Chicken Stalker: Francis Dickens

While wandering through a creepy old cemetery in Moline, IL my son came across a well kept tomb stone (most others in the cemetery were leaning on each other and had ceased to maintain straight lines) and became excited.  I realized it was the grave marker of Francis Dickens, one of Charles Dickens' sons.  Unsurprisingly, Francis Dickens ran into misfortune here.  He stopped at a friend's house on the eve of the start of his lecture tour and died that night.  Google turned up little of note about the late Francis Dickens save the fact that his father didn't seem to think much of his ambitions and nick named him "Chicken Stalker". The Mounty's (with whom he was employed prior to the doomed lecture trip which brought him through Moline) thought him lazy, drunk and reckless.

We were taken with the cemetery and how badly it was maintained.  There was a newer part to the cemetery that was beautiful and had neat rows of hills for us to climb and view of Moline's skyline (The Kone Building).  The ground was so soft and sandy and there were places where graves were sinking and wearing away and the interments were starting to stick out of the ground. The older parts of the cemetery were surrounded by trees and if you started walking through them you'd find cast away headstones for graves that had washed out.  We wondered if there were remains just under our feet.  It didn't seem possible that someone had been moving caskets back into place while the ground washed away.

Enjoy some pics of my creepy neighborhood cemetery, Riverside Cemetery:

Row after row of graves stones leaning every which way, most have no names, some are numbered but they're not in any type of order.

The newer part of the cemetery has these cool hills cut into it.  The entire cemetery winds up a hill above a water park.

More rows leaning and sinking, above yet MORE un-maked graves.

The grave of Francis Dickens, A.K.A. Chicken Stalker.

Grave markers just leaning on one another in Riverside Cemetery, Moline, IL.

Goon Squad

The gangsters in my 'hood are hard core. You can tell by the graffiti they leave: