Exploring cemeteries is not a hobby of mine although I do like to visit reputedly haunted places.
There are some beautiful cemeteries. Undercliffe Cemetery in Bradford, Yorkshire has a lot of Egyptian style obelisks and a tomb guarded by sphinxes. The cemetery gets vandalised but volunteers are fighting to preserve it.
I enjoyed walking around an attractively overgrown and disused Parsee cemetery in Macau, many years ago. In Mozambique, when it, too was under Portuguese rule, I walked around a cemetery in which some of the tombs had glass windows and doors. There were tables and chairs in some tombs and in at least one, there was a dressing table with a mirror next to the coffin! There were framed photos on the tables and dressing table, and many gravestones were decorated with photos of the deceased. What a nice idea, I think. BTW, while I was in Macau, a Portuguese woman explained that things like chairs and dressing tables in tombs were for the benefit of visitors, not the deceased. I think that I was a little bit disappointed.
The only time I've thought that a cemetery looked spooky was when I was a child in Aden. We were inspecting a ground floor flat near the Crater Pass. Opposite the flat was a large, old Arab cemetery, barren except for some thorn bushes. It was early evening and in Aden the air was full of audibly beeping bats (you got used to them even in the roofless cinemas). Even then I liked spooky things but I was not sure that I wanted to sit on the verandah every evening looking out on that barren cemetery. Later, there was a local scare when a driver picked up a silent Arab woman on the Crater Pass, one night. While she was getting into the car, the driver noticed that the woman had cloven hooves. I don't know why he still gave her a lift into town instead of running away screaming. By the time they had reached Crater town centre, though, the mysterious woman had disappeared. Woo-oo!
There was an active Parsee cemetery in Aden, complete with vultures (deceased Parsees are traditionally left on open platforms for carrion birds). I never got to visit it, though. Probably for the best.
