To spend a night at the cemetery sounds like a teenage prank, but this sort of thing has nothing to do with juvenile kidding in the cemetery of Cementerio del Norte.

This burial ground is not your average final resting place for it is not populated by the dead alone – very alive and breathing squatters roost among the tombstones and mausoleums. Among them are gravediggers, caretakers of tombs and other official nine-to-fivers for whom the city has allowed housing in the burial site, but most of them have no work and no place else to go.

Some estimates say there are close 10 000 people living among the dead. When we visited the site we talked to several dwellers, some of them residents of the cemetery for 15 years now, who all were in opinion that the number is not that high. They said there are approximately 300 families living in the cemetery.

For odd jobs, cemetery dwellers don’t have to pay for their “house”, electricity or water. The house is often a self-made shack or discarded mausoleum, where the relatives of the deceased have stopped visiting – apartment tomb, if you will.

If they thought of living among the dead men gives you heebie-jeebies, there are no ghosts here, the tomb dwellers assure. Only bones. The people living here can not afford to be afraid or superstitious. But that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in higher power.

“It helps a lot if you have faith for all the things you do,” one of the tomb dwellers told us. “I have faith to survive. If you have hope, you will live, if you don’t have hope, you will die.”

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