In Brief
The ghost story at Avon Cemetery near DeQueen, Arkansas is about a well that's gone. A baby is said to have drowned in it, and the mother still searches the headstones. No name, no date, and now no well — two sets of locals can't agree where it stood.
The Full Story
Avon Cemetery sits on a country highway north of DeQueen, Arkansas, and the way the kids tested its ghost was simple: drive out at night, find the old well, drop a rock down the shaft, and listen. What was supposed to come back up was a baby's cry — the same fall the child had taken. Some said they heard it. Others could never find the well at all.
The drowning is older than the cemetery. Back when the place was just a wellhead for the surrounding farms, the story goes, a woman came to draw water and set her baby on the stone edge so she could lift the bucket with both hands. The baby fell in. No source gives her a name, or the child's, or a year. There's no death record, no newspaper, nothing in print until ghost blogs and a regional magazine picked it up generations later. It traveled friend to friend through Sevier County instead.
The other half of the legend is the mother. People describe a translucent woman moving through the headstones near where an old church once stood, weaving between the stones, searching. She doesn't speak and doesn't stop. The story says she's still looking for the baby.
That she can't find it fits, because nobody can find anything here. The well was cemented over sometime in the late 1990s. The people who repeat the story put it in the middle of the cemetery; the ones who claim to know the ground swear it stood across the road by the old church foundation — and that's gone too. Two sets of people now argue over a patch of bare earth.
No mother, no baby, no drowning anyone can fix to a year, and the well it all hangs on has been buried for thirty years — in a spot the locals can't agree was ever there.
