By: Diane Benjamin

I received numerous responses to this story: https://blnnews.com/2022/04/10/anybody-have-a-problem-with-park-hill-cemetery/

Since many stories like the below are on-line in reviews, this should come as no surprise to those who research Park Hill. Short of a group lawsuit it appears these people will not care about service.

Reviews show a pattern of Park Hill not following through on what people paid them to do. Below are comments from a person who has been dealing with them for over a year. This person has done extensive investigation and found the owner is a guy in Pennsylvania who doesn’t respond to emails or phone calls. He owns more than one cemetery, others found are in Champaign, Peoria, Canton, Pekin, and East Moline. A business partner owns many more across the country.

Excerpts from an email this person sent to me:

After taking on Park Hill in a battle to get REDACTED’s grave to be taken care of appropriately and respectfully, I ended up having a face to face with the office person.  After trying to get a straight answer out of her, regarding a marker that obviously never got ordered, and maintenance deliberately running over his grave and destroying the name sign I had placed there in Dec, after 9 months of BS from them I told her I was done, I wanted the marker ordered cancelled, and all my money back.  She initially told me I may not get it all back so I looked at her and said…”Oh Yes I Will”!  On the way out I had a paper with copies of all the bad comments I had found about them on Yelp and Google and said…by the way, you told me you’d never had any dissatisfied customers…here’s something to refresh your memory!  She started to read it and then began some kind of an excuse for the first one…I just said “I don’t want to hear any more excuses” and I walked out.   Not long after that, there was a fresh load of dirt on REDACTED’s grave to cover up their “little mishap” and amazingly, they found a temporary marker to put on the grave, which should have been placed there not long after burial last April.

It’s owned by a group of owners that own cemeteries across the country.  The name I was given is a Guy Saxton with his office in a cemetery in PA.  At the top of the invoices from Park Hill there are several other cemeteries listed in areas outside of Bloomington.  You can’t get a straight answer from these people, they are prolific liars and cover up artists.  So frustrating.  The “Burial Industry” is such a Crock!  They charge an arm and a leg and take advantage of people grieving the loss of a loved one.  By the time I finished up with REDACTED’s arrangements the Funeral home, which didn’t even hold a service there and I did not get an expensive casket, although it was not cheap, was over $10k and the cemetery was over $5k, it’s horrible what the “Dying Industry” gets away with!

It took them 9 months to Finally put extra dirt on REDACTED’s grave and that was to try to over up the tire tracks from when they ran over it deliberately and smashed a wooden name sign I had placed there as a marker.  I only did that because, again, they didn’t do they job and get a temporary marker placed there for him.  I had placed flowers in the vase they had set there for me, but the bronze vase was laying on it’s side in the mud and the flowers were gone.  A heavy bronze vase does NOT blow over in the wind!!

The “employees” of this cemetery should all be fired and a whole new crew brought in.  They haven’t even cleaned up Christmas decorations which all other’s did around the 1^st of March, even though a posted sign states that all Christmas decorations will be removed in Feb!  Guess that would mean that someone out there would actually have to “work” for their paychecks!!

I just think that Bloomington-Normal needs to be Well Aware of how bad this Cemetery really is!