Halloween is this Friday, as evidenced by the pumpkins, ghosts and gravestones now haunting front yards across Charlotte. But for one city employee, dealing with old graves and tombstones is a year-round task.
Bill Biddy is Charlotte’s city sexton — essentially the head caretaker of the city’s seven public cemeteries. He’s held the job since 2015, and he already knows what people are going to ask him.
“Have I ever seen a ghost? No,” he says with a laugh.
Biddy spends much of his time in some of Charlotte’s oldest burial grounds, including Elmwood Cemetery on the edge of uptown, which dates back to the 1840s.
He rattles open a metal door to one family mausoleum. The interior is dimly lit by a yellow-stained glass window. A broom sits in the corner.
“Yeah, that’s for the witch,” he jokes. “Just kidding.”
Actually, the broom is for city staff. They inspect and clean each tomb as best they can, though Biddy says cobwebs return within a week. Crews also check for structural issues, since aging mausoleums can crumble — or, in one case from years ago, get struck by lightning. (No, the bodies didn’t come back to life.)
Back outside, Biddy says there’s a lot that goes into the job.
“The number one priority is putting the right person in the right spot. Every day,” he says, laughing. “That’s the most important thing.”
Another priority, he adds, is sometimes digging people out.
“I’m taking more people out of the ground than I ever have before,” he says. “People are moving people nowadays.”
No, not grave robbers — just families relocating loved ones’ remains to other states.
“Sometimes people wonder why I grab the dirt and smell it,” he says. “When I’m getting close, you can smell the dirt of a decomposed body.
That part of the work, he admits, can be unsettling.
Biddy also oversees maintenance across all seven city cemeteries, from Old Settlers’ Cemetery in uptown — dating to the 1760s — to Evergreen Cemetery off Central Avenue, built in the 1940s.
“Garbage is the number one problem,” he says. “Everybody dumps their garbage in a cemetery.”
Every Halloween, crews find some especially strange things.
“There’ll be candles lit. Maybe a dead chicken here and there,” he says.
His staff also repairs vandalized headstones and decapitated statues. But often the hardest part, he says, is working with grieving families.
“I’ve had a lot of flowers thrown in my face,” Biddy says. “But it’s okay. All of them who threw flowers in my face became my friend. I can tell you that for sure.”
It’s why he's quick with a joke and a laugh — to keep the job from getting too heavy. He says the most important quality for the job is empathy, and that goes for the living and the dead.
And after years among Charlotte’s cemeteries, Biddy says the work has changed him.
“It has changed me to enjoy life,” he says. “I love life. I very rarely get mad, because to me it’s not worth it.”
After all, when you spend your days surrounded by the dead, it’s hard not to appreciate the living.
