Graves in the Wrong Place (10 Photos)

November 14, 2026

By Vidar

These Graves Ended Up in the Wrong Place

A cemetery fourteen stories high, another forty feet under the sea, a king under a parking lot and a husband and wife who hold hands across a wall. All ten are real places.

✝️ Sunken Cemetery — Catarman, Camiguin, Philippines 🇵🇭

This cross marks a cemetery that is now under the sea. Off Bonbon in Catarman, the old cemetery went under after Mount Vulcan erupted in 1871, and the town around it sank too.

💡 Cross Fact: The concrete cross was built in 1982 by the provincial government of Camiguin to mark the spot.

📷 Photo and cover crop: “Sunken Cemetery – Camiguin” by Edwin Juen Jr. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

🤝 Graf met de handjes — Roermond, Netherlands 🇳🇱

Two graves, one wall and a pair of stone hands. In the old cemetery of Roermond, Colonel J.W.C. van Gorkum, a Protestant, lies on one side of the wall that divided the Protestant and Catholic sections. His Catholic wife, Josephina van Aefferden, lies on the other. They married in 1842 against the wishes of her family and stayed together for 38 years, but the rules of the time did not let them share a grave.

💡 Hands Fact: He died in 1880, and she had him buried right against the wall on his side. She died in 1888, and their children carried out her last wish: her grave went against the other side, and stone arms reach across the wall to hold hands. It became a Dutch national monument in 2002.

📷 Photo and cover crop: “Graf met de handjes 2 (cropped)” by Frank Janssen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

🪵 Lemo Burial Cliff — Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi, Indonesia 🇮🇩

The crowd on this cliff is made of wood. At Lemo, graves are cut into a sheer rock face, and balconies of tau tau, carved figures of the dead, look down at the people below.

💡 Tau Tau Fact: Tau tau were once made only for the wealthy. In the 1980s, grave robbers looted many of them and sold them on to museums, and in 1991 tau tau were even on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

📷 Photo: “Tana Toraja, Lemo, tau taus” by Arian Zwegers / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

🏢 Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica — Santos, São Paulo, Brazil 🇧🇷

This tower block is a cemetery. The Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica in Santos stacks its tombs floor upon floor, and Pelé was buried there on January 3, 2023, close to the stadium where he made his name.

💡 Record Fact: Building started in March 1983 and the first burial was on July 28, 1984. Guinness World Records lists it as the tallest cemetery, from when it had 10 stories. It has 14 now.

📷 Photo: “Memorial Necrôpole Ecumênica • total” by Geogast / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

🤿 Neptune Memorial Reef — off Key Biscayne, Florida, USA 🇺🇸

These gates stand on the seabed, 40 feet (12 m) down and 3.25 miles off Key Biscayne. The Neptune Memorial Reef is an underwater cemetery, and the only visitors who reach it are divers.

💡 Ashes Fact: Cremated remains are mixed with cement to build parts of the reef itself. It opened in 2007, first under the name Atlantis Reef Project.

📷 Photo: “Neptune Reef” by Elkman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

🏝️ Isle of the Dead — Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia 🇦🇺

This little island off the convict settlement of Port Arthur is the final resting place for more than 1,000 people. The only way to visit is by boat, on a guided tour.

💡 Convict Fact: From 1833 until the settlement closed in 1877, convicts and free people were buried here. Only about 180 graves are marked, those of prison staff and soldiers, so most of the dead lie in unmarked graves.

📷 Photo: “Isle of the Dead” by OliverH88 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

👑 Greyfriars Car Park — Leicester, England 🇬🇧

A king of England lay for five centuries under what became a parking lot. In 2012, archaeologists dug into this council car park in Leicester, on the site of the old Greyfriars friary, and found the skeleton of Richard III. One of the parking spaces was painted with the letter R, for “reserved”. The grave site is now inside the King Richard III Visitor Centre.

💡 Reburial Fact: The bones were identified as his in February 2013, and he was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on March 26, 2015.

📷 Photo: “Excavation of King Richard III” by zaphad1 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

⛵ Isola di San Michele — Venice, Italy 🇮🇹

In Venice even the cemetery needs a boat. The whole island of San Michele in the lagoon is a graveyard, behind walls that rise straight out of the water. Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Ezra Pound are buried here.

💡 Island Fact: The monumental cemetery was founded in 1807, when burials on the main islands were banned. Most graves are not forever: after about ten years the remains are usually moved to an ossuary to make room.

📷 Photo: “Cimitero ( Isola di San Michele ), Venezia” by h_laca / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

🐚 Cemetery Island of Fadiouth — Joal-Fadiouth, Senegal 🇸🇳

Dig a grave here and you only hit shells. Fadiouth, off the Senegalese coast, stands on an island made almost entirely of clam shells, and so does its cemetery, on a second island with its own footbridge. This photo is from 1982.

💡 Shell Fact: Christians and Muslims are buried side by side here, and gravediggers find nothing but shells even 26 feet (8 m) down.

📷 Photo: “Cemetery Island near Fadiouth, Senegal 1982” by John Atherton / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

🏘️ City of the Dead — Cairo, Egypt 🇪🇬

These rooftops look like a neighborhood, and in a way they are. Cairo’s City of the Dead stretches below the Citadel, and tens of thousands of people live here among the tombs.

💡 City Fact: People have been buried here since the 7th century, across about 10 square kilometers. In recent years, bulldozers have cleared thousands of graves for new highways, although UNESCO says the area should be preserved.

📷 Photo: “Looking over Qarafat Bâb al-Wazir to Cairo Citadel” by H. Hakan Atik / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Some of these places are easy to reach, like the visitor center in Leicester. Others take a boat, a guided tour or a dive. If you could visit just one, would it be the tower in Santos, the reef off Florida or the island of shells? Tell us in the comments.