Rhea and Eddie Holmes – credit, family photo released
When a Syracuse police officer got the call that there was someone living among the dead at Oakwood Cemetery, you’d forgive them for perhaps being a little on edge.
But what they found wasn’t anything out of a horror film. Instead, it was 55-year-old widow Rhea Holmes, sleeping under a winter sky on the cold ground of her husband’s grave.
Holmes enjoyed 26 years of wedded bliss with her husband, Eddie. Together, by 2024, they had collected enough money to buy a small home in Syracuse. It wasn’t much, but it was their dream.
Offer accepted, they must have been preparing to sign on the dotted line, when Eddie suffered a fatal heart attack the very same day.
In shock, Holmes took the down payment and spent it on a grave plot, headstone, and bench incised with his name where she could come and reminisce. However, without her beloved Eddie by her side, she slipped into a depression, lost her job, and got evicted.
Rudderless, directionless, and alone, Holmes decided to go to the only place in the world where she felt she belonged: the slab of marble where Eddie Holmes lay in eternal rest.
Too proud to sleep at a shelter, she would volunteer at a food kitchen where she too could eat, and then, with night as her cloak, would slip into the cemetery to sleep under the stars—which she did from May of 2025 to this month.
“I assumed that I was going to die there,” Holmes said of the cemetery, but then “along comes an angel.”
Syracuse Police Officer Jamie Pastorello was informed of Holmes’ presence by a retired colleague, and went to investigate.
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“First, he paid for a hotel room for Holmes,” wrote CBS News’ Steve Hartman in his “On the Road” segment. “Then he connected her with the president of LeMoyne College, who let Holmes stay on campus while the students were on winter break.”
Lastly, he connected her with a nonprofit called A Tiny Home for Good, which got Holmes her own tiny home at an affordable price.
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“It was just the right thing to do,” Pastorello told Hartman. “And I wasn’t going to let Rhea sleep outside again. A complete turnaround, you know, in 20 days, she went from sleeping on the cold, hard ground in a cemetery, to her own home.”
He visits her from time to time, and all at once, the warm, confidant character that’s easy to see how Eddie Holms could have fallen for emerges, and one gets the feeling, writes Hartman, she won’t go back to sleeping in a graveyard for a fair few years still.
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