Greenvale Rural Cemetery sits beside the Erie Canal in Fairport, N.Y., a suburb of Rochester. Massive oak trees cast leafy shade over the rows of graves — large tombstones, mausoleums, slanted markers and plaques.
On a typical morning, the only soundtrack is birdsong, cicadas and the occasional horn from a train passing nearby. And sometimes, the sound of rhythmic scraping or the soft noise of brush bristles on stone.
This is where Katie DeRaddo gets to work, scrubbing, washing and chipping away dirt and grime from some of the thousands of centuries-old gravestones that surround the Rochester area.
Ms. DeRaddo usually reports to Greenvale one morning a week and stays for hours, hauling two large tanks of water, gardening gloves, trowels and scrapers from grave to grave. She pauses only to press record on her phone, perched atop a tripod, or adjust the miniature mic stand she has fashioned out of a toothpick.
Later, she scours Ancestry.com, FindAGrave.com and Newspapers.com, hoping to piece together the histories of the people whose graves she has uncovered. Then she pairs short videos of herself cleaning their headstones with narration about their lives.
Ms. DeRaddo, 29, is part of a wave of social media creators invested in grave cleaning, providing content for an audience sometimes referred to as “GraveTok.”
Scores of influencers across the country arrive in cemeteries with their iPhones in tow, providing their followers with satisfyingly edited videos of once-mucky graves wiped clean. The videos intersect with a number of existing trends, such as A.S.M.R., and cleaning content, which makes them popular with a broad range of viewers.
Though she had been fascinated by her own genealogy for years, Ms. DeRaddo was not introduced to grave cleaning until 2019, when she began volunteering at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, best known as the resting place of luminaries like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass.
Ms. DeRaddo said she was just as interested in the less well-known people buried in and around the city. In 2021, she worked up the courage to begin posting videos of her work online.
“Everybody has a story, and even somebody who was maybe only just your everyday farmer back in the 1800s, I want to share that story,” Ms. DeRaddo said. “I think there’s a group of people that just love to hear about that and learn about people that otherwise would have been lost to time.”
A marketing manager for a health technology company, Ms. DeRaddo cleans on her days off, editing together videos for her more than 200,000 followers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, who know her as “A Grave Attraction.”
When she first encounters a gravestone, it is often clogged with lichen, moss and mold, obscuring the engraving so that the names and dates are hard to make out. The true obstacles are algae and black mold — challenges that require multiple rounds of cleaning to overcome.
On a Friday morning in late August, Ms. DeRaddo focused on three gravestones clustered together in a center row of the Greenvale cemetery. After spraying them down with a cleaning solution, she worked quickly but diligently.
She used a plastic hand scraper, perhaps more commonly encountered during paint jobs, to clean larger areas, and a long cotton swab for more detailed work around the numbers and letters.
“I’m going to call this good,” she said, stepping back from one of the gravestones. Then came the dramatic reveal that her followers love: She sprayed it with a hose, washing away the dirt to reveal a long-hidden name.
Eventually, three names had risen from the water: Edith R. Burlingame, George T. Burlingame and Bertha Moon Burlingame.
Marriage records and newspaper clippings would later reveal that Edith and George had been married, and that Bertha Moon was the wife of their son, Clark. Their other child, a daughter named Theodora, lived until 1970.
Bonnie Traino, 81, Theodora’s granddaughter, still lives in Fairport and has faint memories of her great-grandmother Edith. Ms. Traino said she remembered a photograph of herself sitting on Edith’s lap as a child, and that her mother, Edyth, was named after her.
Though her great-grandparents were buried in Fairport, Ms. Traino’s grandparents and parents were laid to rest in neighboring Penfield, so her family wound up visiting her great-grandparents’ graves less often.
She said it was nice that Ms. DeRaddo had stepped in to clean their graves, and she was not surprised that so many people were drawn to videos of grave cleaning.
“You just feel interested,” Ms. Traino said. “You don’t mind looking at other people’s gravestones, reading what they have to say.”
Jenna Jacobson, an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who specializes in social media, said that in a world of sensory overload, where many people feel overwhelmed, grave-cleaning videos offered “digital escapism.”
A majority of those watching, Ms. Jacobson noted, have no aspirations to become grave cleaners, but they are drawn to the satisfaction they feel when they see the end result.
Reflecting on graves can also provide a sense of perspective, she said, and the videos are often inspiring.
“Grave-cleaning videos also are showing an act of kindness,” Ms. Jacobson said. “They’re a little bright spot on the internet of somebody doing something for someone else who can never repay you.”
Wade Fowler, 43, who is based in Iowa and is known online as the “Millennial Stone Cleaner,” has collaborated on grave-cleaning videos with Ms. DeRaddo. He agreed that selfless acts tend to “take off” on social media.
“There’s so much in the news about things that are going wrong,” he said. “And so it’s sort of a different side of social media that allows for the positivity of it.”
To preserve that positivity, Ms. DeRaddo emphasizes the importance of etiquette when it comes to grave cleaning.
She gets permission from the cemetery’s caretaker before stopping by, and she only tends to gravestones that are stable, not crumbling or in need of repair. She always takes care to be respectful of the dead.
And while Ms. DeRaddo has long enjoyed spending time in cemeteries, she admits that her hobby has not always gone over well at happy hour.
At first, her friends thought that she was drawn to the paranormal side of things, before she explained that she was really just a history buff.
“I think some of my friends maybe had a bit of a pause, like, oh gosh, you like walking through cemeteries, that’s kind of macabre,” Ms. DeRaddo said. “But now they get it. Now they understand.”
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