Vale End Cemetery

A historic cemetery in Wilton with approximately 1,000 interments dating back to the 1750s, considered one of the most haunted in New England.

Vale End Cemetery occupies a quiet hilltop in Wilton, New Hampshire, its oldest burials dating to 1752, making it one of the town's original burial grounds. The cemetery was officially established when the town purchased land in 1778, and it was renamed Vale End in 1871. Among its dead are Revolutionary War soldiers including Major Isaac Frye, who survived the 1773 collapse of the Wilton Meetinghouse that killed five construction workers, and veterans who fought at Bunker Hill, Ticonderoga, and Saratoga. William Abbott, who participated in the adoption of the United States Constitution, also rests here.

But the grave that draws visitors from across New England belongs to Mary Ritter Spaulding, who lies in the northwest corner of the cemetery. Born January 12, 1773, in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, Mary often went by the name Polly, as recorded on her marriage documents. She married Captain Isaac Spaulding, a tanner and currier by trade, and bore seven children in ten years before dying on April 27, 1808, at the age of thirty-five. The cause of her death was never recorded, or the record has been lost, leaving a void that local legend has filled with speculation ranging from childbirth complications to something more sinister.

Historical sources describe Mary as a woman of superior intellect, a great worker, and a skilled tailoress. It was said of her that she virtually walled in the farm of her husband with her needle, meaning she earned enough from her sewing to buy the fencing that enclosed their property. She was considered kind, well-mannered, a devoted mother who regularly attended church, and a healing herbalist who aided friends and townsfolk with natural remedies. Captain Isaac remarried just sixteen months after her death, to another woman also named Mary, who is buried beside her.

The Blue Lady, as the apparition has come to be known, manifests in two ways. Most commonly, she appears as a vibrating, hazy blue light in the shape of a column roughly the size of a human being, hovering just above her gravestone. On rarer occasions, she materializes as a full apparition wandering through the cemetery dressed in the fashion of her era. The blue light has been photographed repeatedly by independent witnesses, and paranormal investigators who have studied the cemetery describe it as one of the most consistently active sites in New Hampshire.

Interestingly, members of the Wilton Historical Society who grew up in the area say they did not begin hearing about the Blue Lady until the 1970s, suggesting the legend may be of relatively modern origin despite the antiquity of the burial. Whether the story was always told quietly within certain families or was genuinely invented in the twentieth century remains debated.

Beyond the Blue Lady, investigators report the cemetery is highly active in general. Electronic equipment malfunctions and batteries drain with unusual speed. Some visitors have reported sightings of small creature-like entities that paranormal researchers identify as pukwudgies, trickster spirits from Algonquian folklore. The New England Legends podcast dedicated an episode to the Blue Lady, and the cemetery appears in multiple regional paranormal guides. Whatever Mary Ritter Spaulding's cause of death, and whatever the true origin of the legend, the blue light above her stone continues to glow for those who visit after dark.