Grave decisions prove popular in US

By Andy Gallacher
BBC News, Miami

The park offers private and community mausoleums

The Daytona Memorial Park on Florida's east coast is a 90-acre spread just down the road from the famous race track.

A huge bronze statue of an angel greets visitors as they pull in through the gates.

It is not one of those graveyards you might have seen, with headstones grown over with ivy and weeds.

Everything here is meticulously maintained, including tombstones and burial sites dating back 100 years.

In amongst those - in American terms - ancient graves, there are new, far grander buildings clustered around a small lake.

This is the private section of the park and home to family mausoleums.

Built from the finest granite and embossed with intricate brass fittings they do not come cheap with prices starting in six figure sums.

But with several plots already sold and more being planned, the Memorial parks owners say they are catering for a new demand in the finest resting places money can buy.

Lowell Lohman, whose family own and run the park, takes me on a tour of the park in one of a fleet of golf buggies they use to show potential customers around.

We didn't want to be buried someplace that ended up with weeds and what not and be completely forgotten Ed Peck

"I think in the last five or 10 years our industry has changed and there are a lot of families that have the resources so that they can not only leave a good portion of what they have to their kids, but they can actually afford to have a family estate," Lowell says.

Lowell has arranged for me to meet an elderly couple who were amongst the first to buy one of the mausoleums.

Family heirlooms

Ed and Hilda Peck are both in their 80s and made their fortune in real estate back in the 1970s.

They drive up to us in a black Cadillac with private number plates and greet us warmly.

Demands for family mausoleums are becoming grander

Ed tells me the idea of a mausoleum, where several generations of his family to come can be laid to rest, appealed for more than just sentimental reasons.

"I have a phobia about being put down in the ground and having dirt dumped on me and so this would eliminate that possibility," he tells me.

"We didn't want to be buried someplace that ended up with weeds and what not and be completely forgotten."

The couple give me a tour of their final resting place.

Their mausoleum, which cost $372,000 (£200,000), is made from white granite and features two prominent Greek pillars either side of the glass doors.

Inside, there is a family portrait and a chandelier. Standing inside what will be their grave, Hilda seems totally unfazed by the experience.

"I don't feel any different, I'm not dead. Someday, I will be, but I won't know it. Everything is already done and I know exactly what it's going to be like even though I won't know it when it happens," she says.

Tombs for all

Families like the idea of leaving something for future generations

The Lohman family say when they first started building mausoleums here they thought the prices were high.

But as each customer comes along, they find their plans getting grander and grander.

The most expensive here cost more than $619,000 (£300,000) and they expect to exceed that in the near future.

But they say it is not just about wealth and status.

"As you see the weather across the country with floods and hurricanes, I think that's had a lot to do with an increase in mausoleums. A lot of families just don't like to be in the ground," Lowell says.

For those not amongst America's wealthy there is an alternative that the Lohman family, and funeral directors across the States, are now offering: community mausoleums.

For about the same price as a traditional burial or cremation you can buy yourself a spot in an above ground tomb, something that is proving increasingly popular.