Vale End Cemetery

A column of blue light rises from the Spaulding grave in Wilton and stops six feet off the ground. Two women named Mary share the stone.

Vale End Cemetery in Wilton is where a column of blue light rises out of Mary Ritter Spaulding's grave and stops six feet off the ground. Sometimes it takes the shape of a woman. Sometimes it just sits there, slow and cold, a vertical bar of blue in an otherwise dark New Hampshire cemetery. Locals call her the Blue Lady. Her actual name, the one carved on the headstone she shares with her husband's second wife, is Mary.

Captain Isaac Spaulding married Mary Ritter in 1795. She was by every surviving account a remarkable person: sharp-minded, a gifted tailoress, a worker so industrious that the town historian wrote that she "virtually walled in the farm of her husband with her needle." She died in 1808 at thirty-five. Isaac remarried. The second wife was also named Mary. When she died, Isaac buried her in the same plot as the first. Two Marys, one grave. That detail alone is enough to set the story in motion.

The blue light is what the cemetery is known for. Witnesses describe a vertical column of blue rising above the Spaulding headstone, visible to the naked eye, sometimes photographable and sometimes not. In certain accounts the light resolves into the full shape of a woman before dissipating. In others it stays a column. Paranormal investigators have collected enough photographs of the phenomenon over the years that Vale End has become one of the most-investigated small-town cemeteries in New Hampshire, and the photos keep coming.

There's a complication, which is worth being honest about. Older residents of Wilton, including members of the town's historical society, have said the Blue Lady story doesn't actually go back generations. It appears to date from the 1970s. That doesn't mean the phenomenon isn't real to the people who see it; it means the story has a recent origin, grafted onto a two-hundred-year-old grave. Folklore sometimes works like this. A place starts producing reports, a name gets attached, a legend takes hold, and within two decades the story feels ancient.

There's also a darker strand of Vale End folklore that investigators whisper about more than they write about. Multiple paranormal groups have reported encounters in the back corner of the cemetery, near the tree line, that don't match the Blue Lady's gentle column-of-light presentation. These accounts involve hulking black shapes, a feeling of dread strong enough to drop visitors to their knees, and at least one investigator who described what he called a "humanoid pukwudgie," a reference to the Wampanoag forest creature of regional legend. Vale End has produced both the calmest and the most frightening reports in New Hampshire cemetery folklore, sometimes on the same night.

The cemetery is on a small hill off Isaac Frye Highway. Mary Ritter's headstone is easy to find. The stone is old enough that the inscription is worn, but her name is still legible, and the family plot is marked. Vale End is closed after dark. Wilton Police patrol the grounds and will remove trespassers, which is a detail to take seriously, since getting ticketed is the least interesting thing that has ever happened to anyone here after sunset.

Two women are buried under that shared headstone. Only one of them keeps showing up.