Evergreen Cemetery

One of New Haven's most historic cemeteries, Evergreen has been a final resting place since the 1800s. The cemetery is most famous for the legend of "Midnight Mary" and her supposedly prophetic gravestone.

In the heart of New Haven's West River neighborhood, Evergreen Cemetery stretches across 85 acres of rolling hills and quiet paths, home to more than 85,000 souls. Founded in 1848 by the city's most prominent citizens as older burial grounds ran out of space, the cemetery became the final resting place for governors, generals, and pioneers. But among these distinguished dead, one grave draws visitors unlike any other—a pink granite monument bearing an inscription that has terrified New Haven for over 150 years.

Mary E. Hart lived an unremarkable life as a seamstress in the Winthrop Street neighborhood, just east of Evergreen Cemetery. On October 15, 1872, at the age of forty-seven, she collapsed at noon while preparing for her daily work. For twelve hours she remained unconscious, and precisely at midnight, she was pronounced dead. What happened next has sparked legends that refuse to die.

According to the most persistent version of the tale, Mary's aunt experienced a vivid nightmare the night after the burial. In the dream, Mary was screaming from inside her coffin, begging to be released, still alive. The aunt's distress was so profound that she eventually convinced the family to exhume the body. When they opened the casket, they discovered a scene of horror: Mary's fingernails were bloody and torn, the inside of the coffin was shredded with claw marks, and her face bore an expression of absolute terror. She had been buried alive and had died trying to scratch her way out.

Her tombstone tells its own haunting story. The pink granite monument reads: "AT HIGH NOON JUST FROM, AND ABOUT TO RENEW HER DAILY WORK, IN HER FULL STRENGTH OF BODY AND MIND MARY E. HART HAVING FALLEN PROSTRATE: REMAINED UNCONSCIOUS, UNTIL SHE DIED AT MIDNIGHT, OCTOBER 15, 1872." But it is the inscription above this biography that has fueled supernatural legends for generations: "THE PEOPLE SHALL BE TROUBLED AT MIDNIGHT AND PASS AWAY."

The phrase is an abridged passage from the Book of Job, chapter 34, verse 20—in its original biblical context, a meditation on how death comes to rich and poor alike. But New Haven locals have reinterpreted these words as a curse, a warning from beyond the grave. Those who visit Mary's resting place after midnight, they say, will meet a terrible end.

Stories circulate through Yale and the surrounding colleges about students who dared to test the curse. Some were allegedly found dead on Mary's grave the next morning, their faces frozen in expressions of abject horror. Others were discovered impaled on the iron spikes of the cemetery fence, as if trying to escape something pursuing them through the darkness. One account describes three sailors on leave who visited at midnight and were found the next day impaled on the fence. These tales are told and retold by each generation of teenagers and college students, with new details accumulating like offerings at Mary's grave.

Beyond the curse, Mary herself is said to walk. Her restless spirit reportedly wanders the area around her former home on Winthrop Avenue, sometimes appearing to unsuspecting motorists late at night. In one version of the vanishing hitchhiker legend, a driver picked up a pale young woman who asked to be taken to a house near the cemetery. When he returned the next day to check on her, he learned the woman he had driven home had been dead for decades.

Visitors continue to report strange phenomena at the grave. Some describe sudden weather changes—sunny skies turning dark and threatening as they approach her monument. Others have experienced unexplained difficulty taking photographs, their cameras malfunctioning repeatedly. Cemetery manager Dale Fiore once received an emergency call about the security alarm going off on a dark winter night, and arrived to find no explanation for the disturbance. He attributes such occurrences to Evergreen's resident ghost.

Today, people continue to leave offerings at Midnight Mary's grave—coins, flowers, small tokens—reinforcing the power of legend over historical fact. No records actually confirm the exhumation story, and the fear of premature burial, while common in the Victorian era before modern medical diagnostics, does not validate the grisly tale. Yet the legend persists, drawing ghost tour groups, curious visitors, and thrill-seekers who want to test the curse for themselves.

The grave sits at the back of the cemetery, on the path paralleling the iron fence that separates Evergreen from Winthrop Avenue—the same street where Mary once lived, now forever watching over her from beyond. Ironically, she rests just a short distance from another famous burial: Sarah Winchester, the "Belle of New Haven" who built the Winchester Mystery House in California, allegedly haunted by victims of the Winchester rifle. Two daughters of New Haven, linked in death by the supernatural legends that surround them.

Whether Mary Hart was truly buried alive or simply fell victim to a stroke that mimicked death, her grave remains Connecticut's most visited haunted site. The New Haven Museum offers lantern-lit tours of Evergreen each October, culminating at Midnight Mary's monument. The inscription continues to warn all who approach: the people shall be troubled at midnight and pass away.