Lafayette Pioneer Cemetery

A hanged witch's curse, fulfilled by fires. Visitors report scratches on their backs and a recorded voice saying "Run home!"

The legend at Lafayette Pioneer Cemetery is that a woman accused of witchcraft was hanged by the townspeople, buried somewhere in the cemetery, and screamed a curse on Lafayette before she died. The town would burn. After her execution, fires did strike the area. You can decide for yourself whether the prophecy actually fits the chronology of any verifiable hangings in Yamhill County, but the legend has been part of this place for so long that the cemetery and the curse are basically inseparable now.

A second story belongs to Lena Elsie Imus, who is buried at Lafayette Pioneer. Lena died by suicide in 1908 after drinking carbolic acid in her home. The home where she died later became Argyle Winery, and employees there have reported seeing and sensing her presence in the years since, describing a woman in a long dark dress and high lace collar who appears among the headstones or near the winery property. Lena's story makes a useful point about the cemetery: the activity here doesn't seem to stay inside the fence line. The dead and the living share the same hillside, and whatever follows you home from a visit might already have been wandering before you got there.

The cemetery itself covers four and a half acres of gently sloping ground in Oregon's wine country, southwest of Portland. The land was bought for $100 in 1874 by local leaders who needed somewhere to put the dead. The first recorded burial was Henrietta Hodges, a young girl whose family had crossed to Oregon from Wisconsin by wagon train. Thousands of families made that crossing. A lot of them ended up here. The cemetery filled in with farmers, merchants, and the children who didn't survive the journey or the early years afterward.

The reports of activity at Lafayette Pioneer follow a few patterns. Dark figures move among the headstones at dusk and after dark. Visitors describe walking through a sudden cold that arrives without warning even on warm summer evenings, narrow enough that a single step takes them out of it again. Faint whispers turn up on recordings, including, in at least one investigator's account, the words "Run home!" The sense of being watched is almost universal among visitors who come at night, and several have described a tightening in the chest as they walked deeper into the grounds.

The more alarming reports describe physical contact. Some visitors say they were chased from the cemetery by something they could feel but not see, and only later discovered deep scratch marks on their backs that they hadn't felt being made. Cameras malfunction. Orbs turn up in photographs. Footsteps and children's laughter come from places where no children are. Gates swing on their own.

The cemetery has been so popular with paranormal investigators and trespassers over the years that Yamhill County eventually imposed a no-trespassing rule to protect the grounds and the graves. The rule has slowed the foot traffic but not the reputation. Lafayette Pioneer is on every list of Oregon's most haunted cemeteries, and the witch legend, regardless of whether it can be sourced to a particular hanging, has settled into the place like sediment. Wine country isn't where you expect to feel watched. The pioneer dead buried at Lafayette do not seem to mind being out of place.