HGB Ep. 560 - Haunted Cemeteries 30

Moment in Oddity - The Giant's Causeway 

The Giant's Causeway is located in Northern Ireland and is believed to be 60 million years old. This is a unique formation of hexagonal basalt stones that became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. This is referred to as a causeway because the tops of the columns form stepping stones that lead down to the sea and go under it. All of the stones seem to have been cut in the shapes they have whether they have four or more sides. But scientists claim that these stones were formed from a volcanic fissure eruption. The use of "giant" in the name indicates that legends are connected to this site. One story claims that there was an Irish giant named Finn McCool and a Scottish giant named Benandonner. The two were mighty rivals and Finn built the causeway so that he could have a meeting with Benandonner. After the meeting, Benandonner ripped up the causeway and ran back to Scotland. For his part, Finn McCool left behind his giant boot, which is fossilized at the Giant's Causeway in "bay of the giant." Causeway guides told a different story in the 1700s and this story was also written out as a poem in 1830. Finn had fallen in love with a Scottish maiden, but he couldn't reach her, so he decided to build the causeway. He was making good progress, but it was stopped by his grandmother who didn't want him going after the maiden because she feared losing him to Scotland. She used magic to create a storm that destroyed the causeway. Finn built it again and she destroyed it again. This went on and on and on this final night, the storm lashed out as Finn built. He was exhausted by the time he got to the other side and fell into the maiden's arms and died. His grandmother was horrified that her magic lead to his death and she turned to stone and continues to stand at the causeway today. The legends are fun, but a giant more than likely didn't build the causeway. Regardless, the formation certainly is odd!

This Month in History - St. Paul's Cathedral Bombed

In the month of October, on the 10th, in 1940, St. Paul's Cathedral was bombed. King Aethelberht (a thel barret) I dedicated the first Christian cathedral to be built here in 604 A.D. He dedicated that cathedral to St. Paul. It burned to the ground later and was rebuilt and then destroyed by the Vikings in 962. A third cathedral was also burned down in 1087. The fourth cathedral stood for many years, but burned up in the Great Fire of London in 1666. English architect Sir Christopher Wren built the fifth and final cathedral in the baroque design and crowned it with a beautiful dome. Wren considered it his masterpiece and he was buried inside it. During the Battle of Britain in World War II, the German Luftwaffe bombed Britain heavily. A nighttime raid was launched on October 10th and a Nazi bomb went through the dome and left the high altar in ruin. The image of St. Paul's in the midst of smoke and fire inspired the British people. The cathedral survived the Blitz and the bells rang out in 1944 to celebrate the liberation of Paris and again in 1945 at the end of the war in Europe with services attended by 35,000 people.

Haunted Cemeteries 30

A bench, hewn from natural wood, that is located in one of our featured cemeteries reads, "Here I sit broken-hearted, thinking about, our dearly departed." And that is why we have cemeteries. To remember our dearly departed family and friends. For those of us that wander these cities of the dead, we make new friends along the way as we stop and read a headstone here and there. A life remembered for a brief moment. We give that to the dead when we stop and care. And in some cemeteries, our efforts do not go in vain as we are watched and surveyed from beyond the veil. On this haunted cemeteries episode, we feature haunted cemeteries in Arizona; Alabama; Ontario, Canada; Prague, Czech Republic; South Dakota and two St. Mary Churchyard's in London, Britain.

Evergreen Mortuary and Cemetery

Evergreen Cemetery was founded in 1907 on 110 acres outside the city of Tucson to replace the original city cemetery known as Court Street Cemetery. That cemetery was open from 1875 to 1907. When it closed, the bodies were moved to Evergreen. The process took 20 years. Remains from another cemetery named Presidio were also relocated here. This means that many of the early pioneers of Tucson are buried in Evergreen. The cemetery is surrounded by mountains and features a lush landscape with many trees has attracted  wide variety of birds through the years, so it has been listed as a Bird Sanctuary by the Audubon Society of Tucson. Evergreen Mortuary was opened in 1974 to make the cemetery a one-stop shop. The NorthStar Memorial Group acquired the property in 2014.

Some of the notable people buried here are Jacob Mansfeld who started the first public library in the territory and Thomas Jeffords who was a U.S. Army scout and blood brother to Apache leader Cochise and helped negotiate a treaty with the Apache. The Drachman family were pioneers who came to Tucson from California. Philip Drachman traveled as steerage to New York in 1852 and through several years, made his way to the Territory of Arizona. There he opened a dry goods store with his friend Joseph Goldwater and got involved in real estate. By 1881, he owned a saloon and a few years later he had a cigar shop and he got involved in politics. Drachmann died in Tucson in 1889. He was buried in the Masonic Plot at Evergreen Cemetery. His son Mose got involved in Tucson real estate and politics, following in his father's footsteps. He too is buried at Evergreen.

The Evergreen Cemetery page on Facebook shares this about Maria Wakefield Fish who was buried at the cemetery in 1909, "Governor Safford invited Maria to come to Arizona and inaugurate the public schools in Tucson. There were no railroads; the desert stretched out desolate and hostile Indians ranged the country. Maria braved the dangers and came and took the post and opened the public schools of Tucson and practically of the territory. She was the pioneer that opened up the splendid vista of education to boys and girls of today. Wakefield Middle School was named for her. She was also the first American woman married in Tucson - the date was 1874."

Many people believe this cemetery is one of the most haunted places in Tucson. There is the disembodied sound of children laughing and playing that is heard. A woman was walking through the cemetery one day and felt a sudden and forceful yank of her hair. There was no one near her. There can be an eerie silence about the place at times. More quiet than any cemetery should be. No birds sing, no bugs flit and no wind courses through the trees.

Hodges Cemetery

Hodges Cemetery is a family cemetery in Alabama that dates back to 1887 and is on land owned originally by W. L. Hodges near the border with Brookside. There are around 135 graves here and despite being a small graveyard, it is apparently very active with spirits. That could be because the cemetery regularly gets disturbed by recreational ATV riders and other trespassers. People driving by the cemetery claim that something bangs against their car. Ghostly hands and faces appear on the windows of their cars. Shadow figures dart among the tombstones and strange noises are heard. And there have even been claims of sightings of a wolf with glowing red eyes.

Drummond Hill 

The land of the Haudenosaunee was once where Drummond Hill Cemetery now sits. This land sits in the Niagara Falls area in Ontario, Canada. A settler named Christopher Buchner bought 400 acres of land in 1799 from his father-in-law James Forsyth. On the top of a hill there, he designed a burial ground. The earliest burial dates to 1797. During the War of 1812, the Battle of Lundy Lane was fought. Lieutenant Governor Gordon Drummond took command of the British forces and his goal was to drive the Americans from the west bank of the Niagara. Brigadier General Winfield Scott led the Americans and they emerged from a forest right into the path of Drummond. At first, Scott's men took a big beating, but then one regiment moved to flank the left side of the British, which surprised two battalions. Another American regiment arrived and one brigade under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James Miller released a devastating attack on the British and earned the title of "The Hero Of Lundy's Lane." Several attacks later and many deaths later, the battle ended in a draw. The hill was named for Drummond. 

One of the notable people buried here is Burr Lockhart Plato who was a slave in West Virginia. He escaped and used the Underground Railroad to get to Canada in 1856. He settled in Niagara Falls and grew in prominence there until he was elected as a councilor in 1886, one of the first black politicians in Canada. Laura Secord is also buried here. During the War of 1812, she walked over twenty miles from American-occupied territory to get a message to the British warning them of an impending American attack. This was despite her father being a Patriot. Her husband was a Loyalist. The information helped the British and the Mohawk repel the attack. Her effort was largely forgotten until 1860 when she was formally thanked and awarded 100 pounds by the Prince of Wales, Edward. Schools have been named for her, a museum was set up for her, there are monuments and memorial coins and stamps and even chocolates were made in her honor. Her legend has reached almost mythic levels.

The main ghosts seen in this cemetery are of course, soldiers. People have seen the spirits of five soldiers in Royal Scots uniforms. They limp across the cemetery. A residual haunting plays out featuring three British soldiers walking towards Lundy House, which was used as a hospital during the war. The sounds of battle are often heard. People claim to feel as though they are being watched. Ghost Walks had taken a group out on their Niagara Ghost Bus Tour and as they exited the cemetery, a woman turned to look back because she felt a cold breeze on her neck and she yelled, "Turn around! Look!" The whole group saw black figures hovering behind graves and then they just disappeared.

Bohnice Cemetery

The Bohnice Cemetery is located in the city of Prague and was founded in 1909. This was the burial ground for the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital. There are about 4,000 bodies in the cemetery. The grounds of the hospital are very large and described as being more like a village. The grounds feature a park that is used as a music venue and host for festivals and exhibitions. The main building, which is a baroque country house, still houses patients. The St. Wenceslas Church had been a church, then a barracks and military warehouse. It's open for special occasions now. There are also villas, a theater, cafe and farm. And then there is the abandoned cemetery. Through the years, grave robbers came and took many of the headstones that had metal so that they could sell the metal. So most burials are unmarked. And the cemetery is so overgrown, no one would know it was a cemetery if not for the fence and gate. A small chapel is in ruins with just the outer brick walls still standing. A large cross still sits against a wall. The last burial took place in 1951 and the cemetery was abandoned in 1963. 

Before the closure, about 40 patients were buried every year. Some patients with syphilis were treated with blood that was contaminated with malaria. It was thought this would give patients fevers that would kill the bacteria. Sometimes it worked, but most ended up dead. Especially when the treatment was used for schizophrenia or mania. There are also victims from a typhus epidemic and prisoners from World War I. There is only one gravestone here that can be read and it reads, "Maria Tuma Reiter" with her death marked as April 1912. She had been 29 years old. She passed from pneumonia, but is believed to not have been a patient, but rather a worker who lived in the cottages nearby with her husband and two children. The most notable burial here would be Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke of Austria Franz Ferdinand. And the possible murderer of a sex worker named Otilia Vranska might be here. Sergeant Pavlíček never confessed to the murder publically, but he had friends who claimed that he confided to them that he had murdered the woman. Otilia was found, cut in half, with her body in two different suitcases set with two different destinations. The murder was never solved. Pavlicek was admitted to Bohnice psychiatric hospital and he committed suicide there.

It is said that the cemetery is full of negative energy. Satanic rituals were conducted in years past and remnants have been left behind like circles of salt. Seances were held for years, as recently as 2008 and this was recorded on security cameras. People claim to hear strange sounds coming from within the cemetery. Unexplained lights are also seen. A legend claims that Maria's gravestone has stayed so nice because her spirit protects it. Thieves claimed that when they tried to take her headstone, they were grabbed on the shoulder by a woman who said, "Hey, this is sacred!" She might be haunting the cemetery because there is one story that claims she was admitted to the hospital for wrong reasons and was raped and impregnated and that the doctor who committed this act, killed her during an abortion attempt. There is another story that thieves were carrying a large tombstone out of the cemetery when they were scared by something they saw and dropped it. That headstone now sits near the front gate. 

Keystone Cemetery

Keystone Cemetery is perfectly situated so that Mount Rushmore can be seen from the grounds. The grounds are picturesque and there is a cute little white chapel. This cemetery is also known as Mountainview Cemetery and was founded by Patrick F. Hayes in 1900. The first burial was his daughter Catherine who had died at just 18-months-old. Notable burials her include David N. Swanzey who was friends with Charles Rushmore and Gutzon Borglum and helped with giving Mount Rushmore its name. His wife was Carrie Ingalls - yes, a member of the "Little House on the Prairie" family. His son, Harold David “Davey” “Red” Swanzey, is also buried here and had been a worker at Mount Rushmore. As a side note, Mount Rushmore was built from 1927 to 1941 and 400 workers using ropes and scaffolding moved nearly 450,000 tons of rock and not one person perished. 

Also buried at the cemetery is Harry Hardin who was known as "Wild Horse." He had a donkey named "Sugar Babe" and the two became characters advertising Landstrom's Black Hills gold jewelry. Hardin played the part of a bearded prospector. He would tell people he survived the Custer Massacre, but he was born twenty years after the Battle of the Little Big Horn. A recent burial in 2005 was for Orville Francis Salway who was also known as Paha Ska. The name means "White Hills" and was given to him by Ben Black Elk. Paha Ska was an elder of the Oglala Sioux tribe and he traveled the world as an ambassador for his tribe and the city of Keystone. He won numerous awards for his artwork, which is on display at the Crazy Horse Memorial.

The grave of Robert "Bobby" Buntrock is here. He was born in Denver in 1952 and his parents moved the family to California when he three-years-old. They got him signed to an agent and when he was seven, he landed his first role on an episode of "Wagon Train." When he was nine he landed his biggest role as Harold "Sport" Baxter on the sitcom Hazel starring Shirley Booth. He retired from acting in 1967 when he was fifteen. The family moved to Keystone and Bobby died there in 1974 at the age of 21 when his car veered off a bridge under construction and landed in Battle Creek where he drowned. He was young, making this tragic, but even worse is that his mother met a similar fate just a year before this. And yes, on the exact same bridge.

There are stories of spirits in the graveyard. Disembodied and haunting laughter is attributed to Wild Horse Hardin. Ghostly apparitions have been spotted standing in the cemetery. Caitlin wrote on B102.7's website, "Friends and I went to this cemetery years ago. I took many pictures with my digital camera and found nothing on the pictures, but I took a video on my cell phone. Unfortunately, I no longer have the video but after reviewing the video there something big and white shot across the screen of my phone. Also, on our way out, all of our phones stopped working – said there was service, but when we tried to call out, our phone just shut off."

St. Mary's Churchyard at Hendon

A church of some sort has stood on the St. Mary's Churchyard site in Hendon, North London since Anglo-Saxon times. The original church is thought to have been named for Mary Magdalene by a heretical cult linked to the Knights Templar. This churchyard contains family sepulchers numbered with Roman numerals and an addition was added between World War I and II for newer burials. It is said that an ancient and horrifying history is part of the churchyard and may have influenced Bram Stoker’s writing of Dracula. The Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper reported in 1892 a story that dated back to 1828. A young medical student approached the vicar of St. Mary's Church in 1828 and him that he desperately needed to get access to his family's vault. The vicar at first refused, but then agreed saying that he would only open it if the young man promised not to open any coffins. He should've stuck around to supervise becasue the young man brought an axe with him and proceeded to chop off the head of his mother's corpse. When authorities asked the man why he did this, he claimed that he was dying from a hereditary disease that had also killed her. When the story was shared in the newspaper in 1892, it was opposite a review of the Lyceum Theatre’s production of King Lear. At that time, Bram Stoker was the manager of the Lyceum Theatre and probably saw the article. Could this have inspired some of his ideas for Dracula? Van Helsing cut off the head of Lucy after she turned vampire at a churchyard called Kingstead. It's description sounded a lot like St Mary’s Hendon reading, "a lordly death house in a lonely churchyard, away from teeming London, where the air is fresh, and the sun rises over Hampstead Hill, and where wildflowers grow of their own accord." When Dracula was published, St Mary’s Churchyard was in the countryside. Today, it has homes all around it.

That's interesting, but on top of possibly being connected to Dracula, this churchyard is haunted! The disembodied sounds of shuffling have been heard as though a group of phantom monks are walking through the churchyard and in the church. This is heard most often during religious festivals. The sounds of a ghostly choir are heard around the church. Some of it sounds like Benedictine monks chanting and they would have been here before King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. The manager of Arsenal Football Club before World War II was herbert Chapman and he was buried here. His ghost haunts his burial and is said to also show up at the Old Highbury Stadium.

St. Mary's Churchyard in Wanstead

Just as with our other St Mary’s Churchyard, this has had a church and graveyard for at least 800 years dating back to around 1208. The current church was built in 1787 and designed by architect Thomas Hardwick. This church was made in the Georgian style. The oldest headstone dates to 1685 and is for a man named James Waly. Notable burials here are the sculptor Joseph Wilton, Royal Navy Vice-Admiral Robert Plampin and Thomas Turpin, allegedly uncle to dastardly Dick Turpin who was Essex's most famous thug. Winifred East was the wife of an auctioneer whose decapitated body was found on the southern railway between Kidbrooke and Eltham in Wanstead. She was only 28 and her murder was never solved. The Derry Journal of Monday 18 March 1929 gave these details, "A young man who is known to have entered the carriage in which Mrs. East traveled, and left at a later station, is being sought the police. When the driver of the electric train had just passed Kidbrooke station he saw in the distance dark object lying between the two sets of rails. As he came closer, he saw that it was the decapitated body of a woman. He reported the matter to the stationmaster at Well Hall, the next stopping place. After establishing the woman’s identity, the police searched the train in which she was known to have left Barnehurst, and the discovery of number of her personal belongings under a seat were able to determine the actual compartment in which she traveled." She was buried in St. Mary's Churchyard.

There are claims that at least four spirits have made this churchyard their home. There is a grey lady here that seems to be looking for her husband. Sightings of her have been reported for nearly 100 years. Dick Turpin must have liked his uncle because it is said that he likes to show up in the churchyard every so often. Dick also shows up at St George’s Field in York, close to where he was executed in 1739 and lots of pubs claim his ghost too. The third spirit seen here is a skeleton who is wheeling along a handcart with a coffin on it, so he seems to be working as a ghostly grave digger. And there is a lady in white here too whom seems to be upset that grave robbers took her body.

We love cemeteries, especially if they have a haunted reputation. All of these cemeteries are unique and interesting. Are they haunted? That is for you to decide!