Although Salem is almost stereotypical in its small-town-ness, we do have an unusual attraction in East Lawn Cemetery, the final resting place for several Gypsies.

One of the happier legends about Gypsies is that God had a Goldilocks experience during His creation of man. His first creation was too dark, and that man became the ancestor of Negroes. God’s second creation was too pale, and that man was the world’s first white man. The third divine creation was just right, however, and this perfectly brown man was the ancestor of the Gypsies.

Other Biblical legends are less kind. Gypsies, for example, are charged with being descendants of Cain, whom God outlawed for fratricide and who thereafter became a wanderer and fugitive on earth. Another legend brands Gypsies as “strays of the earth” because they refused shelter to Joseph, Mary, and Baby Jesus as the Holy Family fled from Egypt.

Supposedly they were also bodyguards for Christ, but they were unable to defend him because they drank too much. Later a Gypsy blacksmith allegedly forged nails for Christ’s crucifixion.

Today the name “Gypsy” still conjures unflattering stereotypes. However, Gypsies are remarkable in their devotion to family and to honoring their dead loved ones with respectful and colorful pageantry. Many sites that provide testimony to the Gypsy journey of death and remembrance are within a day’s round-trip from Chicago.

When a member of the Gypsy family or clan is seriously ill, word is urgently sent to all relatives and friends, no matter how far away they may be. Through fixed contact points called vurma, Gypsies can find each other even without fixed addresses.

“Each family always has someone who can contact everyone else in the clan,” said Buck Oulrey, great-grandson of “Gypsy Sam” Joles and his wife, Betsy, Gypsy “royalty” who, in 1891, settled in the small southern Illinois town of Salem.

All who can make the trip will appear at the bedside of the dying loved one. Showing family solidarity is important at this time of impending loss. Gypsies must also seek forgiveness for any past transgressions against the family member or friend who is dying. No envy or resentment should linger in those beginning their journeys to the land of the dead.

In early Gypsy history, touching the body of the deceased was discouraged for fear of contamination. If possible, the nearly departed was dressed in his finest clothes immediately before death. Otherwise, a non-Gypsy, usually the funeral director, attended to these cosmetic details. Some clans plugged the nostrils of the deceased with beeswax or pearls to prevent spirits from entering the body. Rituals such as these have been mostly abandoned by “modern” Gypsies, however.

A tradition that is continued is that Gypsy wakes and funerals are elaborate occasions that often resemble family reunions. Friends and family come from great distances to say their final good-byes. Their attendance is considered a gift to the grieving family.

“All will chip in for expenses if someone has no money for the trip, food, and lodging during the wake and funeral,” Oulrey said.

Gypsies still try to keep a constant vigil over their dead loved one. This custom may have evolved from the old Gypsy superstition of keeping at least three mourners with the casket to guard against the ghost of the dead person visiting a lone watcher if a single companion fell asleep.

Some funeral homes will allow around-the-clock vigils, while others will request limitations in either time or the number of mourners staying with the body.

Larry Rogers of Roger-Atkins Funeral Home in Salem, IL, allows only part of the family to remain with the body overnight during the wake. However, Larry Irvin, owner of Irvin Funeral Homes in Odin and Centralia, IL, has no problem with keeping his funeral home open to all mourners for the duration of the wake and funeral.

“Gypsies pretty well operate their own funeral,” Irvin said.

They have committees to clean, provide food and beverages, transport flowers, and set and arrange flowers and chairs. When Irvin ran low on seating because of the huge attendance, a Gypsy committee hauled and returned the extra chairs from his other funeral home.

After one of Irvin’s lights was broken during a Gypsy wake, not only did the Gypsies call in an electrician to fix it, but they also paid to replace its companion so that the two lights would match properly.

“They were neat and clean and easy to deal with,” Irvin said.

In New York, a funeral director’s assistant, who wishes to be identified only as “Gizmo,” said that Gypsy wakes were “party time” with lots of alcohol, food, and loud music. Gypsy mourners cooked in hibachis even in the viewing room, where the smell of sausage, hamburgers, and pizza mingled with the scent of funeral flowers. Fruits, melon, cookies, and cake as well as bottles of beer, rum, and wine were also there.

Funeral directors were there as late as two in the morning to police the proceedings.

Another Gypsy tradition still observed is that of placing mementoes and other objects in the casket with the body. Irvin said that today such requests are also typical for non-Gypsy families. However, Gizmo reported that money and even credit cards were put into the folded hands of a deceased Gypsy each day of a wake. On the day of the funeral of a Gypsy king, over $5,000 in cash was in the casket with the royal body. The king was buried with the money, oranges, and American Express cards to ease his way in the afterlife.

Elaborate floral pieces are another special way that Gypsies honor their dead.

Paradise Flowers in Salem has been filling Gypsy orders for over two decades.
“We are delivering flowers to the funeral home all day until one in the morning every day of the wake. It’s a revolving door around here,” said owner Pam Deckard.

Even those Gypsies who have already ordered floral pieces will call and order something else when a new idea occurs to them.

“These are not just obligatory funeral pieces,” Deckard said.

She and her staff must work with all the patience, skill, and creativity of those building floats for the Tournament of Roses Parade because Gypsies want meaningful tributes where flowers are used for set work or floral sculptures that in some way represent the lifestyle of the deceased or a special memory shared by a mourner and the deceased.

Food is a favorite theme, food that the deceased especially liked or cooked well for a loved one, or maybe food that was the final meal that the deceased had eaten.

Deckard has had to think of ways to use flowers to depict spaghetti and meatballs; a steak, mushroom, and lobster tail dinner; a three-dimensional cooked turkey with drumsticks; a hotdog; a cherry pie with a piece missing; an oatmeal box; a Sweet’N Low packet; and a can of Diet Pepsi.

Habits are covered, too. Deckard has used Styrofoam cutouts and flowers to sculpt a Skoal can, broken cigarettes, and a bag of Redman chewing tobacco.

She has also created a broken heart, a crawling baby, and a full-sized table and chair.

For a three-dimensional floral house, she used carpet remnants for the floors, Contac paper for wallpaper, and the inscription “Without you our house is not a home.”

“Gypsies are really into inscriptions,” she said.

Another example is a floral telephone that carried the inscription “God called her home.”

The greatest pageantry is preserved for the funeral procession from the funeral home to the cemetery.

Irvin remembers one funeral that was attended by 900 Gypsies in his Odin funeral home—about 200 people fewer than the whole population of Odin. When the first car from this procession reached East Lawn Cemetery in Salem, six miles away, the last car was pulling out of the Irvin lot.

Gypsies are very much aware of the show they are presenting. They will drive their best vehicles, which have been washed and shined for the occasion. To Gypsies, the fact that so many people will stop to view the procession is a sign of respect for the deceased.

The elaborate processions are another tradition with a long Gypsy history.

When Gypsy queen Matilda Stanley died of cancer in Ohio in 1878, thousands of people came by special trains to view the procession, which consisted of 1,000 carriages. In fact, the procession was refused admission at the cemetery gates because it was so long. With so many spectators joining the mourners at the gravesite, the minister had to deliver his sermon from a wooden plank laid over the open grave.

In their earlier history, not all Gypsies were buried in consecrated ground. A Gypsy who died by accident was often buried on the site of the accident. The grave was marked only by a cross of stones. For whatever reasons, some Gypsies were given “surreptitious burials” with only thorn bushes or rose trees planted there to prevent the ghosts of the dead from emerging from their resting places.

A legendary cemetery in northwest Indiana was begun in the 1820s by a band of local Gypsies, who had settled, as much as the wanderers could settle, on a piece of land there. After some trouble with the local townspeople, the Gypsies were given two days to pack up their belongings and leave. Town officials refused to relent even though an influenza outbreak had made many Gypsies seriously ill.

When the deadline arrived and townspeople investigated, they found only a makeshift cemetery. The Gypsies were gone, but they had left their dead behind.

Prejudice gave way to practicality, and the local population made this cemetery their own. Although no Gypsies returned to visit these graves, odd occurrences have since been reported there, occurrences strange and persistent enough to attract an ongoing investigation by a group of ghost researchers known as Shadows of Chicago.

Campfires visible from the street appear, disappear, and reappear although no fire remains are ever found. Balls of blue light chase passing cars and then vanish. Photographs show mist, orbs, and black figures that cannot be reasonably explained.

Today, however, more reverential remembrance is afforded the resting places of Gypsy loved ones. Many clans make annual pilgrimages to the gravesites.

On Memorial Day each year, members of the Joles and Broadway clans from across the country gather in Salem to decorate graves in East Lawn Cemetery with brightly colored floral pieces.

While on a journey from Ohio to southern Missouri during the summer of 1890, “Gypsy Sam” and Betsy Joles and their family had camped within sight of East Lawn. The tidy serenity of the site impressed them so much that when their daughter died in Missouri during the winter, they returned to Salem with her remains to bury her in East Lawn. While they were in Salem, another daughter died and was buried next to her sister. These two small graves marked the beginning of the first of two Gypsy burial areas in East Lawn, which now attracts annual pilgrimages of Gypsy descendants.

Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, OH, is another site that attracts Gypsy pilgrimages. Gypsies began burying their family there in the 1800s when a local funeral home director extended credit to an indigent Gypsy. Although Gypsy burials in Spring Grove have declined in recent years, many Gypsies still visit the cemetery, especially on Memorial Day.

Gypsies were also buried in St. Joseph’s New Cemetery in Prince Hill, OH.

Paul Erwin, a retired University of Cincinnati history professor, studied Gypsy burial tradition in the Cincinnati area. He claimed that Cincinnati cemeteries were convenient for thousands of Gypsies whose annual north-south migrations routed them through that area each spring and fall.

Funerals and the yearly pilgrimages of remembrance are significant family occasions for Gypsies, who spend enormous sums of money on caskets, vaults, and flowers. A florist in Northside, OH, sold $35,000 worth of flowers to Gypsies for one Memorial Day. The owner of an area auto dealership sold 35 new Cadillacs to Gypsies, who paid cash.

Despite all the pomp and circumstance attending Gypsy traditions of death and remembrance, Buck Oulrey claims that Gypsies are “just ordinary people.”

Ordinary people with extraordinary ways of paying homage to their honored dead.