Point of Graves Burial Ground

Portsmouth's oldest cemetery, founded 1671, where Dr. Vaughan's crypt holds 28 unidentified skeletons and his family tomb keeps glowing in photographs.

Point of Graves, in the heart of old Portsmouth, holds a tomb that keeps glowing in photographs. It belongs to the Vaughan family, and it sits in the right-hand corner of the cemetery. People who come back from the half-acre plot with a strange orange or yellow wash across their cemetery photos always swear the camera was working fine everywhere else.

The burial ground is the oldest surviving cemetery in Portsmouth and one of the oldest in New Hampshire. Captain John Pickering II donated the land in 1671 with the condition, preserved in the town records, that the half acre "shall be impropriated forever unto the use of a burying place." About 125 people are buried under the roughly 100 slate headstones still readable on the site. The earliest legible stone dates to 1682.

The Vaughan tomb is not just a marker. It is a raised above-ground structure with a stairway leading down into a crypt that contains 28 unidentified skeletons, bundled there sometime after the original burials. That fact alone would earn the plot a reputation, even without the photographs. The tomb belongs to Dr. George Vaughan and his family, one of the old Portsmouth lines.

The other name that keeps surfacing is Elizabeth Pierce, buried in 1717. The local paranormal investigator and tour guide Roxie Zwicker, who wrote books on New England graveyard folklore, has described being "gently shoved by a spirit" while standing near Elizabeth's stone. She has brought tour groups to Point of Graves for years and told the story more than once. It is the most specific physical-contact account the cemetery has on record.

There is also a tall slanted headstone marking the shared grave of two children, both under three years old, who died of yellow fever. Visitors regularly report a heavy wave of grief standing in front of that stone, and a few have started crying without understanding why. The parents' names are on the marker. The children's bodies are under what is now a sidewalk on the edge of the plot.

Elizabeth Elatson, buried here after her death around 1704 to 1705, has a specific kind of fame. She died after rescuing someone from a house fire, and the Boston News-Letter's account of her death is believed to be the first published report of a house fire in American newspaper history. Several visitors have reported a strong sense of presence near her stone, though no specific apparition claims attach to her the way they do to Elizabeth Pierce.

Yankee Magazine put Point of Graves on its 2017 list of the top five cemetery tours in New England. The city of Portsmouth maintains the grounds through a Historic Cemeteries Trust Fund, and a working iron gate protects the slate stones from the traffic on Mechanic Street. The gate is one of those features that makes the place feel sealed from the rest of downtown, even though the Strawbery Banke Museum and the waterfront are a few blocks away.

The cemetery is small enough to walk in ten minutes. What you find depends on what you brought with you. Roxie Zwicker brought a tour group and took a shove near Elizabeth Pierce's stone. Someone else brought a camera and walked home with a photograph of Dr. Vaughan's tomb lit from the inside. The yellow-fever children's stone catches people who were not planning to think about yellow fever that afternoon.