From KUT News:
This story was originally told during the ATXplained Live show at the Paramount Theatre on April 3, 2024.
Jigger was Liz Henry’s baby doll.
As a child, Liz would dress up the chihuahua-terrier mix and push her around in a stroller. After a while, Jigger would jump out and run away, but she was mostly tolerant of Liz’s mothering.
Shang-hai, or Shang, came along five years after Jigger. A typical Siamese cat, he had his quirks.
“He loved playing the piano in the middle of the night and waking us all up,” Liz says. “He could turn on a light switch like that. Even if it was that high, he could grab it and flip it so the lights would come on in the middle of the night.”
Liz Henry holds her cat, Shang, while her father holds Jigger.
Courtesy Of Liz Henry
Liz flips through decades-old photo albums on her kitchen table in Northwest Austin. There’s Jigger splayed in an almost-sitting position, propped up by a beaming 3-year-old. There she is lapping Kool-Aid from a cup.
One photo shows Shang poking out between family members dressed in matching red pajamas for Christmas. Another shows him sunning himself outside a sliding glass door.
Liz turns the page, and there are more photos of Jigger. This time she’s lying in a 3-foot-long box with the lid propped open. A spray of white flowers sits on the ground in front.
‘There it is, and now it’s not’
Jigger was buried in 1974 in the Pet Rest Cemetery on Three Points Road in Pflugerville. Shang joined her almost 10 years later. Liz’s parents bought side-by-side plots and tombstones made of Texas granite. They weren’t fans of cremation; they wanted to be buried themselves and thought it was only proper to bury their pets.
Liz Henry’s dog Jigger lies in a coffin before being buried in the Pet Rest cemetery in 1974.
Stephanie Federico / Courtesy Of Liz Henry
Back then the cemetery was called Pet Rest Memorial Park. It was pretty well known. Liz visited a few times throughout the years, but it had been decades since her last visit when she returned in 2021. At that time, she says, it didn’t look like they were taking in new animals.
“It looked like they pretty well shut their doors and gone away,” she says.
Dan Seligman drove by from time to time and noticed the same thing. Then bulldozers showed up.
“I always glanced over, just thinking: Well, there it is,” he says, “and now it’s not.”
Dan wanted to know what became of the animals, so he wrote to the ATXplained project.
He says he doesn’t think anything “nefarious” happened, but he couldn’t find anything online or in the paper about it. It would’ve been great if the animals were removed, but if so, where’d they go? If his pet were buried there, he says, he would want to know what happened to the body.
“Probably wouldn’t be anything to dig up and take home,” Dan says. “I’m sure plenty were buried in cardboard boxes, as were our pets and, you know, kind of ashes to ashes, dust to dust sort of thing.”
Texas law says you can’t build on top of a cemetery for humans. Any sort of construction requires the graves to be relocated. That requires the next of kin to be notified or court approval if those folks can’t be found.
“But maybe because they aren’t people there’s no rules about it,” Dan says.
He’s right: Pets are considered property in Texas. They aren’t afforded the same dignity as humans when they die.
‘A little creepy’
So, what happened to the bodies?
To answer Dan’s question, I reached out to the owners of the cemetery. I left several messages, but they didn’t respond to my requests for an interview.
Pet Rest had been around since the ’60s. There was a two-story house on the property that the owners lived in. There was also a crematorium with two smokestacks.
Meg Meo, whose dog Taffy was buried there, says it was like “walking around someone’s front yard” when she visited in 2021.
“It’s like the Stephen King book,” she says. “You can’t help but think about their spirits. … I think it would be a little creepy.”
A Google Street view image of the property from 2021. The cemetery was in the front yard of a house, with most of the markers flat on the ground. Two smokestacks sit behind the house.
Google Image
Most of the markers were flat on the ground, but there were also headstones and other memorials. The price to bury a pet varied depending on an animal’s size and what it was buried in (if anything). A cardboard box. A styrofoam container. An actual coffin.
Liz’s dog may have been buried in the liner of a child’s casket.
Nothing in the papers Liz showed me promised the animals would be there forever.
The property was sold in 2021. The owners were both about 70 then — a good time to call it quits.
‘Progress is progress’
I went out to the property just before Christmas. It hugs a busy intersection across the street from a U-Haul rental place. There’s a strip mall nearby with a hair salon, a dance studio and a daycare center. In the distance, you can see the “Welcome to Pflugerville” water tower.
There definitely aren’t any smokestacks.
I stopped by the construction company next to the property to see if anyone knew what happened. One guy standing at a copier just smirked and said the animals were “respectfully removed and relocated.”
Another employee said the company bought the property about a year ago to expand. He showed me where the cemetery used to be. Now there’s just a square one-story building on green grass behind a black fence and a bunch of construction vehicles.
Owners of the pet cemetery sold the land to the construction company next door so it could expand.
Stephanie Federico / KUT News
He estimated there were around 1,000 animals buried there. Buffalo Framing and Truss has all the tombstones out back. A notice went out saying families could come by and pick them up — as well as any remains.
So Liz went out to collect her pets’ headstones.
“We were glad we found them and we just put them in our flower bed out back,” she says. “I think my parents would be glad we did that, too.”
The Henrys put Jigger Dogg’s and Shanghai’s tombstones in their backyard after retrieving them from Pet Rest Cemetery.
Patricia Lim / KUT News
She said she has no hard feelings: “Progress is progress.”
Back at the construction company, I asked if I could take a look at the tombstones.
The employee suddenly decided I needed to talk to his boss. But it was clear during a phone call later that the boss didn’t want to talk to me. And neither did his boss.
All they would say is that they hired a contractor for the expansion — and it was creepy working next door to a cemetery.
Beyond the grave
Since the owners of Pet Rest didn’t want to speak to me, and the construction company bosses wouldn’t tell me what happened, I contacted DeeDee Hawk, a medium and animal communicator. Maybe the animals would speak to her?
“There’s still animals here. I’m picking up that,” she said when I met her at the property on a windy Thursday afternoon. “Someone did come across this property and purposely pulled up all the gravestones and just left the animals here.”
DeeDee Hawk, a medium and animal communicator, hugs her dog, Sapphire, at Bull Creek Park.
Patricia Lim / KUT News
As we stood near a stop sign at the intersection, truck after truck drove by, curious passengers waving our way. A plastic baseball bat, food wrappers and other litter was tangled in the dead grass by a fence marked “No Trespassing.”
I hadn’t told DeeDee anything about what I had learned.
On that day, she sensed the outline of what had been the cemetery and a little girl looking for a dog named Charlie. But not much else. No animals spoke to her.
DeeDee says she believes when animals die, they “level up” and go to another plane. Sometimes they come back to check on their people.
“Just like if you were to talk to people out loud, you know, past family members out loud, same thing with pets,” she says. “If you speak to them … they’ll kind of chime in and be like, ‘Yes? You rang?’ And hang out with you.”
DeeDee says she understands wanting to bury a pet in a cemetery. It’s a way to tell complete strangers this animal existed. This animal meant everything. This animal was loved.
“For me, it’s [also] respect for the animal and for the life,” she says. “So I feel like burying them, returning them back to the earth, is where they would want to be.”
Anticipatory grief
This story got me thinking about my two older cats. Every time one of them throws up, I’m like — is this it?
The reporter’s cats hang out on top of her in bed.
Stephanie Federico / KUT News
People with this — what’s called anticipatory grief — often seek the support of Nicole Vykoukal, a licensed social worker in Austin who began specializing in pet loss and grief after her cat Cecil died.
“People say like, there’s no roadmap, like I need a book on how to do grief. A lot of people get kind of blindsided,” she says. “And so I help people navigate for themselves how to make meaning out of the loss.”
Nicole Vykoukal, who specializes in pet loss and grief, goes over notes from a recent therapy session as her dog, Snoop, sits nearby.
Michael Minasi / KUT News
Pets are our “chosen” family, so losing one can be devastating. You don’t just get another cat. And one of the worst things about pets dying is that they’re not there to comfort us in our grief — over them.
But Nicole says they may still be present in a way. Sometimes when she’s talking with a client about a pet who’s died, she can feel a shift in the room. It’s as if they’re there.
Her goal as a counselor is often to help people connect with their pets spiritually.
“How can they transition their relationship to still carry this pet in their heart?” she says.
When I told friends about this story almost everyone wanted to tell me about a pet of theirs who had died. Each wanted to share how awesome their dog or cat or chinchilla was. The need to share memories is pretty universal.
There’s a line in the movie Pet Sematary that really hit me. Fred Gwynne’s character, Jud, says that in time the young girl Ellie will learn what death really is: “Where the pain stops and the good memories begin.”
‘They’re just with us’
I asked Nicole why anyone would get a pet knowing they’re probably going to die before us. She said our brains may not be able to fully grasp that we’re going to outlive them.
But also pets are the reason a lot of people get up in the morning.
“As lovely as humans and people are, we can hurt each other,” she says. “And pets are not like that. You know, we can really, truly trust them. And I think we can open up and bond and just be ourselves and they can comfort us in a way. They don’t try and give us advice or change the way we feel. They’re just with us.”
So we get a pet and we love that pet and then the pet dies. But after a period of mourning, many of us do it all over again.
And why? Maybe the answer is simple: Pets are just worth it.
Reporter’s note: This piece was written before the death of my orange cat, Speedy Morris McBay Cat. This story is dedicated to him.
