I went cemetery hunting in Evergreen, La., in Avoyelles Parish, on Labor Day. Someone told me about a very old cemetery across from the Bayou Rouge Baptist Church. I am assuming the cemetery is part of the church.
The church itself is dated back to the 1800’s and a lot of the graves are from that time period.
Older cemeteries are my favorite to explore. I feel like they have stories to tell and I love to pay homage to the neglected and forgotten resting places. This cemetery is not very big but there are a lot of older and forgotten grave sites there. In addition, there are many that are sinking into the ground.
When I drove up, the first thing that I noticed was that there were a lot of birds and butterflies. There were many different varieties of birds and they played in the trees that hovered over the older graves. They were also very noisy. The butterflies would seem to appear out of no where and they randomly flew around some of the graves.
There was a section of woods behind the graveyard and I swear, I thought I kept hearing an animal or person walking back there. This made me very paranoid and feeling a bit vulnerable. I quickly realized that I am an awfully brave-or not so smart-person to be exploring a lot of the places that I do alone.
In any case, to make myself better, I convinced myself that it was actually the birds that I was hearing BUT I never turned my back, “just in case”
I was always have odd things happen in cemeteries. This wasn’t any different. After awhile of shooting, I started getting the feeling that it was time for me to go. I wasn’t really ready to leave when I first started feeling that though.
However, a large number of mosquitoes started swarming around me in a huge circle. The longer I stayed, the bigger the circle got. So, I decided it was time to leave.
As I was walking to my car, the mosquitoes disappeared…and all the birds stopped chirping and playing.
Maybe, I should take someone with me when I go to my next one?
I ll be processing all of my shots and posting them on my FB biz page when they are all done. If you don’t follow me on FB, you can find me here: https://www.facebook.com/tmattphoto