Maple Hill Cemetery

In 1893, Dr. Emile Overton Moore was shot and killed by a rival physician over who would treat a patient, and his Irish Setter Pedro sat howling on the grave for two years before dying and being buried alongside him. Visitors to this 37-acre Civil War-era cemetery on Crowley's Ridge still hear Pedro's howl near the monument inscribed "Waiting" and "Fidelity."

Pedro was an Irish Setter who sat on his master's grave for two years. When nearby residents heard howling in Maple Hill Cemetery at night, it was Pedro, mourning Dr. Emile Overton Moore. In 1893, Moore and a rival physician named Dr. Shinault got into an argument over who would treat a patient with a broken leg. Shinault shot Moore in the head. Moore's gravestone uses the word "murdered." The court ruled it self-defense.

Not many people had attended Moore's funeral. Pedro did not care about the turnout. He stayed. Day after day, night after night, the setter sat on the grave and howled. When Pedro finally died two years later, the Moore family buried the dog with his master and erected a monument topped with a carved stone likeness of the setter, head up, alert, permanent. The inscription on the front reads: "Waiting." On the back: "Fidelity."

It is one of the most photographed graves in Helena, and visitors still hear him. The sound is distinct from coyotes or strays. It is a sustained, mournful howl that seems to come from exactly one spot near the monument. It has been more than 130 years since Pedro died, and the howling has not stopped.

Maple Hill Cemetery sits on 37 acres on the east side of Crowley's Ridge, overlooking the Mississippi River in Helena-West Helena, Phillips County. The cemetery exists because of a battle. On July 4, 1863, Confederate forces attacked the Union-held town of Helena in one of the bloodier engagements in eastern Arkansas. The shelling destroyed Helena's existing cemetery on Graveyard Hill, so around 1865, Maple Hill was established as a replacement on higher ground, laid out in the rural cemetery style popular in the mid-19th century.

In 1869, the Phillips County Memorial Association relocated the remains of 73 identified and 29 unidentified Confederate soldiers into a one-acre section in the southwest corner. Most had died at the Battle of Helena or from wounds sustained afterward. Well over 100 soldiers are buried there now. A granite monument topped with a marble Confederate soldier was dedicated on Decoration Day in 1892.

General Patrick Cleburne, the Irish-born Confederate officer killed at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, 1864, was interred here in 1870 after being moved from Ashwood, Tennessee. A marble shaft memorial mixing Confederate and Irish symbols was dedicated in his honor in 1891. Cleburne was later moved to his final resting place, but the memorial remains.

Civil War-era figures have been seen in the older sections. Given that over a hundred young soldiers are buried in the Confederate section, many of them teenagers who died violent deaths far from home, the sightings fit. People walking through at dusk describe a feeling of heaviness, of being watched, that lifts once they reach the newer plots closer to the entrance.

Helena was once the most important port city between Memphis and Vicksburg. Now it is a small town with a population under 6,000. Maple Hill is one of the few places where you can feel what Helena used to be. The scale of the monuments, the military section, the sheer acreage on the bluff above the river all point to a city that mattered enormously for a brief, violent period.

Pedro is still waiting.