Union Cemetery

Drivers on Route 59 in Easton have been hitting the White Lady for decades, including a 1993 incident that dented a fireman's car. Ed Warren captured video of a misty figure in 1990, and a second entity called Red Eyes, possibly linked to a man burned alive in 1935, watches from the woods.

In 1993, an off-duty fireman was driving down Route 59 past Union Cemetery when he hit a woman. The impact dented his car. He stopped, searched the road, called it in. Nobody was there.

He wasn't the first. Drivers along Route 59 in Easton have been hitting the White Lady for decades. She shows up in headlights wearing a white nightgown or wedding dress, long dark hair visible, sometimes with a bonnet. People swerve. People brake. People get out of their cars shaking, certain they've killed someone. The road is always empty. Police officers and firefighters have filed reports. She's also been spotted on Route 111. The sightings stopped being news in Easton a long time ago.

Union Cemetery sits at the junction of Routes 59 and 136, next to Easton Baptist Church. The earliest surviving headstone dates to 1761, though historians believe older unmarked graves exist in the northeastern corner where wooden markers have long since rotted away.

The cemetery became nationally famous when Ed and Lorraine Warren made it one of their primary research sites. On a stakeout around 2:40 a.m. in 1990, Ed heard a woman weeping. He looked out into the field of headstones and saw small points of light coalescing into the shape of a woman. His video camera captured what looked like a misty white form taking human shape, moving several feet through the graveyard before fading into the ground near the front gates. That footage became some of the most widely circulated paranormal evidence of the decade. The Warrens published their findings in 1992: "Graveyard: True Hauntings from an Old New England Cemetery."

Nobody agrees on who she is. One theory says she died in childbirth and rests in an unmarked grave. Another claims she was murdered near the turn of the twentieth century and her body thrown down a sinkhole behind the church. A third version puts the murder in the 1940s, committed by her husband. A fourth says she's a grieving mother still searching for a lost daughter. The lack of a definitive backstory hasn't slowed the sightings. If anything, it multiplied them.

The White Lady isn't alone. The Warrens documented a second presence they called Red Eyes: a pair of glowing red eyes visible in the woods behind the graveyard at night. Donna Kent of the Cosmic Society speculates that the eyes belong to Earle Kellogg, a man who was set on fire across the street and burned to death in 1935. (There's also a local prank tradition: someone placed bike reflectors on a piece of wood and moved it around the brush to scare teenagers. Those are not the same thing.) One person walking past the cemetery saw the real eyes peering from the brush, turned, and ran. He heard footsteps following him.

The cemetery's fame has caused real problems. Officials have issued warnings against ghost hunting during Halloween season because trespassers damage headstones and disturb the grounds. Police patrol regularly, and trespassing results in arrest. This is a working cemetery with centuries of real burials and real families visiting real graves.

Union Cemetery is probably Connecticut's most famous haunted location. The combination of the Warrens' involvement, the video, police and fire department witnesses, and the physical dent in that fireman's car puts it in a different category than most ghost stories. Most hauntings have witnesses. This one has body damage.