Gilson Road Cemetery

A perfectly round hole is drilled through five-year-old Walter Gilson's 1811 headstone at Nashua's Gilson Road Cemetery. Nobody knows why.

There's a drilled hole in the headstone of five-year-old Walter Gilson at Gilson Road Cemetery in Nashua, perfectly round, about an inch across, bored directly through the center of the carved inscription. The lettering flows around where the hole is. That means someone drilled it after the stone was engraved, into a child's grave marker, for reasons nobody in town has ever been able to explain. Walter died on August 28, 1811, aged five years, eight months, and twenty-five days. The hole has been there longer than anyone living remembers.

That's the cold open for a cemetery that has earned, by most counts, the title of most haunted cemetery in New Hampshire. Gilson Road Cemetery sits about five miles from downtown Nashua, at the intersection of Gilson Road and Tanglewood Drive, tucked into a residential neighborhood that does not quite believe what's inside its own stone walls. The Gilson family plot is modest. The activity around it is not.

The most famous local legend involves Betty Gilson, and it has a ritual attached. Leave the cemetery, turn to face the gate, and shout "Betty Gilson, I have your baby!" She's supposed to appear in colonial-era clothing, sometimes stepping into the middle of Gilson Road itself, and drivers have described swerving around a woman in a long dress who wasn't there a second earlier and isn't there a second later. The story has run on itself for long enough that teenagers now pass it down like a dare. The reports stay specific: colonial dress, middle of the road, gone before you can brake.

Past Betty, the catalog gets dense. Visitors describe a green glow rising from Joseph Gilson's grave, sometimes bright enough to read by. A crying baby that nobody can locate. A woman in white drifting through the stones or standing along the road outside the wall. Screams from the tree line. EMF spikes that cluster around specific plots. Orb photographs that even skeptical investigators have a hard time dismissing. Fog that rolls in out of nowhere on otherwise clear nights.

The cemetery has been investigated so many times that paranormal groups now treat it as a rite of passage. One visitor described seeing what looked like portals opening near the older stones, with dark figures stepping through them. That account gets quoted a lot. It's one person's report, but it slots into a pattern that goes back decades: people keep leaving Gilson Road Cemetery with stories that other people had already been telling before they arrived.

The Walter Gilson hole is the detail that won't leave your head, though. Theories have ranged from the mundane (a post-engraving bit of cemetery vandalism, a stake driven through to pin something in place, a family mark with meaning since lost) to the lurid (fear of the child rising, a folk ritual to prevent something from escaping the grave, a hole bored to let the soul out). There's no documentation that tells you which. There's just a hole in a child's gravestone from 1811, bored through the inscription by a hand nobody named, for a reason nobody has written down.