Six Seriously Spooky Cemetery Stories

It's that time of year, when we look to graveyards for tales that scare the dickens out of us. Ghosts, unexplained phenomena, and even vampires figure in these stories of graveyards from all over.

1. Silver Cliff Cemetery

Silver Cliff Cemetery in Colorado took its name from the nearby mining town of Silver Cliff, which was named for the Silver Cliff Mine. It was a silver mine. Despite an abundance of ore, bad management and financial shenanigans ran the company into the ground -three times! The cemetery is famous today for its dancing blue lights. National Geographic published an article about the lights in 1969. Witnesses say the lights are small, round, and come in other colors besides blue at times. The lights dance across the gravestones. Some say they are reflections of lights from town, but sightings were recorded before electricity came to Silver Cliff.

2. Stepp Cemetery

Stepp Cemetery is a small abandoned cemetery in the Morgan-Monroe State Forest in Indiana. Only a couple of dozen graves are there, some going back 200 years. It is officially a local family cemetery, but legend has it that it was founded by a cult called the Crabbites, whose rituals include snake handling and sex orgies. Some reports say you can still hear the chanting of their gatherings in the cemetery at night. However, I could not find any references to the Crabbites outside of Stepp Cemetery stories, which gives it urban legend status. Another story holds that a devoted mother stayed at the grave of her infant every day, even after the mother's death. Yet another story attributes the crying sounds heard to an old woman who put a curse on the cemetery after a fraternity group killed her dog and left its body at the cemetery.

3. Camp Chase Cemetery

Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio is the final resting place of 2,260 Confederate soldiers. Why Ohio? It was the site of a Union POW camp, which held 9,400 rebel soldiers during the Civil War. A smallpox epidemic struck the camp in 1863, and the victims, both prisoners and those who worked at the camp, were buried there. After the war, the camp was dismantled and the cemetery is the only remnant left. Gravestones began to replace wooden markers in 1895.

Louisiana Ransburgh Briggs was a Southerner from New Madrid, Missouri, whose father sent her north to Ohio to avoid the war. After the war was over, she married a Union veteran but never forgot her Southern sympathies. She visited the Camp Chase Cemetery and placed flowers on various graves, even those covered with overgrowth. Briggs wore a veil to hide her identity during her evening visits, earning her the nickname

"the Veiled Lady of Camp Chase."

She later spearheaded the efforts to reclaim and maintain the cemetery. After her death in 1950, reports of mysterious flowers appearing on graves and the sounds of crying were attributed to the ghost of Mrs. Briggs, who then came to be known as "The Gray Lady." Her activities are particularly connected with the grave of a 22-year-old soldier from Tennessee named

Benjamin F. Allen

. There have also been reported sightings of

Confederate soldiers' ghosts

at Camp Chase.

4. Highgate Cemetery

Highgate gothic /

Highgate Cemetery in London, England, has its share of celebrities, but after it was filled, maintenance declined and the resulting overgrowth made it a classically spooky-looking place. So much so that a series of horror movies from Hammer Films were filmed there in the late '50s. In the 1970s, interest in the occult led to rumors and sightings of first ghosts, then vampires, in Highgate Cemetery. Vandalism and graverobbing stunts fueled these rumors, and ultimately led to a competition between "magicians" Seán Manchester and David Farrant. Both vowed to be the one who could rid the cemetery of the vampire. A series of escapades in the cemetery occurred between 1970 and 1973 in which crowds of people gathered after dark, and corpses were found unearthed, damaged, and sometimes posed. Police tried to keep order, and in 1974 Farrant was jailed for vandalizing graves. Manchester and Farrant carry on their occult rivalry to this day. A lasting document from the vampire scare 40 years ago is the Hammer film Dracula AD 1972, which was inspired by the Highgate Cemetery hijinks. Image by Flickr user Anders B.

5. Chase Mausoleum

The Chase Family Vault in Christ Church Parish, Barbados was built in 1724 and first used in 1807. Remains were interred and sealed with marble and cement. In 1812, the mausoleum was opened for the fourth burial, but the three earlier coffins were found to have moved! An infant's coffin was found standing on end. They were repositioned and resealed. Twice in 1816 and once in 1819, the crypt was opened for further burials and the previous coffins were found flipped over or turned end-to-end. The island governor ordered a seal placed on the door and sand was put on the floor to retain evidence of any break-ins. Yet when the crypt was next opened, the seal was unbroken, the sand was intact, and the coffins were again moved. That's when the family decided to relocate the coffins of their loved ones elsewhere. The vault has not been used since. Although contemporary accounts say there was no evidence of flooding, the simplest explanation is underground water seepage, which could move coffins without seeming to disturb a layer of sand. As the vault is built of coral, leakage does seem to make sense.

6. Chesnut Hill Cemetery

Chesnut Hill Baptist Church Cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island is reported to be haunted by a vampire named Mercy Lena Brown. She was preceded in death by her mother and sister, victims of tuberculosis, and Mercy would often visit their graves. In January 1892, 19-year-old Mercy herself fell to tuberculosis and was interred with her family members. Mercy's father George claimed she haunted him every night, complaining of hunger. His son Edwin fell sick, also with tuberculosis, but as he experienced visits from Mercy, the family and townspeople considered the cause of his illness to be the restless dead. George Brown, with the help of others, dug up the graves of his wife and two daughters on March 17, 1892. Only Mercy, who died in January, was free of decomposition. This led George to believe she was a vampire. The villagers cut out Mercy's heart, burned it, mixed the ashes with water, and gave the concoction to the ailing brother Edwin as medicine. He nevertheless died a couple of months later. The story of Mercy Brown was an inspiration for elements in several novels, including Bram Stoker's Dracula.

If you don't see your favorite haunted cemetery in this list, you light try 10 of America’s Most Haunted Cemeteries.