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On Sunday evening, more than a dozen of the dead Moravians buried there rose to tell their stories.
More than 250 people came to Lititz Moravian Church on the crisp, cool evening for the second-annual Cemetery Lantern Tour.
In groups of 25, visitors followed costumed guides to the Corpse House, where bodies of the deceased were kept until interment, and then through the graveyard lit by the moon and hundreds of luminaries.
Along the way, church members dressed in black waited to portray some of the notable dead that can be found there, from Andreas Albrecht, a soldier, gunsmith and innkeeper who helped design the Pennsylvania rifle, to Amelia Demuth, descended from the family of tobacconists and an ancestor of famed local artist Charles Demuth.
"I picked people I thought would be most interesting and familiar," church archivist Dale Shelley said later.
People who toured the cemetery last year saw a different selection of characters, he said, and if the event repeats in 2010 they will be different again.
God's Acre, which was reserved to members of the Moravian church, has flat stones "because everyone is considered equal," Shelley said. Families that wanted a more elaborate headstone were buried elsewhere on the grounds.
The tour began at the Corpse House, built in 1786 because the church did not permit bodies to be brought into the sanctuary.
"Moravians believe that when somebody dies, the spirit leaves the body," Shelley explained. "We respect the body, but we don't honor it."
Nearby, a trombone choir performed chorales for the deceased.
Other characters on the tour included Joseph Sturgis, a missionary who survived gun wounds and fire from an attack by Delaware Indians during the French and Indian War; Greenbury Pettycourt, a goat herder and carpenter known for building churches and outhouses; and Christina Margaretha Kiesel, a midwife whose husband, John George Kiesel, gave his name to Kissel Hill.
