In a world where you can find a video of absolutely anything—the first woman to travel to the moon, a deep dive debunking the newest health fads, the first steps after the birth of an endangered Przewalski’s horse—it seems a little peculiar that some of the most popular content is banal to the point of confounding. To turn our brains off, we often find ourselves seeking stimuli that are repetitive, simple, or satisfying. A few years ago, I had perfectly curated my feed of Instagram reels to present only the top tier soap cutting, slime squishing, and rug cleaning videos to relax. I would watch a man in an overly bright warehouse spraying a filthy rug with a power washer in neat little rows and visualize him doing the same to my brain. As the muck sloughed off into the drain it would reveal a new row of clean tufted fiber. In my mind’s eye I would see my anxious and intrusive thoughts washed away from a sleek and shiny brain. If this pressure washer could instantly erase decades of filth from this rug, it could easily clean all the useless junk stuck inside my head.
Content creator Katie DeRaddo knows by now how to give the people what they want in a satisfying cleaning video. She uses a variety of tools, from scrub brushes, firm scrapers, specialized cleaning chemicals, toothbrushes, and wooden dowels to really get in the nooks and crevices. She starts a video with a hook, trying to catch the attention of viewers before the urge to mindlessly scroll takes over: “I’ve been up since 3:45 this morning; it’s currently about 5:20 p.m.” The camera pans up to reveal her location, manmade stone markers peppering the grassy background. “Let’s see how many headstones I can clean before I get too tired!” The answer, if you’re curious, is six.
DeRaddo, known as A Grave Attraction on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, cleans gravestones around the Rochester area and shares what she learns about the names hiding underneath the muck with her thousands of followers. She’s amassed 148,000 subscribers on YouTube, 91,600 followers on Instagram, and 21,500 followers on TikTok, all watching with rapt attention as she brings these cemetery markers back to their former glory. When asked about the type of audience she cultivates with her content, she specifies that there are a few different kinds of viewers. “I would say half are history buffs, people who like hearing the stories I tell as I clean. Another part are people who like the cleaning, the satisfaction of seeing something really dirty come clean. There’s also a portion of people who are really into grave cleaning specifically.”
DeRaddo’s content falls under the growing niche known as the “Death Positive” movement, defined by speaking openly about the realities of death and dying. Pioneered by Caitlin Doughty, who garnered a following by sharing stories about her experience as a funeral director on her YouTube channel and eventually lead to her publishing three best-selling books and founding the Order of the Good Death.
According to the website: “The Order is about making death a part of your life. That means committing to staring down your death fears—whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural but the death anxiety and terror of modern culture are not.”
Other folks working in the industry popped up online sharing their work and knowledge on death and dying: morticians like Heather Taylor of @beforethecoffin and Syracuse’s own Eileen Hollis of @HollisFuneralHome, A. J. Hawkins of KALMA (a death-positive lifestyle brand and gathering space), and fellow graveyard enthusiasts like Caitlin Abrams of @Manicpixiemom and Alicia of @ladytaphos. As a topic that has been traditionally shrouded in taboo creeps toward the mainstream, people have begun to pick up hobbies in what was formerly considered macabre. For Katie DeRaddo, watching others clean graves online inspired her to pick up a scrub brush and a tripod and get down and dirty herself.
“I got started by volunteering at Mount Hope Cemetery; they have a great training program for volunteers,” shares DeRaddo. Grave cleaning isn’t as simple as it seems; it requires approved pH-neutral cleaners, soft-bristled brushes, and wooden or plastic tools so as not to degrade the strength of the monument over time. While it can be tempting to use a pressure washer to create the brain-tingly clean that viewers crave, “Do No Harm” is often quoted as the golden rule of headstone restoration. Using abrasive cleaners can allow for faster degeneration long term.
“I try to focus on the headstones that need the most love and work from there.” DeRaddo reaches out to cemetery staff to get permission beforehand and will spend her entire day scrubbing lichen on her time off from her day job. Her cleaning videos are paired with a voiceover going into the history of the deceased that she finds from scouring the Internet’s resources. She digs in on public access websites like Ancestry.com, FindAGrave.com, and old newspaper archives to create a narrative of someone’s life to share with her followers.
When asked if she has ever been contacted by relatives of the deceased she’s featured, she says she’s had a few comments here or there, but nothing confirmed. It’s less about connecting people through ancestry and more about educating her followers on the reality of the lives of those who lived on the same ground decades apart. In one video, DeRaddo scrapes lichen off a stone to reveal the headstone of Allie Lord, a Rochester transplant after marrying her husband at nineteen. She had three children—losing the youngest at only a year old—and kept house while her husband traveled working in sales. She lived twenty-two years longer than he did, raising a family and keeping up an estate until she passed away at seventy-seven. As DeRaddo scrapes the dirt and detritus away, she reveals Allie’s marker, a modest stone next to her hus- band William’s, labeled only “Allie B. Lord, His Wife, 1872–1949.” By cleaning her stone, DeRaddo not only recognizes her for her name but also unveils a life so much richer than you could possibly garner from the words we’re expected to remember her by. Nature creeps in on us all, but it is up to us to unearth the stories of people past and to listen, learn, and remember them.
“There’s that phrase about how you die twice, once when you pass and then once when you’re no longer remembered,” says DeRaddo. “Maybe it’s my own anxiety around death, but I hope I get to bring these people back and that people can learn from their stories.”
If she’s not in your local cemetery, you can find Katie DeRaddo on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok under @agraveattraction.
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2026 issue of (585).
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