• Wall Street Journal, Thursday, August 12, 2010 10:39 AM

When it comes to rebranding, this may be the ultimate challenge. Stephanie Simon reports that mortuaries and graveyards -- don't the very words give you the creeps? -- are "opening their grounds to concerts and clowns, barbecues and dance performances -- anything that might bring happy families through the wrought-iron gates."

The idea is simple: If you enjoy yourself today, you may decide to stay for eternity.

The Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, Conn., for example, holds regular scavenger hunts. "It gets them into the cemetery, but not in a scary way, and if they have a nice experience, maybe they'll say, 'I want my family there,'" says executive superintendent William F. Griswold, Jr. Los Angeles' Hollywood Forever projects films on mausoleum walls; Flat Rock's Michigan Memorial Park invites disabled children to fish at its pond.

Every story has its partypooper, of course. "We understand the need to market ... but we certainly wouldn't have a party" in a graveyard, Rob Visconti, who runs the Catholic Cemetery Association for the Boston Archdiocese, tells Simon.

I'm thinking that these festive morticians would not look fondly upon developments in Belgium, where six states have approved a new, low-carbon way to dispose of human remains that involves reducing the body to a mixture of liquid and minerals, as Marketplace's Stephen Beard reports. And I can't imagine what 'ol Tim Finnegan would make if it.

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