Last year the owners of the rundown graveyard defaulted on a $2.7 million loan. A bank became the unhappy proprietor; now it can hardly give the place away. An auction last month failed to attract even the minimum bid of $500,000. Says a bank trustee: “If someone doesn’t come forward, we’ll have no choice but to shut the cemetery down.” A hearing in bankruptcy court next week could finalize the bank’s request to abandon the burial ground. But speculators interested in picking up 64 prime acres shouldn’t get any wild ideas about condominiums. The Department of Consumer Affairs says a builder would first need permission from the next of kin of the dead persons-“all 80,000 of them.” And even then, remember the movie “Poltergeist”?
CORRECTION: we should not have referred to that cemetery as Jayne Mansfield’s “final resting place.” There is a marker honoring Mansfield at Hollywood Memorial, but her grave is in Pen Argyl, Pa., her hometown.
