century, a Dutch graverobber was mangled to death by some beast in a churchyard nearby Rotterdam. The locals buried him there along with a curious amulet he had with him. It is this amulet that the protagonists want and so they set out from their home in England to dig up the Dutchman's grave. All goes well and the aesthetics desired for their quest meet them at the churchyard: "the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odours of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas." Things become weird when they open the Dutchman's grave, however, as the skeleton inside looks far more put together than it should after five centuries. Taking the amulet and closing the grave, they are disturbed by distant baying and upon leaving perceive the bats gathering at the Dutchman's grave. Over the next few weeks, it's obvious something followed them from the churchyard to England and after St. John is killed, the narrator sets out alone to return the amulet to the Dutchman's grave. As he's digging, he's curiously joined by a vulture, which he kills with his shovel. With some more digging, he opens the grave to find not just the Dutchman's skeleton, but also bats and caked blood and shreds of human remains. The skeleton also is very much alive and not in a forgiving mood, but he allows the narrator to run for now.
- Johannes Cabal the Necromancer Johannes Cabal may or may not have accidentally locked his brother in a particularly disturbed crypt in a possibly haunted cemetery.
- "Lenore": Wilhelm's and Lenore's nighttime ride ends in a country graveyard with a clanging iron gate, where tombstones shimmer eerily in the moonlight and ghosts are dancing while ghostly voices are heard howling in the air and moaning in the crypts.
- The Loved Dead: The murderous narrator hides from the police in an abandoned cemetery that in better days was where he buried his parents. It reeks of decay, which is like perfume to the narrator. So at ease, he sits down on an aged grave and uses a fallen tombstone as a desk to write his memoir on. From midnight to the first suggestion of dawn, he writes and then kills himself.
- Pool of Radiance: Phlan has a notable one, and the culmination of Tarl's individual plot arc involves him rescuing the Hammer of Tyr from a vampire who lives there.
- The Red Tower: The second subterranean level is filled with blank headstones packed together, illuminated by the haze of phosphorescent paint on the stone walls. No one is buried there, though - they are the factory's highly experimental birthing graves for the production of hyper-organisms.
- Salamandra: During the second half of "Creepy Good," Jermaine, Lillith, and Luna visit a cemetery that's haunted by at least one ghost.
- The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek: Sailing by the island of Samsø where her father has been buried, Hervor, who is intent of recovering her father's sword, tries to persuade her viking band to make landfall and rob the gravemounds. The vikings however refuse because they know that the gravemounds of Samsø are haunted so that "it was worse to be there in the daytime than it was to be out at night in other places." So Hervor disembarks alone at sunset; as she goes near the gravemounds she meets a herdsman hurrying home who refuses to answer her questions about where her father's mound is and instead advises her to turn back at once because going near the gravemounds at night is suicide. As Hervor goes on, she sees ghostly "grave-fire" burning all over the mounds, and eventually calls her father's undead ghost forth from his grave.
- Shaman Blues: Cemeteries are usually an inversion, as oft rituals spoken on them make them anathema to most ghosts. However, Katia and Witkacy do visit one that neatly fits the bill, complete with being a source of weird magic energy and having power-mad ghosts invading it slowly.
- Space Wars, Worlds & Weapons by Steven Eisler mentions a world called Necromancer, home to a vast alien cemetery that's actually a form of suspended animation. All attempts to terraform or colonize it are disastrous failures thanks to the aliens who protect the "cemetery" inhabitants. The attached picture shows several of these, portrayed as vicious-looking Beast Men, carrying away a hapless human explorer.
- The Walker in the Cemetery by Ian Watson: The lifelike statues notwithstanding, the Staglieno necropolis in Genoa isn't very creepy until it's cut off from the outside world and an Eldritch Abomination starts hunting the tour group for its own amusement.
- Averted in The Zombie Survival Guide, which points out that zombies (by that book's rules) can't rise from the grave, and they won't go into cemeteries because that's not where the food is. Therefore, cemeteries are usually a good place to rest.
Live-Action TV
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: When Buffy has no other demands on her time, she stakes out the cemetery because new vamps emerge from there.
- The third season of Charmed (1998) has a few cemetery scenes and it's mentioned a few times that Cole can't be tracked in a cemetery.
- Many of Night and Day's pivotal scenes take place in the graveyard at St Vincent’s church. For extra shivers, there are underground catacombs too — usually reserved for violent scuffles, sexual encounters, demonic episodes and monster sightings.
- Supernatural:
- "All Hells Breaks Loose, Part Two": A Hell Gate is inside a crypt in a cowboy cemetery surrounded by a 100-mile Devil's Trap.
- "Swan Song": The battle for Armageddon will take place in Stull Cemetery
, an old boneyard just outside of Lawrence, Kansas.
- The Twilight Zone (1959) has this in two episodes.
- "The Grave": The scary part of the episode takes place in a cemetery.
- "Mr. Garrity and the Graves": The end has resurrected townsfolk rising from their graves on Boot Hill.
Music
- Turned on its head in Wolfgang Ambros' and Georg Danzer's 1974 Austropop song "Es lebe der Zentralfriedhof" ("Long Live the Central Cemetery") featuring the eponymous Vienna cemetery (which has the dubious honour of being one of the world's largest cemeteries by number of people buried). It begins with an appropriately creepy aesthetic, featuring a howling wind, distant Gregorian chants and muted bells. And then it quickly transfers to a schmaltzy and surprisingly wholesome pop ballad about the dead awakening and throwing a party to celebrate the Cemetery's first centennial. While somewhat controversial when first released due to its impious nature, the song is nevertheless quite in tone with the ghoulish, world-weary traditional Viennese sense of humour.
- "Pet Sematary" by The Ramones depicts a run-down graveyard with goblins and ghosts (and it's implied a vampire or two) living(?) there. Like the book/film the song is based on, it's Unholy Ground that brings back anyone buried there. The singer follows his friend Victor in one night, and is unpleasantly surprised to find out that Vic's actually a dancing skeleton.
Music Videos
- "Victor and his Demons", by Fiddlers Green, also features a creepy cemetery.
- The video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" memorably features one of these.
- "Moon Trance", by Lindsey Stirling, features a misty and dark cemetery, and she's creeped out even before the zombies come.
Pinballs
- The Addams Family has one behind the mansion. Wednesday can be seen hanging out here.
- The "Nightmare"/"Graveyard" table from Pinball Dreams takes place in one of these.
Podcasts
- The Magnus Archives: Several: the narrator of "Alone" finds herself in one after getting lost. It looks as if we're going to see another one in "A Distortion" when someone asks Sasha to meet them there, but the trope is subverted when it turns out they just chose the cemetery as a convenient landmark close to the actual destination. Defied in "Growing Dark" when the narrator has to pass through a cemetary at night; he finds it quite peaceful. It's the cemetery's long abandoned chapel where creepiness happens.
Tabletop Games
- Call of Cthulhu: Anytime you find a cemetery, you can (and should) assume that there are ghouls nearby.
- Dungeons & DragonsAnytime you find a cemetery, you can (and should) assume that there are some variety of undead nearby.
Theme Parks
- Disney Theme Parks: The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland includes an adjacent pet cemetery alongside the entrance queue, dotted with tombstones bearing humorous epitaphs.
- Universal Studios:
- The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera had this as the setting of the first part of the Scooby-Doo scene.
- Shrek and Donkey end up stumbling into one in Shrek 4D, where they discover Lord Farquaad's ghost and his grand evil scheme.
- Halloween Horror Nights:
- The haunted house Cryptkeeper's Dungeon of Terror from 1995 had the guests walk through one of these at one point.
- Concept art reveals that Universal's Museum of Horror: Chamber of Horrors from 1998 contained one of these at some point.
Video Games
- Upcoming indie game Beacon of Hope is going to have a level set in one, as revealed by a screenshot posted by the developer.
- In Conrad Stevenson's Paranormal P.I. you're called to investigate a local church and surrounding grounds at one point, most of which are occupied by a large cemetery. This turns out to be a massive investigation job due to the sheer number of spirits haunting the place, from residual ghosts to an actual Wendigo-like demon lurking in the nearby woods.
- Fox n Forests: The level Foggy Fable is set in a decrepit graveyard full of ghosts and plant monsters. A thick fog hangs over the level, obscuring the view at certain points, and can only be dissipated by switching to winter.
- GhostControl Inc.: Since this is a not-Ghostbusters game, you will be taking jobs in haunted cemeteries.
- Ginger: Beyond the Crystal: Pet Sematery Hill, which is accessible from Crater Peaks, is set in a cemetery full of zombie frogs and tombstones. One of the hazards is graves on the path that, when approached, have a pair of skeleton creatures rise out of it to attack Ginger, then crawl back into their shared grave.
- Haunted Halloween 85: Naturally, given the nature of the game, one of the levels that Donny traverses is a monster-infested cemetery.
- The Gamindustri Graveyard from Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2. Doesn't help that it has its own creepy, all-seeing eye on top of a tower.
- Kingdom Hearts:
- The cemetery in Halloween Town of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days.
- Kingdom Hearts II features the Proof of Existence, which is basically a graveyard for Nobodies.
- In Left 4 Dead, at the end of the third level on the "Death Toll" campaign, the path leads through a cemetery into a busted up church, where an insane and paranoid man in the safe room rings the church's bell to attract zombies, supposedly to make sure that you and the other survivors in your group are not infected. It turns out that he was infected himself, and he makes his transformation into a (random) Special Infected by the time that the Horde wave is over and you enter the safe room.
- Used several times in the Last Half of Darkness games. Jaja's bones in Shadows of the Servants must be dug up to acquire an item, and mausoleums (yes, plural) must be accessed to complete all the non-text games.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda I has a graveyard on the western side of the map. Touching most of the gravestones makes an invincible Ghini spawn, which can quickly become a hassle. But if you can handle them, it becomes one of the best places to farm rupees. The first quest hides the magic sword there, and the second quest has the entrance to the 6th dungeon hidden there.
- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has several graveyards on the world map, including a massive one that hides the entrance to the third palace. Since Random Encounters are almost always difficult in graveyards, you'll generally want to avoid them. However, visiting the tombstone south of King's Tomb will be necessary to progress in the game.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has the Kakariko Village Graveyard. Link can drop down into some of the graves to do things like race the ghost of an Undertaker in a creepy maze, fight ReDeads for a Piece of Heart and find a Fairy's Fountain, where he can also find a free Hylian Shield. Also, it houses the entrance to the spooky Shadow Temple, and the Well isn't too far away from the cemetery.
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: Ikana Graveyard, which is located within the path to the main area of Ikana Canyon. Inside the cemetery, Link can race against the remains of an army officer who died centuries ago, trick his men who dance around graves at night into thinking he [Link] is the officer, and have his men open up the graves to go on adventures underground.
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games:
- Ages has the Yoll Graveyard, which had ghosts in it as well as the first dungeon in the game, the Spirit's Grave. In addition, the final dungeon in the game, the Ancient Tomb, is located in the same location in the past, and is an ancient tomb on a mysterious island blocked by whirlpools. The Yoll Graveyard is also one of the only two places in the entire game that prevents you from time traveling, and distorts the screen if you try.
- Seasons has a graveyard on the southwest corner of Holodrum, which houses the game's seventh dungeon, the Explorer's Crypt.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
- Kakariko's graveyard is a desolate place where Creepy Crows will swarm you if you're not careful and haunted at night besides.
- The graves of Hyrule Castle are full of the rotting ghosts of Hylian soldiers, but despite their appearance they're helpful, pointing the way to a hidden treasure.
- LEGO Dimensions: One level has the player characters chase a Cyber-King through one. Though the cemetery itself isn't that creepy, save for all the Cybermen bursting out of the ground, or those angelic statues that seem to move when the player isn't looking at them. Ultimately, it turns out the area isn't even a cemetery at all, just a hologramatic disguise. But the statues are very real.
- Luigi's Mansion: The graveyard. It gets even creepier when lightning strikes the glowing blue tombstone near the end of it and Bogmire attacks Luigi in the area 2 boss battle.
- PAGUI has a stage set in a haunted cemetery infested with ghosts and shrouded in an Ominous Fog all the time, ending with your battle against the Hanging Ghost boss, one of the scariest-looking enemies in-game.
- Pokémon:
- Pokémon Red and Blue: Pokémon Tower in the infamous Lavender Town is a massive cemetery tower where people all over pay their respects to Pokémon who have passed on. Team Rocket infiltrates the tower, disturbing the restless spirits, one of them is a mother Marowak who was killed by Team Rocket Grunts.
- Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire has Mt. Pyre. It's also filled with Ghost-Types, the exterior portions are misty, adding to the creepy atmosphere, and Team Magma or Aqua will steal the Red or Blue Orbs on the player's first visit, kicking off the endgame plot.
- Princess Maker 2: Baran the Gravekeeper handles one of these, and he can hire the Daughter to help him working there. He'll often tease the girl by telling her about a Skeleton Knight who supposedly haunts it. If she has good enough Fighting/Magic skills, the Skeleton Knight will challenge her and she'll have to defeat him to send him to Heaven, which will net her at least 2.000 gold.
- Resident Evil 3: Nemesis: Jill goes to the cemetery when she goes through the Raccoon Park. There has been one in almost every Resident Evil game since then, and a Dummied Out graveyard even got added back into the remake of Resident Evil 1.
- Shantae has one just after the swamp containing the Cackle Mound, in the area right before Shantae reaches the Zombie Caravan for the first time. The place is filled with a lot of floating ghosts and Big Creepy-Crawlies climbing up and down the surrounding trees.
- SimCity 4: Zig-Zagged, cemeteries are unlocked as population grows, they have a strong park effect (meaning people like living next to it) and clear some air pollutions. They're also free to build and cost nothing to maintain, so there's only benefits to building them. Cemeteries will spawn zombies and ghosts as an Easter Egg, but they're perfectly harmless.
- Torchlight II's Act I is sprinkled with graves, but the one cemetery, Skull Hollow, covers a small plot over a much larger underground tomb. In Act III is Rivenskull Gorge, a vast gothic graveyard complete with Haunted Castle.
- Total Distortion: The Sonic Cemetery contains several guitar-shaped tombstones inside a gloomy monochrome landscape. A rock cover of a creepy organ theme plays when you first enter, and you can use a bell to summon a zombie Goth rocker named Edgar Death. The three songs he performs even have bizarre background effects that the player can film for their music videos.
- Twin Caliber have a stage set in a cemetery, appropriately called "Rest in Pieces!" and the zombies are coming out of their tombstones.
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: In real life, Hollywood Forever Cemetery is perfectly normal, safe for the famous names on its tombstones. In the World of Darkness, it's full of zombies that occasionally rise for reasons unknown, the caretaker is a local Vampire Baron's ghoul, and below it is an access way to the warrens of L.A.'s Nosferatu Primogen, "Gorgeous" Gary Golden.
- White Noise Online: One of these is in the woods you explore.
Visual Novels
- The Many Deaths of Lily Kosen: Zig-zagged - the graveyard looks incredibly run down and ominous (just look at that page image!), but the characters treat it as though it's perfectly normal. Their reluctance to go there stems more from the fact that they're looking to see whether they can find a clue as to why their demon-possessed friend has risen from the grave, and it's bringing up bad memories. If, at the end of the game, at least one character has died, it's revisited to pay respects, and the tone is more sombre than creepy.
Webcomics
- Unsounded: While tracking the scent of freshly spilled blood Sette comes across an overgrown crypt deep in the woods with no apparent entry. The Red Berry Boys gang is using it as a temporary hideout and Sette is visibly terrified as she works her way inside to discover urns full of their victims organs, the drainage system full of blood and a dying girl they abandoned as they fled.
Web Videos
- Karolina Żebrowska: Miss Tatternickle prefers to spend her time hanging out in cemeteries, keeps track of her local monsters (which are scared of her) and is friends with spiders.
Western Animation
- Captain N: The Game Master: "Quest For the Potion of Power": Captain N, Link, and Princess Zelda venture into Hyrule's cemetery. The Captain notes that the cemetery is much creepier in person than in the game.
- Invader Zim had a pretty creepy cemetery (but with cool LED-screen tombstones).
- The Owl House: Luz's hometown of Gravesfield has an old cemetery dating back to its founding in the 1600s, most of which has flooded into a incredibly unsettling swamp. It ends up being the site of the Hexsquad's fight against a Belos possessed Hunter in "Thanks to Them", which gets bonus creepy points for taking place on Halloween night.
- Samurai Jack: "Jack and the Zombies": Jack battles an army of skeletal warriors in a cemetery.
- The Simpsons:
- "The Girl Who Slept Too Little": The Springfield Cemetery gets relocated next door to the Simpsons' house, and it ends up scaring Lisa out of her mind.
- "Treehouse of Horror III": There's the town's Pet Cemetery, where Bart and Lisa attempt to raise Snowball I — and end up unleashing a Zombie Apocalypse.
- SpongeBob SquarePants:
- "One Krabs Trash": Mr. Krabs has to go into a cemetery to find a valuable hat and had to fight an army of undead fish.
- "Nasty Patty": SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs go to the cemetery when they believe they've killed the Health Inspector and need to get rid of the body.
- The Transformers: The Decepticon Crypt in Starscream's Ghost is more of a memorial, but the Decepticons regard it as a spooky cemetery. The Sweeps are afraid to enter, and Octane refuses to hide behind the tomb markers, lest their spirits curse him. He's also terrified when he accidentally desecrates Starscream's marker, and the ghost of the bot himself shows up.
Real Life
- A group of British ravers invoked this when they tried to organise a rave at a cemetery for Halloween 2011. The local council was not amused.
- Actually, most of our ideas about creepy cemeteries originate in Victorian London. The city had serious problems with overcrowding, both for living people and as a consequence for the dead as well. This resulted in dead bodies being buried in graves that were already occupied, half-buried body parts sticking out of the ground and the like. Add constant smog for special spookiness. Matters were much improved in 1839 by the founding of Highgate Cemetery and six other rural or garden cemeteries in London. Based partly on the iconic Mount Auburn which was itself inspired by Père Lachaise, these garden cemeteries — and even the word "cemetery" — were part of a movement in society to change the mindset around death. Instead of grim graveyards with constant reminders of the physical reality of death, the cemetery was a hopeful place to think about the next life.note People were actually encouraged to go there to relax and have fun. They were the first city parks.
- The KGB set up a meeting for Sergeant Robert Lee Johnson (whom they'd recruited as a spy) in a cemetery for exactly this reason, as no-one else was likely to come out there.
