Find VIPs (and others) who R.I.P. through online cemetery.(www.findagrave.com)(Product/Service Evaluation)

Byline: Jeff Gammage

These days it seems like everybody wants to get close to celebrities.

Not Jim Tipton.

He wants to get close to what's left of them.

Tipton, 32, is a hunter of headstones, a connoisseur of crypts _ the creator of a mournfully masterful Web site, www.FindaGrave.com.

The site is a giant, online cemetery _ a necropolis with a search engine, instantly providing photos and information on the final resting places of the famous, infamous and anonymous.

If you're dying to know where Frank Sinatra is buried (Cathedral City, Calif.), how Sylvia Plath met her end (suicide _ turned on the gas), or longing to visit the grave of Lon Chaney Jr. (you can't _ his body was donated to science), Find a Grave has the answers.

The site offers a final word on 8 million graves. New ones are being added at the rate of 100 an hour.

"It's a surrogate visit to a cemetery, and we all know what a …