Haunted Cemeteries Page 11

  Besides his pioneering detective stories, Poe left an indelible mark on the horror genre as well, with titles such as “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of Red Death,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and that perennial funereal favorite, “The Premature Burial.” All classics of terror—every bit as thrilling as they were the day they appeared.

  All things considered, Michael wouldn’t have been surprised if Poe’s ghost had jumped out from behind the tomb. He’d read that many people have felt Poe’s presence while standing there. Some said they saw his apparition; a few swore he talked to them.

  Michael didn’t need a supernatural visitation, however. He was happy simply to pay his respects. It was late afternoon by then, and dusk was already starting to fall. He had to be on his way if he wanted to get back to Philly before it was completely dark.

  “Thank you, Edgar,” he murmured, staring straight at the bronze medallion bearing Poe’s portrait on the side of the monument. As Michael turned to leave, a sharp, hard gust of wind swept across the yard, kicking up a whirlwind of red, orange, and golden leaves. Was it Michael’s imagination, or were they taking an almost human form? An instant later, the breeze died down, and whatever he might have seen was gone.

  All the way back to Pennsylvania, Michael ran those brief seconds over and over again in his mind. Had there actually been a shape inside the spinning foliage? Probably not. Logic told him otherwise.

  But if he had learned anything at all from those years reading Edgar Allan Poe, it was this: You never know when the Unseen will come to call.

  Although Poe doesn’t personally manifest very often at his grave, the tomb does have a regular visitor. An unidentified Man in Black has appeared there every year since 1949 on the night of January 19, the writer’s birthday. The caller, who’s thought to be flesh and blood, not a ghost, is always dressed completely in black, including a fedora and a scarf covering his face, and he carries a silver-headed cane. For some unknown reason, he leaves a bottle of cognac and three red roses on the base of the monument. No one knows who the stranger (or probably, now, his successor) is.

  Perhaps the graveyard has too many visitors for Poe to hang out there. But he may haunt the upstairs rooms of the Fells Point tavern (now called The Horse You Came In On Saloon), where legend has it Poe was last seen having a drink.

  Then there’s the house where he lived with his aunt on Amity Street. The home was built sometime around 1830 as a two-story brick structure with a gabled attic. Since 1949—coincidentally the same year the shadowy Man in Black began appearing at the writer’s tomb—the Edgar Allan Poe Society has administered it as a museum. Guests to the attic have reported sensing an unusual, invisible presence in the room. Could it be Poe?

  That’s not all people experience when they’re in the house. They’ve also felt invisible fingers tap them on the shoulder, heard soft, disembodied voices, and seen doors and windows open and shut by themselves. Lights sometimes seem to have a mind of their own, and the place is prone to the sort of icy cold spots that are a hallmark of unearthly spirits.

  Then there’s the apparition. From time to time, the spec-tre of a gray-haired, stout woman shows up, dressed head to toe in clothing from the nineteenth century. Has Maria Clemm also returned?

  Meanwhile, back at the Westminster Burying Ground, there are several spooks besides Poe that haunt the graveyard and catacombs. One of the most outrageous is a screaming skull. According to ghost lore, if a person’s head is separated from the rest of the corpse, his or her spirit sometimes returns to inhabit the skull. If it is then disturbed, the skull will begin to shriek mercilessly. Often the sound of inexplicable bangs and thumps accompanies the screeching.

  The screaming skull that’s interred in the Westminster Burying Ground supposedly belongs to a Cambridge, Maryland, minister who was murdered. Its cries have been heard both day and night, despite the skull having been gagged and enclosed in cement before it was lowered into the ground. It’s said that if you hear the shocking shrieks, you won’t be able to get them out of your head, until they eventually drive you insane.

  The spectre of Valence, a former caretaker and gravedigger, also appears at the Burying Ground. It’s always pretty clear from his staggering and erratic behavior that he’s drunk, and he’ll chase you with his shovel. You’ll want to keep out of reach: If he catches you, he’ll bury you alive.

  Finally, there’s the tale of Leona Wellesley, a raving maniac who, though dead, was buried in a straitjacket in the churchyard. People who pass by her grave may hear her crazed laughter or get the sensation that she follows them as they walk around the cemetery.

  Tales of mystery and horror come and go. But before there was Stephen King or Anne Rice; before R. L. Stine, Shirley Jackson, or H. P. Lovecraft—there was the first great American master, Edgar Allan Poe.

  Chapter 17

  From These

  Honored Dead

  Thousands of men made the ultimate sacrifice on the battlegrounds at Gettysburg. Most of those who gave that “last full measure of devotion” stay peacefully in their graves. But more than a few walk the fields where they fell. Among them are those whose spirits never made it out of the Devil’s Den.

  Keith didn’t know where to start. He’d first learned about Gettysburg way back in fourth grade. He never thought he’d one day get to visit the place.

  The names connected with the three-day battle tugged at his imagination with as much urgency as when he first heard them: Cemetery Ridge, Seminary Ridge, Round Top. Now here he was, about to drive the carefully maintained roads that snake through the Gettysburg National Military Park.

  There was so much to see and do on the battlefield that Keith decided his best bet was to follow the self-guided auto tour the National Park Service had laid out. He made his first stop at the visitor center, where he picked up the map, and within minutes he was out on the road.

  The suggested route ended at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, or Gettysburg National Cemetery, as it’s also known, but Keith felt compelled to stop there first. He parked in the lot just off Steinwehr Avenue and walked solemnly onto the burial grounds.

  The battle, often referred to as the high-water mark of the Confederacy and the turning point of the Civil War, took place on the meadows and knolls surrounding the town of Gettysburg on July 1 through 3, 1863. The melee ended with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in retreat and Union Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac hot on its heels. But the residents of Adams County were horrified with what was left behind.

  Approximately 8,000 soldiers—about 3,100 Union troops and 4,700 Confederate forces—had been killed during the fierce campaign. Many of them had been hastily buried in shallow graves right on the battlefields. Out of necessity, many more had been left out in the summer sun.

  In addition, hundreds of wounded soldiers who died in the field hospitals and local farmhouses had been buried on the spot in makeshift cemeteries surrounding people’s homes. More bodies lay stacked, decaying, along the city streets. Matters got worse when heavy rains came in mid-July and washed out many of the simple battlefield graves. Putrid cadavers were exposed, with limbs sticking out from beneath the earth.

  Practically speaking, the entire fabled town and battle-field were one giant graveyard.

  David McConaughy, a local lawyer and newspaperman, decided that the soldiers who had died for the Union cause deserved a decent burial, and he began to lobby for a proper cemetery to be constructed on the battleground. David Wills, another prominent attorney, picked up the cause and succeeded in convincing Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin as well. Land was purchased on the already appropriately named Cemetery Hill, and William Saunders, a respected landscape architect, was hired to design the graveyard.

  (A few years later, Saunders would be called on to design Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois. The president’s ghost is said to haunt the
mausoleum as well as the White House. Also, an apparition of the train that carried his body from Washington, DC, to Springfield appears on portions of the old track each year on the night of April 27, most frequently on the stretch between Albany and Buffalo in New York and the one from Urbana to Piqua, Illinois.)

  Standing at the entrance to the cemetery, Keith marveled at its simplicity and beauty. The graves fanned out in a semicircle, grouped by the states from which the recruits had come. Officers were interred side by side with enlisted men, and identical plain headstones inscribed with the soldier’s name, rank, and regiment marked each grave.

  The Soldiers’ National Cemetery was intended for Northern forces only. By March 1864, the bodies of 3,152 Union fighters had been transferred to their new resting place, which included those removed from the battlefields and the crude graves around the temporary hospitals. Of them, 979 soldiers were unidentified. No doubt many more remained undiscovered in the fields.

  One of the reasons Keith stood so much in awe of the place—that is, in addition to the natural reverence accorded any burial ground—was that this was the place Lincoln delivered his most famous oration, the Gettysburg Address.

  The president had been asked to attend the dedication of November 19, 1863, almost as an afterthought. In fact, Wills didn’t send the invitation until November 2. The primary speaker was to be noted orator Edward Everett. Lincoln was asked to follow with “a few appropriate remarks.”

  “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Keith smiled as he recited the words in his mind. Everett’s interminable speech has long been forgotten, but Lincoln’s mere 271 words—in which the president invoked the memory of “these honored dead” who “gave the last full measure of devotion”—have reverberated down through the ages.

  Keith got back into his car and began the loop around the north side of town. It was there the Confederate forces gathered as they started their push toward the Union defenses. Soon Keith was down in the heart of the battle-field, where most of the hostility took place on the second day of the conflict. Before long, he passed Little Round Top. Then, rather than continue on the main route, he took a turn down Crawford Avenue toward Devil’s Den.

  He had already seen the cluster of rocks from the top of the ridge, rising as the stones do over a wide, open field that’s now referred to as the “Valley of Death.” The spooky out-crop of giant boulders was well known to the various Native American tribes that had passed through the area. There’s even some evidence that a major Indian battle took place in and around the rocks years before European settlers arrived. (According to legend, you can sometimes hear their ancient, disembodied war chants, and occasionally some of the ghostly warriors peek out from behind the massive stones.)

  Keith pulled off into a turnout and walked over to the formation. Over the millennia, freezing rain and subsequent expansion under the sun had caused many of the igneous slabs to crack and split, opening wide, deep crevices in the surfaces. Centuries of erosion further wore some of them away into separate rocks, some piled on top of another, or with pathways between them and natural caverns underneath.

  Confederate regiments had to pass through Devil’s Den on their path to capture the Round Tops. As they first entered the rocks, Union artillery fire rained down on them. Then Yankee infantry descended upon them, and as the Union and Rebel soldiers struggled on and around the monumental boulders, fighting was reduced to hand-to-hand combat.

  As Keith wandered through the maze of rocks, he could well understand how the place earned its nickname, the “Slaughter Pen.” It would have been almost suicidal to try to engage an enemy in such a confined space. The Confederates won the early-evening fight, but bodies from both sides were strewn everywhere, lying across the tops of boulders or wedged into cracks. Some of the dead were quickly buried; others were dropped into one of the many crannies and out of sight.

  Keith climbed to the top of the highest boulder and looked out over the valley back toward the Big Round Top. It dawned on him that this battlefield was where the fate of the nation had been decided. But how many brave souls were still buried under these pastures, lost and forgotten?

  As he scanned the horizon, he was surprised not to see more people. But then, it was after Labor Day, off-season, and it was too soon for school groups to be making field trips.

  Then, as Keith looked down toward the base of the cluster of rocks, a man, young but haggard, walked out from a break between two of the larger stones. He had long hair and a few days’ stubble on his dirty face, but most of his features were hidden by a large, loose hat. His clothes were a bit ragged, torn at the knees. And he had no shoes.

  Suddenly realizing the day was fast coming to a close, and with several more stops to go, Keith decided to head to his car. As he scrambled down the back of the boulder and came around the front, Keith expected to bump into the man he had seen just moments before. But the field was empty.

  Where could he have gone? The stranger was only out of sight for a few seconds. Unless he had turned and deliberately run back between the boulders or into one of the tunnels, he should have been in plain view. Keith stood there, waiting for the man to emerge. But he never did.

  Oh, well, Keith mused. Let him hide. I have a date with Cemetery Ridge.

  Keith couldn’t have known that he wasn’t the only one to have encountered the “hippie,” as others have described him. The man has been seen, has talked with people, and has posed for pictures. But oddly, he never shows up in the photographs when they are developed. And like with Keith, he has a disturbing habit of suddenly disappearing.

  It’s now believed that the frequently seen apparition may very well be the ghost of a Confederate soldier who lost his life in the Devil’s Den. By that point in the war, many of the combatants were wearing their own clothing because no uniforms were available. Shoes were in particularly short supply, which could explain why the apparition is barefoot.

  Numerous other phantoms have been observed, felt, and heard in the Slaughter Pen. But then, spirits appear all over the national park, especially in the Valley of Death, the so-called Triangular Field, and the meadow where Pickett’s Charge took place. Sometimes entire regiments are spied parading across the battlefields. Is it any wonder there are so many spectres, considering the number of people who died there during those three dreadful days in 1863?

  As President Lincoln said, the brave men who died at Gettysburg consecrated the grounds “far beyond our poor power to add or detract.” Their bodies may lie resting in their hallowed graves, but many of their spirits walk the earth. So if you’re planning a trip to the national military park, be warned: You won’t be there alone. You might get a visit from one of “these honored dead.”

  Chapter 18

  The Curse of

  Giles Corey

  Giles Corey, a well-to-do farmer in Salem, Massachusetts, was falsely accused of witchcraft along with scores of others. Perhaps it was his barbaric execution—he was crushed to death instead of being hanged—that resulted in his returning to haunt one of the local cemeteries. He also made a dying curse that, some say, has caused several calamities to hit the town.

  “More weight!”

  The sheriff, George Corwin, shot upright. He had been leaning down over Giles Corey’s body, his ear pressed to the man’s lips, hoping that the prisoner would finally agree to be tried in open court. Corey’s astonishing request was the one thing he hadn’t expected to hear.

  Corwin knew that what he was doing was inhumane. But the punishment was a court order, and as an officer of the law he was duty-bound to carry it out.

  It was unthinkable that things had come so far. The whirlwind of fear that had overtaken Salem, Massachusetts, had started just seven months earlier. But by now the panic had swept through all of Salem Village (where the initial outbreak took place) and the seaport community of Salem Town. Before the madness calmed down, more than twenty people would
be dead.

  Salem Village, today known as Danvers, was settled around 1630 on the route between the already-established Salem, a thriving harbor town, and Boston. The small hamlet was surrounded by farmlands, and most of the area residents were of Puritan stock.

  In November 1689, Salem Village formed its own church congregation separate from the one in Salem Town, and the Rev. Samuel Parris was called to be its minister. From the very beginning, church members fought over the selection. All the same, Parris was still there three years later when in January 1692, his nine-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and his eleven-year-old niece, Abigail Williams, began acting strangely. They became violent, fell into fits, crawled around on the floor, and contorted their bodies. They’d babble incomprehensibly or shriek that they were being pinched or stuck with needles.

  They were examined by a doctor in mid-February, and when he couldn’t find any physical cause for their peculiar actions, he suggested that witchcraft might be involved. After all, hadn’t the very same thing occurred to several youngsters in the John Goodwin household in Boston a decade before? It hadn’t stopped until their washerwoman, Goody Glover, was tried and executed for bewitching them in 1688.

  But who was troubling the girls in Salem? Coerced by the alarmed townsfolk to implicate someone, anyone, Elizabeth Parris accused Tituba, who was a Carib or Arawak slave in the Parris household. After being beaten and jailed, Tituba quickly confessed, which probably wound up saving her life. She joined the two girls in “naming names” and was released from jail when a new owner bought her. After that, records of her disappear.

  After Tituba, the first to be accused of witchcraft were Sarah Good, a poor indigent, and Sarah Osborne, who was considered a fallen woman because she had slept with one of her servants.