By far the most famous ghost said to haunt Bonaventure Cemetery belongs to a child named Gracie Watson, who died in 1889 of pneumonia at the age of six. Sculptor John Walz created this life-sized marble statue of “Little Gracie” after studying photographs of the child. It has become the single most visited gravesite in this 100-acre cemetery. So many visitors touched the statue that an iron fence was erected to protect it from wear. (Walz created many other monuments at Bonaventure, and one of the cemetery’s streets is named in his honor. He died in 1922, and is buried in Bonaventure. Ironically, no headstone marks his gravesite.)

This statue is the most photographed monument at Bonaventure. Photographers invariably push their cameras between the bars in the fence to get a clear shot of the statue. I deliberately stepped back to include the fence itself in my own image of this monument. In doing so, I symbolically separate life from death, putting Gracie Watson well beyond our reach. I also convert the image to black and white, abstracting the scene and making the white marble statue seem more ghostly than it actually is.