‘I had to go through hell’: When burial plans change, disposing of plots can be anything but peaceful

David Garcia has been struggling to sell a plot his mother owns at Memory Gardens Cemetery in Arlington Heights. He’s offering it at well below the usual price, but he’s encountering an unexpected problem.

He can’t find a buyer.

His story echoes a trend found across the Chicago area. Online marketplaces such as Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are flooded with listings for cemetery plots, because many cemeteries will not buy back interment rights, leaving land unused and empty even after plot owners have either moved away or decided to be cremated.

Garcia said his mother bought the plot at Memory Gardens in the late 1970s believing that she would be buried there. Not long after, she relocated to Kansas City with her family, leaving the plot behind.

After learning that the cemetery does not buy plots back, Garcia, who lives in Kansas City, went to great lengths to try to help sell his mother’s deed. The site is listed on Facebook Marketplace for $1,500, well below the typical price in privately owned cemeteries, which can run from the upper $3,000 range to as much as $8,000.

The cemetery is owned by Dignity Memorial, a Houston-based funeral, cremation and cemetery provider that owns about 1,900 locations across the country. Garcia said he tried to facilitate a plot transfer between Memory Gardens and another Dignity-owned cemetery in Kansas City, but the plot of land he was offered was a “junky one by a tool shed.”

“I had to go through hell,” he said. “New plots had to be purchased, and it wasn’t even worth dealing with.”

Alicia Wodtkey, an Indiana resident who has never lived in Illinois, has been trying since August to sell four unused cemetery plots that have been in her family for nearly 100 years. Wodtkey’s great grandparents, who bought the sites at Dignity-owned Irving Park Cemetery in the 1930s, ended up moving to Wisconsin and leaving them unused. The plots have moved down from generation to generation, and she’s offering them for $1,400 each.

“Everybody’s asking, ‘Are these still available,’ but nobody wants them,” she said..

The no-buyback policy spans the private and public sectors of the cemetery industry. Many municipally owned cemeteries, such as those in Burlington, Elgin and South Elgin, also do not buy back interment rights.

James Orr, cemetery manager at Lakewood Memorial Park, a privately owned operation in Elgin, said that cemeteries do not have obligations to buy back interment rights unless it is in the cemetery’s “best interest.” Because many already have large inventories, buying back unused plots rarely meets that standard.

Howard Paterson, general manager at Memory Gardens, said most of Dignity’s locations in the Chicago area do not buy back interment rights, but Memory Gardens “does their best” to help families resell them.

Julie Vicory, a Tennessee resident who grew up in Des Plaines, has two adjoining plots at Memory Gardens listed for $8,000 on Facebook Marketplace. Her listing of the dual plots has been sitting on her profile for about five years.

Both plots were bought in 1963 by Vicory’s parents, who believed that they would be buried at the cemetery alongside other family members. Years later, they retired to northern Wisconsin, and when they passed away, their wishes were to be cremated, leaving both plots unused. Though she said Memory Gardens helped her with finding the market value for the plots, she has had little to no traction from potential buyers.

Although it’s rare, some cemeteries do buy plots back. Peggy Arquilla, utility billing coordinator at the village-owned Huntley Cemetery, said people can sell their plots back to the village for what they paid, minus a $25 transfer fee. Or they can sell them to an independent buyer, also with a $25 transfer fee to the village to draw up a new deed.

In the three years she has been working at the cemetery, she has only seen this happen twice, once to the village and once personally.

The pricing of plots varies greatly between the public and private sectors.

At Memory Gardens, a plot ranges between $3,495 to $7,995, with the price increasing or decreasing depending on the location of the site within the park. This pricing guide is reflective of most Dignity-owned cemeteries in the Chicago area, with prices starting in the lower to mid-$3,000 range and increasing to about $6,000 to even $8,000.

According to 2024 data from the National Funeral Directors Association, 66% of Baby Boomers prefer cremation over burial. This sentiment is something that Orr also echoed.

“The problem with selling graves right now is nobody wants them. Everybody wants to be cremated,” said Orr, who has been in the cemetery business for more than 60 years.

Jeffrey Kaufman, of Northbrook, bought four plots in 1997 at the Dignity-owned Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie. But now he and his wife have decided to be cremated. He only started advertising the plots on Facebook Marketplace a couple of weeks ago but has been looking for a buyer for about three to four years.

Still, he remains optimistic.

“It’s very difficult to sell a plot,” he said. “We’re just going to hold on to them and see what we can do.”