Jonathan Buck’s Cursed Tomb

Colonel Jonathan Buck (1719–1795) came to the Penobscot River from Haverhill, Massachusetts. He surveyed the land in 1762 and the next year settled for good on what was then called Plantation No. 1, building a sawmill on Mill Creek, a house and a store; by 1775 there were 21 families. In 1779, during the Revolutionary War, a British warship’s crew burned the settlement. After the war it was rebuilt, named Buckstown in honour of its founder, incorporated in 1792 and renamed Bucksport in 1817.

In 1870, three-quarters of a century after his death, a tall granite obelisk was raised in his memory in the cemetery near the town centre. At some point a dark, irregular stain appeared on its face, and people began to see in it the shape of a woman’s lower leg and foot, perhaps in a stocking or boot. A second, smaller mark higher up is sometimes said to resemble a heart.

The legend explains it as a curse. In the best-known version, Buck, as the local magistrate, sentenced a woman to be burned as a witch; as the flames rose she cursed him, promising that the mark of her foot would stand on his grave forever, and her leg rolled from the fire. Other tellings make her his mistress, or have her son deliver the curse. The family, it is said, cleaned the stain and even replaced the stone, but the leg always returned.

None of this fits the record. No one was ever tried for witchcraft in Maine, and no one convicted of witchcraft in colonial America was burned; the last executions for witchcraft in New England took place in 1692, decades before Buck was born. As a justice of the peace, he had no power to try or execute anyone. The stained obelisk is not even his original grave marker: his actual headstone, elsewhere in the same cemetery, is unmarked by any curse. A plaque at the site describes him as an honourable, industrious man.

The “phenomenon” is the stain itself: a dark mark on the granite shaped, to many eyes, like a woman’s leg and foot, said to reappear whenever it is cleaned. Visitors sometimes report a sense of unease at the grave, but there are few ghost sightings attached to the legend.

On the face of the Buck family obelisk in the Buck Cemetery beside U.S. Route 1 in Bucksport, viewed through a wrought-iron fence.

Buck’s tomb is one of Maine’s most photographed curiosities, a staple of New England folklore collections and roadside-attraction guides, and a stop for Halloween visitors to Bucksport.