The cemetery in Treorchy sits on a hill above the village of the same name. It contains the remains of some thirty thousand people. It has consecrated ground for Church of Wales punters, non consecrated ground for chapel people, a plot for the Catholics who like to be buried separately from Protestants and one or two graves for Muslims who insist on being buried West/East as opposed to North/South. They all have one thing in common though theyre all dead and buried.In my capacity as one of four temporary grass cutters I spent the summer of 1982 working in and on the cemetery. We were in the company of eight or so gravediggers. Their number included a pot smoking hippy who didnt have a tooth in his head, a farmer who had a manic look in his eye who just liked digging, a religious nut, a very small fellow who was used to sliding over coffins in walled graves, a peripatetic gravedigger who plied his bull nosed shovel trade all over South Wales and an old man called Em who had seen it all and wouldnt be phased by anything.Each of these men although different in their own ways had one common trait. They all had developed a serenity brought on through years of studied solemnity standing back during funerals. They all also could tell you blood curdling tales of corpses and the finer points of burials not generally known outside of an undertakers convention. For example, tales of coffins sliding through the earth on the sloped mountainside were rife. You see. In order to locate a coffin in a grave, that could hold six or more corpses, one had to use a spike that was inserted into the earth until it reached the last coffin that had been placed there. Of course some graves hadnt been opened up for decades and so it wasnt unusual for the coffins to have slid away from the position that they were originally placed in. This wasnt so bad as there was enough space to place another coffin in the grave. It was a bit more disconcerting for the gravediggers however when the coffin had rotted and they dug down straight into the coffins contents. Tales of men leaping out of graves in a single bound was not unheard of. This was not because of any fear of the undead rising from their graves (gravediggers are the most non superstitious people alive) but because many of the bodies had died during the Nineteenth Century when cholera, smallpox and typhus etcetera was rife; many bodies were buried in lead lined coffins to keep in whatever had caused death in the first place.On other occasions the men were mortified to find that there was barely enough space to place a new coffin in a grave and so banks would be built up around the circumference to make it look deeper. This generally worked as the earth was stacked up on top of the coffin to allow gravity to work its magic. However there were cemeteries in other boroughs that revealed their contents from time to time as there was less than two inches of top soil covering the coffin. There was a tremendous scandal in Merthyr Tydfil because of this.These tales were told to us in a workmens hut during the longeurs of rain soaked afternoons. Initially there was an attempt to scare the living crap out of us by adding, in hushed tones, elements of the supernatural to the stories. When it became obvious that we were quite happy to spend the night up amongst the tombstones the anecdotes became more mundane. However, there was one genuinely creepy tale about an oak coffin that was opened accidentally. Oak was used in the nineteenth century as the wood of choice for coffins. This wood is very hardy stuff and when sealed is hermetically tight. By all accounts Em was digging an old grave when the pick he was using penetrated an oak coffin. He pulled back and the top of the coffin came with him. Inside was the corpse of a woman. She was 19 when she died as was shown on the gravestone. He said she had long black lustrous hair to her waist and skin like alabaster. Within seconds the shell that she was disintegrated as the air entered the coffin. It unnerved him for a while as he had just seen his own great grandmother.What you have to remember is that despite the job and the locale there was nothing morbid or frightening about working in the cemetery. If anything it was as though we developed a comical attitude to the whole thing as a sort of defence I suppose. There were incidents where a man who had come to pay his last respects to his brother had a heart attack and fell into the grave and died. This is gallows humour of the first order. There are those who are buried there who obviously had a sense of humour in death as well as life. One ex publican of The Red Cow Hotel had a statue erected on his familys crypt. Its an image of him with an outstretched arm and an open hand. Its designed to show all those to whom he gave credit that they still owed him money. To emphasise his disgust he had the statue erected with his back facing Treorchy. One other amusing incident springs to mind concerning a local wit and poet called Hughie Davies. He was in his eighties when a contemporary of his died. The man used to be his boss and there was mutual hatred between them. It was something of a surprise therefore that Hughie turned up at his funeral. What the hell are you doing here? You hated him. he was asked. I never trusted him replied the droll Hughie. Im here to make sure hes dead.