The Peaslee Sphinx

Louisville, Kentucky

One of the oldest offbeat grave monuments in Cave Hill Cemetery is the Peaslee Sphinx that arrived in 1907. At the time it was shocking to Southern sensibilities, which, outside of New Orleans, tended to keep graveyard art to traditional Christian forms such as mourning figures, angels, and an occasional truncated tree trunk. And it didn't help that the Sphinx, perched atop the Peaslee family tomb, was positioned right alongside the cemetery's main thoroughfare. If you visited Cave Hill, you saw the Sphinx.

The Sphinx is 14 feet long, carved from a single block of granite by Louisville's Muldoon Monument Company. The three Peaslees buried beneath it, Charles, his wife Ella, and their daughter Eleanor, were dead for nearly two years before the Sphinx arrived. It was probably not their idea, and appears to have been the brainstorm of Eleanor's surviving sisters, who sold one of the Peaslee's summer cottages to pay for it. They were inspired by a Sphinx in a Cincinnati cemetery, which squatted over the graves of some of their mom's relatives.

By the time the sisters died their neo-Egyptian ardor had apparently cooled, and they were buried elsewhere, not under the Sphinx.