Get a new view of a destination from a cemetery

When planning a vacation, most people put museums or scenic landmarks on their itineraries, perhaps adding a day at a beach or a walk in the woods.

Some go to the cemetery.

"I just find you learn so much of the history of the city when you visit a cemetery," says Diane Lanigan of Arlington Heights. If you visit a historic home, such as Milwaukee's Pabst Mansion, then go to the local cemetery, you might find the homeowner's ornate tomb there. "It just follows through with the story," she says.

Diane and fellow cemetery devotee Henry Kuehn, both volunteers at Chicago's Graceland Cemetery, don't consider their interest morbid.

Cemeteries are "fundamentally beautiful places, like walking into an arboretum," Kuehn says. "Soon you are swept up in the history of the place."

Kuehn particularly enjoys visiting cemeteries from the late 19th and early 20th centuries when landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmsted and his followers where designing them. He's visited many in the Midwest, including one in Detroit where auto barons are buried along with civil rights idol Rosa Parks.

One of Lanigan's favorites, historic Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Mass., inspired the designs of many other cemeteries, especially in the Midwest. Among her favorites is Lake View in Cleveland, noted for its Wade Chapel with interior designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Whether you take your vacation in the Midwest, across the country or across the ocean, there are historic cemeteries and notable tombs to be discovered.

Here's a sampling of a few I have enjoyed.

Where's Jim?

The man in the kilt looked out of place in fashionable Paris, but his question seemed even more surprising. The brawny Scotsman (dressed to support his favorite sports team playing in the city) strode up to me and asked: "Do you know where I can find Jim Morrison?"

Luckily, I did. I had just visited the grave of the American rock star and could point the way down the stone path in Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Morrison's whereabouts come up often here, not just from men in skirts, but from fans across the globe. The tomb of the frontman for The Doors ranks among the most visited gravesites in what has become a major tourist attraction in the French capital.

Founded by Napoleon in 1804, Pere Lachaise is the largest cemetery in Paris, covering more than 105 acres on the east side of the city. The hilly land once belonged to Jesuits who came here on retreat, including Father Francois de la Chaise, confessor of Louis XIV and the cemetery's namesake. Built on wooded hills where stone paths wind below trees and around shrubs and flowerbeds, Pere Lachaise is part park, part burial ground. Parisians come to stroll. Visitors search for tombs.

More than 1.5 million people a year wander this maze of monuments and mausoleums. Maps in hand, they seek the final resting spots of the famous, including actress Sarah Bernhardt, painters Camille Pissarro and Georges-Pierre Seurat, French intellectual Marcel Proust, lovers Heloise and Abelard, writers and companions Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and composer Frederic Chopin (his body is here, but his heart is buried in Warsaw).

The tomb of novelist, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde stands out among the flat grave markers and telephone booth-size monuments. Marked by a modernist sculpture of a naked male angel, the tomb is covered with lip prints in bright shades of lipstick. The statue's genitals have long since disappeared.

Wilde's flamboyant lifestyle and sexual habits shocked society in Victorian England and landed him in prison on charges of indecency. He later moved to Paris where he lived in a rundown hotel before he died at age 46 of meningitis (though some claim it was syphilis).

A more traditional marker covers the tomb of French chanteuse Edith Piaf, whose life is portrayed in the biographical film "La Vie En Rose" released last summer. Born Edith Giovanna Gassion, she took the name Piaf, a French colloquialism for her nickname "Sparrow." The diminutive cabaret singer's torch songs touched the hearts of Parisians from the 1930s until her death of liver cancer in 1963 at age 47. More than 40,000 people attended her burial at Pere Lachaise and flowers still cover her black marble grave marker.

Visitors to the tomb of Jim Morrison leave more than flowers behind. Vandalism, litter and graffiti, some pointing the way to the difficult-to-find grave, disturbed the families whose loved ones lie nearby. Now cemetery workers often patrol the site. Liquor bottles, lighters and drug paraphernalia mix with bouquets piled atop the grave. A bust of the psychedelic rock star, with leonine mane, that stood on the tombstone has been removed.

Morrison earned a degree in cinematography from UCLA and joined in the drug culture in Southern California, writing poetry and lyrics before forming The Doors. "Light My Fire" hit the No. 1 spot on the music charts in 1967, the "Summer of Love."

In 1971 Morrison moved to Paris and died a few months later in his bathtub. He was 27. Because no foul play was suspected, an autopsy wasn't performed and mystery continues to surround his death. Among the speculations: heart failure, suicide, heroin mixed with alcohol, assassination by the CIA and a drug overdose in a popular nightclub where he died while sitting on a toilet like Elvis. Some even speculate he staged his death and is living in India.

No matter; fans still flock to his grave. A quote attributed to Morrison seems prophetic: "I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps 'Oh look at that!' Then -- whoosh, and I'm gone …and they'll never see anything like it ever again, and they won't be able to forget me -- ever."

Beer baron burials

In the late 1800s Milwaukee was a city of cramped neighborhoods and dirty streets with little green space to offer respite from the fetid air and heat of summer. To escape, families did what some Milwaukee visitors do now -- head to the cemetery.

The first burial took place at Forest Home Cemetery in 1850, about four years after Milwaukee was founded. The cemetery's wooded, rolling hills became a quasi-public park before the city's park system came into being. On Sundays, as many as 8,000 people gathered there, some coming by horse-car service on what was then a long trip from town. Though picnicking was forbidden, most families smuggled in hampers of food for their day in the country.

Today Milwaukee's oldest cemetery covers 200 acres on its southwest side and opens its arms to visitors with a museum and maps for self-guided tours of the grounds and monuments. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, its open landscape design was inspired by Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts. Intended as a rural retreat or garden, it contains a manmade lake, waterfall, more than 300 varieties of trees, a chapel of Lake Superior brownstone, 11½ miles of roads and the tombs of 85,000 people.

At its most famous spot, Beer Baron Corner, the plots of brewers Pabst, Blatz, Schlitz and Uihlein overlook one another. The largest monument in Forest Home, the Blatz Mausoleum, contains more than 500 tons of granite. Its marble interior still has plenty of space for family members.

Along with beer, sausages are a legacy of the city's German heritage. Milwaukee's most famous wurstmacher, Fred Usinger, is buried at Forest Home. Emigrating from Germany in 1881 with his Old World sausage recipes, he founded a family business that still thrives on Milwaukee's Old World Third Street.

But it isn't just beer and brats that make Milwaukee famous. At Forest Home, bikers make a beeline for the grave of William A. Davidson, often leaving flowers behind. Davidson, his two brothers and William Harley tinkered with motorcycles in a woodshed at the Davidson home, founding the Harley-Davidson Co. headquartered in Milwaukee today.

Two bright lights of Broadway now lay at rest side by side in Forest Home. Milwaukee native Alfred Lunt and his British wife Lynn Fontane first starred together in New York in 1924 and went on to become theatrical royalty. For more than four decades they performed, achieving international stardom before retiring to their Wisconsin estate Ten Chimneys.

Aviation pioneer Gen. William Mitchell chose to be buried here in his hometown rather than Arlington National Cemetery, where many war heroes are entombed. Billy Mitchell developed the first system of air routes across the U.S. and served admirably in World War I. However, his outspoken manner of insisting that an air force was critical to our military might got him in trouble. His superiors had him court-martialed for bad-mouthing their unpreparedness.

The story of the "Father of the U.S. Air Force" is portrayed in the 1955 film "The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell," directed by Otto Preminger and starring Gary Cooper.

After his death, Congress awarded Mitchell the Congressional Gold Medal. Milwaukee's International Airport is named for him.

Eerie New Orleans

Cemeteries in New Orleans often are called Cities of the Dead because the above-ground family tombs carefully arranged along cemetery walkways resemble miniature homes lining neighborhood streets. The tombs might better be called condos, because each holds the remains of several people.

New Orleans sits below sea level, so the water table is too high to dig a grave. Instead, bodies are interred in tombs above ground. Historically, unembalmed bodies in biodegradable caskets were placed in the tomb, which was sealed for a minimum of one year and one day. The intense heat inside the tomb, which one can easily imagine on a hot summer day in New Orleans, caused the body to disintegrate in a kind of natural cremation.

Before the next burial, cemetery caretakers opened the vault and used a 10-foot pole to push the human remains to the back of the tomb where a passage opened to a pit, or caveau. The process was then repeated with the next dearly departed. If a death occurred before a year and a day, the family rented a vault in a wall at the back of the cemetery.

Burial practices have changed today. Special formulas are used for embalming and tombs are sealed for two years before they are opened and reused. Also, more families choose cremation, so only ashes are interred.

In St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 on the edge of the Vieux Carre, or French Quarter, 41 people share the tomb of New Orleans' most famous Voodoo Queen. In the 19th century, Marie Laveau performed Voodoo ceremonies in nearby Congo Square, now renamed Louis Armstrong Park.

Her final resting place in the Glapion family tomb, named for Laveau's second husband, often is adorned with candles, flowers and coins. For luck, some visitors scratch a trio of crosses, or X's, on the side of the whitewashed monument.

St. Louis No. 1, founded in 1789, is the city's oldest cemetery. A scene from the film "Easy Rider" was shot there, but it is Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 that is the movie star. It served as the setting for many films and scenes in novels, especially the vampire tomes of Anne Rice.

Located in the Garden District, across from Commander's Palace Restaurant, Lafayette No. 1 was established in 1833 on a former plantation. Its elaborate tombs, life like sculptures and intriguing inscriptions earn it a stop on Gray Line sightseeing tours. Along with war veterans, some dating back to the Confederacy, it contains the remains of hundreds who died in yellow fever and cholera epidemics in the mid-1800s. At times, so many died so quickly that desperate families left bodies of their loved ones at the cemetery gate.

Both St. Louis No. 1 and Lafayette No. 1 are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Fortunately, these outdoor museums survived Hurricane Katrina, though water lines appear on some tombs showing the depth of the flood.

If you go

Cemeteries

Go: To see the final resting place of the famous and infamous

No: If cemeteries give you the willies

Need to know: Search cemeteries by location, name of deceased or claim to fame at www.findagrave.com

Pere Lachaise: Boulevard Menilmontant, 75020 Paris, France. Near the Pere Lachaise and Gambetta Metro stops, the cemetery has five entrances. Maps of the gravesites can be obtained nearby from vendors and at florists and news kiosks. For more information, visit www.pariscemeteries.com/pagecems/pere.html; for a virtual tour, see www.pere-lachaise.com.

Forest Home: 2405 W. Forest Home Ave., Milwaukee, Wis., (414) 645-2632, www.foresthomecemetery.com. Start your visit at the Hall of History, a mausoleum, community education center and museum with displays devoted to famous Milwaukee residents buried here.

St. Louis No. 1 and Lafayette No. 1: Guided tours of St. Louis No. 1, 501 Basin St., and Lafayette No. 1, 1400 Washington Ave., New Orleans, La., are offered on various Gray Line tours ((800) 535-7786, www.graylineneworleans.com) and by street hawkers. Save Our Cemeteries Inc., which is devoted to preserving cemeteries, also offers guided tours ((888) 721-7493, www.saveourcemeteries.org).

Other notable burial spots and those who occupy them:

Lake View, Cleveland, Ohio: Eliot Ness, John D. Rockefeller, James A. Garfield

Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, Calif.: Stan Laurel, Liberace, Bette Davis, Ricky Nelson

La Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Eva Peron

Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown, N.Y.: Washington Irving, Andrew Carnegie, Elizabeth Arden, Walter Chrysler, Leona Helmsley

Cimetiere du Montparnasse, Paris, France: Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Seberg

Kensico, Valhalla, N.Y.: Lou Gehrig, Tommy Dorsey, Ayn Rand

Mount Moriah, Deadwood, S.D.: Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane

Ferncliff, Hartsdale, N.Y.: Judy Garland, Malcolm X, Joan Crawford, Aaliyah

Hillside Memorial Park, Culver City, Calif.: Al Jolson, Jack Benny, Milton Berle

Novo-Devichy, Moscow, Russia: Nikita Khrushchev, Anton Chekov

Crown Hill, Indianapolis, Ind.: John Dillinger, Benjamin Harrison, James Whitcomb Riley

Highgate, London, England: Karl Marx, George Eliot

Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, Calif.: Frank Zappa, Natalie Wood, Marilyn Monroe

Gate of Heaven, Hawthorne, N.Y.: Babe Ruth, James Cagney

Woodlawn, Detroit, Mich.: Edsel Ford, Rosa Parks, John Dodge

Mount Auburn, Cambridge, Mass.: Mary Baker Eddy, Winslow Homer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

-- Kathy Rodeghier