Gilson Road Cemetery

At Gilson Road Cemetery in Nashua, New Hampshire, a headstone belongs to a boy who died at five. Walter Gilson, son of Joseph and Lucy, died on August 28, 1811, aged five years, eight months, and twenty-five days. Someone drilled a hole through his stone. It sits about an inch across, clean through the center of the inscription, with no cracks spreading out from it, the way a stone splits when it's struck. The cut looks deliberate, made with a bit, long after the words were carved.

Nobody in Nashua has ever produced an explanation for it. Theories go around — vandalism, a folk ritual to let the soul out, a family mark since lost — but none of them is written down in any record, and the people who repeat them know it.

The cemetery is small, under an acre, walled in old stone across the road from a housing subdivision. Most of the graves date to the 1800s; the oldest legible one belongs to Hannah Robbins, who died in 1796 at age 20. There are three small, near-identical stones for unnamed Gilson infants, and visitors leave toys and candy on them, and on Walter's.

It's the summoning that draws people out there. The story goes that if you leave the cemetery, turn back to face the gate, and shout "Betty Gilson, I have your baby!", a woman in colonial dress will appear — sometimes among the trees, sometimes standing in the middle of Gilson Road. There is a Betsey Gilson buried here. Whether she ever lost a child is folklore, not record.

The reports pile up regardless. A green glow above one of the graves, bright enough to read by, the way it's retold. Cold spots, orbs in photographs, the feeling of legs gone heavy at the gate, like wading through water you can't see. The researcher most associated with the place is Fiona Broome, who has been documenting it since the 2000s. She told New Hampshire Magazine there are more reports of activity here than at any other cemetery in the state — the one, in her words, "that scares the daylights out of people."

The investigators who actually spend nights there are more careful. A team that worked the cemetery in August 2012 logged faint whispers in the back left corner — one of them heard an audible "hey" — along with footsteps caught at the edge of the eye near the back wall, orange and blue orbs in their photos, and every member feeling watched. Their own conclusion, written down at the end, was that "the jury is still out with regards to whether it's truly haunted or just the results of overly active imaginations or nerves."

The hole in the boy's headstone isn't waiting on a verdict. It's been there longer than any of them, and it still has no answer.