Illinois Couple Plan to Pledge Their Undying Love, Marry in Missouri
Graveyard
Monday, February 19, 2007        0123 PST

PACIFIC, Missouri --  It's not the traditional "till death do us
part," but
Scott Amsler and Miranda Patterson believe getting hitched in a
graveyard is
just thinking outside the box.

Come September, the Illinois couple expects to pledge their undying
love
among the dearly departed in this St. Louis suburb's city cemetery,
even
though those who approved the request are dead set against seeing it
become
a trend.

The wedding wouldn't be out of character for Amsler, 27, a computer
expert
for a financial company by day and rehabber of old hearses by night.

The graveyard, he said, just has a certain tranquility and thriftiness
for
nuptials the young couple insists will be small, private and
traditional _
except for the bagpipes, Amsler's refurbished hearse and the throng of
eternally silent witnesses.

"People are going to think how they want. I don't actively try to
convince
people that my interests are normal or logical," Amsler said. "I'm not
a
freak or Satan worshipper or cult member. It just goes with our
theme."

Deep down, the couple said, it just seemed right.

Amsler and Patterson, who recently moved to Collinsville, Ill., became
an
item not long after they met in November 2005 at a birthday party
where
Patterson, 21, was to have been the celebrant's blind date. Amsler
showed up
in a retooled hearse that caught Patterson's eye.

"I wanted a ride in it but I chickened out at the last minute," she
said.

By their first date weeks later, on New Year's Eve, Patterson knew
Amsler
was the one. Not long afterward, she quit her factory job in Sullivan,
Mo.,
and moved in with Amsler in Troy, Ill.

Amsler proposed last June, affixing to the side of the 1965 hearse _
which
the two call "Edgar" _ a plate with a simple message: "Will you marry
me?"
Seconds later, the ring slid onto a crying Patterson's finger.

She received Edgar as an engagement gift and had only one stipulation:
The
wedding had to be outside, in a gazebo.

Her worries were laid to rest while she and Amsler drove to her dad's
house.
While traveling on Interstate 44, Patterson spotted a gazebo on a
hilltop,
only to find it was in a graveyard. No worries.

"The view was just gorgeous," she said. "I said, `This is where I want
to
get married.'"

When the couple called last fall for permission to use the three-acre
cemetery, which dates to the Civil War, City Clerk Jo Ann Hoehne told
them
the local cemetery committee would have to decide.

"When I spoke to them, they were just a normal young couple who wanted
to
have a wedding some place they thought was nice and serene for a very
small,
intimate wedding," Hoehne said. "They weren't any cult group or
anything
like that."

Bill Hohman, a 71-year-old alderman on the cemetery panel, wasn't sure
what
to think.

"It's strange to me. This is kind of an unusual thing around here," he
said
of the country town where the roughly 5,700 residents "roll up the
sidewalks
at nine o'clock, and everyone goes to bed."

The committee last month signed off on the couple's request despite
concerns
about the appropriateness of the setting for the occasion _ and fears
that a
burial might be scheduled for the same time.

Hohman, though, vows to introduce a measure to make Amsler-Patterson
nuptials the last among this town's tombstones. "Once the horse is out
of
the barn, you have to have an ordinance," he said.

But Patterson said she and Amsler have respect for the living and the
dead.

"We're not going to do anything stupid or horrible. We just want to
have a
wedding," she said.

"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?"

... Death is proven to be 99.9% fatal to all laboratory rats.