Woodlawn Cemetery: Where the Rich and Famous Spend Eternity

Duke Ellington, Herman Melville and other luminaries have tombs with a view in this famous New York City graveyard, located on 400 leafy acres of the Bronx

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New York City’s Woodlawn Cemetery is a mini-city of neighborhoods of the dead; The city’s great entrepreneurs are buried near each other, and the plots of jazz greats all share an avenue. Herman Melville’s tombstone commands its own graveyard of manuscripts left by failed writers. But the spookiest graves of Woodlawn are the ones whose names we don’t know, but have spectacular stories to tell. Here’s our favorite inscription:

Lost life by stab in falling on
ink eraser, evading six young
women trying to give him
birthday kisses in office
Metropolitan Life Building