EASTON, Pa. – People with family members at Northampton Memorial Shrine say they want to see a permanent fix to the problems there.<\/p>\n
For years, people say they have been voicing concerns to management about sunken graves and poorly kept grounds.<\/p>\n
They say while they’ve noticed some improvement, they are hoping things can stay cleaned up.<\/p>\n
Julie Butler purchased her plot in Northampton Memorial Shrine in the late 70\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Her parents are buried there, and she says back then the grounds were well manicured.<\/p>\n
“It was beautiful. It was beautiful, it had a really great reputation,” says Butler.<\/p>\n
Now, Butler says it’s a different story.<\/p>\n
“The cemetery seems neglected in ways, there’s been constant issues,” she explains.<\/p>\n
Butler says despite voicing concerns over the years to management, issues continued.<\/p>\n
She and another woman decided to start a Facebook group, Friends For A Better Northampton Shrine.<\/p>\n
In the group, people share photos of sunken graves, broken headstones, and poorly kept overgrown gravesites.<\/p>\n
Butler says the cemetery’s section for deceased infants, \u201cbaby heaven\u201d, is also in bad shape.<\/p>\n
“I have a lot of family members up there and I have a nephew in baby heaven and it’s heart wrenching sometimes,” says Butler.<\/p>\n
Butler visits the cemetery often and says recently, it’s looked a bit better.<\/p>\n
She says she understands things can’t be perfect, but that administration should do a better job of keeping an eye on conditions.<\/p>\n
“It needs to be constant it can’t be the spring thaw 12 months a year. There’s problems they need to be addressed,” she says.<\/p>\n
Shawn-Kimberly Kocher also has multiple family members in Northampton Memorial Shrine.<\/p>\n
She says she’s had her fair share of issues, one of the most notable when her father’s mausoleum wasn’t cleaned before his service.<\/p>\n
“Got the key went to the mausoleum only to find like debris on the floor, cobwebs, flowers, just a lot of debris nobody’s going in there or sweeping and taking care of anything. You’re mourning the loss of a parent and then you have to go in for several hours and clean the mausoleum yourself,” explains Kocher.<\/p>\n
Kocher says she has also seen improvements on the grounds, and she hopes the place can be cleaned up permanently.<\/p>\n
“Hopefully changes can occur and stay not just because all of a sudden there’s a light flashed on it,” says Kocher.<\/p>\n
We reached out to the shrine’s owner several times.<\/p>\n
In response to people’s concerns, he says the winter causes the grounds to shift and tree limbs and branches to come down and that crews work hard every spring to make repairs and clean up.<\/p>\n
He also says that with 20,000 grave sites, and a limited staff, they do the best they can during the non-winter months to repair everything they can and make sure the grave sites are intact and level with the ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EASTON, Pa. – People with family members at Northampton Memorial Shrine say they want to see a permanent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[79989,153,155,154,79987,79984,24683,33734,18958,79988,79983,79986,79985],"class_list":["post-179176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-baby-heaven","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-broken-headstones","tag-cemetery-maintenance","tag-community-concerns","tag-facebook-group","tag-family-members","tag-neglected-cemetery","tag-northampton-memorial-shrine","tag-overgrown-gravesites","tag-sunken-graves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}