OBITCH is this grave for real?!

“A woman is charged after she allegedly attacked a woman visiting her husband’s grave.” That’s the headline that closes this episode of OBITCHUARY, and it captures the show’s signature blend: true-crime horror, dark humor, and genuine curiosity about what happens after we die.

The episode weaves together several threads around death, burial, and the strange things people do with—and to—the dead. The throughline is that our relationship with mortality is messy, often absurd, and increasingly complicated by real-world constraints like land shortages, environmental regulations, and human cruelty.

Fictional graves and the stories we tell

The most sustained segment comes from Spencer’s “coffin spinner” on fictional graves—actual tombstones erected for characters who never existed. She starts with Paul Bunyan in Callahan, Minnesota, whose worn tombstone reads “born 1794, died 1893.” The folk hero was likely based on a real French-Canadian lumberjack named Fabian Fournier, who stood six feet tall in an era when that was remarkable. Fournier was murdered in 1876 by a man called “Blinky,” who beat him with a mallet. His remains ended up at the University of Michigan. The grave itself contains nobody.