Princeton Cemetery

A 1757 burial ground holding Burr, Cleveland, and Jonathan Edwards, where Princeton students have summoned Burr's ghost in a ritual since 1892.

Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton on a cliff in Weehawken on July 11, 1804. He's buried in Princeton, because his father ran the college, and that single geographic fact is why generations of sophomores have dragged freshmen down Witherspoon Street to watch Burr's grave for something.

Princeton Cemetery was laid out in 1757 and has been called, since Princeton historian John F. Hageman coined the phrase in 1878, the "Westminster Abbey of the United States." Grover Cleveland is there. So is Aaron Burr Sr., Burr Jr., Jonathan Edwards, and more than a dozen Princeton presidents. The oldest headstones were carved before the Declaration of Independence. You can find a grave marker for Penelope Stout, who by legend was scalped, buried by her husband as dead, and then dug herself out, lived another eighty years, and produced five hundred descendants.

Most of what people feel here is suggestibility plus shade. Oak and sycamore close over the oldest section, the stones are leaning, and the west end dips into a hollow that stays cold on July afternoons. Groundwater and canopy explain the cold, not the afterlife. The ghost stories live at the specific graves, not in ambient atmosphere.

The one that won't die is Burr. An 1892 piece in the Nassau Literary Review describes a student bumping into Burr's ghost on McCosh Walk and asking where he normally lived. "Yes; I am the latter," Burr replies, in a classic Princeton undergraduate joke. "I am always in Princeton for a while before examinations and during them." By the late 1800s, sophomores were herding first-classmen down to the cemetery on the first rainy night of fall term to "see Aaron Burr arise." A 2023 ghost tour still leads visitors to his plot and recounts the whole thing with a straight face. The grave is a plain flat slab. No statue, no epitaph flex, just his name and dates, which for a man of his ego is arguably the haunting.

Cleveland's plot is a few rows over and gets a different treatment. His epitaph is one of the best in the cemetery, and visitors leave notes on his stone like they're writing to a pen pal. Nobody reports seeing him. Nobody has claimed a vice-presidential apparition in the hydrangeas. When you're the only president buried between two non-consecutive terms, maybe you earned the quiet.

The third name you'll hear on a ghost tour is Jonathan Edwards, the fire-and-brimstone preacher whose "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon made hardened farmers cry in 1741. He died in 1758 of a smallpox inoculation gone wrong, which is a historical irony that writes itself. Visitors occasionally report the smell of burnt matches near his headstone. It could be the groundskeeper's equipment. It could be imagination. It could be the nation's most famous hellfire preacher giving a small demonstration.

The gates are open dawn to dusk. Burr's grave sits in the President's Lot near the center, and a printed map at the sexton's office marks the famous plots. Tour groups cluster there in October. The rest of the year, most visitors pass through without noticing him at all.

Two hundred years of Princeton students, and the one they keep summoning is the one everyone else forgot.