I know I am a little late starting out this year with my adventuring but truth be told I did attempt to go out a few weeks ago – sadly that destination ended up as such a clusterfuck I didn’t write about it (or even have photos to show off as my camera randomly decided the memory card was not readable.) Some days are just hard like that – and you find yourself arriving at a closed sandwich shop after the GPS sends you backtracking for half an hour after already driving for two and a half. And then you find out just how badly out of shape you are as you huff, puff, and puke trying to reach the end of a very short hike, and to top it all off you end up locked in a park after hours because you couldn’t get your ass back to the car in time. I didn’t want to ward people off from this otherwise lovely location so we decided we’d go back at a different time and try again.
Which brings me to my last little adventure which was MUCH more pleasant! We had decided a leisurely stroll through the village of Chepachet Rhode Island was a better option for the beginning of this year’s blog. The drive was reasonable, the destinations were super easy to find, and it was a gorgeous spring day.
We started with Acotes Hill Cemetery (alternately called Chepachet cemetery and/or Rhode Island Historical Cemetery Glocester #23) which is said to be quite haunted. Or at least that’s what the book we found it in claimed. It was named after a mystery man who was buried here in an unmarked grave. He was just travelling through town when he booked a room at the Kimball Hotel. This is ultimately where he died of a mysterious fatal wound and a fall down the stairs. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that his death was ever investigated as a murder though it sounds like it probably was. This may just be because justice for “half-breeds” (people of both white and indigenous descent) was hard to come across in those days – and maybe that’s why his ghost is said to sometimes haunt these hills.
The cemetery is surprisingly vast and so indicative of burial grounds here in New England. At it’s center there is what was likely the groundskeeper’s house in the past just in front of an old dug crypt. The stones are scattered over a series of rolling hills and a few share the shade a handful of creepy gnarled trees. It’s something from a Stephen king novel.
I noticed when I was there the stones were very chronologically mixed up. Usually cemeteries are somewhat organized by broad age categories and I was told this was an old cemetery so I looked for the slate stones that would have been the markers for Revolutionary War era individuals but alas, I found none. This confusing set of circumstances ended up being because this cemetery is actually a gathering place of many other cemeteries in the area which had been disinterred and moved here.
The monuments here were more or less the usual series of boring marble stones although a few did catch my attention. A large angel looks over the grounds from the back and nearby a bronze of the Virgin Mary cradling a dying Jesus is situated in a corner. I didn’t really know what to make of it.
In any event it was a nice place for a little walk and a great way to start when exploring this sweet little corner of New England. To add to its charm it was also the site of a tiny “armed but bloodless” uprising between the People’s Rights faction and the Law and Order party in 1842. The leader of the People’s Rights Thomas Wilson Dorr surrendered peacefully but was still tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for treason. However public sentiments were so strongly in favor of his cause that he only languished there for a few years before being released and he now enjoys a monument here in the cemetery.
Once I got to the feed store I decided to take an equally ridiculous route home. That’s how I ended up in Sharon, a town I had no real reason to be in. As I drove down some beautiful rural streets I noticed a cemetery smack dab in the middle of nowhere. (My GPS claimed it was 80 McCoy Road. I just discovered the “Where am I?” button and am bouncing with delight at that one!) And when I say smack dab in the middle of nowhere I mean it. It was a small cemetery surrounded on all sides with forest, contained within the boundaries of a stone wall. From afar it didn’t look that interesting – very typical marble stones from the 1800’s. White marble ages poorly and that’s why I tend not to have any interest in them but it is still October and I did promise more spooky places so off I went.
There was a little white gate facing the road. It wasn’t open but there were no locks on it either. There was also no markers telling me which cemetery this was but Google figured that one out for me. I opened the little gate and walked in. There wasn’t much to see at first, this was a small cemetery of maybe 100-150 stones, none drew me to them but the feeling of this place was surreal. It was like I was walking into a bubble where time was lost. The stones here had once been repaired, a few split in half were fused back together with supports and propped back up, but even this effort seemed to have been a long time ago. Moss grew over the supports. This place felt utterly forgotten. That’s when I noticed something weird. Off to the side of the cemetery, past a little stone wall, there were new plots and they were really new. It was if most of the cemetery was the 1850’s or so and then 2017. Hmmm. I headed over to check them out.
These new stones were scattered like confetti on the grounds. They faced all directions and made no sense what-so-ever. Stranger still were the stones themselves. While most were rather ordinary there were a lot that were… odd. The most normal of which was a very modern stone with a modern etching of a lighthouse, a beach, and an old Studebaker driving down the road in front of it. It read, “On the road again.” That just made me shiver a bit. Why had I approached this one stone in particular while trying to take photos for a travel blog? A message from beyond… perhaps. Or just a coincidence. The next stone however was even more startling.
It was on the very edge of the cemetery and didn’t even look like a gravestone, it looked more like building debris. It was raw cut granite, very raw, with the tool marks used to quarry it still visible. It also had an engraving… of a mouse or a rat. I’ve seen a lot of gravestones and many of them have remembrances of cats and dogs on them, sometimes horses or birds, but this is the first mouse/rat and it belonged to an old couple. I might expect to see this on a young Goth’s stone, you know someone who died in the 90’s at age 25, but an elderly couple?! This seemed to be another possible message from beyond… as I used to breed fancy rats and mice many years ago. They brought me such joy I had often joked about getting one as a tattoo or memorializing them on a cemetery stone. I smiled. I liked these people, whoever they were.
Back in the old part of the cemetery I noticed a bizarre corner that seemed more confetti-like than the rest. I noticed those stones were also new and even had a bench overlooking them. They seemed even more raw than the rat/mouse stone. In fact one of them appeared to just be a rock that was already in the area, engraved thusly. Here there were a whole row of educators, scientists, mathematicians, and a few house wives scattered between them, though one was very sweet in stating, “Wife, mother, and a great woman.” She wasn’t going to be left out with the three descriptions! This also made me smile. I bet you these were some damn interesting people. At the very back another natural rock was affixed with a plaque remembering “the angel woman.” I wondered what this meant…
ust as I was leaving I noticed two stones which had been scrubbed clean. They were from the 1800’s and had been so thoroughly cleaned up they looked brand new. I wondered why these two stones? Before I reached the car I also found a tiny orange grub-like caterpillar. I tried taking a photo but he seemed incensed I was trying to handle him , rolled into a hedgehog ball, and clenched all his tiny feet together. There was no unrolling him.
It all starts with Colonel Buck, one of the town’s founding leaders. I was told the story went something like this: A long time ago there was a mayor named Colonel Buck who had an illicit affair with a woman about the town and when she threatened to spill the beans about it he had her burned as a witch. As she was engulfed in flames her foot fell out of the fire, flopped onto the grave stone of her accuser, and made a permanent mark after she cried out some curse involving said foot. It’s a marvelous story. Gruesome, morbid, full of intrigue… and a complete lie. This had to have been made up by some bored parent one day teasing their children walking by the cemetery. Still, it attracts visitors from all over who come to gaze at Colonel Buck’s Tomb, which isn’t a tomb so much as a pillar shaped gravestone that was erected six decades after he died. He also wasn’t the mayor, he was a justice of the peace, and if he had any illicit love affairs they’re not on record and neither is there any record of any executions of witches in Maine. In fact the only witches put to death in all of New England were hung or pressed to death with stones, not burned alive. There’s a sign saying all this, basically a big ol’ bulletin that might as well read, “Y’all full of shit.” but hey if it’s real blood guts and gore you’re after there’s a much lesser known stone with a much truer story a few streets away.
This is the stone of Sarah Ware. Her story is as weird as it gets up here in Maine. She was unusual in life because she was a divorced woman in the 1800’s, something pretty much unheard of. This had to have given her one hell of a stigma and maybe it was exactly that that got her killed. Life as a divorcee was not easy then and at fifty two years of age she was supporting herself by being a Jill of all trades babysitting, cleaning, and doing the odd job here and there. She was on her way home one evening when she disappeared. She was found two weeks later in a field viciously bludgeoned to death. She had been beaten so badly that when the body was removed her head fell clean off and her jaw was nowhere to be found. It was then kept as evidence as the rest of her was buried somewhere. Her head was kept in criminal storage as evidence for nearly a century before clerks discovered this gruesome artifact in 1983. The head was given a stone and laid to rest in the Oak Hill Cemetery, sans body.
It’s the first day of October which means my favorite holiday of the year is coming up – Halloween. In celebration of this I have decided to make this month’s travels themed. So welcome to the first entry of my Haunted New England Tour! I will try my best to go to locations that are haunted, creepy, abandoned, surrounded by local myths and legends, stalked by cryptozoological beasts, or part of our brutal history. Of course there will be a number of cemeteries and this month could be a great way to get all you history and psychology buffs involved as New England is the site of many murders and mysteries! I shouldn’t have any problem finding new places to go!
I am starting out with a familiar stomping ground for me – the graveyard behind the town common in Ashby. If you’re wondering what the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery is I am told cemeteries exist on their own while graveyards are consecrated ground adjoining a church. It took me way too long to figure out what this particular graveyard was called. I had to stare at Google street view for quite a while! But the Church is the First Parish Church (Unitarian Universalists) and the graveyard behind it is called 
But anyway this cemetery is mostly slate stones which are the older stones you can find here, mostly dating to the 1700’s. These stones were particularly beautiful as they clearly had several different artists, all adding their own unique signature styles to familiar symbology. This was the first time I found a triple-headed stone. There’s usually one or two double-headed stones here and there, most often married couples or more grimly the gravesites of slaves, infants, or peasants (as double stones are cheaper than two separate stones…) From what I could guess these appeared to be siblings, all children, all dying in the third year of their life. Another sad find was a double stone for a twenty three year old woman in the late 1700’s who died four days after giving birth and one day after her infant died. Was this due to complications, disease, or a broken heart? We may never know but there did seem an inordinate amount of children here, even considering the time period.
Because of its age this graveyard is littered with Revolutionary War soldiers. I have become accustomed to seeing their stones, usually easy to spot because of their metal war plaques and the small American flags that are placed at each. During my first visit here I noticed a very lonely little stone at the very back left corner. It was just a square marble post, looking more like a property marker than a gravestone. It was showered in pennies. In New England this is an old tradition that denotes respect for an important historical figure. Who could it be? I wandered closer and read the stone, “PRINCE ESTABROOK NEGRO GREATON’S CO. 3 MASS REGT REV. WAR.” I must admit this confused me greatly. Was Negro his last name or was he black? And if he was black… we had black revolutionary war soldiers?! I didn’t have a penny to leave that first time I visited but I did today and it seemed to mean a little more because I knew who it was now after looking his story up.
Prince Estabrook was indeed a black man and also a slave. On April 19, 1775, after requesting and being granted legal permission from his owner, he became the first black man to become a revolutionary war soldier (yes, I said first, not only.) He fought and was wounded in the battle of Lexington and Concord, the first battle of the Revolutionary War. His service was on and off from there until the end of the war. We know shockingly little other than that. We have no idea why he volunteered to fight for a country which was enslaving him, we have pretty much no details of his personal life, only that after he eventually won his freedom he lived in Ashby Massachusetts with the son of his previous owner, dying at around ninety years of age. He does not appear to have been honored in any special way during his life and on his death he was buried outside the graveyard’s official boundaries, forever segregated. This explains why his stone was so… isolated. It was moved at some point in recent history to at least be within the graveyard’s official grounds. Only in 2008 did he get recognition being mentioned on a memorial facing the Lexington Green where he fought.
Today I needed to drive – desperately. So I made an excuse to go out and somehow ended up three hours away in Montepelier Vermont just as the sun was starting to go down. My aim was to find a castle in the woods. Instead I found a sweet little dog park, a lot of aging hippies, and a gorgeous cemetery. Green Mount Cemetery is actually famous. The stones there are clearly for rich people and are exquisite. Nestled between the green mountains the view from the cemetery is breathtaking. It’s a popular fall destination spot because it’s even more beautiful when the trees turn color. I was a couple weeks early for that but this didn’t stop me from ambling in and checking the place out. The sign at the gate said it closes at dusk but in true Vermont fashion the only thing making sure this happened was those tiny forgettable little signs. This place didn’t even have a gate anymore, just five separate open entrances. Suffice to say I took my time.
I may not have found the castle I was looking for but I did find a castle-like structure at the entrance of the cemetery! That was close enough and besides the drive up there was all I needed to settle my frazzled mind. I find I am needing more and more intellectual stimulation these days and it’s driven me in some odd directions. Driving for three hours into the mountains seemed to ease this need. Just between you and me I caterwauled a great deal of the way until I nearly lost my voice. That’s what the open road is all about – freedom. Freedom of movement, freedom of intellectual curiosity, freedom to butcher your favorite classic rock songs as loudly as you can muster.
Today I had to go to Marlborough and decided to let the GPS drag me down some back roads. I am so happy I chose to do this instead of going the way I knew! I ended up on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere (which is always a nice thing for me) and when I passed a cemetery that looked like it was full of old slate stones I couldn’t resist. Oh! This cemetery had the most character of any slate graveyard I have been in! Whoever was carving those old stones must have had quite the personality! I got to see all the usual designs – cherubs, urns, weeping willows, but with so much added extra flair it was unbelievable. Odd swoops and swirls, intricate geometric designs, and even one which had a 3-D face. Totally bizarre! But how wonderful!
