Riverview Cemetery

Riverview Cemetery in Parkersburg, founded in 1801, holds two West Virginia governors and a U.S. senator honored in Profiles in Courage. Its Weeping Woman statue has been accused of pulling visitors' hair and granting fertility wishes, while a couple living behind the cemetery reported a vanishing wedding ring that reappeared after one of them spoke directly to a grave.

The Weeping Woman statue at Riverview Cemetery has been blamed for pulling visitors' hair, unbuttoning their clothes, unzipping their pants, and tripping people on flat ground. She guards the Jackson family plot, carved in the late 1800s from white stone, her hands wrung together in permanent grief. According to the oldest version of the legend, she walks the cemetery grounds on moonless nights, drifting through the fog as if looking for someone. A more specific tradition says she comes alive at midnight during a full moon. At least four women have claimed that touching the statue resulted in pregnancy within a year.

Riverview Cemetery sits on 2.5 acres in Parkersburg, overlooking the Ohio River. The first burial here, B.W. Jackson, dates to 1801. Joseph Cook of Massachusetts bought 200 acres of Captain Alexander Parker's original 2,400-acre land grant in 1802, and the Cook family used part of it as a private plot. In 1843, Pardon and Tillinghast Cook deeded one acre to the public, and it became Riverview Cemetery. It has been collecting Parkersburg's dead ever since.

The list of people buried here reads like a local history textbook. Two West Virginia governors (Jacob B. Jackson and William E. Stevenson), one congressman, eight Parkersburg mayors, four county court clerks, three sheriffs, six justices, and veterans from every American war dating back to the Revolution. U.S. Senator Peter G. Van Winkle is here, the man who cast the deciding vote against impeaching President Andrew Johnson in 1868. John F. Kennedy later honored Van Winkle in Profiles in Courage. The Dils, the Dudleys, the Thompsons, all the founding families of Parkersburg are in this ground.

Captain George Deming, a sea captain from New Haven, built his home in Parkersburg in 1861 and died the following year. A smaller, weathered stone near his plot is believed to belong to his young son, likely a victim of the typhoid fever epidemic that swept Parkersburg in the 1860s and 70s. Visitors have seen a man in a black overcoat hunched over Deming's grave, both during the day and after the gates close. He appears solid. He does not respond when spoken to.

The strangest report involves a couple named Ben and Natalie Bradley, who lived on 13th Street with the cemetery stretching behind their backyard. Natalie began having vivid dreams about a woman named Lucy Pierpont who claimed a connection to Ben. A wedding band vanished from their dresser. Ben eventually found the grave of Lucy Pierpont Jones roughly 100 yards behind their house. Within 24 hours of Ben speaking directly to the grave, the ring reappeared on the dresser. Footsteps and silhouettes in empty rooms continued, though the Bradleys described the presence as unsettling rather than hostile.

Slaves were buried in unmarked graves outside the cemetery's formal boundaries. Local researchers believe some of the unexplained activity reported in nearby buildings may be connected to those disturbed resting places. The cemetery also carries reports of black dogs with glowing red eyes roaming among the headstones. Cemetery dogs with red eyes are a fixture of British and Appalachian folklore (the "black shuck" tradition), so this detail is either genuinely unnerving or genuinely predictable, depending on your tolerance for regional ghost tropes.

Riverview is part of the Julia-Ann Historic District, added to the National Register in 1977. Ghost tours operate in the area. The cemetery's charm is that it functions as both a serious historical site and a genuine locus of local ghost folklore, with the Weeping Woman serving as the centerpiece. The statue is easy to find. The Jackson plot is well-maintained. Whether you believe she grants wishes to pure-hearted women or yanks the hair of disrespectful visitors, she has been the subject of Parkersburg's most persistent ghost stories for over a century.

The strongest detail in the whole collection is the Bradley story. A wedding ring disappearing from a dresser, a grave 100 yards behind the house, the ring returning after a direct conversation with the dead. It is exactly the kind of story that sounds made up and yet is too specific and too inconvenient to invent.