BANGOR TOWNSHIP — Please stop bringing your dead animals here in the middle of the night, he asks. There’s no room for any more.
“It’s getting to be too much,” Jim Giffin said. “They keep coming in here and wanting to bury this and bury that, and do this and do that. And I tell them, ‘You cannot bury them here.’"
Giffin is a burly, 63-year-old truck driver who owns a modest home with a nice plot of land in Bangor Township, just north of Bay City. He lives here with his wife. And his house just happens to sit next door to an abandoned animal graveyard.
The Bay County Pet Cemetery has no owner. The township doesn’t want it. The state wants nothing to do with it. And it’s overloaded with buried animals.
Yet people keep coming here to add more by conducting
freelance funerals for their beloved pets, often spookily in the middle of the night, sometimes placing them on top of animals already buried there.
And that’s not the only problem.
“I've witnessed a lot of things there in the 12, 13 years that I've owned my house,” Giffin said.
He says he’s broken up drug deals and drug use, and interrupted people who came there to have sex. He’s caught people dumping their trash, teenagers smashing headstones, even confronted a man who pitched a tent on the graves and declared this his new home.
But more than anything else, he keeps seeing people bringing their dead pets here without even first asking anyone if it was still allowed.
State law prohibits pet cemeteries from having more than 100 animals buried per acre. Based on that, the Bay County Pet Cemetery was over capacity long ago. Yet, that hasn’t stopped people from bringing more.
Since nobody has been in charge of the cemetery for years, Giffin has unofficially and voluntarily become its caretaker, handling the landscaping and keeping an eye out for trouble. It’s made for headaches ever since.
“It's just been a mess,” he said. “I have cameras on my house, and two of them will pick up anything that comes in the cemetery. And when my alarm goes off, I put on my slippers and I truck my little fanny out there and say, 'What are you doing?’ It's become a problem because it’s like they're trying to push me to a limit.”
***
When Giffin moved into his house, he saw a jungle next door.
“It was all grass and I'm not kidding you, it was this tall,” he said, holding his hand chest high. “The wind was blowing just right and my wife goes, ‘There’s something in that tall grass.’ So I walked over there, and I started wading through the grass, and I tripped over a headstone. And another. And another. And then it dawned on me — this is the pet cemetery.”
The Bay County Pet Cemetery was established in 1947 on a couple of acres by a local businessman. Here people buried their dogs, their cats, their bunnies and even a horse, according to legend. It’s believed to be the second-oldest pet cemetery in the state, behind only the Michigan War Dog Memorial in South Lyon.
“When I was a little boy, I lived half a mile down the road,” Giffin said. “I used to come down here all the time and play, and the place was immaculate. The guy that kept it was just phenomenal. He was out there daily, manicuring the place and keeping it clean. It was gorgeous. But when he passed away, nobody in his family wanted to take it over, so they just let it go.”
The property was given to the Bay County Humane Society. But several years later, the organization folded without transferring the property, leaving the cemetery unowned and neglected. It soon became unruly and overgrown, and old forgotten headstones crumbled in the elements.
“It’s a very odd story,” said Glenn Rowley, township supervisor of Bangor Township. “The term I use is ‘quagmire.’ It's a no-man's land and everyone says, 'nope, not mine.’ And so that's kind of where it's at.”
Yet people continued to regard it as the rightful resting place of their pets. And over the years, they kept coming to bury them here.
Some installed granite headstones, a few of which rivaled in quality those normally afforded to people. Others crafted humble, homemade wooden monuments that became faded and brittle with age. A few carved out plots over the years that now hold several of their family’s pets. One person just arranged a bunch of small, smoothed rocks in a square pattern to wordlessly mark their pet’s grave.
Over the years, one volunteer after another dove into the vegetation, trying to restore the property. And each time, they eventually gave up or drifted away, leaving nature to once again smother the graves.
Not long after he moved here, Giffin spotted someone in the weedy field hacking away at the tangled overgrowth.
“I see this guy walking through here with a sickle, knocking grass down. And I'm like, that’s strange. Well, then I see this girl come popping out of the weeds, and she's got one of them push mowers with the blades on it. She's just killing herself trying to cut the grass, And I said to her, I says, ‘Hey, you need a hand?’”
Sarita Sylvester’s dog had died the night before. She searched online for a place to bury her, and the township’s old pet cemetery came up in the results.
“We took her out there and buried her,” said the 34-year-old teacher, who lives nearby. “And we saw the horrible condition that it was in. It just broke my heart because I knew that a lot of those owners really cared for their pets and they were probably in their 70s, 80s or dead by then, so there's nobody here to care for them. And that really struck a chord.”
Giffin walked over to see her.
“I said, ‘I just bought this new tractor, so you walk in front of me, and you mark out the headstones and whatever’s in the ground that I'm gonna hit. And I'll drive around it, and I'll cut it all down for you.’ So I come over here, and I cut the whole thing.”
For the first time in years, the graves that hadn’t been worn away by the weather could be seen.
With a little more work, the two of them figured, the cemetery could be restored to a respectable condition. And with a little more help, they thought, a lot more could be done. So they created a Facebook page for the cemetery and posted an appeal to the public.
Dozens of people applauded their efforts and pledged to come out. Giffin rented dump trailers, a skid steer loader and a mini excavator. They bought a bunch of water bottles and coolers to keep them cold. Sylvester’s mom made a bunch of tacos to serve all the hungry volunteers.
And on the day of the cleanup, nobody showed up.
Sometime after, a young man working for a local funeral home got permission from the township board to take over the maintenance of the plot. He came in with a brush hog and started clearing all of the old headstones, plowing them into a pile of broken pieces. His idea, Giffin was told, was to clear the land and start charging for pet funerals.
“Some kid came through trying to make money off of it,” Sylvester said. “He tore up a bunch of the graves and a bunch of the signs. So even more ended up unmarked.”
Sylvester looked over some photos she took before the destruction, got an idea where some of the missing grave markers once were, made a couple hundred wooden crosses, painted them and placed them where the buried pets most likely were.
But the incident dampened her spirit. And like others who’ve tried in vain before her to make things better, she drifted away from the effort.
“A lot of it got soured for me when that kid came in and destroyed a bunch of the cemetery,” she said. “I don't go out as often as I used to, but I do still go out there to visit my pets. And Jim takes good care of it.”
Since then, there have been sporadic cleanups. The Boy Scouts once came and cut everything down. A local animal shelter spent a week clearing brush. An older couple was coming by for a while to lend a hand. But each time, soon after everyone loses interest or heart, nature encroaches once again.
So now, when he’s not long hauling on the road somewhere, Giffin comes by with his lawnmower and his weed whacker.
Even a cancer diagnosis didn’t stop him.
"I had to have chemo 24/7,” he said. “It was pumped into my body. I had that pump over my shoulder and tied basically to my back above my rear end. And I was down in the ditch out front with a pair of snips and a hatchet, and I completely cleaned that ditch out in one day, by myself, because I wanted people to be able to see the cemetery from the road.”
Recently, Giffin posted on the cemetery’s Facebook page asking people to stop bringing their dead pets here and to remove the ones they buried on their own. For one thing, he said, it’s disrespectful to the pets buried beneath. For another, the graves they’re digging are too shallow, and coyotes and foxes have come by and dug up some of the beloved pets as a snack. And that leaves Giffin to have to go back and rebury the mangled remains.
The responses he got were less than kind.
“It caused this whole whirlwind,” he said. “People weren't very nice to me. But I got really thick skin. I can handle it.”
Through it all, the property is stuck in ownership limbo, and Giffin remains its unpaid caretaker — much to the relief of the township.
“He saw a problem. It wasn't being taken care of. And he had the gumption to go take care of it,” Rowley said. “And that's awesome. God bless him for doing that. We could use that spirit in so many other things.”
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These days, the lawn at the cemetery stays cut, and the weeds along the fence line have been uprooted. A tunnel of trees leads visitors gracefully along a dirt road into the grounds.
Much of the space is bare after the tombstones were razed years ago, while others lie sunken by gravity into the earth, visible thanks only to the neatly trimmed grass around them. Throughout the cemetery, there are white crosses tilting this way and that, like an Arlington National for unknown pets.
But many headstones still stand high as monuments to lost friends after all these years.
Here lies Skippy. And Chico. And Peppy. And Little Joe. And here’s a stone for Mittens, born during the Truman administration. Another for Wrinkles, born during the Eisenhower administration.
Many pets have their owners’ names etched below theirs on their grave marker. Some were granted the family’s surname, including Fluffy A. Shaw, gone since 1983. And Fifi Kellogg, gone since 1974.
Some markers feature heartfelt sentiments toward missing members of the family: Like the one for Pierre, whose owner noted that “you gave us all so much happiness.” And the one for Zeus, “my sweet soul who enjoyed the most to just snuggle up and spoon.”
Even the people who brought their pets here under the cover of darkness fashioned their own primitive tributes so their pet’s grave wouldn’t be unmarked.
One person left a small concrete marker with the name “Aiden” etched onto it, along with gemstones and seashells embedded for decoration. Another left the plaster relief of a cat bearing angel wings and the words “Run free now.”
And all of it, from the stately to the humble, shows itself because a neighbor takes the time to keep this resting place looking nice, in tribute and respect.
“I’d just as soon not have to even go over there and cut it if somebody was willing to take it over,” Giffin said. “But the thing of it is, I kind of enjoy seeing them come out here and walk through, especially when people bring their kids or grandkids, and walk through and show them a little history. It was just a beautiful place back in the day. And I would just like to make it so people can come back and visit their pets.”
John Carlisle writes about Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Abandoned pet cemetery caretaker asks public to stop bringing dead animals
