HIM “Gone With The Sin” Graveyard Location Finally Found!
How I Solved 25+ Years Mystery and Found The Real Filming Location of the Gone With The Sin Graveyard?
So where the hell is that cemetery from the Gone With The Sin video by HIM? Does it actually exist, or was everything shot in a studio? It looks way too overgrown and green, almost unreal. It’s clearly heavily edited and color-graded. Sure, there’s also that darker, more “realistic” version of the song with nude women, but still, what kind of strange place is Ville Valo walking through while singing the lines of that melancholic murder ballad from the Razorblade Romance album released over a quarter of a century ago?
I don’t even know how to describe the moment when I spotted the statue of the sorrowful angel on a cross in a churchyard, as it suddenly appeared while I was scrolling through images on Google Maps. It took me 4 – 5 days of intense searching, and I usually solve cases like this in a single evening.
I know you hate reading, but this is still a website, not a social network – so whether you like it or not, I can’t just hand you a link with the exact address. You’ll have to feel the pain I went through to find this, similar to what Ville goes through while singing those famous lines.
Disclaimer 1:
We do Junkyard rock scene investigations purely out of curiosity and for fun, without any intention of exposing anyone or revealing anything sensitive. If you happen to visit any of the locations mentioned, please do not disturb the people or businesses there under any circumstances. Be respectful!
Disclaimer 2:
For some of you who live nearby or in the same town as these investigations, this may not seem very interesting. But Junkyard is far away, and for us, this is a challenge.
The Scene Investigation
- Single Case File: #06
- Video: Gone With The Sin
- Artist: HIM
- Scene: The graveyard scene
England or Germany?
As with every Junkyard investigation, I first checked whether there was any information about the location on official websites that deal with music video descriptions. After dozens of various well-known and unknown ones, the only thing I could conclude was that nobody has a clue – not only where exactly the Gone With The Sin video was filmed, but most of those so-called “official sites” can’t even agree on whether it’s England or Germany. Since one of the comments on the mentioned post said it was the English countryside, I decided to start from there.
English cemeteries
Searching through dozens and dozens of English cemeteries was a completely new experience to me and something I never thought I’d go through. I’m not from England, so I guess I have the right to be surprised. That’s how I discovered something called Highgate Cemetery in London, which looks the least like a cemetery and the most like scenes from popular horror movies and TV shows. They even say it’s haunted. Great! But that only took me further away from the answer.
A bit of describing scenes from the video in Google search, then some Google reverse image search, led to Google, AI, and me all agreeing that it was England. Celtic gravestones contributed the most to that conclusion, but none of them, nor the angel statues that appear several times in the video, gave me the answer I was looking for.
One cemetery after another looked similar to the one in Gone With The Sin, but that’s not how OSINT works. You don’t solve it by “this looks like that.” I need an almost 100% match to declare the investigation successful.
However, zou’re probably wondering, why specifically around London? Well, first of all, HIM in the year 2000 still wasn’t mega-popular. That means the budget for Gone With The Sin probably wasn’t huge, so it wasn’t realistic to expect a band from Finland, with a German production company, to head all the way to Newcastle or Scotland or somewhere at the north. Southern England made much more sense.
Finnish internet
The failure in tracking down the statues and other monuments on that graveyard led me to a desperate attempt. With my best friend Google Translate, I started searching the Finnish internet and websites in that strange and unique language. I spent a lot of time in that jungle, but as you can guess, no trace in sight that could push the investigation forward. But I did find the forum from 2006 and people talking about the video. Reminded me of some simpler times….
Anyway, all it takes here is just one small clue… and you solve the case in five minutes.
What if it’s actually Germany?
Probaly, it was already the third day of unsuccessful attempts. Desperation. It’s normal to start questioning everything. We know about those legendary photos of Ville Valo from Potsdam in the spring and summer of 2000. Maybe they just dropped by, took some photos, quickly shot the video, and headed back home satisfied. Even his hair length matches, and the video itself wasn’t released until the fall of that same year. In other words, plenty of time to edit and release it.
But… both common sense and artificial intelligence were telling me that there aren’t many Celtic crosses in Germany, and that their cemeteries look much more orderly and less spooky than the English ones. After checking a few in the Brandenburg area, I abandoned the idea of searching Germany.
While I was thinking about whether to drop the whole thing, luckily I came across a new piece of information – the band recorded Gone With The Sin together with Wicked Game in 2000. The later being the third version of the video (the one in the strip club), and it was all done in England! Okay, at least we settled that once and for all. But researching that third version of Wicked Game didn’t lead me anywhere. Nothing. Empty again…
It’s about the rocks too!
The next day I completely lost it and started describing and searching everything from the video: fields, flowers, vegetation, terrain, even that cursed barn that appears briefly… but also, the rocks. Rock formations, to be precise!
And after some searches made, BAM! I got something that looked like a scene from the video. An image, or better say bunch if images from alamy.com titled “High Rock in Tunbridge Wells.”
Wait a second, that’s it isn’t it? That’s the place where Ville Valo is sitting, leaning against the rock, right? The place is located in Kent, which is south of London, in one of the areas that Google and AI both kept pointing me to based on the first searches I made days ago.
Now all that’s left is to compare the images…
Pay attention to the rock in the middle of this small valley. It’s oval-shaped, bulging to the same side, and the rock to the right and slightly behind it has an identical crack down the middle that stretches to the right. That’s it, right? Right there, that’s where Ville Valo was sitting. We have a damn match! Incredible! Even 26 years later, it looks exactly same, and you know, rocks can change overtime.
Here is the exact adress: High Rocks Tunbridge Wells
So if you want to see it yourself, the rocks are located just east of the entrance that was made for tourists, standing hidden in in the forest. Beautiful place, but more importantly, it’s the one from the video.
People, do you realize what this meant for the further investigation?
Here’s another comparison that proves part of the video was filmed at High Rocks.
But where the hell is the cemetery?
I was thinking about ending the investigation here. I found where part of the video was filmed, which was not not bad at all. But what about the church and the cemetery? I started with the cemetery, and I’m going to finish with it! The rocks created a tectonic shift in the investigation and opened new possibilities. Why stop now? Let’s see what kind of places are around Tunbridge Wells, Rusthall, Southborough…
Now at least I have a narrowed-down area where I’ll be searching for churches with surrounding cemeteries. I type “church” into the search bar on Google Maps while my position is still set to High Rocks, and I get a ton of results. I open one church after another and scroll through the photos on the map… and… people, you have no idea what that feeling was like when I saw this photo…….I almost…just look at it!
Here, I don’t even need to draw with a red pen. Everything is clearly visible! That’s the exact same statue leaning against the cross. That’s the grave in front of which Ville Valo kneels in the video, and you can also see the large crosses on the left and right. Including the chains. Behind in the background, there’s the church as well!
And if that’s not enough for you, I somehow managed to find, among the photos on Google Maps, the statue of the angel with a raised finger. That statute was my first big clue that I started this investigation. I just needed to find it.
My dear people, that’s it! The case is solved and finished! The name of this mysterious church is St Paul’s C Of E Church and it’s located just a half-hour walk from the High Rocks formation we originally found.
From the church and the cemetery, through England and Germany, with a detour to Finland, across fields, flowers, and rocks – and back again to the church, the real one. And to the grave that in the year 2000 had “Jack Daniels” written on it in the Gone With The Sin video. I also tried to locate some other gravestones. But this was more than enough.
Case closed!
Hit me up if you want me to track down something else like this. It can be a video, a picture or whatever else you would like me to investigate. And check out the previous Junkyard Scene Investigations.
