A 22-Year-Old Who Digs Graves : Michele Devulder of Orange Feels ‘Safe’ in Cemeteries

“Ahh, look at this! This is my lucky day. They’re re-burying! Yeah!” shouted Michele Devulder, not quite loud enough to wake the dead. We would have noticed, since we were driving into a cemetery a mile from her home. She visits it about four times a week but doesn’t often see the mounds of fresh earth that are piled up next to rectangular holes in three different spots this day.

Once out of the car, she was respectfully quiet, walking with prim little steps between the rows of horizontal markers denoting the departed. Devulder (pronounced Devil-dare) is fascinated with the dead. She watches funerals from a polite distance. At times, she has sneaked into cemeteries after closing just to enjoy the quiet. She has binders and shoe boxes full of grave-site photos and a Manila envelope stuffed with yellowed obituary notices. She owns books listing celebrity causes of death and resting places. One is titled “Permanent Addresses.”

While an open grave may be an added curiosity to her day, these cemetery jaunts aren’t a comic lark for the 22-year-old.

“I just feel I’m connected, better, completed here. You feel free. It has a mysterious aura I feel safe in. The thing with the people here is they’re dead. Dead people don’t come up to you and say, ‘Hey, baby, wanna go out?’

“If I’m really down in the dumps, I go to the cemetery and think and look around, and I feel better. It feels like I have this imaginary pat on my back, saying it’s OK,” she said.

Some might call her ghoulish. Others might propose that she is only getting out of cemeteries what their brochures promise: solace, peace and reflection.

In either event, Devulder is not one of those black-dyed and garbed depressives that a musician friend likes to refer to as “vampire girls.” When we talked recently, she was dressed for summer, and she has no lack of optimistic plans for the future. She’s kind of like Gidget, except she digs sarcophagi instead of surfboards.

“Now this is what I don’t like,” she said, kneeling to wipe the mud and grass clippings off a grave plaque with her hands. She repeated this at other markers. “I’m a slob at home, but when it comes to this, ugh! They really should take better care of these, have some respect for these people,” she said.

On her planned trips to graveyards she often brings cleaning materials. Her tips for those with problem graves: Use a clean cloth and a mixture of water and Windex or car washing liquid. One other aesthetic point: “When I see plastic flowers I pull them up, because they look trashy.”

*

When Devulder was 8 years old, she and her mother visited family members in France, and went to a cemetery to see the resting place of a great-grandfather. “It just fascinated me,” she said. “I still remember the red gravel and all the other details. I was really drawn to the aura of it, the fact that it’s quiet, that there’s nobody there to bug you. It’s private.

“France is not like America. There, it isn’t just a hole in the ground. It is a way of respecting people who are gone. It seemed that every mile there you’d see another cemetery. I started bugging my mom, ‘Stop the car! Stop the car! I want to go look!’ I’ve just been drawn to them ever since.” she recalled.

Now, she says, “When I tell my mom, ‘I’m going to be out’ she knows I’m going to the cemetery.” It usually takes her four or five full days to get to know a cemetery, finding interesting gravestones and musing over the departed. “This guy here, I’ll bet he was a loving grandfather,” she said of one stone we passed that recorded a long life. “There’s a lot of young people here too. There’s a cute little la-la land where they have lambs and stuff like that. And I always wonder, ‘What happened to you?’ Why did they die so young? Was it a car accident? A drug overdose?

“I’ll remember the name and the date, and then go to the local library and go back through microfilm or whatever they’ve got to see if there are obituary notices or anything like that. And the first thing I look for in the L.A. Times every morning is the obituary notices.”

*

She approaches cemeteries the way others might a shopping mall or museum: “I have to think, am I going to go clockwise? Counterclockwise? Start in the middle and go wherever I want? I’ll have this little map in my head. Even if it’s a place I know well, I still check to see if there’s a new arrival, and I’ll lay a flower on there and respect that person,” she said.

Of her times spent watching funerals, she commented, “It’s strange but its fascinating. It gives my curiosity a thrill, though I don’t get my kicks off of people crying. It’s sad. My own grandmother passed away from lung cancer a couple of months ago, and it was very hard. I visit her as much as I can.”

When she sojourns up to the more famed cemeteries of Los Angeles, Devulder makes a hobby of finding celebrity grave sites. She has photos of the cold abodes of such disparate characters as Charles Laughton, Andy Gibb, Joe E. Brown, Casey Stengel, Margaret Hamilton and Marilyn Monroe. She was delighted when she learned that Ruby Keeler had been buried in an Orange County cemetery. “My face lit up. I thought, ‘Yes! A famous person at last is going to be here.’ Besides me . Someday I want to be famous,” she said.

*

Devulder is an aspiring actress, with several minor TV and film credits to her name already. But if she doesn’t get known in this life, it’s just as well with her if it happens afterward.

“I have a will already, and I’m saving up money to buy a plot for myself. I would like to be buried next to my great-grandparents. If I had money and a lot of it, I want to be buried in my own little mausoleum house that I want built just for me. I’d prefer a mausoleum--it’s too cold six feet under, I think. I want a white statue, a thing of some sort, so that when people pass by, they’ll know it’s me. I want attention.”

She’s not as keen on getting attention now. She had a learning disability when growing up and spent her school years in special education classes.

“I was the only girl in whole school that was in special ed, so I really got a lot of ribbing. (The classes) did a world of good for me, but I felt a lot of isolation. I got tired of being called ‘retard.’ It wasn’t a nightmare, but it was hard to deal with,” she said.

She did make friends but has been hesitant about sharing her interests in the deceased with them. “It was only recently I told my closest friends from high school. You don’t just start off, ‘By the way, I’m into cemeteries. Are you?’ ”

*

She’s had a boyfriend for the last two years who doesn’t share her interests.

“My boyfriend goes with me a lot, but he doesn’t understand. It’s, ‘Why do you have to be there all day long ?’ Well, because it’s fun, it’s good exercise, and I’m just curious. The only thing he likes about it is it’s free.

“He doesn’t have to pay. He has his hobbies and I have mine, and we put up with each other’s. His are soccer, cars, normal stuff. I’ll get excited if I find a famous person’s grave, and he’ll only go, ‘Who was Jim Backus?’ I’ll go, “Remember Mr. MaGoo ? Mr. Howell ? C’mon, you’ve gotta know this one!”

Along with her acting, she works at a cosmetics counter in a MainPlace mall shop. She thinks she might like to become an aesthetician, doing facials and such, though she also is interested in starting a low-cost coffin business.

At past jobs or on school days, she’s sometimes called in sick when she felt the need for some reflection. Then she headed to a cemetery.

“I know much more what I want to do when I’m here,” she said, with a sweep of her hand taking in the golf course-perfect lawn, stone markers and the trees sighing in the breeze. “This is my power pad to keep going. I’ll come here to decide things. I’m not a freak, I’m just eccentric. As long as I’m not digging up anybody, I think I’m OK.”