12 Weird Things Left at Famous Graves

As documented on Twitter by his son, one tribute that pops up at the grave of pitchman extraordinaire Billy Mays is that of his most iconic product: OxiClean.

The grave of Frederick the Great is littered with the most humble of gifts: the potato. It’s not just an issue of not springing for flowers, either. He’s known as the Potato King because he was heavily responsible for introducing the potato into the Prussian diet.

If you’re looking to pay tribute to the French poet and musician, you might be greeted by a head of cabbage. Weirdly, there’s not much metaphor here: One of his famous albums was called The Man With the Cabbage Head, inspired by a sculpture of the same name.

Warhol had much more than 15 minutes of fame, and people still pay respect to his grave today. Even with no interest in art beyond dorm room posters, you’re probably aware of some of his most famous work being his prints of Campbell’s soup cans. Now, fans leave the real deal on his grave as a tribute.

If you’re a fan of the author’s Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, you might be expecting towels, but apparently those are removed because they cause problems with wildlife. What does remain next to his grave is a large collection of ballpoint pens, owing to his love and frequent loss of them, and a passage from his books about the planet all lost ballpoint pens end up on.

Here’s one that apparently the British Government had to officially ask for a stop to: marmalade sandwiches left on the late Queen’s grave. Funnily enough, it’s not a tribute to her actual life, but to a sketch she did for the BBC with Paddington Bear, where she revealed she, too, always kept one in her purse.

For anyone else, a headstone covered in stickers would be nothing more than disrespectful trash. But for famous suffragette Susan B. Anthony, the I Voted stickers left by women on her grave — at least until they installed a protective shield to bear them instead — are a testament to what she accomplished.

Their grave in Paris is covered in tickets from the Paris Metro, with the official reasoning somewhat in question. A stunt that they supported where free Metro tickets were given away by Maoists during fare hikes is one theory, and famous riots revolving around a closed metro station are another.

A beloved children’s book author has the ability to reach a lot of people and stay with them. Not always in the same way, which maybe explains the massive variety of things left on his grave. Everything from toys from children, to peaches for his famous book James and the Giant Peach, to onions because he was a big fan of gardening and specifically onions, apparently.

You don’t necessarily have to be human to earn unending respect. Miss Baker is the name of one of the first monkeys that survived being sent into space. For her service, her grave is supplied with an unending stream of bananas from the appreciative.

Fans of the Harry Potter series used to leave socks, like the one that gave the house elf his freedom, on a Welsh beach where Dobby was shown dying. Eventually, the socks became enough of a threat to local marine wildlife that Wales had to shut the practice down.

Depending on the source, you’ll hear of Victor Noir as a victim of retribution from an authoritarian Bonaparte regime on the press. What his grave is famous for isn’t nearly so honorable, though. At some point, his grave became a sort of fertility statue, with the specific tale that kissing it and rubbing its prominent bulge would help women conceive. 

It’s a popular tradition, and it has the wear marks to prove it. I guess in this case, it’s more of a tribute of subtraction than addition.