In Brief
At the Post Cemetery on Mackinac Island, Michigan, visitors keep seeing a woman kneeling over two small infant headstones in the shaded northeast corner, head bent, softly crying. When they get close, she's gone. The stones belong to the Cowles children.
The Full Story
The Post Cemetery on Mackinac Island, Michigan keeps a grieving mother in its northeast corner. Visitors walking the shaded edge of the oldest cemetery on the island say they find a woman kneeling over two small infant headstones, head bent, softly weeping. When they step closer to her, she isn't there.
The stones belong to Josiah and Isabel Cowles. Their father, Lieutenant Calvin Duvall Cowles of the 23rd Infantry, was posted to Fort Mackinac in 1884, and he brought his wife, Mary Ella, born in Rochester, New York in 1855. Josiah died shortly after the family arrived. Isabel died just after her first birthday. The lieutenant buried both children side by side in the corner of the post burial ground, and the small stones are still there.
The story, told in Todd Clements' book *Haunts of Mackinac*, is that Mary Ella came back for them. It describes "a mother seen weeping over the late 19th-century graves of her two young children." It's tour tradition rather than documented testimony, but it sticks for a plain reason: almost nothing else in this cemetery is named.
This is the oldest burial ground on the island, with graves going back to the War of 1812, holding both British and American soldiers. A white picket fence rings the roughly one-acre clearing cut into the pines, and a wooden archway opens onto it. The flag here flies continually at half-mast, one of only four national cemeteries that keep it lowered. The place once displayed a cannon from Fort Sumter. It sits about a half mile north of the fort, near Skull Cave.
Of roughly 108 burials, only about three dozen are identified. The rest lie unmarked, their early wooden crosses long since rotted into the ground. The Cowles corner is one of the few specific things in an acre of unknowns, two infants with a documented family and dates you can actually trace.
Not far off stands the one grave you can't miss. Charlotte O'Brien, "the Chaplain's Lady," died in the spring of 1855 at 42, and she lies beneath a marble obelisk set apart from the uniform soldier stones, guarded by four chained posts. She kept letters about everyday life at the fort in the 1840s and 1850s. She is the most striking marker in the cemetery, and she is not the woman people see kneeling. The weeping mother keeps to the small infant stones in the shaded corner.
What the lore tends to leave out is where the mother ended up. Mary Ella Cowles died in 1906. Her husband died in 1937. Both of them were buried at Arlington National Cemetery, hundreds of miles from the island. The graves people watch the weeping woman kneel beside are the only two members of the family left here. She is reported returning to a corner she was never buried in, to the children she had to leave behind.
