JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – Summers in Mississippi can be brutal, anyway, with all of the heat and daily monsoon thunderstorms.

But when you take away the rain for a few weeks, like we’ve experienced this year, and add in over half the month’s high temperatures above 100, strange things happen. One of those oddities occurs in graveyards as grass begins to die. Not all of the grass at first, but where some of the first grass turns brown is in odd places. 

Cecile Wardlaw is the executive director of the Greenwood Cemetery Association in Jackson. She told me about it.

“Some graves become much more visible. The grass turns brown in a perfect rectangle right where the burial took place,” Wardlaw explained.

Greenwood Cemetery is the oldest anything left over from early Jackson that still functions as it did when it was created.

“I mean the Old Capitol is close in age, but it’s a museum now. And City Hall sort of is still City Hall, but it’s not as old,” Wardlaw said.

Greenwood Cemetery was Jackson’s only burial ground for a long time until churches started graveyards for their own members. If you were in early Jackson and you died, you were buried here somewhere.

And that “somewhere” is a key element in why having graves outline themselves in a drought is helpful from time to time.

There are many graves unmarked here, simply because there wasn’t anything handy to mark them with that had any permanence over time.

“I think probably there were wooden crosses or just a pile of rocks or maybe somebody planted a tree. Jackson didn’t have a really good stone quarry around in the early days to make monuments,” said Wardlaw.

So, it’s only in the hot, blistering, dry Mississippi summers that only some along about once in a decade. Some of the unmarked graves come out of hiding and can be plotted on a map that way we know where someone is buried. We still don’t know who they are. Some secrets are just meant to be kept, I guess.