by Aaron Mahnke
Suddenly something stepped into the light. According to Bill, it was perhaps four feet tall, covered in hair, walked on two legs like a human, and looked to weigh no more than a hundred pounds. It was naked and potbellied and looked nothing like anything Bill had ever seen before in the swamp. And as it stepped out of the trees and into the light, it continued to speak to him.
“Eee wah chu,” it said again. “Keahr. Keahr.”
Bill and Samantha stood frozen to the ground, paralyzed with fear. And as the dog continued to whine and shiver, the creature lifted its arms and beckoned them to follow.
“Eee wah chu,” it said again, motioning to them. “Keahr.”
Bill claims that he tried asking the creature a few questions, but it only replied with the same nonsense it had already said. Not knowing what else to do, Bill managed to tug Samantha after him, and they both turned and headed home.
They didn’t look back.
THE UNKNOWN
It’s not the trees that make the woods a frightening place. It’s what the trees conceal. There’s no telling what creatures hide behind the green leaves and thick branches of the forest landscape.
Cryptozoologists, ghost hunters, and believers in the supernatural are often seen as abnormal, as believing in things that can’t possibly be real. But when we step into the woods, when we surround ourselves with the dark embrace of the unknown, somehow the impossible begins to seem more likely.
Maybe we want to believe. Maybe that feeling we get in the pit of our stomachs when we step into a strange wooded area is a cry for answers. There has to be something more out there, right? Maybe that’s what we all want to know, but we’re simply too afraid of the answers.
Bill Russo experienced such a fear on that night in 1995. He and Samantha managed to find their way home safely, but he was beyond shaken up. Even though it was one o’clock in the morning, he went into the kitchen and brewed himself a large pot of coffee. There was no way he was going to let himself sleep that night.
Cup after cup, hour after hour, Bill relived the experience over and over again, playing back everything he had heard and seen. He experienced doubt and fear and regret. He wondered if maybe he should have tried harder to speak with the creature. Perhaps he should have approached it—if Samantha would have allowed him to, that is.
But the question that plagued him the most that night was more difficult: what had the creature been saying to him? Bill wrestled with his memory of those sounds all through the night.
“Eee wah chu,” it had said. And then, “Keahr.”
Before sunrise, Bill was almost positive that he had his answer. It wasn’t another language the creature was speaking, after all; it had been trying its best to use English. And the words it kept repeating?
“We want you,” it had been saying. “Come here.”
FOR MANY CULTURES, the funeral is the last goodbye. It’s the final chance to say what needs to be said, or do what needs to be done, in order to honor the ones we’ve lost. But while the methods and purpose behind these rituals can vary drastically from one culture to the next, one thing is common among the vast majority: the burial.
We bury our dead. We’ve done it for an incredibly long time, and we’ve gotten very good at it. Every year, archaeologists open new tombs that date back millennia, each one teaching us something new about the cultures that time has caused us to forget. And central to each of these discoveries is the burial itself. The techniques, the beliefs, the ritual.
But it’s not just about the dead. The practice of honoring and burying our loved ones is just as much about our own feelings of loss and grief as it is about our responsibility to care for those who have passed away.
No place personifies the act of burial more than the local cemetery. With their green lawns and neat rows of pale stones, the graveyard is unique among urban constructions. Cemeteries are respectfully avoided by some, obsessed over by others. But whatever beliefs you might hold, whatever opinions you might have about them, graveyards are a special place.
Stephen King explores the allure and power of the graveyard in his novel Pet Sematary. In his story, the cemetery is a portal between our world and another. It’s a place of transformation, of transition, of mystery. And while we might not be digging shallow graves for our pets in hopes that they’ll return to us in the night, we’ve never lost our fascination with those places.
Cemeteries have always been seen as the end of the journey. Whether you believe in a heaven or not, the graveyard is where most of us will go when our time is up. For some, however, the story doesn’t always end there. Some things, it seems, can’t be buried.
FERTILE GROUND
For a very long time, burial in Europe was limited to churchyards. It made sense: with a vast majority of Europeans holding to the Christian faith, all of them wanted to be buried close to their place of worship.
Politics held sway even in these quiet, humble places of burial, though. Throughout Europe, it was common to find cemeteries that separated Protestant and Catholic graves. There’s a touching example of this near the Dutch town of Roermond, where a couple was buried in the late 1800s. The husband had been Protestant, while the wife held to the Catholic faith. Despite strict rules regarding their burial, the couple managed to cheat the system by picking graves on opposite sides of the dividing wall. Their tall headstones included carved hands that reached out to touch each other.
Economic status played a part in burial as well. Those wealthy enough could purchase space inside the church itself, while the less well-off had to settle for graves outside the church walls. And even then, social status determined where in the yard a person might be buried. The higher the status, the closer to the chapel. But no one wanted to find themselves in the north corner. That was where people of uncertain birth, strangers from out of town, and stillborn infants were buried.
But churches filled up fast, as did the yards around them. As the population of Europe swelled, churchyard space began to disappear at an alarming rate. At first, graves were simply moved closer together, like the parking lot at your local mall. Smaller spaces meant more occupants, and that was good for business. But it only worked for a while.
Next, people opted for the vertical approach: coffins were stacked one atop the next. But as earth was filled in between the newly added graves, the churchyards were rising, sometimes as high as twenty feet.
Greyfriars Cemetery in Edinburgh, Scotland, is a horrific example of this problem. It used to be a depression in the ground, but over time it’s become more of a hill. With more than half a million recorded burials, the cemetery has risen over fifteen feet in elevation, introducing problems that are unique to a graveyard so old and so full. According to reports, there’s such a high concentration of human remains that on especially rainy days, remains that aren’t sealed within a casket have a tendency to float to the surface, bursting through the mud like white teeth.
All of this left cities in need of some seriously creative thinking. In some places, the solution they chose was a drastic one. In France, for example, the government actually had to step in. Churchyards had gotten so full that they would often collapse outward, spilling soil and human remains onto the streets. Walls were built around them, but they rarely worked. The dead were getting out of hand, so to speak. In 1786, they removed all the bodies from Holy Innocents Cemetery in Paris and moved them to a series of disused stone quarries that became known as the Catacombs. It’s estimated that the Catacombs hold close to six million bodies.
Sometimes it wasn’t a lack of space that ruined a cemetery, but a lack of popularity. That’s the fate that awaited the cemetery built on the former property of Sir William Ashhurst in the north end of London. Named for the small hilltop community that once existed there, Highgate Cemetery was established on the grounds of the old manor house, which had been demolished and replaced with a church in 18
39.
At first the cemetery was popular. Karl Marx is buried there, as are many relatives of Charles Dickens and Dante Rossetti. But when the owners lost money and fell on hard times, the graveyard was left to the elements. Monuments and crypts became overgrown with vegetation, and sometimes trees would sprout up right through the graves themselves.
Highgate is a wonderful example of what we all imagine a haunted cemetery might look like. Filmmakers and authors have been drawn to it for decades, tapping into its arresting visual atmosphere to create works of gothic horror and fantasy. It was even the inspiration behind Neil Gaiman’s beautiful novel The Graveyard Book.
But while there are plenty of stories about the history of graveyards throughout Europe and America, cemeteries have always been known for something darker, something less tangible than what we can see above ground. Perhaps it’s all those neat rows of bone-white headstones, or the notion that hundreds of bodies lie waiting beneath our feet.
Whatever the reason, it’s in the local graveyard, more than any other place, that we find rumors of the otherworldly and unexplainable. Inside those walls, between the pale stones and dark trees, almost everyone has heard tales of those who refuse to stay in the grave.
Buried or not, sometimes the past is too traumatic to leave us.
HERE AND THERE
Just south of Chicago, between the curving arms of I-80 and I-294, is a graveyard known for a level of activity unusual in a place of the dead. Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery isn’t big; there are only eighty-two plots there, and many of those have never even been used. But that hasn’t stopped the stories.
It’s said that the famous gangster Al Capone used to use the pond nearby as a dumping place for the bodies of those he had killed. Other rumors make reference to satanic rituals and meetings that have taken place in the graveyard over the years. But there are those who swear they have seen unusual things there.
The most famous sighting has been called the White Lady, the ghostly image of a woman that was said to appear only during a full moon. In 1991, the Chicago Sun-Times featured a photo of the White Lady on the front page, taken by a researcher on one of her visits. The woman appears to be semi-transparent, sitting on a tombstone near the trees, and dressed in white. Other visitors have seen glowing orbs, apparitions, and even vehicles and a farmhouse that seem to fade in and out of existence. The site is off-limits to visitors now, but it’s remained a favorite haunt—no pun intended—of ghost hunters across the country.
In 1863, an outbreak of smallpox moved through a Civil War POW camp in Columbus, Ohio. The camp held close to ten thousand Confederate soldiers, and thousands of them died from the epidemic. As a result, the Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery was formed—unusual in that the site was so far north into Union territory.
Miles away, in New Madrid, Missouri, a Confederate sympathizer sent his young daughter north to avoid the destruction caused by the war. Louisiana Briggs settled in Ohio and eventually married a Union veteran, but she apparently never lost touch with her southern roots. It was said that later in life she would often visit the Camp Chase Cemetery, where she would place flowers on various graves there. She wore a white veil each time she went, in an effort to hide her face. Nevertheless, she acquired a reputation in town as the Gray Lady, and was known for her passion for the old burial ground.
She passed away in 1950, but flowers would still appear regularly on the graves there. Visitors to Camp Chase have heard the sounds of a woman quietly weeping, while others have seen the figure of a woman in a veil. Something drew Louisiana Briggs to that location; that much is clear. According to the stories, though, she never left.
Across the country in Connecticut, yet another graveyard plays host to a mysterious story. Mary Hart was born in New Haven in 1824 and lived a very modest life there. She was a corset maker and machine stitcher by trade, working hard to support her family.
On October 15, 1872, Mary fell into a deathlike state from an unknown cause. She was only forty-seven—young even for the late nineteenth century—and this tragedy rocked her family to the core. By midnight Mary had expired, and her grieving family set about to arrange for a quick and immediate burial. There was a lot of pain, and I can imagine they just wanted to get it over with.
It’s said that Mary’s spirit still wanders Evergreen Cemetery, close to the site of her home on Winthrop Avenue. More than one story has been told about drivers pulling over to pick up a hitchhiking woman, only to have her disappear.
Others say Mary was a witch, although you didn’t have to look far in the late 1800s to find a woman who had been accused of something like that. According to the stories, local college students have frequently visited Mary’s grave, which is said to be cursed. Anyone who visits her grave at midnight, goes the legend, will meet a horrible fate. As a result, most people refer to her today as Midnight Mary.
There are no records of New Haven college students who’ve died after visiting Mary’s gravesite. But whether or not the stories are rooted in fact, it hasn’t stopped them from spreading. Mary still has one foot in our world, it seems. It’s just not clear who’s keeping her here.
RUTH’S STORY
South Cemetery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is really a collection of many smaller graveyards. It’s the site of the oldest burial ground in town, dating back to the 1600s, and is a wonderful mixture of styles and centuries. Together, the old Auburn Cemetery, the Proprietor’s Burial Ground, Sagamore Cemetery, and Harmony Grove all combine to showcase everything from an Egyptian-style sarcophagus to winged skulls and Victorian funerary imagery.
It’s a peaceful place, and much of the grounds have been planted with flowering trees, creating a parklike atmosphere. But that wasn’t always the case. In the 1700s, South Cemetery served double duty as both a graveyard and the site of several public executions. All of them were hangings, and more than a few of them were women. And the reasons were often tragic.
The early eighteenth century was a very different era from our own, and the law books were filled with rules that might seem barbaric or cruel by today’s standards. Provincial laws of the time required capital punishment for a wide assortment of crimes—close to six hundred of them, in fact—including murder, rape, abortion, bestiality, burglary, treason, and counterfeiting. Another capital crime, though, was known as concealment.
If a woman found herself pregnant outside of marriage in the mid-1700s, her life was effectively over. Social stigma, loss of employment, fines, and even physical punishment were all expected to follow upon discovery of adultery and the possible resulting bastard birth. To avoid this fate, it had become common for women in that situation to hide their pregnancy, and then abandon the newborn baby to die of neglect and exposure.
This was concealment. And it was the situation that a woman from South Hampton, New Hampshire, found herself in during the spring of 1768. Ruth Blay was twenty-five and split her time between teaching in the nearby towns and working as a seamstress. She was single and poor, but she did her best to hide the pregnancy for as long as she could.
No one knows where she gave birth to the child. We don’t know if she labored alone, with no hand to hold or companion to help her through it. All history remembers is the baby, but even then, there are still questions.
According to Ruth, the baby had been stillborn. It didn’t erase her crime of adultery, of course, or the stigma that was sure to follow, but it did mean that she didn’t kill the child. She had been afraid, and so she buried the tiny body beneath the floorboards of a local barn, most likely the site of one of her traveling classrooms. And that, she thought, was the end of it.
But what Ruth didn’t know was that some of her local students had watched her bury the child’s body. They didn’t see the birth itself. They didn’t feel her pain and loss and fear and hopelessness. All they saw was a young woman placing a body in the space beneath a loo
se board. They saw a crime, and so they reported it.
Ruth was soon arrested by Isaac Brown, the local constable, and was quickly brought to trial. A jury was formed—all men, of course—and they soon ruled that the child had died by violence after birth. Ruth, they said, was a liar. And a murderer.
Ruth was held at the constable’s home until she could be transported to the jail in Portsmouth. But she was still recovering from the birth, and so she remained there for over a month while her body healed. By July 19, she had been formally accused, and two weeks later she was brought before the provincial court. She pleaded innocent, of course, but no one listened. Her final trial date was set for nearly two months later, toward the end of September.
I can’t imagine how lonely she must have felt, how hopeless. Ruth didn’t have a chance; I think it’s safe to assume she knew that. Society wasn’t kind to women in her position, and when you added in the dead infant…well, Ruth was pretty sure how it was going to end.
Her trial began on the afternoon of September 21, 1768, and a little over twelve hours later, the jury handed down their verdict: guilty. She was, according to their instructions, “to hang by her neck until dead.” But not just yet.
No, the royal governor of New Hampshire, a man named John Wentworth, issued three consecutive reprieves, postponing her execution. He said it was to give her time to prepare herself for death, but I can’t help but wonder if it was really just one more punishment. Rather than walking to the gallows before the end of September, Ruth would have to wait three long months.
Just before noon on December 30, over a thousand people gathered at Gallows Hill in South Cemetery. It had snowed earlier that day, and now a cold, freezing rain was covering everything in a layer of ice. Sheriff Packard, the man presiding over the execution, had Ruth placed atop the back of a wagon, a rope draped around her neck. Parents stood with their arms around their children, who craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the woman about to die.