In 1966, a brand new shopping center opened on the south edge of Greenville. There was a J.C. Penney, an tire shop, a pharmacy, a shoe store, a supermarket, and a woman’s clothing store.

There was also something else: An old graveyard less than 100 feet away, sitting right in the middle of the parking lot, across from the Rose’s.

Somehow, a lot of people missed it. The graves were surrounded by a brick wall, which made them hard to see from the nearby parking spaces. A lot of shoppers thought it was a storage area. “When they see the graves they don’t believe it,” the shopping center’s PR man, Slim Short (excellent name), told the Raleigh News & Observer in 1972.

The cemetery is about 40 by 50 feet, and holds two dozen graves. It’s stayed in place even as its surroundings have drastically changed. The shopping center was enclosed in the mid-1980s and turned into what’s today known as the Greenville Mall. A sushi bar popped up just feet away from the graveyard’s western wall. The city itself grew as well, and the shopping center that once sat at its outskirts is now right in the middle of town.

As cities and suburbs grow, they keep bumping into graveyards. North Carolina has at least 30,000 cemeteries that we know of, and as new neighborhoods, offices, and warehouses push into formerly rural areas, builders and developers frequently encounter the final resting places of a lot of people. Consider what’s happening in Monroe. Earlier this month, a guy recorded a video of workers putting remains into boxes at an old cemetery on the north side of town. An assistant city manager said the cemetery was on private property. The owners are paying to relocate it, and they’re moving the remains to a city cemetery to make way for potential future development. The dude who shot the video wasn’t happy about all of this. “My thing was if they can do this here, what’s next?” Joseph Austin told the Charlotte Observer.

This sort of thing keeps happening in Monroe. Last year, the city moved remains out of a cemetery that few people knew even existed. It sat at the back of what’s now an industrial area, and contained about 50 graves dating back to 1842, before Monroe was even founded.

It seems weird, but the relocation of cemeteries is more common than you might think. “Is it happening all the time? Yes,” says Tanya Marsh, a law professor at Wake Forest University who’s an expert in cemetery law. It’s not easy to do, and it costs a decent amount of money. “But by and large, you can move graves,” she says. “There are consultants who only do is this line of work.”

That may bump up against the idea that your final resting place is supposed to be, um, final. “Cemeteries are these fascinating things. Nature grows. Time marches on. Things happen,” says Marsh. “But we have this concept that cemeteries have this moment time that they should be fixed in.” Which brings up a morbid but increasingly practical question. Would you rather that your earthly remains be moved someday? Or should they stay in place forever, and eventually be surrounded by, say, a parking lot and a shopping center?

For this part, put yourself in the shoes of a real estate developer. You might buy a piece of property and have no idea that people are buried on it. Sure, you’d probably be able to spot old gravestones, but plenty of people’s graves were once marked by wood. “That degrades over time, and people forget that folks are buried there,” says Marsh. “They don’t know know about the graves until they start digging.”

So then what? Well, it depends. If the government wants to use the land for a new road or school, it can move the graves. If a church wants to build an addition, it can move the graves. And if a private property owner wants to build something new, he or she can move the graves.

To do so, says Marsh, you need to put a public notice in the local newspaper. You may need to try and find the descendants of the people buried there. After that, you’ll need to buy new burial spaces. You’ll have to pay the cost of opening and closing a grave, which might set you back $1,000 each. The new grave site might need a vault, which will cost $800 at minimum. You’ll need to pay for a new casket if the old one has fallen apart. If you’re dealing with unmarked graves, you might have to find an archaeologist to use ground-penetrating radar to find them. And you’ll need to hire a funeral director to oversee the whole process. “It’s not inexpensive,” says Marsh. I can’t see getting all of that done for less than $5,000 to $7,000 per grave. That would be the minimum.”

Some people have no problem paying for it. As data centers and solar farms pop up on what used to be farmland, they’re encountering the small burial places of the families who used to own big swaths of property (or, potentially, the cemeteries of the enslaved people who worked that land). Governments or big companies can figure out how to move the remains. For others, it’s too expensive. It’s cheaper to build around them.

Plus, the developers might not have a choice. In Wilson, the Parkwood Shopping Center opened in 1964, and left a large, leafy family cemetery in the parking lot. A descendant of some of the people buried there—a Black sharecropper and his wife in an otherwise white cemetery—thinks the Winstead family mandated that that the developers had to leave the graves in place. The tree that his grandfather planted more than a century ago is still towering over the cemetery today. Burials continued there as recently as 2007, even as the mall itself was dying. The shopping center, which became the Wilson Mall, closed in 2013 and is currently in the process of being torn down by the city, which has repeatedly stated that it will leave the cemetery in place.

In Concord, the people who built the Carolina Mall in 1972 were also forced to build around a cemetery. It once belonged to Private Jacob Misenheimer, who was given the land by the state to compensate him for his service in the Revolutionary War. The earliest burial was in 1821, and over the years, 22 others were buried there. For a time, the graves were surrounded by a golf course that was once part of the old Cabarrus Country Club. When a new owner bought up the property in 1966, the family refused to sell the land. “It's not for sale,” Misenheimer descendant Mary Burgess told Spectrum News in 2020. “We're not allowed to sell it. It's tied up because it's supposed to be passed down and never to be sold.” One of the caretakers, Elizabeth Burgess, died in 2021 at age 103. She was buried there next to her husband, between the Belk and the food court.

The mall itself mostly saw the cemetery as a minor oddity. In 1976, the mall manager told the Charlotte Observer that “it really doesn’t bother us. It’s more of a conversation piece than anything.” The same story also noted that the most recent burial, in 1972, was that of Larry Burgess of Concord, who died after refusing any medical treatment for a rattlesnake bite. “Family members said at the time that Burgess believed he couldn’t be hurt by serpents because he was a follower of the Lord,” the story stated, dryly.

Even if malls surround cemeteries with walls, stores, and pavement, they can’t cut off access to a cemetery completely. “There’s a common law right of access across the United States for the descendants of those buried there to visit,” says Marsh. “Even if it’s on private land, you have a right to cross their land to get to it.” That means the descendants of the folks buried between the runways at Raleigh-Durham International Airport? Or the folks whose ancestors’ graves were cut off when the TVA flooded a valley to create Fontana Lake? They’re allowed to find a way to get there to visit.

All of that said, the idea of a permanent final resting place is, largely, an American one. In Europe, grave sites often are not bought, they’re rented, maybe for as little as 10 years. You’re buried there until the lease runs out. After that, whatever’s left of you is supposed to be relocated to a communal burial site. In the Netherlands, that’s done partly for practical reasons: It’s a small country that’s low on space, with bad soil and high groundwater tables. In Germany, some American veterans began to notice that the graves of fellow service members were starting to disappear, only to learn that their burial sites had only been leased for 15 years. “I know it sounds nasty, but if you want the full benefits of your service [proper military burial and marked grave] then here is what you need to do: Go home,” a European service officer for the VFW told Stars & Stripes.

In the United States, Marsh says the rights of the deceased conflict with the realities of a changing world. “The law promises the right of undisturbed perpetual repose. And that right is completely unrealistic. How do you promise somebody that nothing is going to change forever?” she says. “Do people believe it? Sure. Should they believe it? They should not.”

Which all means that, increasingly, graves are moving. But that doesn’t mean that the ones that remain on newly desirable land aren’t being cared for. In Greenville, the Evans Family Cemetery in the parking lot of the Greenville Mall got an upgrade a few years ago. Originally, the tombstones were surrounded by gray asphalt because nobody could get grass to grow after the shopping center was built. Recently, it was painted red and green and given a faux-brick look to make it look a little nicer.

That would have made James L. Evans happy. Evans was prominent attorney in Greenville, took care of his family plot in the 1960s and 70s. “Old Mr. Evans was quite concerned about the conditions of he cemetery,” the shopping center’s PR man said in 1972. Evans would regularly pick up trash and debris that accumulated behind the walls. Maybe he was a little guilty that he’d sold what was once his family’s peach orchard to make way for a parking lot. Or maybe not. Either way, when he died in 1970, he was buried in the Pinewood Memorial Park, a large, tree-filled cemetery further out in the country. Today it sits across the road from a Food Lion.