Old Post Chapel

Virginia · USA · Cemetery

The chapel at Fort Myer where every Arlington funeral begins.

The Old Post Chapel stands at Fort Myer, immediately beside Arlington National Cemetery, and since the 1930s nearly every funeral service held at Arlington has begun in it. The caisson waits outside. The families come through in an unbroken line, day after day, year after year. Few buildings in the United States have carried more grief through a single set of doors.

Soldiers posted here describe voices in the empty chapel, footsteps crossing the floor above or behind them, and doors they had locked standing open when they came back. The detail that recurs most often, and the one people find hardest to explain away, concerns cabinets and drawers: staff have returned to rooms nobody had entered to find every cabinet and every drawer standing open at the same careful angle, roughly ninety degrees, as though someone had gone along the row squaring them up.

The figure reported here sits rather than walks. She is described in the bridal room, which for most of the chapel's history was not a bridal room at all but the room where families waited before a service, and where they were taken afterwards. Whatever else the chapel holds, it holds that. This is an active military installation and access is controlled.

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Wo befindet sich Old Post Chapel?

Old Post Chapel liegt in Virginia, USA.