Tacoma man slept in car every night. Here’s how cleaning headstones saved him
William Douglas Fleet’s version of paying rent three years ago was picking up garbage in the area where he parked his car for the night.
It was Fleet’s way of saying “thank you for getting me through the night” when he lived in his car.
One of the places where Fleet parked was the Tacoma Cemetery, otherwise known as the “Old Tacoma Cemetery.” The cemetery was opened in 1875 and contains the remains of many founding Tacoma figures, according to its website.
Fleet, 63, told The News Tribune recently he needed a quiet place that wouldn’t give him too much trouble. He drove into the cemetery and parked his car near some headstones at Red Maple Lane.
“The first time that I had ever been here, and I turned off the engine, and it just seemed so nice and quiet, and you could hear the wind, but then it seemed like there was a sound above the wind. I didn’t know what it was, but it was really calming to me,” he said.
Every two or three weeks, Fleet drove to the cemetery and slept. In October, he recalled, the leaves of a big tree fell to the ground. He described it as a “golden carpet.” The big tree was called “church.”
“So every Sunday, I stopped, and I visited here because this is church,” he said. “I needed to pay rent for all the calming elements that this place was for me, so I started cleaning headstones here.”
According to a posting on Facebook from last year, “Ralph” was the first headstone he cleaned as a way of paying rent. He did not have any brushes or supplies as he does today, so he would brush off moss and dirt on the stones. It took him six months to clean one plot of land, and today, he has cleaned about 20 percent of the headstones at the Tacoma Cemetery. The only headstones Fleet does not touch are the ones that are actively being cared for.
Terry Schatz, groundskeeper at the cemetery, told The News Tribune via phone call that a lot of families are pretty happy over Fleet’s work because most of the stones have not been cleaned in decades.
“They’re kind of in shock when they see [the headstones] and get a little emotional,” Schatz said. “I can’t blame them.”
‘I just couldn’t live another day’
Five years ago, Fleet said, he was a corporate executive, lived in Browns Point and was married.
“I had a really nice house, had been married 29 years, was making about $200,000 a year,” Fleet said.
Things took a turn when Fleet developed issues with anxiety and depression. Fleet said he turned to drugs and eventually got a divorce. He wound up living in his car and became suicidal.
He said, “I just I couldn’t live another day.”
When Fleet first started cleaning at the cemetery, he had trouble making eye contact with people and left his car for short periods of time to clean. Eventually, Fleet got a job as a caretaker for a man with cerebral palsy. He obtained housing and was not sleeping in his car anymore.
“I’ve made sure that I’ve gotten work that allows me to come here every morning so that I can clean stones,” he said.
When a plot of land in the cemetery is clean, Fleet calls it “The Garden” to differentiate it from the areas he has not cleaned yet.
“But the whole place is the garden to me,” he said.
If there is a headstone he has cleaned of a veteran, he will grab an American flag and plant it in front of the stone. For children, he will give the stone a found feather.
Some stones he cleaned recently were of a family belonging to a 90-year-old woman. The woman allowed Fleet to clean some of the stones in time for her husband’s birthday. Fleet said he got the stones cleaned in time for the big day, and when the woman returned, she had the “biggest grin on her face.”
In addition to his work at the Tacoma Cemetery, he has cleaned headstones at the Puyallup Tribal Cemetery with the tribe’s permission, and some private ones, he said. After his work at the tribal cemetery, Fleet said he was awarded a blanket.
Fleet said cleaning the stones is mostly about meditation.
“I clean the stone, and then I sit with the people for a while and contemplate their lives and think about their stories, and how does their story fit with mine?” He said.
Fleet’s journaling
Some Pierce County history can be found among the headstones Fleet has cleaned.
From headstones belonging to prominent Pierce County locals to graves of World War I veterans, Fleet has chronicled some of the stories into his online journal alongside his personal thoughts.
“I am starting on the other side of a parcel of land I call, Angel. The large monument is for Robert Laird McCormick, who with his friend, Fredrick Weyerhauser, founded Weyerhauser Lumber. (More on Robert once I find a way to clean his 15 feet of stone),” Fleet wrote in a recent posting.
Fleet told The News Tribune that he spent one Thanksgiving cleaning the headstone of Fred Fogg, a man who petitioned the county to formally create the city of Ruston.
All of Fleet’s postings can be found on Facebook, and he said many of them have gotten the attention of thousands of viewers.
“When I first started posting, it was maybe just 20 or 30 people that were looking at my posts, and they were all people I knew. I wasn’t really posting for an audience,” he said. “Now I have posts 2-3,000 people are looking at.”
The notoriety, Fleet said, hasn’t fazed him.
“I know people that are on like YouTube that show time-lapse pictures of cleaning stones, and they have hundreds of thousands of people that look at their posts and make a lot of money doing this, and that’s just not what I’m about,” Fleet said.
Most days, Fleet spends his time cleaning and meditating at Tacoma Cemetery. He said his version of a heaven would be listening to the thousands of stories from the people buried beneath the headstones he has cleaned, as they have already listened to his.
“Without this, I don’t know that I’d be alive today,” Fleet said. “I was suicidal, on drugs, living in my car, and now I’m not, and it brings a different perspective to my life, and it’s a service.”
This story was originally published March 20, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
