Visiting Strange Graves: A Scary Encounter with the Countess

It was a November night in 1984, and we had just seen A Nightmare on Elm Street in my hometown of Haverhill, Massachusetts. The "we" in this case were me, my friend Christine, and Cesar, an exchange student from Mexico spending the year at our high school. We had screamed and been appropriately terrified during the movie, and we were in the mood for more scary stuff after it ended. We had watched teenagers encounter terror and death. Maybe we wanted to encounter them ourselves?

"Let's go to the Countess's grave," Christine suggested in the parking lot.

"Yes!" I said. I knew about the grave but never been there myself.

"What is the Countess's grave?" Cesar asked.

We tried to explain. I had first heard about the grave when I was in fourth grade. Some kids from Haverhill's Rocks Village neighborhood told me what they were doing on Halloween night. They were going to wait outside an old cemetery to see if the Countess emerged from her grave. I'm not sure what would happen next, but having seen old Dracula movies I assumed that a countess must also be a vampire. They seemed to feel the same way too.

As a teenager I knew the vampire legend probably wasn't true but the grave still had a reputation as being spooky and somehow supernatural. Perhaps it was haunted, or possibly cursed. It was the perfect place to visit after seeing a horror movie so we got in Christine's car and followed the river until we reached Rocks Village. The old Colonial homes of Rocks Village are charming during the day but they were pretty spooky that night. The Greenwood Cemetery was even spookier, surrounded as it was by a black iron fence.

The Countess's Grave. Photo from Haverhill Public Library.

We drove into the cemetery. Spookiest of all was the Countess's grave. Her gravestone was surrounded by a black iron cage. What supernatural evil had it been built to contain? What horror was trapped within? What...

Suddenly we heard something scratching on the roof of the car.

"Oh my God!" Christine said. "Did you hear that?!"

Conversation came to a stop as we listened intently. Then we heard it again. Something scratching on the roof. It sounded like fingernails, or maybe knives. We had just seen Freddie Kruger terrorize teenagers with his knife-fingered glove...

Then we heard laughter from the back seat. Christine and I turned around to see Cesar with his hand out an open window, scratching his fingers along the car's roof.

*****

We didn't know it at the time, but the Countess's gravestone had originally been enclosed in the iron cage to keep tourists from chipping pieces off as souvenirs. Mary Ingalls (1786 - 1807) was apparently the United States's first countess, a title she assumed after marrying Count Francois de Vipart when she was only 21. Count de Vipart had wound up in Rocks Village after fleeing a rebellion in Guadaloupe and he supposedly fell in love with Ingalls at first sight. Their marriage was passionate but unfortunately short-lived. Mary died a few years later after they wed and her husband returned to France. 

Their doomed romance was immortalized by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier in his 1863 poem "The Countess." The poem was quite popular in the 19th and early 20th century and Mary's grave became a tourist attraction. Fans of the poem who visited the grave chipped off small pieces as souvenirs until an iron cage was put up around it. 

I say Whittier "immortalized" the Countess but none of my friends knew anything about his poem or the Countess's real life. They certainly weren't taught to us in high school literature or history courses. We just knew that it was a strange grave, and a strange grave must have a strange story attached to it. Not knowing the real story we just made one up that seemed appropriate.

This is actually pretty common in New England. There are lots of strange-looking graves that are perfectly innocuous, but strange legends arise because of the grave's unusual appearance. Here are just a few I know about:

Midnight Mary's Grave, New Haven, Connecticut. Mary Hart's epitaph describes how she died at midnight on October 15, 1872 and contains this ominous quote from the Book of Job: "The people shall be troubled at midnight and pass away." Because of that ominous quote, legends have developed claiming that Mary was buried alive, was an evil witch, and/or that she kills anyone who visits her grave at midnight.

Black Agnes, Montpelier, Vermont. This large sculpture of a robed figure is actually titled Thanatos (death in Greek) and marks the grave of a wealthy businessman. Most graves in the Green Mount cemetery are much more modest, and so folklore has transformed Thanatos into Black Agnes, a statue that kills anyone who sits on it.

The Witch's Grave, York Maine. Mary Nasson's grave in York's Old Burying Ground is covered with a huge stone slab. A plaque nearby explains that the slab was placed there to keep animals from digging up her body but local legends claim Mary was a witch. The slab keeps her restless soul from rising out of her grave.

Colonel Buck's Monument, Bucksport, Maine. The large funerary monument erected to honor the founder of Bucksport has a strange stain on it shaped like a boot. The stain is probably caused by iron in the stone. Legends claim that it was placed there as a curse by a witch the Colonel executed.

You get the idea and may even know of some similar graves yourself. These legends may not be historically accurate but they definitely are psychologically powerful. Cemeteries remind us of our own mortality and these strange graves speak to us with particularly loud voices. 

Like a good horror movie they tell us the scary things we secretly long to hear. They tell us about the thin line between the living and the dead, about our darkest fears, and about the inescapable power of death itself. But also like a horror movie, our encounters with these strange graves are voluntary. We choose to visit them and (possibly) experience frightening things, but (usually) escape intact in the end. 

The Countess's gravestone was removed for repairs and sadly no longer stands in the Greenwood cemetery. I haven't seen Christine or Cesar in many, many years but I still fondly remember that night we visited a haunted grave.

Colonel Buck and The WItch's Curse

I've read a lot of New England folklore in my time, and here's one thing I've learned: if a gravestone looks weird it will probably have a strange story attached to it. Is there a cage around the grave? The occupant must be a vampire. Is there a giant slab covering the entire grave? It must be there to keep the occupant down.

One of the area's most famous strange graves can be found in Bucksport, Maine. It is the grave of Colonel Jonathan Buck, who founded Bucksport in 1763. Buck was born in Woburn, Massachusetts in 1719 but grew up in Haverhill, Massachusetts (which coincidentally is my hometown). Buck attempted but failed to start a shipbuilding business in Haverhill and eventually headed north to Maine where he founded a settlement. Buck fought against the British in the Revolutionary War, and as he grew older the settlement was named after him. He died in 1795. In 1852 his descendants honored him with a larger, more impressive funerary monument.

Colonel Buck's monument, with boot stain. Edited from Wikimedia.

So here's the weird thing about Buck's large, impressive gravestone: it is marred by a strange stain in the shape of a boot. By the 1880s a rumor began to circulate that Buck had been cursed back when he was alive, and a story to that point appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper. The story was reprinted a few months later in The Haverhill Gazette on March 22, 1899:

Buck was a severe and Puritannical judge who once ordered the execution of a woman accused of witchcraft. The woman went to her death cursing Buck, who stood unmoved. At the moment of her death she allegedly shouted this prophecy: 

"Jonathan Buck, listen to these words, the last my tongue will utter. Is is the spirit of the one and only true living God which bids me speak them to you. You will die soon. Over your grave they will erect a stone, that all may know where your bones are crumbling into dust. But listen, upon that stone the imprint of my foot will appear, and for all time, long after you and your accursed race has vanished from this earth, will the people from far and near know that you murdered a woman." (Haverhill Gazette article quoted in Leslye Bannatyne's Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History.)

This is the most popular version of the tale, but several variations have appeared since then. In some, the witch says she will dance on Jonathan Buck's grave when he is dead (Lisa Rogak, Stones and Bones of New England, 2004). In others, the woman is not even a witch at all. For example, Joseph Citro cites one version in Cursed In New England (2004) that claims Buck impregnated a young Indian woman. To hide his infidelity he burned the young woman (and her unborn child) alive. As her corpse burned one her legs rolled out from the fire in accusation. The woman's mother, a shaman, cursed Buck for killing her daughter. 

An even more lurid version can be found in Oscar Morrill Heath's Composts of Tradition: A Book of Short Stories Dealing with Traditional Sex and Domestic Situations (1913). In this version, Colonel Buck has secretly had an illegitimate son with a young woman who is the town pariah. When he once again impregnates her against her will he accuses her of witchcraft. The citizens of Bucksport tie her to her house and light it on fire, but as the flaming body falls apart her son grabs one of her burning legs and strikes Buck with it. Yikes! Later, Colonel Buck paints an image of her leg on his own tomb using his blood before he dies.

Heath's version is pure fiction, but all of the other versions are probably fictional as well. There is no record of Jonathan Buck ever convicting a woman of witchcraft, either in Maine or Haverhill. New England's last witchcraft executions occurred in the 1692 Salem trials, many years before Buck was even born. There's also no evidence that he executed an illicit lover either.

But like the stain itself, the story of the vengeful witch endures to this day. It helps to explain the mysterious stain, which is perhaps caused by a vein of iron in the stone reacting with the atmosphere. It also attests to the power that the archetypal image of the witch holds over the local imagination. New Englanders know there were witches in this region, and we know they were executed by Puritans. Can you really fault someone for wanting to ascribe a strange phenomenon to a witch? New England is a weird and wonderful place, and stories like these try to explain why.