Evans City Cemetery - Evans City, PA - Worldwide Cemeteries on Waymarking.com

This cemetery on Franklin Road in Evans City, Pennsylvania is known to horror movie fans for its use in the opening scene of the horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968). Parts of the the cemetery are still recognizable from the film more than 40 years later despite a natural disaster that destroyed sections of it back in 1985.

The cemetery was created out of need when the four existing burial grounds in Evans City had to be closed to further interments in February, 1890. water drainage from the existing cemeteries was threatening the health of the townsfolk. The Evans City Cemetery was incorporated nearly a year later on January 7, 1891 by the 49-member Evans City Cemetery Association. A memorial to the unidentified casualties of war was erected on the property in 1894. Their is well over 8000 interments'

The Cemetery is well know by horror fans for the filming of Night of the Living Dead. In 1967, Evan's City became the shooting location for a horror film being produced by a group of aspiring filmmakers from Pittsburgh that called themselves Image Ten. The newly formed production company was an amalgamation of The Latent Image and Hardman Associates (two local companies that produced industrial films and commercials for television and radio) with the addition of a few other investors. The filmmakers chose to make a horror movie because they thought it would be easy to sell. The film they created, Night of the Living Dead, is often cited as being the dividing line between the classical age of horror films and modern horror cinema.

The Tornado Outbreak of 1985
On May 31, 1985 forty-one tornadoes struck the U.S. states of Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania as well as the Canadian province of Ontario. To date, it is the U.S.A.'s third deadliest tornado outbreak, taking the lives of 76 Americans (a dozen Canadians lost their lives in areas where tornadoes touched down in Ontario). Pennsylvania bore the worst of the damage, accounting for 65 of the 88 tornado-related deaths that day. Twenty tornadoes ripped through Pennsylvania, destroying more than a thousand homes and businesses and partially damaging more than a thousand more.

An F3 tornado tore its way through Beaver County and into Butler County (where the cemetery is located) killing 3 people in Beaver and another 6 in Butler. F3 is a category on the Fujita-Pearson scale for measuring severity of tornadoes. On this scale, the tornado's winds would have been blowing between 254 to 332 kilometers per hour (158 to 206 miles per hour). During its 39-mile journey the tornado passed over the Evans City Cemetery, uprooting trees and shrubs, and tossing headstones. In all, 361 headstones had to be reset in place. The soldiers memorial was damaged and had to be repaired. One mausoleum was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. Part of the original mausoleum was used to construct a new sign at the entrance to the cemetery.
The cemetery today is still an active cemetery for burials

City, Town, or Parish / State / Country: Not listed Approximate number of graves: Not listed Cemetery Status: Not listed Cemetery Website: Not listed

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Date Logged Log   05/28/2018 stinger503 visited it