Pine Hill Cemetery

Pine Hill Cemetery in Hollis, New Hampshire has gone by another name for as long as anyone hiking up there can remember. They call it Blood Cemetery, after one family plot near the center of the grounds, and after one stone in particular.

Abel Blood was a devout farmer, buried here in 1867 next to his wife Betsy. His family marker carried a carving you still see on old New England stones: a right hand emerging from a cuffed sleeve, the index finger pointing up. On the stone it meant the simplest, gentlest thing, that the dead were reunited in heaven. That is not the version the teenagers came for. The story they passed around Nashua and Hollis held that the carved finger pointed to heaven by daylight and swung down toward hell once the sun went down. Generations climbed the hill at midnight to look at a finger.

The land here is older than the legend. Benjamin Parker Jr. donated the plot in 1769, the founders needing a burial ground and Parker needing to sell his farm. Local historians who went looking found no violence behind the Blood name, no occult anything. The family, the genealogy records show, passed away in their own time. The murder story that drifts around the place, that the Bloods were killed in the 1800s, every source that mentions it calls a rumor with nothing behind it.

There are other stories. A paranormal author told New Hampshire Magazine the finger appeared in different positions on different visits, that her camera died at the gate, that car radios near the cemetery switched themselves to dirge music. "There has to be some sort of electromagnetic field around the cemetery," she said. Drivers on Pine Hill Road have reported a young boy who runs into the road waving for help, then is gone when they stop. No record says any such boy existed. Visitors leave coins on the Blood family stones anyway, the way you might at a grave you came a long way to see.

You cannot go test the finger now. After years of vandalism the town took Abel Blood's stone away, the exact when and how no longer agreed on, the battered remnants said to sit with the Hollis public works department. The town locks the place dusk to dawn now, with cameras and motion sensors and police who watch it hardest around Halloween. The patch of earth is still up there. The hand is not.

There is, about ten minutes south in Dunstable, Massachusetts, a properly signed Blood Cemetery with the actual Blood family graves in it. Nobody bothers that one. The crowds keep climbing the wrong hill, to look at a stone that is no longer there.