100 Steps Cemetery

Climb the 100 Steps at midnight counting, hit 100 at the top, and the caretaker reveals how you die. The descent count never matches.

The ritual is simple enough to remember and specific enough to be a dare: go to the cemetery at midnight, climb the stone steps while counting, and if you hit exactly one hundred at the top, the ghost of the original caretaker appears and tells you the date and manner of your own death. Then you turn around and count back down. The count is never a hundred. Most people get ninety-eight or ninety-nine. Some versions of the legend say the missing step is a direct gate to hell. Other versions say the caretaker kills you for miscounting. Nobody's ever really explained why the math doesn't work. It's been told in Clay County, Indiana since at least the late 1800s.

100 Steps Cemetery is officially Cloverland Cemetery, sometimes Carpenter Cemetery, a small hilltop burial ground established around the Civil War on a rise between Brazil and Terre Haute off U.S. 40. The name people know it by came from the steps.

Here's the awkward part: the actual count, when anyone bothers to measure, is closer to sixty. The whole "one hundred steps" premise is folklore doing what folklore does, which is round up for effect. The original concrete steps deteriorated badly and were replaced recently, which means the steps people climb for the ritual today aren't even the steps the ritual was about.

IU's folklore archives started collecting 100 Steps accounts in the 1950s, when teenagers began driving out here on dares. Folklorists call it legend tripping. Jan Harold Brunvand, who arrived at IU in the 1960s and later popularized the term "urban legend," catalogued variants from the archive. His work made Indiana's Folklore Institute one of the country's major centers for the study of stories exactly like this one. The 100 Steps ritual is also formally part of a regional cluster of "seven gates to hell" (Hell's Gate Bridge in nearby Brazil is another one). It's a Midwestern folk tradition that links specific cursed structures into a single supernatural geography.

The cemetery has a documented history of real desecration that probably primed the ground for the legend. In November 1892, a young woman named Emma West was buried at Cloverland, and body snatchers took her corpse from the grave. Body snatchers hit rural Indiana cemeteries hard in the late 1800s, selling corpses to medical schools. Emma West's disappearance is the part of this cemetery that no folklore needs to embellish.

What people describe when they do the ritual: feet sinking into the stone steps, even though the steps are stone. Unseen hands coming from the ground to trip the climber. Invisible force knocking people back down the hill, harder with each step. The occasional woman in white among the headstones. Voices of children or people asking for help echoing in the climber's ears, all designed to disrupt the count.

The paranormal writer Christopher Balzano of Tripping on Legends went up the steps at midnight in 2017 and nothing appeared. No caretaker, no descending death count, no hands from the ground. He still described the experience as deeply unsettling because the steps are broken and slippery and the darkness on the hill is absolute. The cemetery is a set of difficult stairs at midnight, in a two-century-old burial ground with a real body-snatching in its paper trail, and your brain furnishes whatever supernatural explanation your body is asking for.

Emma West's grave is still there. Her body isn't. The cemetery is open sunrise to sunset. Midnight visits are technically unlawful. The counting happens anyway.