Your Next Wedding Gig May Be in a Funeral Home (Seriously) [Friday Fun]

July 31, 2015

By Laura Brauer

A marriage is the beginning of a life together. What better place to hold it than at…a funeral parlor or cemetery.

That seems to the message the country’s funeral homes are sending. According to the Associated Press, the funeral business is, ahem, dying. To cope with the lost revenue, funeral home and cemetery owners are looking beyond their core constituency of corpses to draw in new blood. They’re not pitching themed weddings, either. According to the AP, funeral homes are building community centers and reception halls on their grounds, separated (to varying degrees) from their morbid business.

People appear to be responding positively.

Writes the AP:

Funeral home operators also say there’s a need in their communities for locations that can host weddings or other big events, and people are no longer hung up on their main business.

Declining membership in churches and civic organizations also may be boosting demand for nontraditional venues for weddings and receptions.

As a result, funeral homes and cemeteries nationwide have been marketing their properties for an array of uses. Nearly 10 percent of 280 respondents to a National Funeral Directors Association survey last year said they built a community center to host other events. That’s up from 6 percent in 2011….

Chelsey Lesnick picked a suburban Cleveland funeral home that her grandparents opened in 1949 as the site for her nuptials last March.

The home’s second-floor reception center — not the funeral site downstairs — hosted the service and the party afterward for about 50 people. Lesnick, 24, said the site didn’t feel like a “house of death or a place of mourning.”

“It felt like a place of love and just bright happy joy on that day, it really did,” she said.

So, wedding photographers, what say you: cool or creepy?