In Brief
The Old Burying Ground sits a few steps from Harvard Square, and a paranormal author who propped a church door open with one of its gravestones says the door shut by itself — then a figure in a tricorn hat crossed his eye in an empty building.
The Full Story
The Old Burying Ground in Cambridge, Massachusetts is a two-acre colonial graveyard a few steps from Harvard Square, and the strangest account of it comes from a man who was only there to set up for a meeting. Paranormal author Sam Baltrusis was at the First Parish Church next door, its back door propped open with one of the cemetery's old gravestones. In his telling, the door swung shut on its own. Floorboards creaked. A second door slammed while he was alone in the building. Out of the corner of his eye, he says, he caught a figure that looked like a Revolutionary War soldier in a tricorn hat.
Who that figure was, no one can say for certain. Baltrusis has tied it to a British officer shot in Cambridge during the war, but the name and the year don't hold steady across the records, and that soldier's ghost is more often attached to Christ Church on the other side of the green. Baltrusis called the burying ground itself "a strong magnetic pull to the dead man's dumping ground."
The phrase fits what's underground. The Puritans laid out the cemetery around 1635, before Harvard College existed, and used it as the town's only graveyard for nearly two centuries. Cambridge has called it "God's Acre" since the 1600s, a name Longfellow later carried into a poem. There are roughly 1,218 known graves here, but local historians estimate the ground holds about eight times as many bodies as it has headstones. The visible stones carry the old New England warnings cut into slate — a winged death's-head, the Latin "memento mori," remember you must die.
The people under those stones are not anonymous. Several Harvard presidents lie inside the wall. So does Cicely, an enslaved girl who died in 1714 at 15, whose marker is cited as the oldest surviving gravestone of a Black person in the Americas, and two Black Continental soldiers, Cato Stedman and Neptune Frost. Three Cambridge men killed during the British retreat from Lexington and Concord rest here too; two of them had been the town's only known hands at the Boston Tea Party.
The most literal version of the crowding sits inside one sealed family vault. The Vassall tomb was last opened in 1862. Inside, recorded in a report still held at the American Antiquarian Society, were twenty-five coffins, stacked five on five, in the dark. The graveyard is a regular stop on the Harvard Square ghost tour, where people say they've seen orbs and full-bodied figures among the headstones — though no dated sighting is on record, and the soldier everyone actually tells you about is the one in the building next door.
