Memories of Moon Point

(I am writing this at the request of my daughter who is resurrecting a website that her uncle poured his heart into before it [his heart] simply stopped beating.)

Moon Point is a cemetery in the country just south of Streator, Illinois, where I was born. Like many cemeteries, it is tucked away in a wooded area near a creek--land that is unusable as tillable crop land, although crop fields are nearby. It is the final resting place of many of my family members, and as such, it isn't just a cemetery but a place of reverence; a place that we selected to put the mortal remains of those we loved in life. As the Forever Home of my family, I love that old cemetery. My parents, grandparents, two siblings, two uncles and an aunt are buried there, with more to come. Moon Point Cemetery is a place of complete quiet. Sometimes, one can see deer. More often, one can see/feel mosquitoes!

Before I was born, a toddler sister of mine died in a horribly tragic home accident. It changed the family forever. Barbara Lynn Covill was the first of our immediate family to be buried at Moon Point, and because she was there, it became a special place. (I'm not sure how different my life would have been had Barbara never lived and died, but I do know that, because of her, when I came along a year or two later, I was just loved. That's a whole other blog topic!) As a family, we went to visit her grave at least once a year. (We also always went in the spring because there was wild asparagus growing along the fencelines, and my parents were "gatherers" of asparagus!) As a result of Barbara's death, my grandfather bought up a bunch of cemetery plots for the family--enough that we could all be buried there, if we wanted. I can remember that my grandmother took my other sister and I there for a picnic...because it was peaceful and shady. A picnic in a graveyard. Did we find it scary? Not at all.

Once upon a time, one could exit from Moon Point Cemetery by taking the access road east to Illinois route 23, or taking the road west through the country that eventually led to a place called Reading, and a little farther down the road, our farm. The road to the west was pretty rough and went over a one-lane rickety iron bridge over Moon Creek, then onward. At one point--I think in the 1960s or '70s--the bridge either washed out or was condemned. It was demolished and never replaced. That meant, then, that there was only one way in and out of the cemetery--and a railroad track with no gates or warnings, crossed that road. If a train happened to stop over the road, anyone visiting the cemetery was trapped until the train moved again. (This happened to my brother in the days before cell phones. He was stuck there for three hours!)

When I was a kid, the entrance to the cemetery had two red brick pillars on either side of the road, one with a plaque that said "Moon Point", and a big iron gate across the road between them. In order to gain access to the cemetery, someone had to get out of the car and open the gate to let the vehicle through. The gate had been vandalized so many times that it was finally removed. Then the brick pillars fell into disrepair, leaving them just a pile of broken bricks. Sad, really.

Moon Point Cemetery is quite isolated, and because of this, it was/is a favorite gathering place for kids looking for a spot to do whatever it is that teens do when unsupervised and unseen. Barbara's grave marker had been the base for launching fireworks, and some of the spots inside the letters on her stone were broken out. (The scorch marks from the fireworks are still there, after all these years.)

When I was a teen, myself, in the 1960s, we were visiting my grandparents at their farm when a call came in that the cemetery had some major vandalism damage. My grandfather was on the cemetery board at the time. He was a roly-poly, mild-mannered, devout Christian man, normally, but he became absolutely livid when we viewed the damage. Some very heavy grave markers were knocked over. Many of the older ones were broken off. Whoever was responsible for the damage had worked really hard at doing what they did. I had never seen my grandfather angry before, but I remember so vividly his saying that they needed to post a sign on the cemetery property: "No trespassing. Violaters will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law AND A DOUBLE-BARRELED SHOTGUN." His grandfather was buried there, and his beloved grandchild. Damage to many of the stones was irreparable. No one was ever found culpable. I understood his anger.

The most recent family "burial" at Moon Point was my brother. On the very last day of 2005, he was shopping in a Chicago suburb when he simply collapsed, dead. His long-time roommate didn't call with the news. I found out through an email from the River Forest, IL, police. Doug had distanced himself from my sister and me--hard feelings over the sale of the family farm--but we were left to make his final arrangements. On a perfectly horrible snowy/rainy, windy day in mid-January of 2006, we scattered the ashes of Floyd Douglas Covill among the tombstones of the people he loved and the cemetery whose website he had worked so hard to establish. Now, these many years later, we are trying to get permission to place a military marker on the place that would have been his grave. Also now, his niece Megan is reviving his website. It was his passion and his legacy. I am so very grateful that it won't be lost!

My family's plots are the first ones inside the cemetery on the road in. There are urban legends about hauntings at Moon Point--something about a hatchet lady. So stupid! Still, many pictures on websites about the Moon Point haunting legends show my family's gravestones. If that's what it takes to keep memories alive, I'm all for it!