Soft clouds will sweep across the clear sky as morning slowly fades into afternoon.  The sun will still shine down with summer rays, but a cool breeze will creep through the air.  As a throng of witnesses arrive, only songs from the bagpipes will interrupt the silence.  This September, standing under a wooden gazebo atop an Illinois hill, Miranda Patterson and Scott Amsler will be wed.  The new Mr. and Mrs. Amsler will then drive off in a refurbished hearse, and watch tombstones fly past their windows.  Their beautiful ceremony will take place on a three-acre cemetery.

Amsler is a 27-year-old computer expert for a financial company.  Like many Americans, he spends much of his day locked in an office basking under fluorescent lights.  But his night occupation is much less conventional.  While moonlight creates shadows in the small town of Troy, Amsler restores hearses. 

Patterson first met Amsler at his 25^th birthday celebration.  She had agreed to be his date, although she had never met him.  Amsler rolled up to the party in one of his refurbished hearses, and immediately caught Patterson’s attention.  “I wanted to take a ride in it but I chickened out at the last minute” she recalled.  New Year’s Eve fell a few weeks after Patterson and Amsler first met, and the two celebrated the occasion with their first date. 

In June, Amsler proposed.  He affixed a simple engraved plate to the side of a 1965 hearse, affectionately named “Edgar” by the couple.  The engraving read: “Will you marry me?”  As soon as Patterson saw the message on the hearse, she felt warm tears streaming down her cheeks.  In between sobs, she held out her left hand allowing Amsler to slide a ring onto her finger.  He gave her Edgar as an engagement present, and revealed one stipulation.  The couple must be married outside, in a gazebo. 

With possible wedding locations floating in her mind, Patterson drove towards her father’s house to tell him all about the engagement.  A few minutes into her trip, on Interstate 22, she noticed a beautiful gazebo perched on the top of a grassy hill.  Hundreds of head stones, some dating back to the Civil War, encircled the gazebo.  Patterson recalls, “The view was just gorgeous.  I said, ‘this is the place I want to get married.’”

Patterson’s hands trembled, as her fingers dialed the city clerk’s office.  Bill Hohman, a 71-year-old alderman on the cemetery panel, told the couple: “It’s strange to me.  This is kind of an unusual thing around here . . . in our country town we roll up the sidewalks at nine o’clock, and everyone goes to bed.”  Several months after the couple made their initial request the committee signed to permit the wedding, despite fears that a burial would be scheduled on the same day. 

In a matter of weeks, invitations were sent out to announce the time and location Patterson and Amsler would exchange vows.  The couple’s phone rang constantly the day guests received the invitations.  Patterson remembers many people inquiring about the location of the ceremony: “Some of the ladies I work with said, ‘Are you crazy, why would you get married in a cemetery?’ Does it matter where we get married, just as long as we get married?” 

Amsler kept reminding himself that “People are going to think how they want.  I’m not a freak or a Satan worshipper or cult member.”  Nevertheless, the objections he had been hearing from his friends and family members began to seep into his mind.  In need of reassurance, Amsler phoned the man who had ultimately approved the wedding site.  When Amsler asked why Hohman had decided to permit the cemetery wedding, Hohman read aloud the response he had given the town panel: “When I spoke to them, they were just a normal couple who wanted to have a wedding someplace they thought was nice and serene for a very small, intimate wedding.  They weren’t any cult group or anything like that.” 

The wedding is still scheduled to take place on the Illinois burial grounds this upcoming September.  Their hearse, Edgar, will be present.  Although the wedding is sure to be quirky, the ceremony should be distanced from the surrounding cemetery by the height of the hill.  Still, if Patterson arrives in a black gown, it is safe to assume the couple was more attracted to the site for the graves rather than the gazebo.