Woman Who Went Viral for Cleaning Gravestones Reveals Her Biggest Fear About Posting Videos (Exclusive) Tabitha ParentOctober 30, 2025 at 12:30 AM 0 Manicpixiemom/TikTok; Mortal Mysteries Caitlin Abrams. Caitlin Abrams has nearly three million followers on TikTok — though not for what the average user might expect Abrams, who posts under the handle @manicpixiemom, has grown her massive following for cleaning gravestones and posting videos about the histories of the deceased person associated with them Abrams chats exclusively with PEOPLE, explaining how she first got into her unusual hobby and...
- - Woman Who Went Viral for Cleaning Gravestones Reveals Her Biggest Fear About Posting Videos (Exclusive)
Tabitha ParentOctober 30, 2025 at 12:30 AM
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Manicpixiemom/TikTok; Mortal Mysteries
Caitlin Abrams. -
Caitlin Abrams has nearly three million followers on TikTok — though not for what the average user might expect
Abrams, who posts under the handle @manicpixiemom, has grown her massive following for cleaning gravestones and posting videos about the histories of the deceased person associated with them
Abrams chats exclusively with PEOPLE, explaining how she first got into her unusual hobby and how her online community has grown
Taking a scroll through Caitlin Abram's TikTok page is like taking a nice stroll... through a graveyard?With nearly three million followers on the social media platform, Abrams' content has a wide reach — but her videos don't necessarily reflect the traditional lifestyle-based content that has become commonplace and recognizable for many creators on the app.Instead, Abrams, who posts under the handle @manicpixiemom, has built a following on her page for something much less conventional: her grave cleaning videos.Online, she documents her restoration process as she spruces up old gravestones. Additionally, Abrams also finds and presents her own research about the people who lay "beyond the grave.""I grew up in rural Maine, and in New England, cemeteries are everywhere," she tells PEOPLE with a laugh. "Like, my town had 140 people, and we had three cemeteries."Abrams' educational background contributes partially to the reason why she finds what many consider to be a morbid or scary topic so fascinating. She tells PEOPLE that she has always been interested in genealogy, citing her grandfather as the person who first instilled in her a love of history."In my junior year of high school, like, my project was to go into cemeteries and see if I could figure out when there were certain epidemics or anything like that," she says. "I don't remember how it went 'cause that was before the internet was as good as it is."
Manicpixiemom/TikTok
Caitlin Abrams cleans a grave.
When she and her husband first moved to Vermont nearly 10 years ago, Abrams says that time spent in cemeteries was appealing to her because it was "a thing I could do that was my own." Around the same time, Abrams became a first-time mom, and was looking for some respite."I started looking into, um, the symbols on graves and more broadly gravestone carving because I had always paid attention to the names, but I'd never really looked at the art of it," she explains of her initial attempts to research the subject.From there, Abrams volunteered with a website called Find a Grave, where people can request pictures of their relatives graves and nearby volunteers can upload photos for them. Abrams recalls uploading a picture to the website for one woman who had a relative with a grave near her. It was an old grave — circa 1870, she remembers.The grave needed a good cleaning, Abrams admits, and after she uploaded the photo to the site, the woman reached out, asking if Abrams wouldn't mind cleaning it up for her."I went into, like, research mode on how to do that," she says. Around that time, Abrams also followed some of TikTok's other grave cleaners, specifically, @ladytaphos, who Abrams touts as the original TikTok grave cleaner.However, Abrams was initially hesitant to start posting her cleaning videos on the app, which she began considering during the pandemic.
"I kind of stayed away from TikTok because — this is what I always say — I remember when older people got on Facebook and it was all just like, we were young and in college," Abrams, who is now nearly 40, jokes. "I didn't want to be the almost 40-year-old bothering the youths."
Manicpixiemom/TikTok
Caitlin Abrams cleans the grave of Joseph Ashton who died of scarlet fever when he was 7 in 1874.
Nevertheless, she entered the sacred space of said youths: "It kind of took off and it was a good way of combining my love of history with, with my ability to public speak and teach and, and that kind of thing. It just kind of all like clicked together and then it took off really fast."While Abrams admits that she isn't necessarily a huge fan of haunted houses, she's never felt scared while in a graveyard. "I do think that there are sort of like shared human experiences that contribute to the energy of a space," she says.She adds, "There's times where I'll be cleaning and I get it just feels heavier, like it feels like a heavier place than it does elsewhere."
Once, Abrams recalls cleaning the graves of two parents who had lives well into their 80s, but who had lost four children in the short span of five days — all from diphtheria. For Abrams, that was one of those "heavier" moments.She says she finds it can be easy for people today to dismiss the pain of these losses that historical individuals went through — especially when it comes to children — as there is a misconception that people were having so many children to make up for the fact that some might die very young."We kind of diminish that loss I think a little bit," she says.
What's your sign? Subscribe to our free newsletter to get your unique weekly horoscope delivered straight to your inbox.Finding out information about the people whose graves she cleans is both a challenge and a delight for Abrams, who relishes in going down rabbit holes on genealogical website and public records. She enjoys piecing together the language and wording used in those records and the symbols used on graves in order to unearth information about the past.Graves reveal much information about the past including, Abrams makes a point to say, how effective modern vaccines have been in mitigating the types of deaths she comes across frequently.Telling untold stories, specifically those of women and children, is important to Abrams, who shares that it can often be much harder to find information about those demographics as they are often tied to a husband or father.Keeping her content respectful is also important, and Abrams is adamant about telling these individual's stories and restoring their graves with their humanity in mind.
"I try to really hard to use like correct language," she says, admitting that her commenters have corrected her on language she has used in the past.This is what she has found connects with her audience online as well, including the youths that she once felt intimidated by. Once, Abrams was asked to give a talk to a class of students in New Hampshire, who told her that they could now "see why you find this interesting."
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Abrams also hosts a podcast called Mortal Mysteries, where she talks through "stories from the past" — specifically historical true crime and mysteries, like Amelia Earhart, Rasputin and the Titanic.
"It's been a really cool labor of love to be able to like do the research and into these people's lives and into these old stories," she says.Tracing information from graves down through the decades has given Abrams an insight into her own family's history.Her own father, she says, comes from an Irish Catholic family (which means he "never likes to talk about feelings") and in doing research into his side, she unearthed information about three deaths of her great-grandfather's siblings the year he was born.
"It was interesting to like consider like how that would've affected like, my great-grandfather being raised by two parents that were themselves probably pretty repressed and having to like navigate other children, like with three kids dead," she says. "It's that ability to connect with the past tells us a lot about ourselves and tells us a lot about how we are as humans in the sort of collective, unconscious sense.She encourages people to talk with their older relatives, urging the importance of hearing their stories."The stuff they know, there's gonna be stuff that dies with them that no one is going to know," Abrams explains. "Anything you can get is like gold."
on People
Source: "AOL Entertainment"
Source: Entertainment
Published: October 29, 2025 at 09:09PM on Source: CORR MAG
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