The mission: get to the Brugge General Cemetery - also known as Assebroek Cemetery - Steenbrugge Cemetery - south of the Brugge ring road and chase down the grave of Antoine Michel Wemaer (1763-1837), Brugge's merchant turned pirate. A great looking final resting place worthy of a man who sailed under the Jolly Roger. I just love Brugge, having previously visited 9 times. This gave me all I needed to plan trip #10!

I met my friend Frank from Antwerp at Brugge train station, we walked to the cemetery and started the search. Sadly, 2 cloudy, drizzly hours later we had not found it and called it a day ... but keep reading. It was not a total loss; along the way we learned a lot to enable a second attempt sometime in the future. The day will come that these photos will be replaced by those of my own taking.
We decided to research and come back some day for a second attempt. Our next stop was somewhere I learned about the day before, a place called Retsin's Lucifernum described as a "vampire bar". I mentioned to Frank that maybe a guy who would open a vampire bar would know something about a grave as great looking as Antoine's. Wearing no crosses we entered...

It turned out to be not so much a vampire bar, it was more of a bazaarely lit macabre art gallery with a bar and an outside-looking terrace inside that actually has 6 graves in the back. And upstairs there was a coffin. So maybe it was a little bit of a vampire bar.
Here's the thing, decades before when cleaning out this former free mason meeting house an original manuscript was discovered that appeared to be an unpublished poem by Edgar Allen Poe, though that is not verifiable. The paintings were by a 19th century ancestor of the owner, all done to reflect aspects of this dark poem. Except for the paintings in the room above the bar (which you can see from below via a sky light). Those look more like something from a Classics Illustrated version of the Kamasutra. We asked the owner if he knew of the grave we sought ... and the answer was yes! He told us it was just a few plots away from an ancestor of his! We need to gather more info, but it can only help that he drew us a map...
I know I know, it looks like a schematic from a 70's Jr. High School sex ed class. Kerkhoft is the street from which you approach. The curved thing at its end is the gate entrance and the thing circled above the walkway is a monument donning the inscription above. Augustine Rets(in) is his ancestor. The "13" could be two things, either the 13th grave from the monument or a marker identifying the section of the cemetery - which is broken into over 90 numbered sections. If it is the latter then this does a great job zeroing in on the location, he said Wemaer's grave is 7 or 8 plots away.

Frank and I had split up to cover more ground, I found a cemetery map with comments in Flemish so I snapped a shot and texted it to him in the hopes that it would translate into something useful. It did not, but though I didn't try to get the whole map in (now I wish I had) on the very edge was the Kerkhoft entry point on the map and just up from that a square between sections 2 and 18 that is probably the monument.
Meanwhile, back in Belgium, my Antwerpian grave hunting friend is making calls to dig up more info. He called once and the phone just rang. But he's kept trying because, in his words, "they can't ALL be dead, right"?!