Harry Potter Fans Nearly Ruined A Real Life Cemetery
As we’ve mentioned before there are a surprising number of real life graves for fictional characters like James Bond, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Nicolas Cage. Well Harry Potter super-fans have similarly flocked to a cemetery in Edinburgh, Scotland to pay their respects to … the genocidal maniac who literally tried to murder a baby?
Yes, Greyfriars Cemetery is home to the final resting place of Voldemort, sort of. There’s a headstone belonging to “Tom Riddell,” which very likely inspired former Edinburgh resident J.K. Rowling to bestow her story’s villain with the birth name of “Tom Riddle.” Naturally this has become a go-to tourism destination for Potter fans too cheap to book a vacation to Universal Studios. The cemetery also features a grave belonging to a “McGonagall” and one for a “Moodie” which may or may not have inspired their fictional wizard namesakes.
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But this discovery has also come with some significant problems. For one thing, fans started littering the gravesite with letters to this real life deceased man’s fictional counterpart for some reason, which the cemetery had to routinely clean up “out of respect to the family.” Also, the Riddell family probably wasn’t super-thrilled about having the name “Voldemort” scrawled across their ancestor’s memorial.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, the influx of tourists at the ancient site reportedly caused a “significant” erosion problem.
Which is not unlike what happened in Wales; people created a memorial for Dobby the house elf at the beach in Wales where his death scene was filmed, which eventually had to be removed and relocated because “Harry Potter fans were putting the environment at risk.”
Although, at least in that case no one was desecrating an ancient grave with the name of a noseless creep invented purely to frighten children.
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Top Image: Warner Bros.
