Massachusetts Book of the Dead: Graveyard Legends and Lore

By Roxie J. Zwicker

A historical tour of the Bay State’s oldest burial grounds—and the sometimes-spooky stories behind them.
 
Massachusetts's historic graveyards are the final resting places for tales of the strange and supernatural. From Newburyport to Truro, these graveyards often frighten the living, but the dead who rest within them have stories to share with the world they left behind.
 
While Giles Corey is said to haunt the Howard Street Cemetery in Salem, cursing those involved in the infamous witch trials, visitors to the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain enjoy an arboretum and a burial ground with Victorian-era memorials. One of the oldest cemeteries in Massachusetts, Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, has been the final resting place for residents for nearly 375 years. Author Roxie Zwicker tours the Bay State's oldest burial grounds, exploring the stones, stories and supernatural lore of these hallowed places.
 
Includes photos

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 11, 2009
• ISBN: 9781614237372

Roxie J. Zwicker

Roxie Zwicker has been entertaining the locals, visitors from away and curious souls with her unique ghost stories since 1994. Her company, New England Curiosities, located in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, has been offering ghost tours and special haunted events since 2002. She has been featured on Psychic History on the History Channel and Destination America on the Travel Channel and in the New York Times and Boston Globe . Roxie is the author of eight bestselling books on New England's ghost stories and folklore. Dubbed "Maine's Mystery Maven" by the York Independent , Roxie also writes and produces Wicked Curious , a podcast based on New England folklore. You can visit her website at www.newenglandcuriosities.com.

Book preview

Introduction

Dear Ancestor

Your tombstone stands among the rest

Neglected and alone

The name and date are chiseled out

On polished stone.

It reaches out to all who care

It is too late to mourn,

You did not know that I exist

You died and I was born.

Yet each of us are cells of you

In flesh and blood and gone

Our blood contracts and beats a pulse

Entirely not our own.

Dear Ancestor, the place you filled

One hundred years ago

Spreads out among the ones you left

Who would have loved you so.

I wonder if you lived and loved,

I wonder if you knew

That someday I would find this spot

And come to visit you.

—Anonymous

Thank you for joining me as we take a journey through the fascinating past of the cemeteries of Massachusetts. By picking up this book, it’s clear that you must be a bit curious about burial grounds. Maybe it’s the allure of the hand-carved gravestones, or perhaps it’s the stories of the cemetery ghosts. Or maybe it’s just the opportunity to connect with and honor our history. Whatever has attracted you, get ready to journey through the variety of cemeteries the Bay State has to offer.

I grew up in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, and I had always wondered growing up who the pioneers were. For me, that term always referred to settlers traveling westward to places like Texas or Oregon. I quickly learned after a series of local school field trips and self-conducted explorations (which I did when I was older) who the pioneers in my neighborhood were. I found them in the old cemeteries, and I read their stories on their gravestones.

There was so much of Massachusetts that I wanted to see when I learned how to drive. When I got my first car, I visited the large cities and small towns from the Berkshires to Cape Cod. The temptation to explore these towns’ cemeteries was pretty strong. Granted, fall in New England is really beautiful, and you can take some of your best photographs in the cemeteries where there is often a wide variety of colorful trees. But once the pictures were snapped, it was almost irresistible to shuffle through the fallen leaves and look at the gravestones closer.

Some of the cemeteries I visited were so old and forgotten that, sometimes, I thought people may not have visited there for years. Others were meticulously kept: the pathways were clear, and the stones were in good condition. On some trips, I’d stop at the local bookstore and see what I could find for cemetery history books. I often felt that when I found a cemetery book, I was pretty lucky, as there were not many of them out there. Before I knew it, I was cataloging cemetery photographs and researching some of the more interesting stones. The more work I did, the more I found and the more enticing it became.

I have amassed literally tens of thousands of photographs of gravestones and cemeteries, and often when I’m planning a trip, I’ll search out the locations of the cemeteries before I even make hotel reservations. When I return home, I carefully look through the photographs and information that I’ve gathered from the trip. My car has many scuffs and scratches from driving down remote dirt roads just to find an elusive gravestone.

Old rusty gates and fences show off their salty air patina in Vineyard Haven.

When I’m putting together cemetery presentations or writing about them, I often picture the people from the cemeteries I’ve visited standing behind me while I’m at my computer doing my work. Sometimes, I imagine them each saying, Tell my story and Don’t forget me. My goal has always been to keep their memory alive by telling their stories, and while I know I can’t tell everyone’s story, I strive to tell tales of both the famous and the not-so-famous.

In this book, I will unearth the tales of many people whose lives have been summarized in a few sentences on stone. Join me as I wander the rows of gravestones and markers and discover the legacies and ghosts of these Massachusetts cemeteries.

Chapter One

Discovering Historic Massachusetts Graveyards

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity

—Edvard Munch

It all began with 102 Pilgrims, all of whom were Separatists from the Church of England who had fled to the New World where they could worship God as their consciences dictated. After a long and dangerous passage across the Atlantic Ocean, they landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, on December 21, 1620.

The Pilgrims were hardy, industrious and God-fearing and were prepared to face every kind of danger and suffer every affliction without complaint. They struggled through their first winter in the New World while maintaining their faith in the wisdom and goodness of God. Within just a few weeks of arriving in Plymouth, half of the Pilgrims had died; everyone had become so ill over the harsh winter that there were only a handful of people well enough to keep the settlement going. The colonists dealt with death nearly every day, and burials occurred almost as often as religious services were held.

The earliest grave markers in Massachusetts were stones and boulders, and it was thought at the time that these would keep the dead from rising out of their graves. Some also believed that if plain, unmarked stones were used, the Native Americans would have a difficult time finding the graves.

In some cases, many of the first markers were made from wood planks or rough stones, but these usually did not last very long after being exposed to the elements. As more burials occurred, it became necessary to indicate on the markers who was buried there, and it then became common practice to inscribe the deceased’s initials or name. Over the course of twenty-five years, the colonists established a handful of burial grounds, the oldest of which are in Boston, Plymouth, Salem and Ipswich, Massachusetts.

The grave markers that were used in the mid- to late 1600s were more ornate, reflecting early Puritan beliefs, and the decision was made to start using gravestones styled like the ones in England. In the Puritan view, death was inevitable; it was God’s punishment to humankind for Adam’s original sin. They believed that evil spirits and evil men occupied the earth, suffering from utter and unalterable depravity. Children were shown corpses and were taught to fear death. They were also taught that their own parents would testify against them at the Last Judgment. But there was the possibility of salvation; if a Puritan lived and worked during his lifetime to bring God’s kingdom home, then he would be granted eternal life. The Puritans also believed that while people in their society would be able to receive eternal salvation, most faced eternal damnation. It was preached that Hell was a place of unspeakable terrors.

Those who settled in Massachusetts during the seventeenth century lived in a very simple and yet symbolic world. Using the imagery that surrounded death and funerals at the time, gravestone carvers translated these beliefs, using the ministers’ sermons for inspiration. William Cooper, a Boston minister, described the lessons that burial grounds were supposed to teach the living: Look into the grave and see a dead body, that has been buried there but a month or two, all covered with darkness and corruption, and say whether it is suitable for one to have high thoughts of himself. Most burial grounds were set up just outside churches and meetinghouses, so people could get a firsthand view of their own mortality just outside the windows during lectures and sermons.

Early gravestones became one of New England’s first folk art forms. A variety of skulls, crossbones, winged hourglasses, pickaxes and shovels were just a few of the most common symbols carved on the earliest gravestones in Puritan times. These symbols, unaccompanied by text, served as reminders of death. The belief was that people who passed by the burial grounds and saw these very stark reminders of death would be moved to ponder their own existences on earth. Puritans who regarded death as God’s punishment for sins would often tremble with fear on their deathbeds, afraid that they might suffer eternal damnation in Hell. Some stonecutters, however, added more than just symbols of death and carved dramatic scenes of death imps carrying coffins away. Gravestone images depicted life’s stories in stone, communicating moral lessons or spiritual truths. These gravestones were (and, to some extent, still are) more than just memorials of the dead; they were messages to the living.

In Orleans, an original gravestone from 1725 stands with its more recent granite copy.

There are several primitive-style gravestones in the Boxford Village Cemetery.

As new cities and towns were established during the eighteenth century, the number of burial grounds increased. Many parcels of land next to churches and meetinghouses were set aside for burial purposes. There were many who elected to be buried in small family plots on the land where they lived, but unfortunately, many of those graveyards have been lost to time and urban development.

At some point during the eighteenth century, beliefs about death and cemeteries began to change. Death was no longer seen as a terrifying consequence of sin; rather, it was viewed as an opportunity to be reunited with your loved ones who had already passed. This shift in attitude, consequently, ushered in changes to gravestone design, as angels and cherubs replaced grinning skulls and images of the grim reaper.

During the American Revolution, the British buried their fallen soldiers in the spots where they had died. Historians still have not been able to pinpoint where in Massachusetts these graves lie.

The cemeteries grew almost as fast as the towns, and by the late 1700s, some graveyards had become so overcrowded that bones and coffin fragments would wash out of the graves during rainstorms. There was an immediate need at the turn of the century to establish new burial grounds, and changes were in store for the cemeteries of old. By the early 1800s, cemeteries were landscaped to look more like the picturesque gardens of England, turning them into places of peace and serenity rather than fear.

The first garden-style cemetery in America was established in Cambridge, and it was called Mount Auburn. Many other cemeteries were built in the style of this cemetery, and many of the old colonial burying grounds were forgotten as people looked to the new cemeteries to build grand monuments of remembrance.

Today, there are a variety of burial grounds throughout Massachusetts, and each offers a unique landscape and history. And each gravestone has a story to tell about those who passed before us.

Chapter Two

An Early Landscape of Death

Colonial Burying Grounds

OLD NORTH BURYING GROUND (HIGHLAND CEMETERY), IPSWICH

The town of Ipswich was originally named Agawam after the natives who lived there. In the native tongue, the word means a place where fish of passage resorted. In The History of Ipswich, Essex and Hamilton, it reads that in 1614, Captain John Smith described Agawam: Here are many rising hills and on their tops and descents are many corne fields and delightfull grouse [grounds]. On the east is an isle of two or three leagues in length the one halfe plaine marish ground fit for pasture or salt ponds with many faire high groues of mulberry trees. There are also okes [oaks], pines, walnuts and other wood to make this place an excellent habitation.

The town was settled in March 1633 by John Winthrop Jr. and twelve others, and a year later, it was named Ipswich. In 1638, Masconomet, the Indian chief of Agawam, sold the land to Ipswich for twenty pounds. He died twenty years later, at which point, most of his tribe had become extinct.

The first people interred in the burial ground were the wife and child of John Winthrop Jr. There