A few years back Mel Lett submitted a list of punish epitaphs. Here are a few more.
Most of these have been floating around the internet as long as there’s been email. The person who put them together originally, and even if they are real, is unknown.
On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:
Here lies
Ezekial Aikle
Age 102
The Good
Die Young.
In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:
The children of Israel wanted bread
And the Lord sent them manna,
Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil sent him Anna.
In a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery
Here lies
Johnny Yeast
Pardon me
For not rising.
Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:
Here lies the body
of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas
Instead of the brake.
In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:
Here lays Butch,
We planted him raw.
He was quick on the trigger,
But slow on the draw.
A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery:
Sacred to the memory of
my husband John Barnes
who died January 3, 1803
His comely young widow, aged 23, has
many qualifications of a good wife, and
yearns to be comforted.
Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:
I was somebody.
Who, is no business
Of yours.
In a Georgia cemetery:
“I told you I was sick!”
John Penny’s epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:
Reader if cash thou art
In want of any
Dig 4 feet deep
And thou wilt find a Penny.
On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia:
She always said her feet were killing her
but nobody believed her.
In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:
On the 22nd of June
Jonathan Fiddle –
Went out of tune.
Anna Hopewell’s grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont:
Here lies the body of our Anna
Done to death by a banana
It wasn’t the fruit that laid her low
But the skin of the thing that made her go.
Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:
Gone away
Owin’ more
Than he could pay.
Someone in Winslow, Maine didn’t like Mr. Wood:
In Memory of Beza Wood
Departed this life
Nov. 2, 1837
Aged 45 yrs.Here lies one Wood
Enclosed in wood
One Wood
Within another.
The outer wood
Is very good:
We cannot praise
The other.
On a grave from the 1880’s in Nantucket, Massachusetts:
Under the sod and under the trees
Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
He is not here, there’s only the pod:
Pease shelled out and went to God.
The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania:
Who was fatally burned
March 21, 1870
by the explosion of a lamp
filled with “R.E. Danforth’s
Non-Explosive Burning Fluid”
Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:
Looked up the elevator shaft to see if
the car was on the way down. It was.
In a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery:
Here lies an Atheist
All dressed up
And no place to go.
Dr. Fred Roberts, Brookland, Arkansas:
Office upstairs
In Newbury, England [1742]:
Tom Smith is dead, and here he lies,
Nobody laughs and nobody cries;
Where his soul’s gone, or how it fares,
Nobody knows, and nobody cares.
In a Leeds graveyard [1861]:
Here lies my wife,
Here lies she;
Hallelujah!
Hallelujee!
John Dryden (1631-1700) on his wife:
Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she’s at rest, and so am I.
The Tired Woman’s Epitaph:
Here lies a poor woman who was always tired;
She lived ina house where help was not hired.
Her last words on earth were: “Dear friends, I am going
Where washing ain’t done, nor sweeping, no sewing:
But everything there is exact to my wishes;
For where they don’t eat there’s no washing of dishes…
Don’t mourn for me now; don’t mourn for me never –
I’m going to do nothing for evere and ever.
To the Memory of Abraham Beaulieu:
Born 15 September 1822
Accidentally shot
4th April 1844
As a mark of affection
from his brother
Hillaire Belloc (1870-1953):
Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
On an inkeeper 1875:
Beneath this stone, in hopes of Zion,
Doth lie the landlord of the Lion;
His son keeps on the business still,
Resigned unto the heavenly will.
In a Welland, Ontario cemetery:
Here lies all that remains of Charlotte,
Born a virgin, died a harlot.
For sixteen years she kept her virginity,
A marvellous thing for this vicinity.