Latest / The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales / The Boiled Heart | Museo Panteón de San Fernando, Mexico City, Mexico

Transcript

The Boiled Heart | Museo Panteón de San Fernando, Mexico City, Mexico · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grid morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering the Museo Batonante San Fernando, located in Mexico City, Mexico.
0:26
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:29
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:31
Kristin: So grab your favorite mug and cozy up.
0:33
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:36
Kristin: It's the time of year when on the 1st and 2nd of November, Mexico will welcome its dead home.
0:41
Kristin: It's Tietomos Muertos, the day of the dead, all across Mexico and in Mexican communities far beyond its borders.
0:49
Kristin: Families are gathering marigolds by the armful.
0:52
Kristin: They're clearing space on tables and shelves to build altars for the ones they've lost, setting out photographs, lighting candles, and laying out the food and drinks their loved ones adored in life.
1:03
Kristin: They'll walk to the local cemetery to scrub the headstones clean and drape the graves in flowers.
1:08
Kristin: And for two nights, it's believed the veil grows thin, and the dead find their way back to the people who remember them.
1:14
Kristin: For those of us who love graveyards, there may be no more beautiful tradition on earth.
1:18
Kristin: So far at The Mons Muertos special, we're slipping through the gate of one of the oldest cemeteries in Mexico, the cinewalk with its famous dead, and with the ones the world forgot.
1:29
Kristin: In the old heart of Mexico City, a short walk from the Hildalgo Metro station, there's a small, quiet plaza.
1:35
Kristin: On one side rises a weathered church of red volcanic stone, and beside it, hidden behind a wall, is a garden of the dead.
1:43
Kristin: It's one of the oldest cemeteries in Mexico City still standing.
1:46
Kristin: For a few decades in the 19th century, it was the most exclusive place in all of Mexico to be laid to rest.
1:52
Kristin: Presidents sleep here, generals who fought one another to the death sleep here, just steps apart.
1:58
Kristin: Liberals and conservatives who couldn't bear to share a room in life now share the same ground and same silence.
2:03
Kristin: Its gates closed to burials in 1871, and then the following summer they creaked open one last time for the very man who had ordered them shut.
2:13
Kristin: But before we pass through the gate, let's linger a moment on the celebration itself.
2:17
Kristin: Lietomos Muertos was born when two worlds met.
2:21
Kristin: Long before the Spanish arrived, the people of Mesoamerica honored their dead.
2:25
Kristin: The Aztecs dedicated a festival to Missitecaciwaddle, the lady of the dead, queen of the underworld.
2:32
Kristin: After the conquest, those ancient rites wove themselves into the Catholic feast of All Saints Day on November 1st, and Alt Souls Day on November 2nd, until then two became something entirely their own.
2:44
Kristin: In the days leading up to the 1st of November, the dead are said to arrive in waves, each on their own night.
2:50
Kristin: There's no single calendar followed everywhere in Mexico, and some of these dates are fairly recent additions to the tradition.
2:57
Kristin: But one of the most widely shared versions goes like this.
3:00
Kristin: On the night of October 27, the beloved animals come home first.
3:04
Kristin: The dogs, the cats, and every faithful companion who is crossed over.
3:08
Kristin: Families set out small altars with a photograph, a candle, a bowl of water, and their favorite food or treats.
3:15
Kristin: The little souls are said to arrive after dark and stay until the early hours of the 28th, before padding back to the land of the dead.
3:22
Kristin: And if you're listening to this, after the 27th, they still have till November 2nd.
3:28
Kristin: So if there's a furry friend you're missing, maybe leave a candle lit for them.
3:33
Kristin: October 28th is set aside for those who've died suddenly or violently, in accidents or at the hands of others.
3:39
Kristin: Then on the 1st of November come the children who've died, the angelitos, the little angels.
3:45
Kristin: The second belongs to the grown-ups.
3:47
Kristin: On altars, toys and sweets wait for the little ones on the first.
3:51
Kristin: Then on the second, they're gently replaced with cigarettes and mezzacel for the adults coming home.
3:56
Kristin: At the heart of it all is the ofrenda, the offering, an altar crowded with photographs of faces long gone, candles glowing to light their way, the sweet smoky drift of cobal incense, loaves of bread, sugar skulls, and plates of food they loved.
4:12
Kristin: And everywhere, Sun Pacicho, the Mexican miracle, the flower of the dead, its blazing orange petals and heavy scent are believed to guide the souls home through the dark.
4:22
Kristin: The family scattered trails of petals to lead them to the door.
4:25
Kristin: In 2008, the UNESCO added the Mos Muetos to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
4:33
Kristin: The world, in other words, agreed.
4:35
Kristin: This way of loving the dead is a treasure.
4:38
Kristin: The holiday's most famous face, though, belongs to a lady with no face at all.
4:42
Kristin: La Katrina is an elegant skeleton in her fine gown and her wide-feathered hat.
4:47
Kristin: She began as a print by the Mexican engraver Jose Guadalupe Posada, made between 1910 and 1913.
4:54
Kristin: He called her La Caravera Garbancera, and she was a sly joke at the expense of people who put on European airs and turned their backs on their own roots.
5:03
Kristin: In Posada's print, she was nothing but a grinning skull and a fancy hat.
5:07
Kristin: A line of an attributed Posada captures the spirit of her.
5:11
Kristin: Death is democratic, because in the end, fair or dark, rich or poor, everyone ends up a skeleton.
5:18
Kristin: Then in 1947, the muralist Diego Riviera painted her to his great mural.
5:23
Kristin: Dream of a Sunday afternoon in the Almida Central.
5:26
Kristin: He gave her a body in a flowing gown, wrapped a feathered serpent around her shoulders, and placed her at the very center, arm in arm, with Posat himself.
5:35
Kristin: Riviera, though, gave her a new name, La Katrina, the fine lady.
5:39
Kristin: The name stuck, and she's been strolling through Mexico's imagination ever since.
5:43
Kristin: And the Almeda Central, the park that gave the mural its name, lies just a few blocks from the cemetery we're about to enter.
5:50
Kristin: Even Mexico City's modern celebration, though, has a curious ghost story of its own.
5:55
Kristin: The 2015 James Bond film Spectre opened with 007 chasing a villain through a dazzling Day of the Dead Parade in Zocalo, the city's great main square.
6:04
Kristin: There was just one problem.
6:06
Kristin: No such parade existed.
6:08
Kristin: When visitors arrived looking for it, the city summoned it into being.
6:12
Kristin: On October 29, 2016, Mexico City held its very first Day of the Dead Parade, a tradition conjured quite literally out of fiction.
6:22
Kristin: But for most families, Dietos Muertos isn't a spectacle.
6:26
Kristin: It's a homecoming.
6:27
Kristin: It's a table set for someone who isn't there, and a candle left burning just in case.
6:33
Kristin: And there are few better places to feel that than a 19th-century cemetery crowded with the dead and their stories.
6:39
Kristin: For centuries under Spanish rule, the people of New Spain longed to be buried within their churches.
6:44
Kristin: It was believed to be the surest way to rise again at the last judgment.
6:48
Kristin: But even in death, rank mattered.
6:50
Kristin: The wealthy, the church's benefactors, and the well-born were laid closest to the main altar nearest to God.
6:56
Kristin: The less money you had, the further from the altar you were carried, until the poorest rested near its doors.
7:02
Kristin: The dead were tuck behind the walls and beneath the floors, barely covered with wooden boards.
7:07
Kristin: Lying almost at the surface, worshippers knelt to pray directly above them, breathing in the heavy, Swedish air of the dead.
7:14
Kristin: At the end of the 18th century, the Archbishop of Mexico declared that this had to end.
7:19
Kristin: The dead, he said, belonged to the cemeteries on high, well-ventilated ground, far from the homes of the living.
7:25
Kristin: Slowly, the friars stopped burying the dead within the church and began to lay them in the atrium before its doors.
7:32
Kristin: For more than half a century, that atrium served as a burial ground.
7:35
Kristin: And here is one of the loneliest details in this whole story.
7:39
Kristin: Its tombstones bore no names and no dates.
7:43
Kristin: The people beneath them were simply anonymous, their stories sealed away with them.
7:47
Kristin: At first, only the friars, the church benefactors, and the wealthy had the right to rest here.
7:52
Kristin: Around 1832, work began on the cemetery that stands today, holding around 600 graves, and for members of the community with the highest rank and wealth.
8:02
Kristin: As the most expensive cemetery in this city, it paid for its own construction in no time at all.
8:07
Kristin: Then the dead came knocking and forced its gates wide open.
8:11
Kristin: In 1833, cholera swept through the city.
8:14
Kristin: Within three months, it killed about every one in twenty people.
8:18
Kristin: The government ordered every private cemetery thrown open to the public, and San Fernando, once reserved for the powerful, became a public cemetery.
8:26
Kristin: Yet the cholera dead themselves were said to be barred from its walls, likely out of fear that their bodies would spread sickness.
8:32
Kristin: In 2021, archaeologists found 17 burials just outside those walls, beneath the sidewalk, and some may have been victims from these very same epidemics.
8:42
Kristin: Over the next two decades, its reputation grew.
8:45
Kristin: It was a small, clean, and orderly, well-kept little garden of the dead, and the city's upper class families chose it as the proper place to bury their own.
8:54
Kristin: Prices climbed.
8:55
Kristin: Before long, only the richest and most powerful families in Mexico could afford a place here.
9:00
Kristin: Its golden age ran from 1850 when another cholera epidemic filled its graves to 1870.
9:06
Kristin: In those same years, Mexico tore itself apart.
9:09
Kristin: Liberals fought conservatives over the power of the church in what became known as the Reform War.
9:14
Kristin: On July 31, in 1859, the liberal government of Bonito Juarez issued one of the Reform Laws, the Secularation of Cemeteries.
9:23
Kristin: Every cemetery owned by the clergy now belonged to the state.
9:26
Kristin: The law couldn't be enforced, though, in the capital until the war ended, and Warez government entered the city.
9:32
Kristin: From then on, the city council watched over San Fernando.
9:36
Kristin: And because so many of the nation's great figures were already sleeping within, the government declared it the panthenon of illustrious men, the first cemetery of its kind in Mexico City.
9:46
Kristin: San Fernando, though, was only about half full when Warez ordered that cemeteries within the city be closed, and new ones be built beyond them.
9:53
Kristin: Soon San Fernando would take no more of the dead.
9:56
Kristin: But there was still room for one more.
9:58
Kristin: The man who had signed that decree had already laid his wife within.
10:02
Kristin: Margarita Maza died in January of 1871.
10:05
Kristin: A year and a half later, Juarez was buried beside her.
10:08
Kristin: Benito Juarez was born as Apotec man in the mountains of Owaka.
10:12
Kristin: He was orphaned at just three and spent his boyhood hurting sheep.
10:15
Kristin: Until he was twelve, he spoke almost no Spanish.
10:18
Kristin: Then he walked alone to the city of Owaka with nothing, learned to read and write, and became a lawyer, then a governor of his home state.
10:26
Kristin: His politics, though, made him enemies.
10:28
Kristin: He was arrested and sent into exile, and for a time he rolled cigars in New Orleans to survive.
10:33
Kristin: When he came home, he led the fight to break the church's grip from Mexican life.
10:38
Kristin: His reform laws separated church and state, and one of them took the cemeteries out of the hands of the clergy, which is how San Fernando passed from the friars to the government.
10:47
Kristin: Then came the French.
10:48
Kristin: Napoleon III installed an Austrian Archduke Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico.
10:53
Kristin: Juarez, though, refused to surrender.
10:56
Kristin: He kept his government alive from a carriage, retreating all the way to the northern border, to a town that now bears his name, Cedud de Juarez.
11:03
Kristin: When the French withdrew and Maximilian was captured, the Crown Heads of Europe begged for the emperor's life, but Juarez refused.
11:11
Kristin: In 1867, Maximilian was executed by a firing squad.
11:15
Kristin: Juarez had won.
11:17
Kristin: He was the first indigenous president in the Americas, and he would hold that office until his death.
11:22
Kristin: In 1871, his beloved wife then Margarita Maza died, or as later to rest here at San Fernando, together with the remains of their small children who had gone before her.
11:33
Kristin: On March 28th, in 1872, the day before his 66th birthday, Warz fell ill.
11:39
Kristin: His doctor, Ignatio Avarado, diagnosed him with angia, a disease of the heart.
11:44
Kristin: For a while he seemed to recover, but on July 18th, attacks returned.
11:48
Kristin: Crushing pain in his chest and a desperate struggle to breathe.
11:51
Kristin: Alvarado later admitted that against his own wishes, he turned to a remedy he himself called very cruel but effective.
11:58
Kristin: He poured boiling water over the president's heart.
12:01
Kristin: Ruiz jolted upright from the pain.
12:03
Kristin: At about half past eleven that night, Benito Ruaz died in his room at the National Palace.
12:08
Kristin: He remains the only Mexican president to die there.
12:11
Kristin: His body was embalmed by doctors and placed in the palace's Hall of Ambassadors.
12:15
Kristin: On the cloudy morning of July 23rd, his funeral procession wound its way from the palace to San Fernando, through the streets packed with thousands of mourners.
12:24
Kristin: They filled the sidewalks, crowded the balconies, and lined the rooftops while straining for one final last glimpse.
12:30
Kristin: The cemetery wore his head clothes, was now open one final time just for him.
12:35
Kristin: He'd be the last soul ever buried at San Fernando.
12:39
Kristin: His tomb is the grandest in the cemetery, a Greek-style temple, and inside it waits one of the most hauntingly tender sculptures I know of.
12:46
Kristin: It was carved from a single enormous block of Puerera marble brought all the way from Italy by the brothers Juan and Manuel Istles.
12:54
Kristin: A life-sized woman sits there representing the nation, the Patria.
12:58
Kristin: Engradled in her lap lies the body of Warz just as he died.
13:02
Kristin: She holds him like a grieving mother.
13:04
Kristin: Many of the men who honored him were Freemasons, and over the years they filled the tomb with Masonic symbols, but now all of them are gone.
13:12
Kristin: The Mausoleum was officially inaugurated on July 18, 1880, eight years to the day after his death, and presiding over the ceremony was President Porfino Diaz, the very general who in War's final year had risen in rebellion against him.
13:27
Kristin: Graveyards have a funny way of collecting ironies just like that.
13:31
Kristin: The fame in the end, though, didn't protect him.
13:33
Kristin: When the nation's devotion drifted toward grander monuments, his tomb was left to weather.
13:38
Kristin: A newspaper article in 2002 described the president's remains resting among trash and plunder.
13:44
Kristin: The tombs of San Fernando inhabited by stray cats curled up among the dead.
13:49
Kristin: That same year, someone snapped a toe off the marble Warres and then a finger from his hand.
13:54
Kristin: But Benito Juarez is not the only president to rest here, nor was he the only one who had made enemies.
14:00
Kristin: Miguel Miraman was a dashing conservative general and became president at just 27, ruling for Mexico City while Juarez's government held out in Veracruz.
14:10
Kristin: Later he fought for Emperor Maximilian.
14:12
Kristin: When the Empire fell and he was captured at Quitaro along with Maximilian and another conservative general, Tomás Mejía.
14:20
Kristin: On June 19, in 1867, all three were led to the Hillobells, the Cierro de las Capanas, and executed by a firing squad.
14:28
Kristin: After the executions during the embalming, the three men's hearts were removed and sealed in glass jars of alcohol.
14:34
Kristin: Miramon's heart was claimed by his widow, Conception Lombardo, who meant to carry it with her to Europe.
14:40
Kristin: Some accounts say she kept it in a reliquary in her bedroom, so that his heart at least could never leave her.
14:46
Kristin: Miramon's body was buried here at San Fernando.
14:49
Kristin: Then in 1872, Warez arrived.
14:52
Kristin: According to the story, Miramon's family moved at once to take him away, insisting he couldn't spend eternity in the same cemetery as the man who had defeated him.
15:01
Kristin: His remains were exhumed and carried to the Cathedral of Pebla.
15:05
Kristin: His tomb at San Fernando, though, still stands.
15:07
Kristin: It's empty, a grave holding nothing but a grudge.
15:10
Kristin: Tomas Mojia, though, stayed, and of all the stories in this cemetery, his is the one that breaks my heart.
15:17
Kristin: Mejia was an indigenous general from the Sierra Gorda of Caratino.
15:22
Kristin: His wife, Agostino Castro, was just 20 years old when he was condemned.
15:26
Kristin: On the morning of the execution, witnesses say a young woman with a baby in her arms tried to climb under the cart carrying her husband to his death.
15:34
Kristin: The guards tore her away.
15:36
Kristin: She fell beneath a wheel and was left kneeling in the road, her face bleeding, screaming after him.
15:42
Kristin: Before he died, she had begged him to escape.
15:45
Kristin: A sympathetic officer had offered to smuggle him out of the city.
15:49
Kristin: Mihia, though, refused to abandon his men who would die beside him.
15:53
Kristin: Decades later, in an interview, Augustina remembered his words.
15:57
Kristin: I am poor but honorable.
15:59
Kristin: When I die, I have nothing to leave you but my corpse, and to my children an unstained name.
16:05
Kristin: His heart, too, was sealed in a jar of alcohol.
16:08
Kristin: It was kept at one of the homes of the doctors, perhaps in hopes that his widow would pay for it.
16:13
Kristin: Augustina claimed her husband's body.
16:15
Kristin: With almost no money, she hired a carriage for the corpse and wrote beside it on a transport card all the long way to Mexico City.
16:23
Kristin: There she buried him at San Fernando and poured nearly everything she had left into the modest monument that still marks his grain.
16:30
Kristin: Then came the poverty.
16:31
Kristin: She upon what little she owned.
16:33
Kristin: She took in sewing, crochet, and embroidery for a fraction of their worth.
16:37
Kristin: Working through the nights by the flicker of an oil lamp, until her eyesight nearly failed her.
16:42
Kristin: One of her children died as a baby.
16:45
Kristin: Her daughter was so disabled she could barely walk or use her arms.
16:49
Kristin: Years later, a carriage full of well-dressed gentlemen rolled into the poor neighborhood where she lived.
16:54
Kristin: In a hut of mud and sticks, an older man asked for the widow of General Tomas Mejia.
16:59
Kristin: When she said it was her, he told her the president of the Republic was waiting outside.
17:04
Kristin: It was Porfino Diaz, Augustina Stun, offered him the only seat she had, a wooden wine crate.
17:11
Kristin: Diaz arranged for her son's education and a small pension.
17:14
Kristin: Still, in 1891, a reporter found her struggling to survive, and yet, as one reporter wrote, there was never a shortage of flowers or reefs on the grave of the general shot on the Hill of Bells.
17:25
Kristin: The dead man was remembered, the living woman who loved him was not.
17:30
Kristin: San Fernando kept both sides of that war, though, within the same walls lie the liberals who fought against them, and one of it, it turns out, wasn't in his coffin at all.
17:39
Kristin: On December 22nd, 1869, the journalist Francisco Zarco died at the age of 40.
17:46
Kristin: He had been one of the greatest voices of the liberal cause, a fierce champion of the free press, and the editor of one of the great liberal newspapers of his day.
17:55
Kristin: Years in a filthy prison under conservatives had ruined his health, and he came home bent, frail, and leaning on a cane.
18:02
Kristin: He died in the same building where his beloved newspaper was printed.
18:06
Kristin: His funeral, though, was magnificent.
18:08
Kristin: School children led the procession, the Masonic lodges followed.
18:12
Kristin: The printers of his newspaper carried his coffin on their own shoulders, and some thousand mourners walked behind them, among them cabinet ministers and the finest poets of the day.
18:22
Kristin: As San Fernando, eulogist after eulogist, praised the man in the box.
18:27
Kristin: Then his coffin was slid into a niche.
18:29
Kristin: There was just one problem.
18:31
Kristin: Francisco Zarko wasn't in it.
18:33
Kristin: The coffin only held stones.
18:35
Kristin: One of Zarko's dearest friends, a congressman, had asked the young widow for the body so he could have it embalmed as a tribute.
18:42
Kristin: When the work was done, the embalmed Zarko was delivered to his friend's home, dressed in a frock coat with a cap on his head.
18:49
Kristin: The friend sat him down at the table, placed a pen in his hand, and posed him as if he were about to write.
18:54
Kristin: And there Zarko stayed for months.
18:57
Kristin: I counts say somewhere between six and eight.
18:59
Kristin: Some of Zarko's nephews, still alive in the middle of the 20th century, swore they had seen it with their own eyes.
19:05
Kristin: The dead journalist at his table, pen in hand, forever about to write.
19:10
Kristin: Finally, in August of 1870, his old newspaper published a tiny notice.
19:15
Kristin: The day before it said at six in the evening, accompanied by only a few friends in the greatest of silence, the body of the former editor had been buried at San Fernando.
19:24
Kristin: The remains it explained had been in bond, according to the most modern rules of science, an operation that had taken many months.
19:32
Kristin: So San Francisco Zarko had two funerals, one for the nation with no body in it, and one for the body with almost no one there.
19:40
Kristin: Zarko took months to arrive at San Fernando.
19:43
Kristin: Others, once they arrived, though, didn't stay.
19:46
Kristin: Some of San Fernando's most famous dead have since moved on, leaving their graves behind like empty rooms.
19:52
Kristin: Ignacio Zaragoza was the general who defeated the French army at Puebla on May 5, 1862, the victory now celebrated at Cinco de Mayo.
20:02
Kristin: Four months later, typhoid fever took him.
20:04
Kristin: He was just 33.
20:06
Kristin: He was then buried here at San Fernando.
20:09
Kristin: More than a century later, in 1976, his remains were raised and carried to Puebla, arriving on the anniversary of his victory.
20:17
Kristin: Vincent Guerro, a hero of Mexico's War of Independence and its second president, also slept here.
20:23
Kristin: In 1925, his bones were carried to the Great Column of Independence, the monument the people of Mexico City simply called the Angel.
20:31
Kristin: And then there was Malacor Olcampo, the philosopher of the Reform.
20:35
Kristin: In 1861, conservative forces captured him, shot him by a firing squad, and hung his body from a tree.
20:42
Kristin: He was buried then here at San Fernando.
20:45
Kristin: Decades later, his remains are removed to the nation's rotunda of illustrious persons.
20:50
Kristin: Today, a plaque at San Fernando marks the place where he had once laid, a memorial to an absence.
20:56
Kristin: Generals, presidents, martyrs of the reform.
20:59
Kristin: But among all these heroes, there's one that tells a very different kind of story.
21:04
Kristin: It's a love story, and like so many other love stories in graveyards, it ends in marble.
21:09
Kristin: Jose Maria Lafaruaga was a brighter, diplomat, and statesman who had one day served as a foreign minister under Boris.
21:16
Kristin: In 1850, he was engaged to a young woman named Dolores Escalante.
21:21
Kristin: That year, Collar returned to Mexico City and had found her.
21:24
Kristin: La Fruagua stayed by her side through all of it.
21:27
Kristin: Her illness, her agony, and her death.
21:30
Kristin: She died in June of 1850 before they could marry.
21:33
Kristin: La Faragua had a marble tomb made for her in Italy and saw to its installation himself.
21:38
Kristin: Its epithet reads in translation She was already reaching the altar, a happy bride.
21:44
Kristin: There death struck her down, here she rests.
21:47
Kristin: La Faragua never married.
21:49
Kristin: When he died in 1875, his own remains were placed in the same tomb.
21:53
Kristin: Beside the bride he had lost 25 years before him, he had kept his promise in the only way left to him.
22:00
Kristin: Dolores' name is carved exactly where she lies, but not every name in San Fernando can say the same.
22:06
Kristin: In the cemetery's smaller courtyard is a niche, number 19, that bears the name Isidora Duncan, the American dancer known as the mother of modern dance.
22:16
Kristin: Isidora Duncan died in 1927 in a car accident in France, 55 years after the last burial here.
22:23
Kristin: She's buried in Paris, though.
22:25
Kristin: As far as anyone knows, she never set foot in Mexico.
22:28
Kristin: Yet here is her name in a cemetery she never saw, and no one seems to know how it got here.
22:34
Kristin: A name with no body, and just outside the walls, the opposite, bodies with no names.
22:39
Kristin: In 2021, workers laying an electrical cable lifted the paving stones from the sidewalk in front of the cemetery.
22:46
Kristin: And just below the surface, between about a foot and two and a half feet down, archaeologists found the dead.
22:51
Kristin: Seventeen barrels, holding the remains of at least 15 people from the 19th century, men and women, mostly middle-aged and older.
22:59
Kristin: The most complete skeleton belonged to a young man about 25 who would have stood nearly six feet tall.
23:05
Kristin: It was the first time barrels in San Fernando had ever been found outside its walls.
23:10
Kristin: Archaeologists suspect it may have been victims of the epidemics that once filled this cemetery, beginning with cholera.
23:17
Kristin: For more than a century, the people of Mexico City had been walking over them without ever knowing they were there, forgotten dead beneath the sidewalk, and for a long time the cemetery itself came close to being forgotten too.
23:29
Kristin: After war as San Fernando became a cemetery frozen in time, keeping only the dead already in its care.
23:35
Kristin: Around 1900, the government planned to tear it down and raise a grand national panthenon behind it.
23:41
Kristin: The street there still bears the name Calais de Huros, the street of heroes from that project.
23:46
Kristin: But the Mexican Revolution broke out, the foundations failed, and the Panthenon was never finished.
23:52
Kristin: San Fernando lost some of its walls, but it endured as old cemeteries often do.
23:57
Kristin: In the century that followed, it was declared a historic monument, restored, shaken by earthquakes, and restored again.
24:03
Kristin: In 2006, it officially became a museum.
24:06
Kristin: Today visitors wander its two courtyards among tombs carved with columns, urns, and mourning figures, with the Masonic symbols left by many of the Freemasons buried within.
24:16
Kristin: Pyramids, checkered floors, squares, and compasses, like a secret language written in stone.
24:22
Kristin: And once a year this quiet museum of the dead becomes something else entirely.
24:27
Kristin: For a cemetery that closed its gates more than 150 years ago, San Fernando comes gloriously alive every day of the dead.
24:35
Kristin: The old courtyards bloom with marigolds, candles, and ofrendas.
24:38
Kristin: In 2010, as Mexico marked 100 years since its revolution, the cemetery built an ofrenda imagining the spirits of Zapeta's revolutionaries, pausing for a single night on their long march to honor the heroes buried here.
24:52
Kristin: Among the tombs, skeleton figures called galacas, patted out tortillas and clay griddles, slipped traditional liquors, and murder copal to cleanse the old graves.
25:02
Kristin: In the recent years, the museum has opened its gates for night tours among the tombs, guided by local historians with names like the macabre stories of San Fernando.
25:11
Kristin: And remember those stray cats curled up among the tombs.
25:14
Kristin: San Fernando has taken them to heart.
25:16
Kristin: The museum has two cat puppets named Fircho and Nando, a play on the cemetery's own name, who have led virtual tours for families.
25:24
Kristin: And in 2005, it hosted an offerend of her beloved pets that have passed on.
25:29
Kristin: Her visitors honor the animals they've lost, right alongside the presidents and generals of the 19th century.
25:36
Kristin: I can't think of anything more fitting.
25:38
Kristin: In a graveyard, everyone who is loved belongs.
25:41
Kristin: But when the candles burn low on the night tours end, the people who keep watch over San Fernando tell others stories.
25:47
Kristin: Of course, the cemetery this old has whispers.
25:50
Kristin: Like most graveyard legends, San Fernando's live mostly in stories passed on from one keeper to the next.
25:56
Kristin: The best known belongs to a man who brought the telegraph to Mexico, Juan de la Granja.
26:01
Kristin: A statue of him stands watch over his grave, and it's said that when no one is looking, he moves.
26:07
Kristin: According to the story, the statue shifts its walking cane from one hand to the other.
26:12
Kristin: Then there's Dolores Escalante, the bride who never reached the altar.
26:16
Kristin: It's said that her ghost still drifts through the cemetery at night if she's still on her way.
26:20
Kristin: She's not the only woman, though, to said to wander.
26:23
Kristin: Another story tells a woman dressed in all white, seen moving through the grounds after dark.
26:28
Kristin: No one seems to know, though, who she is or who she's searching for.
26:32
Kristin: A 2024 news report gathers stories from the cemetery's workers and night visitors, shadows darting between the tombs, whispers no one can make out, the prickling sense of being watched.
26:43
Kristin: The most famous apparition in these stories is a heavyset woman dressed in all black, the white lady's dark twin.
26:50
Kristin: She stands perfectly utterly still, but some workers say they've heard her scream.
26:55
Kristin: The other is a man they call Don Juan, said to have been wealthy in life before he lost his fortune, and ended his days in a common grave.
27:03
Kristin: They describe him walking slowly among the tombs, lamenting.
27:07
Kristin: And then there's a legend that has wrapped itself around Tomas Mejia.
27:11
Kristin: You'll sometimes hear that his widow, too poor to bury him, kept his body seated in her home.
27:17
Kristin: It's a chilling image, but it isn't what Augustina Castro herself told a reporter in 1891.
27:24
Kristin: In her own words, she brought her husband's body to Mexico City and laid him to rest here, spending nearly everything she had on his tomb.
27:32
Kristin: The story of a corpse seated in a parlor may have drifted over for Francisco Zorgo, whose embalmed body really did sit at a table, pen in hand, in a friend's home.
27:43
Kristin: Legends are like that.
27:44
Kristin: Over time they wander from grave to grave.
27:47
Kristin: But truly the cemetery hardly needs ghosts.
27:50
Kristin: It holds a president who is laid to rest as its final burial, an empty tomb left behind by a widow's fury, a heart carried away in a jar, a coffin full of stones, a bride whose groom waited 25 years to lie beside her, and a dancer's name on a niche with no one inside at all.
28:09
Kristin: Andito nos muertos, it said the dead come home.
28:12
Kristin: They follow the scent of marigolds and the glow of candlelight back to the people who remember them.
28:17
Kristin: Some of San Fernando's dead will find their way easily, or as well be honored as he is every year.
28:23
Kristin: But think too of the others, the anonymous friars beneath the old atrium, their names lost, the cholera dead beneath the sidewalk, walked over for more than a century, and Augustina Castro, sewing by lamplight until her eyes gave out, while the flowers piled up on someone else's grain.
28:41
Kristin: So this year, if you build an ofrenda, or simply light a single candle in the window, perhaps leave a miracle for the ones no one remembers.
28:49
Kristin: They're the ones that could use the light the most.
28:52
Kristin: For now, the stories of San Fernando slip back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
28:58
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil of the Pantanon de San Fernando, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
29:06
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.