The following are actual epitaphs taken from monumental inscriptions.
Playing with names in a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery:
Here lies
Johnny Yeast
Pardon me
For not rising. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:
Here lies the body
of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas
Instead of the brake. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:
Here lays Butch,
We planted him raw.
He was quick on the trigger,
But slow on the draw. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A lawyer's epitaph in England:
Sir John Strange
Here lies an honest lawyer,
And that is Strange. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:
I was somebody.
Who, is no business
Of yours. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lester Moore was a Wells, Fargo Co. station agent for Naco, Arizona inthe cowboy days of the 1880's. He's buried in the Boot Hill Cemetery in
Tombstone, Arizona:
Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No Les No More. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a Georgia cemetery:
"I told you I was sick!" --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:
Reader if cash thou art
In want of any
Dig 4 feet deep
And thou wilt find a Penny. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia:
She always said her feet were killing her
but nobody believed her. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:
On the 22nd of June
- Jonathan Fiddle -
Went out of tune. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anna Hopewell's grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an epitaph that sounds like something from a Three Stooges movie:
Here lies the body of our Anna
Done to death by a banana
It wasn't the fruit that laid her low
But the skin of the thing that made her go. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More fun with names with Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:
Gone away
Owin' more
Than he could pay. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Someone in Winslow, Maine didn't like Mr. Wood:
In Memory of Beza Wood
Departed this life
Nov. 2, 1837
Aged 45 yrs.
Here lies one Wood
Enclosed in wood
One Wood
Within another.
The outer wood
Is very good:
We cannot praise
The other. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts:
Under the sod and under the trees
Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
He is not here, there's only the pod:
Pease shelled out and went to God. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is almost a consumer tip:
Who was fatally burned
March 21, 1870
by the explosion of a lamp
filled with "R.E. Danforth's
Non-Explosive Burning Fluid" --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oops! Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:
Born 1903 - Died 1942
Looked up the elevator shaft to see if
the car was on the way down.
It was. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a cemetey in England:
Remember man, as you walk by,
As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so shall you be,
Remember this and follow me.
- To which someone replied by writing on the tombstome:
To follow you I'll not consent,
Until I know which way you went. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:
Here lies Ezekial Aikle
Age 102
The Good Die Young. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a London, England cemetery:
Here lies Ann Mann,
Who lived an old maid
But died an old Mann.
Dec. 8, 1767 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery:
Sacred to the memory of
my husband John Barnes
who died January 3, 1803
His comely young widow, aged 23, has
many qualifications of a good wife, and
yearns to be comforted. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:
The children of Israel wanted bread
And the Lord sent them manna,
Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil sent him Anna. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery:
Here lies an Atheist
All dressed up
And no place to go. 
