10 Eerie Ghost Stories From New England Graveyards

Few places in the world have as ghostly a reputation as New England. It’s the region that gave us Stephen King and the Cthulhu Mythos. It also has some of the oldest post-colonial settlements in the US, and along with them some of the oldest graveyards.

Half a millennium has been plenty of time for those cemeteries to gather creepy reputations. These weird stories of haunting in New England’s burial grounds could provide plenty of inspiration for any aspiring horror writer.

10 South Street Cemetery

If you’re making an extra special effort to ensure your cemetery ends up haunted, then one way to go about it is to conduct hangings there. If you then combine your graveyard hangings with shocking injustice, you’re almost guaranteed to end up with a restless spirit or two. The people of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, also threw in some axe murder victims for that extra bit of horror, plus the only fatal sword duel in the town’s history. Put all of that together and you get the “of course it’s haunted” South Street Cemetery.

Ghost hunters note a lot of activity around the grave of Ruth Blay, a schoolteacher that fell pregnant outside of marriage in 1768. She was scared to tell anyone, and eventually delivered the baby stillborn. She buried the body beneath her school’s floorboards, but one of her pupils saw her. The child told her parents about it, and Ruth was arrested and sentenced to death for murder.

That’s awful enough by itself. However, this particular cake of systemic injustice comes frosted with an epic level of being the worst person possible, in the form of Sheriff Thomas Packer. On the day Ruth was due to be hanged, word spread that a reprieve was being sought from the governor. Packer, however, wanted to have his lunch at noon and so brought the execution forward by an hour. Despite Ruth’s screams, and protests from the crowd, he looped a noose around her neck and ordered the cart to be drawn from underneath her.

Within minutes, a horse messenger arrived carrying a pardon from the governor. Packer had already left, and Ruth Blay was already dead. Later that day, the townspeople burnt an effigy of Packer outside of his house. Paranormalists claim that cameras stop working around the area where Ruth Blay was buried, and that two nearby graves glow. Some people suggest that both she and her baby haunt the place.

Researchers also claim to have experienced activity around the graves of two young women who were murdered by a German named Luis Wagner. He strangled the women and attacked them with an axe until the handle broke. He was hanged in Maine in 1875. The women became known as the Smuttynose murder victims.

9 Howard Street Cemetery

If we say “Salem,” you immediately think of the city’s famous witch trials, which marked a low point in our collective humanity. The ghosts of those executed have every right to be angry. Among them is Giles Corey, an 80-year-old man that was crushed to death for refusing to plead his guilt or innocence. He is buried in Howard Street Cemetery in Salem, and locals claim his ghost can be seen wandering around the place.

Also, he’s out for revenge. Witnesses saw the ghostly form of an old man floating through the cemetery in 1914. Shortly afterwards, a fire began on Gallows Hill, where Corey’s wife had been hanged. The blaze destroyed 1,376 buildings and left 18,000 people homeless. It is said that Corey always appears shortly before something bad happens.

The cemetery is bordered on one side by Salem’s Old Jail. Before it closed in 1991, it was the oldest operating jail in the country. It’s now been converted into houses, but when it was empty, many tales spoke of spooky goings-on. People walking in the cemetery claimed to see lights from the building’s windows, even though the electricity had been shut off. People also saw figures moving around, and heard voices and screams.

Some of these figures wore civil war uniforms, and could apparently pass through walls. Those ghosts may have moved out when the place was renovated, but some of the apartments offer a view directly over the graveyard. You can rent one for a couple of thousand a month and keep an eye out for Giles. If you see him, maybe skip town for a few days?

8 Goodleburg Cemetery

Doctor Albert Speaker from the town of Wales, New York was famous for his clumsy, botched abortions. He performed the procedures in his house opposite the entrance to Goodleburg Cemetery around the turn of the 20th century, and they rarely ended well.

When women died during the operations, Dr Speaker dumped their bodies in a (presumably very deep) cemetery pond. People claim that bones still wash up there. Later in life, Speaker became a suspect in a woman’s murder. He died before he could be tried, hanging himself from a tree in the graveyard.

Speaker is now said to wander the graveyard in his white doctor’s coat. The murder victim, Helen Lindeman, is said to stalk the place in black. The ghosts of women that died during abortions have also been reported. The oddest and most disturbing stories are of people seeing phantom fetuses crawling around the cemetery ground, amid cries of children and weeping women.

All of these tales have brought on a huge number of ghost hunters. On top of the usual screaming at the air and running around, the hunters have been reported to engage in turf wars. The investigators have committed significant vandalism. Police have been forced to patrol the graveyard on Halloween and ban parking in all nearby roads. For the people of Wales, it seems, the living are the real nuisance.

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