Making its world premiere this week, an award-winning documentary about an Aurora pet cemetery is bringing residents behind the scenes of the work being done to restore the historic site.
Happy Woodland Pet Cemetery: Uncovering History documents a years-long process to restore and survey the historic site, which Jeremy Hood, who features in the film, says is incomparable.
“People always view a pet cemetery, and it starts with the Stephen King and creepiness, and the actual site is an unbelievable, serene, forest wonderland,” said Jeremy Hood, Aurora’s museum collections technician. “It’s really a beautiful, incomparable site, there’s nothing else like it. There’s other pet cemeteries, but nothing like Happy Woodland.”
Hood was part of the team trying to find all the cemetery's headstones, using archival images and ground-penetrating radar to determine the original boundary of the site.
Over the years of surveying, the number of animals discovered has spiked from around 300 when Hood first joined the project to 809 named pets now, across 752 tombstones.
“There’s always that hope, that one day we’re going to find yet another name," he said. "But I feel personally, that we’re at the point where we’ve found just about everything there is to find underground, we’ve done such thorough probing underground for many years, over the entire site.”
Now Hood said the plan is to start interpreting the data they’ve collected. From there the team will look to potentially restore some of the markers to their original locations that may have shifted over the years. But the process is a lengthy and complicated one, said Hood.
The Happy Woodland Pet Cemetery was originally opened by Victor Blochin and Anne Wilson, who purchased the property on Yonge Street in the late 1920s.
Michelle Johnson, collections and exhibitions coordinator, said a film screening on Oct. 7 at Town Square showed how many residents are keen to learn more about the historic cemetery, which both Johnson and Hood have said appears to be the first in Canada.
“There’s so many people past and present who have worked hard on this site and are passionate about this site,” she said. “Being in front of the camera talking about the project is exciting, because it’s the first step in getting to share this with the public at large.”
She added that said the documentary was the first in a series of films to come, as work continues on the pet cemetery towards it eventual opening to the public. The town bought a 16-acre parcel of land in 2023 that contained the pet cemetery, with an eye on including it in a larger park at some point in the future.
“It is a very exciting time to be involved in maintain and presenting the history of the town,” said Johnson.
“We’ve been kind of tucked away in temporary offices during the construction of Town Square, and now that we are back home in that building, it’s so nice to be able to engage with the public,” she said.
Hood said as work continues, the hope would be to have the site designated as a national historic site, like Hillary House.
