nothin The “Graveyard Guy” Doesn’t Stop | New Haven Independent

The Graveyard Guy” Doesn’t Stop

Paul Bass Photo

Atop the Egyptian-Revival archway that stands at the entrance to Grove Street Cemetery are the words, The Dead Shall Be Raised.” They are engraved in the brown stone in large capital letters, impossible to miss.

Inside, Edwin Torres drives a green truck down one of the many roads that run through the 18-acre burial ground.

It rained the night before, so there’s plenty of work to do today, cleaning up the branches and leaves scattered across the graves. Torres (pictured above) has served here as a landscaper for the last seven years, from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. each working day.

Sometimes my friends tell me I should build my house up in here because I’m here so much,” he says with a laugh. They call me the Graveyard Guy.”

Torres wears baggy jeans, a loose black T‑shirt, Nike shoes, and a fitted Bulls hat. The stubbly black and gray hair on his face looks like the beginning of a beard. His glasses have thick lenses and black rectangular frames that are rounded at the corners, and he constantly adjusts them, pushing them back up on his nose after they slip down.

Torres is on his lunch break, so he grabs his food and we begin walking around the grounds. He eats out of a large plastic Ziploc container and picks at the rice and fish inside with his hands. The fish — a whole fish, eyeballs and all — looks like it was caught just hours ago, and he picks it clean to the bones, flicking scraps onto the ground as we walk.

People ask me, Don’t you get scared working with all of these dead people?’” he says, And I tell them, You should be scared of the people that are alive, not of the ones that are dead.’”

Torres is a jack-of-all-trades at Grove Street Cemetery. I feed the pigeons, I put water out for them, I pick up the leaves, the litter — I do a little bit of everything,” he says. He also cleans and fixes gravestones that grow dirty and fall apart over time. It’s straightforward work. He takes it seriously and he is meticulous. I got to separate the branches because the branches can’t go with the leaves.”

Usually, he bikes to work from his house on Whalley Avenue, but his bike has a flat, so he had to walk today. He’s lived in New Haven since he was 13 or 14, he tells me, when he came over to the U.S. from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. He’s 46 now.

When I ask him if he misses Puerto Rico, he’s quick to respond.

No,” he says. I like it over here better.” His mother and two sisters live in Connecticut as well. He says he never imagined himself working at a cemetery, though he’s no stranger to death. One of his sisters passed away when she was only 19. He doesn’t want to talk about her. She’s buried in another cemetery,” he says.

A Guardian Angel


As we walk through the cemetery, he takes me to some of his favorite spots. The first is the Trowbridge plot. There are many sectioned-off areas in the cemetery that contain a group of graves belonging to individual families, and this is one of them. A small stone border surrounds the plot; in the middle, a statue of an angel leans against what is the largest cross in the cemetery. The stone cross stands on a stone platform that bears the name TROWBRIDGE” in a creepy, bony font. The cross itself is at least ten feet tall with a rough texture; the names E. Hayes Trowbridge” and Catherine Allen Quincy” are carved near the middle. The angel looks down at the names and wears a beaded necklace around its right arm.

I put those beads on her arm about two years ago,” Torres says. I always feel something about the angel. I always come and sit here next to it. It belongs to Trowbridge, but I don’t know who they are or anything. I sit and I talk to talk to the angel to guide me, watch over me. She protects me from all harm.”

Torres says he is Christian. He talks as though he knows God personally. He’s a good God,” he tells me. He listens to you. But he works on his time, not your time. His ways are his ways, not yours.”

He doesn’t go to church every Sunday, but he reads the Bible. He stops and turns in the middle of our walk after I ask about his favorite verse, and he recites it to me. Jeremiah 33, chapter three: Call unto me and I will show you great things and mighty things you do not know.’”

I ask Torres what he thinks the words on top of the front gate mean.

You see, I believe in God and Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was crucified and on the third day he rose again, he came back from the dead,” he says. One day, and the end of days he is going to return. The day that he comes back, the sky will open up and the dead will lift up and fly with him, out of the earth. It’s written, God will come back to judge the living and the dead.”

When Torres talks, he speak softly, calmly.

We walk to another family plot, this one larger than the last. It belongs to the Sheffield and St. John families, joined through marriage. Torres opens a small, wrought iron gate, which looks broken — as though someone forced it open a long time ago — and he walks right in.

A few obelisks and sarcophagi surround one giant structure in the middle. It’s the size of a small hut and the shape of a long box. It has the same brown stone and Egyptian-Revival style as the arch at the cemetery’s entrance. It’s an enormous tomb, and I learn later that it’s called the Sheffield-St. John Mausoleum.

There is a small metal door at the front, and through the open spaces in its elaborate design we can see the sarcophagus inside.

He’s buried right there, inside that thing. Right there. All his ashes or bones or whatever, just right there.” he says, pointing through the doorway. It looks like he’s trapped in a cage.”

Torres says he doesn’t see the point in having such a grand grave site. Stones don’t mean nothing. That’s a piece of rock with your name on it. When I die, I just die. I don’t want nobody to cry for me or anything else. I’m going to a better place,” he says. Death isn’t complicated to Torres, at least not yet. It’s something that will happen when it is supposed to.

Encounter With A Ghost

He tells me a story about a woman who came to the cemetery a few years back to buy a plot for herself. Torres explains that he also works burials.

I dig the hole,” he says. I shovel. Six feet deep.” He says that the lady was supposed to die on a specific day because of an illness, and he was going to dig her grave.

That’s disrespectful to come here to buy a plot when she was still alive,” he says. So she came and I dug the hole but then, guess what happened? She didn’t die on that day. About a week later she died. So I had to refill the hole and then dig it up again.”

He tells me nobody on this earth can tell you when you’re going to die. Everything was written. Even this, that you were going to be here talking to a stranger at a cemetery.”

Still, he knows that doesn’t mean can tell what’s going to happen in life. Once, in his early days at the cemetery, he had a small encounter with a ghost that left him shaken.

I was at Gilbert,” he says, recalling the gravestone where he was working. I was cutting grass and I put my trimmer down and started looking at the stones. I felt a cold hand on my back like this” — he shows me — and I jumped up and I didn’t know what to do.”

Some of the spirits in the cemetery are good, he explains. Some are bad. But he has great respect for them all and for the place where their bodies rest. What’s clear throughout our entire discussion is how much Torres reveres Grove Street Cemetery.

When you start doing your story about the cemetery, you’re going to have a lot of dreams,” he tells me. Things are going to speak to you. I have a lot of dreams about this place.”

Torres seems less like a worker at the graveyard than a part of it. Not among the dead, but somehow inseparable from them, constantly working as their caretaker.

I love working here. It’s peaceful. It’s quiet. Nobody bothers you,” he says. You know, one day we’re all going to go here.”

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