Yet another day I ended up in Rhode Island under the threat of imminent rain. This time around there was a 30% chance and I was willing to take those odds. My travel companion chose a cemetery that has a bunch of completely made up folklore because that was a little different than anything else we have done…
We’d already been to the grave of Mercy Brown, Rhode Island’s last vampire, and it was Mercy Brown who was the inadvertent cause of confusion in the this completely different cemetery. The story suggests that a teacher in the 1960’s told his students about Mercy Brown but his details were vague and he didn’t have her name so the students went out in search of the vampire’s grave with only the scant details they did know – and they decided at some point that the grave of Nellie Louise Vaughn must be the vampire. Nellie died in 1889 from pneumonia at the tender age of nineteen. She was not a vampire or even a victim of tuberculosis (which is where most of our vampires are from.) In fact she was an innocent bystander to the chaos that ensued.
All small towns have their urban legends and this is usually how they start – with a dusting of truth, a lot of mistaken details, and the whole story getting increasingly twisted as it’s told generation to generation. In time local teenagers believed so strongly that Nellie was their hometown vampire that her gravesite became a bit of a tourist attraction and with that came the inevitable vandalism that occurred as pieces of her stone were chipped away as souvenirs. From there stories about satanic worship began being circulated until someone took the stone away completely. Was it stolen? Or were respectable townspeople the culprit, having taken the stone to preserve it? No one knows. But not long after her story got even more colorful as the appearance of a ghostly woman and white showed up not long after. Now, is this a true haunting or just a bunch of hilarious hogwash, I don’t know. What I do know is I ended up in this cemetery and it had a lot more charm than it would seem.
First off this place was a bit of a nightmare to find. My GPS for some reason did not register the address at all and my navigator, using his phone, kept falling asleep on me. This eventually resulted in the poor Prius driving down what looked like an unpaved camp road that ended in signs reading, “Dead End. Private Property. All trespassers will be shot.” Which is always fun. From there I got to practice my 300 point turn on a narrow wooded lane until I got my way out of there.
The cemetery itself is at a church that is easy to spot on the corner. It doesn’t look like a functional church but there is a plaque out front telling the history of the area. We weren’t the only ones there. We parked, wandered into the cemetery as the other people in the parking lot watched us freaks. I began to take photos of cool stones and the many adorable mushrooms that were blooming as my travel companion tried to find Nellie’s absent stone. He wasn’t having any luck but I was finding all kinds of interesting things.
The cemetery looked ordinary from the outside but it had a few unusual quirks. For one it was still in working order – here smattered randomly throughout were modern burials, probably laid to rest next to their ancestors. This graveyard was chock full of Tillanghasts. This is a name I have never met anyone by even having lived in New England for my entire life. It made me wonder if they had gone extinct in the area. It made my travel companion wonder if HP Lovecraft was wandering cemeteries and taking the names off the stones for his characters – which included not just Tillinghast but a number of others here – and as I would later learn he once “haunted the town in his infancy.” It’s an odd thought but it makes sense. Stephen King has openly admitted to both wandering cemeteries and using the names as inspiration so why wouldn’t his horror writer predecessors?
In addition to this there were stones with poems and histories on them – even one of a civil war soldier who was shot and summarily drowned trying to make an escape by swimming. Many of the monuments here were historically speaking enormous – and in these older cemeteries this is a signifier of wealth. But that wasn’t the only clue these people were loaded, there were also Masonic symbols everywhere, and the most alarming thing were their ages at death. Many here died in their 80’s as far back as the early 1800’s and one was even 101! I have found through my travels that life expectancy is a super flimsy thing – it only seems to apply to the lower classes. These upper classes always had the resources to live very long lives.
And then I found a modern stone with a very sweet sentiment on it. It read, “Life is like a painting. It started with my brush and I have filled my canvas with love.” I usually don’t bother to stop for modern stones but that one touched me. This was a small cemetery but we’d made three trips around it finding one cool thing after another before we finally found dear Nellie who was positioned in the dead center just in front of the crypt which had pentagrams and god knows what else scratched into it – likely by clueless teenagers needing a thrill. We knew it was her because other more respectful individuals had left coins and trinkets – as did we. Leaving pennies is usually reserved for historical figures and a 19 year old farm girl from the 1800’s is not exactly the kind of person who’d fit this category but through the power of urban legend she is now. And I hope she’s enjoying it.
As for it being haunted – I don’t know. I didn’t feel anything weird but several of my photos do have an odd haze over them. I thought it was the sun but one of these photos was taken in the opposite direction as the sun and I… just don’t have an answer for that. Just as the people in the parking lot didn’t have an answer about us – having watched us poke around for an hour they left when they saw us leaving. Protective locals? I don’t know. In any event it was an interesting little jaunt. As always I learned a little something and I hope you have too in reading this.
