Dr. Holly Everett’s work helps us better understand roadside memorials and other public expressions of remembrance. Her 1998 master’s thesis, “Crossroads: Roadside Accident Memorials in and around Austin, Texas,” examines 35 memorials, exploring how they’re constructed and the cultural meanings they convey. What is the intent of a roadside memorial? Is it meant to be temporary or permanent? Are these markers legal? Who builds them, and what does that process look like? How do roadside memorials compare to spontaneous large-scale public commemorations of grief? Dr. Everett offers insight into these everyday and deeply meaningful spaces of mourning. After learning more about them, you’ll never look at them the same.

Transcript:

Diane Hullet: [00:00:00] Hi, I am Diane Hullet , and you’re listening to the Best Life Best Death podcast. Today’s guest, I always say this special, excited, but it’s really true. I’m talking today to Holly Everett. Hi Holly. Hi. And Holly joins us from Nova Scotia and she is a specialist in roadside memorials. And I don’t know about you, but I have like.

I don’t know. I’ve just always had this reverence and this connection when I go by a roadside memorial, whether it’s a, a simple cross at, you know, a, a tricky corner, or whether it’s a ghost bike as we call them in Colorado, a white bike on the side of the road, or whether it’s something even more elaborate with tinsel, I guess you’d call it.

And. You know, Christmas lights and holiday lights and something that changes with the season. I feel like I’ve seen all those things and so I don’t know. Listeners, I don’t know about you, but I love roadside memorials. I find them incredibly moving and for three years of the Best Life Best Death podcast I’ve been [00:01:00] saying I wish I could find someone to talk about roadside memorials.

And here is Holly. So I’m so happy you’re joining us and you know, give us a little bit about yourself. What do you do? How’d you get into this?

Dr. Holly Everett: Yeah, well my name is Holly Everett and I’m associate professor of folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. I’m actually a little north of Nova Scotia.

Gosh, I totally

Diane Hullet: said the wrong thing. I’m so sorry.

Dr. Holly Everett: Newfoundland. Of course. Of course. North of Nova Scotia. Yeah. And I’ve been here in the Department of Folklore for a long time because I came here in 1996 to do my master’s degree. Thinking that I would just do the Master’s and go back to Texas, which is where I’m from.

But while I was here, I decided I wanted to stay a bit longer, so I did a PhD and and then miraculously I got a job. So I’ve been here

Diane Hullet: ever since. So great, and you’ve got a book called Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture and True Confession [00:02:00] listeners, I have not read the book. This is one of the few times where I haven’t read the book ahead of time, but I read a couple of articles that Holly has written and I just, I just think she’s got a lot to share about how these have come into being, what, how, why they matter to us and whether or not they’re legal, like even those kind of basic questions.

So. How did you come to this interest in roadside memorials?

Dr. Holly Everett: So growing up in Austin, Texas I saw them a lot and in other parts of Texas as well, because our family was in West Texas. So when we would drive from Austin out to West Texas, I would see them along the road. So I just thought, well, that’s, you know, that’s a thing that happens.

But then when I was learning to drive, I began to pay more attention to them because I realized that they were sort of, you know. Warning signs of dangerous curves or bad intersections or things like that. Fast forward many years later I come to graduate school here at [00:03:00] Memorial University and to do a master’s degree in folklore.

And in your second semester, you have to submit your idea, your your topic idea for your, for your thesis. And I had intended to study music. But in the classes that I was taking, I realized that these roadside memorials were folklore, they were a kind of religious folklore. And I thought, Hmm, maybe, maybe I should do that.

You know, because part of coming up with an idea for a master’s thesis is coming up with an idea that is feasible, you know, something you can do and something that you can. Pay for support or get funding for. So I thought, well this is in my hometown. There are so many memorials there, and I think I could just study those.

And one of my professors said, that’s a good idea. You should do it. [00:04:00] So that’s what I did.

Diane Hullet: Amazing. Amazing. So then did you go back to Austin and spend time in Austin? I did. Yeah. And you kind of cataloged what was there and, and talk to us about the, the range of what is there, right. The range of what’s possible and what we see.

Yeah,

Dr. Holly Everett: so so yeah, I concentrated on these crosses in Austin and so in, in Austin, very near my mother’s house is a memorial that was the first mothers against drunk driving memorial in Austin. And so that went up in 19 1981. So that’s, you know, that’s a good long time. And just right off the bat, you know, you’re thinking wait a minute.

These roadside memorials, they’re, you know, people talk about them as ephemeral and this kind of thing, but then you come across one that’s quite old. And so I, I was kind of intrigued by that. And then I was also really just taken really in kind of overwhelmed [00:05:00] by their, their beauty. Diversity, right?

So you have everything from like the very kind of formally structured mad memorial. You know, it’s a, they’re always a certain size, they’re always white. They always have a red plaque at the cross piece that says, you know, dates of birth, dates of death then to ones that looked like they were maybe made in a garage, you know, or a kind of.

Carpenter workshop or something like that. Maybe they have metal decorations, metal flourishes and just the variation of things that people leave at the sites. I always found very. Very fascinating.

Diane Hullet: Me too. There’s something, there’s real beauty in the personalization of it, or like you said, the Mothers Against Drunk Driving has this consistency to it that’s really moving.

Yes. And you are Some of them quite large, like I. We have this really powerful right now, one in Colorado in near [00:06:00] Boulder where a young man who was a junior national cyclist was hit. And it is like the bike is up on a pillar and it is lit at night. And it is, it is quite something. So say some about the legality of these, or like you said, the, are they ephemeral or are they long lasting?

And also we’re kind of talking right now about. Individual memorials. But there’s also this whole thing that I think we’ll, we’ll segue to at some point about like public memorials with tragedies, and that’s kind of a different thing. But staying on this thing for the moment of kind of a single death, typically along a roadside legal, not legal.

Dr. Holly Everett: Yeah. So in some places they are legal and you know, the the city jurisdiction or the county or you know, will have a policy about it. And usually for those you need to kind of go through the local department of transportation. Sometimes they’ll put it up for you, you know, and, and you just, you give them the, [00:07:00] the information about the person.

But lots of them are. What I would call extra legal in that they don’t conform to a policy. They haven’t been, you know, formally registered with any kind of, you know civic or governmental office. And part of what fascinated me about that was that while there are regulations in a lot of places, people just do what they wanna do regardless.

And, you know, there’s variation in terms of. Like the, the policing of those memorials, even in places where, you know, the, the, the policy might be they can stay for up to 18 months. I. What I have found is most jurisdictions really don’t wanna touch those unless they absolutely have to because it’s in the re in the way of construction.

Or there’s, there’s something about it that they find that they’re, you know, worried is distracting to drivers. And sometimes [00:08:00] that can be, you know that that the offerings at a memorial are kind of. Multiplying and they’re worried about, you know, they’re worried about people having an accident, trying to turn and look at these things ’cause they are so, so so beautiful.

Diane Hullet: Yeah. Interesting. So it’s a little bit of an ask for forgiveness, not for permission. For a lot of families it sounds like. I, you know, I’ve never seen one being constructed, like I’ve never seen somebody at the side of the road creating it. I’ve only seen them after the fact. Have you been a part of any that were being put up?

Dr. Holly Everett: No, I haven’t, but when I, when I decided on this, this topic for my master’s thesis I mentioned it to my mom who had a, she was a grade school teacher and there was a student in her class who’s older sister had died in a car accident and they had put up a memorial for her and. My mom felt like the mom, her shiloh’s [00:09:00] mom shilah that she wouldn’t mind talking to me and so, and so I, I spoke with her and got in touch with a couple other families through her, but then also my sister’s boyfriend at the time had had sat with a friend of his while his friend made.

A memorial cross for his older brother. So I had, I had the, that experience, you know, or talk to these people about their experience, but the same as you. I have not ever seen anyone actually putting one up.

Diane Hullet: And what was, what did these families that you interviewed, or individuals that you talked to, what did they say about the experience and why they did it?

So,

Dr. Holly Everett: For a lot of people, you know, I think the immediate impulse just comes from, from grief and shock. Because, you know, the, these are untimely. Deaths, but then usually [00:10:00] later, sometime later, if it’s not a part of the initial impulse to, to put up a warning, then later on that will become a reason for maintaining it is just to let people know, and, and this is what people told me, you know, if, if one person goes through this intersection more slowly or you know, stops.

At the red light and doesn’t just blow through it ’cause it’s out in the middle of nowhere then, then that’s a reason to have that kind of a cross up.

Diane Hullet: Wow, beautiful. So kind of twofold. One is like acknowledge and memorialize the person and the other is to say, Hey, take notice. Somebody died here and this is dangerous.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Beautiful. Well, you know, so there is this memorials for a single death, like a biker or a pedestrian or a car accident, and then there are these larger. I, I don’t know, would, would we call ’em like public shrines?

Dr. Holly Everett: There’s a lot [00:11:00] of different terminology, right? Yeah. So spontaneous shrines is, is one term that’s used.

Memorial assemblages is another one. But even for like the, you know, roadside memorials, people will sometimes refer to it as a makeshift memorial or, you know what’s the other term? A, a shrine. Yeah. And makes makeshift shrine. Yeah. So people use a lot of different terms for it, but you’re right in that these kind of traditions have kind of developed in a kind of a parallel fashion.

Diane Hullet: Yes, yes. So I know here in Boulder where there was a tragic, you know, multiple person shooting at a grocery store, you know, boom, around the chain link. Fence for more than a block. All messages and teddy bears and flowers in the whole nine yards. And I, I think it, it, it does seem like a public place for people to put their grief when they don’t know where else to put it.

Is that, is that your understanding of what it is? Yeah,

Dr. Holly Everett: that’s a big [00:12:00] part of it. I think that, you know, these kinds of larger scale shrines like you’re talking about, have been put up here and there you know, over the years. But I started working on doing this research in 1997, in early 1997, and then Princess Diana was in that.

Fatal car wreck. Car wreck, excuse me, later on in 1997. And I think those, you know, those were huge shrines that developed, you know, at, at the actual place where the accident was, but also at these, you know, various castles and other kinds of sites related to her. And people were. Taken aback by it, these huge displays, you know, for someone that you know, the vast majority of these people did not know.

But I think that that was just kind of like a moment at which. A lot of people suddenly [00:13:00] thought, oh, that is a thing, you know, that is a thing we can do. And people did talk about, scholars do talk about, you know, this kind of turn in the way that people grieve in that kind of suddenly, you know it becomes okay to do it.

And it also is a way to participate or to you know, grieve. When you don’t know the person very well, but you want to leave a flower or a note and you know, and you’re just drawn to it and it’s, it’s something that you can do even if you didn’t know the person, you know, whereas you might feel hesitant to go to a funeral of somebody that you, you don’t know very well, but.

You know, nobody’s gonna stop you if you wanna go and lay a flower at a, at a roadside memorial.

Diane Hullet: Right. That’s so interesting. So there’s the people who put it up who are moved to put it up, and then there might be close in people who put something at it. But there might also be, [00:14:00] like you said, just a community acknowledgement that says.

I was touched by this loss. And then that’s so interesting that Princess dies. Death was like a flashpoint for these broader public memorials. And nine 11 I think was another flashpoint, right? Where suddenly. This is what we do when something happens. Columbine High School also. So these, these tragedies that are public events in Princess D’s case with a public figure and some of these others just with citizens that we wanna show our love and humanity for.

So, right. Wow. Oh, interesting. Because I, I don’t remember in my childhood, like in the seventies, I don’t remember things like this, but I didn’t know if it was just me not remembering or if they weren’t as prevalent.

Dr. Holly Everett: I, I think they weren’t as prevalent. I mean, I was a, I was a kid at around the same time myself, you know?

And while I. I, well, I remember very well these roadside memorials. I, I do not remember these larger scale kinds of, of [00:15:00] shrines developing, and I, I really think that like. It was this, like you said, princess Diana and then followed by nine 11 that really kind of cemented it as part of, you know, modern or postmodern grieving protocol.

Diane Hullet: Yes. ’cause there is this whole interesting thing. I mean, I, I think grieving and how grief and our display of grief, so to speak, that sounds weird, but like how our, what people see us do when we grieve has changed over time and it, it’s different in every society, and I’m sure it has regional variation too.

So I’m talking kind of theoretically about grief, but that there’s personal grief and then there’s, as we said, kind of public and community grief. I feel like in late April, this is 2025, in late April, I just saw a thing that said. National Public Grief Day is coming up, and I know some other end of life educators are planning kind of specific events where people can [00:16:00] come in public and do something and I, I’m not tracking exactly what people are doing.

I’ll have to tune into that.

Dr. Holly Everett: Yeah, I, and I think that was reinforced during COVID. You know, when we weren’t supposed to be getting together and so, and people were doing things like drive by birthday parties to try and maintain social distance, but also for a while there was a kind of a gap in terms of people wanting to memorialize COVID deaths, but having some discomfort about it at the same time, so that.

These kinds of memorials were, were public a, a way of public grieving for these very individual losses.

Diane Hullet: Yes. So, so it’s just interesting how it keeps evolving, right? These are like. Public public displays, public rituals, and they have this evolution. Now now a very formal public display of [00:17:00] grief and connection and mourning is the Vietnam Memorial.

Yes. And have you, have you been there? I have not, but I hear it’s just extraordinary.

Dr. Holly Everett: Yeah. I have not been there. But I do agree it’s, it’s kind of a really important point in the development of this kind of grieving because people were leaving things at. At that wall. And there was a very good book written about it by Kristin Ann Haas.

And it’s called Carried to the Wall. And it’s about people going there, spending time there, you know, OO other veterans, people leaving things there, and sometimes, you know, taking things as mementos. And that. Yeah, that is another kind of of public memory.

Diane Hullet: And then I’m also reminded of, you know, one of the little moments for me in my memory is there’s an incredible drive between Walsenburg, Colorado and like Taos, New Mexico, Northern New Mexico.

And on that road, when you first kind of hit [00:18:00] the. Two lanes outta Wallenberg heading west. There’s this incredible little rock out crop that’s, oh gosh, it’s probably only 20 feet high or something, maybe even less, but it’s full of these little, it’s sandstone probably, and it’s full of these little natural niches.

Niches, uhhuh, how do you say that word? And in these little niches, people have tucked things, and it’s everything from a candle to a doll to a note. To a milagro heart kind of thing. And so it’s this I, I, I guess I think of it as a shrine. I don’t know that it is technically, and I don’t know if it is about death or just sacred relationship in some way, but I always love driving by it.

And there’s a little place where you can pull out and stop and kind of. Take a look and take a picture. So that’s almost like a group spot that came from this natural formation and the rocks that had these incredibly almost little shelves, you know? Yeah. So, and I’ve never seen anything like that anywhere else.

[00:19:00] I’m sure there are some others, especially in the Southwest, where we have these kind land forms that acknowledged that you know, different geographies lend themselves to different expressions, right?

Dr. Holly Everett: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And one of the first one of the first articles I read about Memorial Crosses was by a, a geography grad student who wrote her thesis about these memorials in Mexico.

And so she, she traveled down there and she, I. You know, mapped them out. And that’s kind of how, you know, people think of the, the memorials as being kind of a southwestern thing tied in with, with Mexican culture particularly. But you know, they’ve, they’ve since kind of spread up, up into the northern states and in, in Canada.

I a friend of mine who’s a historian found in a tra a traitor’s journal documentation of, of a group of traitors having put up a cross for someone [00:20:00] who drowned on the river. So. We also have that northern tradition, and that’s also a tradition in, in, in Newfoundland, is if someone, you know, drowns to put a, a cross near nearest the shore.

And so we have both. Those influences. Mixing?

Diane Hullet: Yeah. Mix up. Oh, I just, I think they’re so moving. I, I, I, you know, I joke, I joke, I half joke with my family, if I die in a car accident, I want one of those put up a cross for me. You know, so it’ll be you know, tragic if that happens. But also this podcast will explain this long affinity to roadside memorials.

Right. What else do you think is interesting for people to know?

Dr. Holly Everett: I think that one of the things I was really interested in is how those kinds of memorials may reflect religious belief or, or not even strictly religious, but you know, even more broadly spiritual belief. What, what they say about our [00:21:00] ideas about death.

And that’s one of the things that I talked to people about in my, in my thesis research. Is kind of how does the Memorial cross or that memorial site fit in with what you believe about where that person has gone? And that can be kind of a tricky thing to get at, you know, when you’re, when you’re talking to people, and especially when you’re talking to people who, who may still be grieving.

But that’s one of the things I was interested in. So when I look at them, I’m. Interested to see if there are any religious icons or any other you know, small figurines or candles or anything that could be associated with any kind of spiritual practice, basically. But then I’m, I’m also interested in people leaving notes at these memorials, particularly in, in Texas.

I’ve seen. Notes in plastic baggies [00:22:00] pinned, you know, like to, to a cross or left on the ground, but, you know, protected from the elements in some way. And, I find that really, really fascinating to think about this idea of, of people leaving messages.

Diane Hullet: Well, and in that case I’ve seen that too. And in that case, it’s really an invitation to read the message.

Right. Because they, they wanted the message to remain and not be washed away by wind or reign. Right?

Dr. Holly Everett: Right. That’s part of looking at the memorials for, for intent, what the intention of the, of the builder is. Does it look like something that is only meant to be temporary? Does it look like something that people intend to last a long time, you know, like a, a wrought iron cross or one mom I talked to she had put up a memorial with her, with her partner who was a contractor.

And so they had [00:23:00] set the cross with rebar on the bottom and poured concrete around it. So they meant for it to stay there, you know, and this was after the first cross they had put up was destroyed. They don’t, you know, they just came back to it one day and it was gone. And so. They went to make it more permanent

Diane Hullet: and it’s still there.

It’s interesting too. I’m reminded also of a friend who is kind of a thrift store. Person. And she found some incredible little statues of Mother Mary. And she decided to tuck them in different spots on a nature walk that she took. So she tucked it like in a tree trunk where most people wouldn’t notice it.

But if you happened to stop by this tree, ’cause your dog stopped there and you looked, you would see this little, you know, eight inch high figure of Mary tucked in this tree trunk. And she and I loved it and thought of it as like. Folklore art. That was kind of a [00:24:00] mystery. But then I thought it was interesting ’cause I also have come across people who say, oh, I hate it when people leave junk on the trail.

Right? Like, that’s trash and that shouldn’t be here. And why would somebody subject me to Mother Mary on my beautiful nature walk? So I think these, these crosses or these memorials can have that kind of tension as well. Like one man’s trash is another man’s treasure or something, you know? So, yeah. You know, the plastic flowers that blow and the, and the notes and black bags that look ratty over time.

You know, what do we do with those? And I wonder, with these big public memorial sites, where does all that end up? I, I would be wonderful if there was some kind of like a ritual collecting and burning of it all or something beyond just like it’s all collected and put in a trash dumpster. But that’s probably what happens.

Maybe the person who dumps it in the dumpster has a little moment of. Reflection as they lifted in, you know?

Dr. Holly Everett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s a, an [00:25:00] issue for you know, that, that people like me, folklores, but also archivists and, you know, historians are, are interested in, is what becomes of. All those things, those stuffed animals or bibles or candles or bottles of coke, you know, whatever it happens to be.

After the Texas a a and m bonfire tragedy, one of a folklorist at Texas a and m she worked together with conservators on the campus to try and preserve those materials, which is. Really difficult. You know, let’s say you have a, a teddy bear that’s been sitting outside for four months and has been rained on, you know maybe six or seven times.

How do you preserve that?

Diane Hullet: Right, right. And I’m sure photography is a big piece of this, right? Capturing it as it changes over [00:26:00] time. Yeah. Yeah. Having that photographic record. Well next time, you know, next time listeners drive by a roadside memorial. I hope this gives them a little food for thought about some of the history of where they come from and the, the meaning behind it.

Although it sounds like in your experience in all the interviews you did in Austin, the meaning is twofold and it’s also very personal, and we just, we just don’t know. Yes,

Dr. Holly Everett: that’s right. We, we, every person brings, you know, something of themselves to it.

Diane Hullet: Yep. Yeah. And yet there is almost always this sense of memorial recognition, acknowledgement making, you know, staking a claim that their person died here as opposed to wherever their body or ashes may be.

And then also this sense of warning and concern for the future, and wanting to tell other people about what happened. So, exactly. Holly, I just, I thank you so much for your time. I just think this [00:27:00] is such an interesting subject and you know, again, here in Colorado, in Boulder where I live, we have just, I could think off the top of my head of four bikes within five miles of my house, you know, and so this is a real.

Peace of public mourning and public awareness of death. That I think is another way to bring, I don’t know, death awareness, death, death out of the shadows of illiterate, illiterate approaches to death, you know, to say this happens, tragedies happen. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Holly Everett: Definitely. I yeah, I, I feel like, you know, even, even for people who, like you say, even for people who, who think it’s too much, you know, it, it shouldn’t be this kind of public mourning is, is unseemly, you know, or something like that.

Or they just, I. Think it looks cruddy after a while because of all this stuff. You know, there is still, it still brings up debates about, about mourning and [00:28:00] about how we feel about death. And so it’s kind of always evolving, you know? Yeah. Well said. How can people find out about your book if they wanna read more?

Yeah. My, my book Thank you is available through Amazon. Both in the States and in Canada, and you can also buy it through the University of North Texas Press. If you go to the University of North Texas press website. Nice. And tell us the name of it again. The full title is Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture, and it was published in 2002.

Fantastic.

Diane Hullet: I don’t think anybody’s published anything about it since. I mean, if they do, you or I will. Find it because we are both paying attention to

Dr. Holly Everett: what’s out there. Yeah. The newest, the newest book is one that was published in 2020 and that is by a communication studies scholar in Texas, a named Robert Bednar.

And the name of that book is Rhode [00:29:00] Scars, and that’s, that’s the newest one that I know of. Diane Hullet: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time and all that great information. You’re very welcome. As always. You can find out more about the work I do at Best Life, best death.com. Thanks so