Kind of place · 20 hauntings
Haunted Cemeteries & Churches
Graveyards, crypts, churches and abbeys — where the dead are supposed to rest.
- 20 places
- 11 in the USA
- 20 you can visit
Cemeteries, churches and abbeys are, in theory, where the dead are supposed to rest – and their ghost stories are some of the oldest. Chicago’s Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery is known for a famous 1991 photograph of a “woman on a bench”; Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard gained a modern poltergeist legend through ghost tours from the late 1990s; London’s Highgate Cemetery saw a media-fuelled “vampire” hunt in 1970; and New Orleans’s St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, burial place of the Vodou priestess Marie Laveau, can now be visited only with a licensed guide, after years of vandalism.
Most reports from graveyards are of figures, lights and “orbs” in photographs – the last almost always dust, pollen or moisture lit by a camera flash. Expectation does much of the rest: a cemetery at dusk is exactly where people expect to see a ghost.
Cemeteries are working burial grounds where families still grieve. Visit only during opening hours, stay on paths, never touch or damage graves, and never go in after dark without permission – trespassing in cemeteries is illegal and ghost hunting has caused real harm to historic graves.
Haunted Cemeteries & Churches in the USA
Mercy Brown, the Exeter “Vampire”
In 1892 Exeter neighbours exhumed 19-year-old Mercy Brown, a tuberculosis victim, and burned her heart to save her brother. Her grave still draws visitors. Folklore
Cheesman Park
A leafy Denver park laid out over the old city cemetery, where thousands of graves were never moved after a botched removal in 1893. Regional legend
Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery
A tiny pioneer cemetery in the woods south-west of Chicago, famous for a 1991 photo of a woman on a gravestone – and for decades of vandalism. Widely reported
Stull Cemetery
A country churchyard near Lawrence that became a “gateway to hell” after a 1974 student-paper Halloween story. The legend is fiction; the graves are real. Hoax / debunkedThe Richmond Vampire and the Church Hill Tunnel
When a Richmond rail tunnel collapsed on a work train in 1925, men died and were never recovered. Legend turned a burned survivor into a vampire. Local legend
St. Louis Cemetery No. 1
New Orleans’ oldest surviving cemetery, a maze of whitewashed tombs from 1789, holds Marie Laveau – whose spirit, tradition says, never left the city. Widely reportedHoward Street Cemetery
Giles Corey, pressed to death in 1692 for refusing to plead to witchcraft, is said to walk this Salem graveyard before disasters like the 1914 fire. Local legend
Witch of Yazoo
A chained grave in Yazoo City holds, legend says, to a witch who swore to burn the town; the great fire of 1904 duly came. Willie Morris made it famous. Folklore
Boyington Oak
A live oak in Mobile said to have grown from the grave of Charles Boyington, hanged in 1835 for a murder he swore he did not commit. Local legend
The Gray Lady of Sims
All that remains of the coal town of Sims is its 1884 Lutheran parsonage and church – and the story of a pastor’s wife who still plays the organ. Local legend
Jonathan Buck’s Cursed Tomb
A granite obelisk to Bucksport’s founder bears a stain shaped like a woman’s leg – the mark, legend says, of a witch he condemned. History says otherwise. FolkloreAround the world
Chase Vault
A Barbados vault where heavy lead coffins were said to be found tossed about each time it was opened, 1812–1820 – a legend with no eyewitness record. Folklore
Recoleta Cemetery
Buenos Aires’s city of marble tombs, resting place of Evita – and of Rufina Cambacérès, the 19-year-old said to have been buried alive in 1902. Regional legend
Masakado’s Mound (Masakado-zuka)
A small memorial to the rebel warrior Taira no Masakado amid Tokyo’s office towers – a site so revered and feared that the city has built around it. Widely reported
Catacombs of Paris
Twenty metres under Paris, the bones of some six million people line old quarry tunnels – a city museum wrapped in legends of lost souls. Widely reported
Highgate Cemetery and the Highgate Vampire
A gothic Victorian cemetery where a 1970 ghost sighting snowballed into a TV-fueled “vampire hunt,” a mob in the graves and a feud that lasted fifty years. Local legend
Greyfriars Kirkyard and the Mackenzie Poltergeist
Edinburgh’s storied old graveyard, where since the late 1990s ghost-tour visitors say an unseen force has bruised, scratched and knocked them out. Widely reported
Mae Nak Phra Khanong
Thailand’s most beloved ghost: a young wife who died in childbirth but kept waiting for her husband – now honoured at a busy shrine in a Bangkok temple. Widely reported