In 1843, Absalom Lawrence, Jr.’s family was cursed. Banging pots and strange groaning roiled their house in Pepperell, Massachusetts. Their farm’s milk wouldn’t churn into butter. Caroline Lucretia, Abasalom’s 13 year-old daughter, suffered from fits and lock jaw.
Dr. J.M. Nevens, a traveling Mesmerist, visited the Lawrence home with a young woman who was a trance medium. They diagnosed the problem as witchcraft; a shape-shifting spirit-traveling witch astride an unshod white horse, to be precise.
Nevens exorcised the witch from the Lawrence home. Unfortunately, young Caroline still suffered. Finally, Absalom and his family moved to neighboring Hollis, New Hampshire where they found peace and resumed normal lives (link to an introduction to the Lawrence case based on newspaper coverage). Meanwhile back in Pepperell, the witch went on to harass another girl, or so says poet and folklorist James Greenleaf Whittier (Supernaturalism in New England, link, pages 62-63).
Now, even after nearly 180 years, Absalom Lawrence could probably still find his way around the rustic town of Hollis. Thanks to the mixed blessing of the internet, however, a present-day Absalom might not choose Hollis as a suitable place to escape dark forces. After all, it is widely known online that Hollis keeps the most haunted cemetery in New Hampshire.
That says as much about the peaceful charm of the state’s other centuries-old graveyards as about Hollis’s Pine Hill Cemetery. The dead are quiet neighbors. The only visible disorder here is the chronic vandalism of tombstones by living nuisances.
The grave of Abel, Betsy, and little George Blood
The outstanding haunted feature of the cemetery used to be the gravestone of the family of Abel Blood.
Used to be because the town removed the stone during the first decade of this century. Its battered remnants are now in the safekeeping of the Hollis Department of Public Works according to a local informant.
The stone featured a recessed carving of an upward-pointing right hand emerging from a cuffed sleeve. That design is a well-known theme on old tombstones. Its probable meaning is obvious, that Abel Blood, his wife Betsy, and their son George who died in childhood are together again in heaven.
The paranormal phenomenon associated with the carving was that when the light was poor enough, especially at night, some people are said to have seen the carved hand point downwards instead of up.
Wait. At night? Who looks at gravestones at night?
Daniel Webster logo
The origins of the custom of nighttime grave gazing in Hollis are lost to history, but its heyday was in the latter part of the last century when the residential campus of the now-closed Daniel Webster College operated about two miles away. College students found the nearby but isolated graveyard convenient for a variety of activities. Local high school students emulated their older peers. As word got around that the cemetery was supposedly haunted, paranormal investigators young and old visited.
As to the upside-down hand, there are few if any first-person reports from anyone who actually saw that themselves. In any case, it’s not the sort of thing that simply hearing about it sets the neck hairs on edge. Some old tombstones have a downward pointing carved hand signifying death’s suddenness, not confinement to Hell (link). Now that the Bloods’s stone hasn’t been there for more than a decade, the persistence of the cemetery’s best-in-state reputation is puzzling.
Other supposed phenomena and legends about the Blood family
Apart from the Bloods’s suggestive name, rumors of other paranormal phenomena around the cemetery and made-up stories about the Blood family help keep Pine Hill current on the web.
As might be expected of a commuter attraction, many of the “other phenomena” involve automobiles. There is the woman sometimes called Mary Blood (though nobody by that name is buried at Pine Hill) who’s seen walking along the road, but only in rear view mirrors. Then there is the little boy who tries to stop passing cars, as if he were asking for help. If a car does stop, then he vanishes. Some car radios supposedly change stations all by themselves to play dirge music when passing by the cemetery.
Ear- and eyewitnesses for these events are thin on the ground. There is, however, a first-person account of a teenager visiting the cemetery at night with friends, feeling a hand push on her shoulder from behind and yet no one in her group owned up to the contact (comment of “Kate,” link).
There is one report of the Abel Blood family stone “bleeding” (link), from a man who visited Pine Hill with a pal in the 1990’s. That there’s only this one report is remarkable given the “bleeding gravestone” Hallowe’en trope, the surname on this particular stone, the biblically apt personal name (Genesis 4:10, “The voice of your brother’s [Abel’s] blood cries out from the ground”), and the ease with which a friend can pull this prank on a companion.
The made-up stories center on two themes: Abel having been an occultist or that the Bloods were mass murder victims.
Abel Blood and Absalom Lawrence, Jr. were contemporaries at a time when many believed in the occult, or at least were fascinated with it. Whittier laments the survival of witchcraft superstition in post-Salem New England. Even a small-town Yankee devout church-goer might inspire spooky tall tales (link).
Although there is no evidence to implicate the living Abel in any unusual activity or rumors of such, it’s hard to rule out categorically. On the occult (or occult reputation) question, then, Hitchens’s Razor will have to serve. What can be proposed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The idea that the Bloods were murdered en masse seems to derive from the number of family members buried here. Indeed, Pine Hill is sometimes confused with the Blood Cemetery in neighboring Dunstable, Massachusetts. However, the death dates on the Hollis Blood headstones reflect several generations of individual deaths years apart, refuting the possibility of any common disaster.
The camera flares seen ’round the world
With the current century’s ubiquitous digital cameras came a new form of paranormal evidence, orbs. In reality, these are out-of-focus airborne particles lit up by a camera’s flash. In imagination, they can be spirits, aliens, ghosts, fairies, … whatever setting and set suggest. The best time to capture orb-laden images is at night, shooting a dark scene with flash. Were it not that Pine Hill, like all Hollis cemeteries, is closed after dark, it is an ideal location to capture orbs, and orbs have supposedly been captured there by nighttime trespassers. (The illustrative example here is from an unknown location.)
In the summer of 2020, one of those unwelcome visitors at Pine Hill bagged bigger game than orbs. He managed to capture lens flare while shooting through the gap left by the removal of Abel Blood’s family stone. Lens flare is light from the flash or from a bright object in or near the frame reflecting off the surfaces of the camera lens or brightening a smudge on the lens. This post’s headline picture shows lens flaring in its top left corner.
In this nighttime photo, the flare is the vague translucent shape on the upper right side of the leftmost tombstone. Its light source is probably a reflection from the vividly white but mottled stone on the far right.
Something wonderful happens when the brightness of this image is enhanced. Behold, what looks like a head appears! What had at first been a vague shape becomes the bustled skirts of a ghostly woman walking among the gravestones.
The photographer posted his discovery on a Facebook group (link). From Facebook, his pictures were copied by newspapers around the globe (for example, the UK link and Asia link). Hollis’s already unwelcome fame went wide.
No ghosts were disturbed in the making of this image
Here is that image without the red ovals alongside the Uncertaintist’s own daytime image taken onsite from an angle similar with that of the Facebook picture.
The original scene could not be closely reproduced, because there has been more vandalism since the summer of 2020. Even so, there’s an easily seen correspondence between the enhanced Facebook image and the markers that are in the actual scene. In particular, at position 2 there is a white headstone and a smaller stone, about 80 feet (~25 meters) from the triangular remnant of Abel Blood’s stone, and aligned about where the “head” appears in the image.
These far stones would likely be out of focus in the Facebook picture, being about twice the distance from the triangular remnant than stone number 5, which is already soft focused. Reflection from the background trees (an evergreen and elm with summer foliage lie about 35 feet behind the far stones) may have added some of the light captured from that direction.
By increasing the brightness even more than in the Facebook posting, the far contour of the field emerges, defined by the relatively dark band formed by the line of background trees overhanging a pathway. Tracing along the contour, maybe using the tops of some of the mid-distance headstones as a guide, confirms that the crucial headstones align well with the “head.”
Pareidolia is the human ability to see meaningful shapes where nothing of the kind is actually present. Its role in making another New England ghost’s image figured in an earlier year’s Hallowe’en posting (link). In this year’s images, pareidolia changes a headstone into a head which then transforms a blurry blob into someone’s skirt.
Trying the patience of Hollis townsfolk
Hollis has done what it can to smother its unsought celebrity. It removed the Abel Blood stone. Its cemeteries close at dusk; those who come at night anyway are treated as trespassers. There are now lights and motion detectors at Pine Hill. Police surveillance of this cemetery is vigilant.
“Move on, there’s nothing to see here” is a popular webly meme. Unless you’re family, a volunteer perhaps placing flags on the several Revolutionary War veterans’ graves, or just a quiet respecter of those whose lives are remembered there, there really is nothing to see at Pine Hill, especially not after dark when nobody is welcome to visit.
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Images:
Tombstone of Abel, Betsy, and George Blood: Tracy Lee Carroll link under a Creative Commons license link.
(The usually reliable findagrave.com site shows the picture of a different Abel Blood’s tombstone at a cemetery in Merrimack, NH. That is probably the grave of the Abel Blood who was born in New Ipswich, NH in June 1791. The post’s Abel Blood was born in Hollis during May 1791 according to the transcribed town records or during 1796 or early 1797 according to the gravestone at Pine Hill.)
Example of photographic orbs: Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee link. The page also has other examples of photo mishaps.
Photos from the Facebook posting are displayed here by fair use with the purpose of criticism.
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This the 10th anniversary Hallowe’en post at the Uncertaintist. To see all the Hallowe’en posts (witches, ghosts, pirates, practical magic, and more), follow this link: https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/category/halloween/
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