Pine Hill Cemetery

Abel Blood's 1867 stone at Pine Hill Cemetery in Hollis had a carved finger locals say pointed down at night. Vandals broke it. The haunting stayed.

Abel Blood was buried at Pine Hill Cemetery in Hollis in 1867, and for more than a century, kids from Nashua and Hollis hiked up Pine Hill Road at midnight to check his gravestone. Locals said the carved finger on top pointed up toward heaven during the day and swung down toward hell after dark. That's the legend that renamed the cemetery. Pine Hill is the name on the 1769 deed. Everyone in Hollis calls it Blood Cemetery.

Vandals finally broke the stone and hauled off the pieces, so you can't check the legend against the original anymore. Blood's plot is still here, just unmarked. The family is still listed in the cemetery records; the headstone itself is gone.

Credit the vandalism with one thing: it didn't kill the haunting. People still report strange encounters on Pine Hill Road, and the phenomena cluster tight around the cemetery. The most repeated account is a small child, sometimes described as a young boy, waving at cars to flag them down. Drivers stop. The child walks toward the passenger window. And then, somewhere in the three or four seconds it takes a driver to lean over and crack the glass, he's gone. Some reports put him standing in the middle of the road. Others have him at the edge of the stone wall. Nobody has ever been able to identify him by a marker or a name.

The car stuff is the detail paranormal writers keep coming back to. Drivers passing Pine Hill Cemetery after sunset have reported their radios sliding off station and landing on what people describe as dirge music, slow, organ-heavy, funeral tempo, then snapping back when they clear the cemetery gate. Fuel gauges drop unexpectedly, or swing to empty and back. Engines hesitate. The specifics vary, but the pattern holds: something about crossing past this particular cemetery gets into the car.

Inside the walls, investigators have reported orbs clustering around certain older stones, sudden temperature drops in the back corner by the tree line, and cold hands brushing the backs of their necks. There's a grave with a blue column of light photographed more than once. Whether any of that holds up to scrutiny depends entirely on how much you trust paranormal photography.

Hollis knows what it's got. The town has never leaned into this the way Salem leans into witches or New Orleans leans into vampires, but Pine Hill Cemetery is on every list of haunted spots in New England for a reason: the Abel Blood story, the vanishing boy, the weird radio dial. Three distinct phenomena, three distinct categories of witness, one small rural cemetery off a back road.

The town is firm about daytime-only visits and the local police enforce it. You won't get the legend in daylight, but you'll get to see the empty patch of earth where Abel Blood's stone used to stand, and generations of New Hampshire teenagers stood on that same patch at midnight, looking down at a finger pointing back up at them.