Elizabeth Edwards

Birth Name:
Mary Elizabeth Anania
Birth Date:
July 3, 1949
Birth Place:
Jacksonville, Florida
Death Date:
December 7, 2010
Place of Death:
1201 Old Greensboro Road, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Age:
61
Cause of Death:
Metastatic breast cancer
Cemetery Name:
Oakwood Cemetery
Claim to Fame:
The Odd and the Interesting
During a lifetime of idyllic successes and crushing reverses, Elizabeth Edwards was an accomplished lawyer, the mother of four children and the wife of a wealthy, handsome senator with sights on the White House. But their 16-year-old son was killed in a car crash, cancer struck her at age 55, the political dreams died and, within months, her husband admitted to having had an extramarital affair with a campaign staffer. The scandal over the affair faded after his disclosure in 2008. But in 2009, Mrs. Edwards resurrected it in a new book and interviews and television appearances, telling how her husband had misrepresented the infidelity to her, rocked their marriage and spurned her advice to abandon his run for the presidency. Eventually John Edwards admitted he had fathered a child with the staffer. Soon afterward, he and Mrs. Edwards separated legally. Her story and John Edwards subsequent charges of campaign finance violations involving his mistress to the tune of $900,000 was fodder for tabloids for the better part of a year. Elizabeth Edwards gravesite is one of the top most-visited memorials at historic Oakwood Cemetery.

There’s More To The Story

Mrs. Edwards had always been a dominant figure in her husband’s political life. Often called his closest adviser and surrogate, she reviewed his television advertisements and major speeches, helped pick his lieutenants, joined internal debates over tactics and strategy, and sometimes dressed down, or even forced out, campaign aides she thought had failed her husband. A scathing portrait of Mrs. Edwards’s political role, based on unnamed sources, was presented in “Game Change,” a book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. This badly written and reviewed tome died a quick death.

 

Cemetery Information:

Final Resting Place:

Oakwood Cemetery

701 Oakwood Avenue

Raleigh, North Carolina, 27601

USA

North America

Map:

Map of historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina
Map of historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina

Grave Location:

Section Forrest, Division B, Lot 2, Grave 2

Grave Location Description

As you enter the cemetery stay to the right and make your way to the center of the cemetery and park at the intersection of Sycamore Avenue and Maple Avenue. Walk the sort distance down Sycamore Avenue to the beautiful memorial to Elizabeth Edwards and her son Wade Edwards.

Grave Location GPS

35.787270, -78.626516

Photos:

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Betty Hill

popular name: Betty Hill

date_of_death: October 23, 2004

age: 85

cause_of_death: Lung cancer

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Betty and Barney Hill lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire where Betty was a social worker and Barney was a postal worker. The couple were catapulted into the international spotlight when in September 1961 they claimed to have been abducted by aliens in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The two were returning home to Portsmouth from a trip to Montreal, Canada, when as they were driving in the middle of the night, they saw lights approaching from the sky. What followed is said to be the first well-documented, "feasibly legitimate" UFO abduction in history. The couple claimed that they saw bipedal humanoid creatures in the window of a large spacecraft that landed in a field. They claimed they were followed by a spaceship and eventually accosted, kidnapped, examined, and then released by its extraterrestrial crew. The event has since become the best documented and most famous case of alien abduction in the history of UFO-ology. The story of the Hills grew big enough to prompt a best-selling book by John Fuller entitled "The Interrupted Journey", inspire a television movie called "The UFO Incident" starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons. Over time their story was subjected to a brutal debunking by multiple people including the famous intellectual Carl Sagan.

Eben Byers

popular name: Eben Byers

date_of_death: March 31, 1932

age: 51

cause_of_death: Cancer due to excessive radiation exposure

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Eben Byers, popular Pittsburgh sportsman, socialite and industrialist, fell out of an upper berth in 1927 returning from a Yale-Harvard football game and injured his arm. His Pittsburgh physiotherapist, Dr. Charles Clinton Moyar, prescribed a patented drink called ''Radithor." Radithor, a popular and expensive mixture of radium 226 and radium 228 in distilled water, was advertised as an effective treatment for over 150 "endocrinologic" diseases, especially lassitude and sexual impotence. Over 400 000 bottles, each containing over 2 μCi (74 kBq) of radium, were marketed and sold worldwide between 1925 and 1930. Byers was drinking in excess of 3-4 bottles a day for years, claiming the elixir eased the arm pain and gave him a little energy boost. He enthusiastically recommended it to friends, sent them cases of it, even gave some to one of his horses. but stopped in October 1930 (after taking some 1400 doses) when that effect faded. Soon after he lost weight, had horrible headaches and his teeth began to fall out. In 1931, the Federal Trade Commission asked him to testify about his experience, but he was too sick to travel, so the commission sent a lawyer to take his statement at his home; the lawyer reported that Byers's "whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth and most of his lower jaw had been removed" and that "All the remaining bone tissue of his body was disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull." The death of the Pittsburgh millionaire sportsman Eben M. Byers, who was an avid Radithor user, by radium poisoning in 1932 brought an end to this era and prompted the development of regulatory controls for all radiopharmaceuticals.

Mary E. Hart

popular name: Mary E. Hart

date_of_death: October 15, 1872

age: 47

cause_of_death: Unknown

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: As the story goes, at 48 years old Mary E. Hart, as she was known in life, “just drops to the floor” one day at midnight. Believing her dead, her family had her buried at Evergreen Cemetery the very next day. However, one night her aunt has a terrible nightmare that Mary’s not actually dead. The aunt eventually convinces the family to exhume the body, and when they open the coffin, they find Mary’s nails bloodied from scratching and a petrified look on her face as if she died of asphyxiation. Legend has it that she may of just suffered a stroke when she fell to the floor, her family not realizing she was still alive. So now urban legend has it that Midnight Mary haunts Evergreen Cemetery and will curse anyone with certain death if they are found in the graveyard at midnight or caught desecrating her grave.

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