Woodland Cemetery Chapel

The gray-stone Sumner Knight Chapel sits in the middle of Woodland Cemetery in Keene, New Hampshire, and the rule about it is the kind every local child learns early: don't swear near the doors. The story goes that a spirit there objects to profanity, and an offender walks away with the taste and smell of soap in their mouth, the way a parent used to settle a foul word.

The legend is popular enough that people break the rule on purpose. They gather by the black wooden doors and curse, loudly, hoping to provoke the soapy encounter the story promises. Where the ghost came from, nobody can say. No named person, no documented event starts it. It just floats there, attached to the building.

A spirit of a little girl is reported outside the chapel too, peeking out from behind the tombstones and trees. No record names her or explains her either.

Woodland is a 19th-century garden cemetery, the Victorian idea of a graveyard built like a public park: large family plots ringed by granite and iron, marble monuments hauled in by rail. It holds real Keene history in its ground. Major General Simon Goodell Griffin, who led the 6th New Hampshire Volunteers in the Civil War and wrote the town's history, is buried in the Northeast Division; his granite monument was dragged into Keene by ox sled over the snow in April 1902.

In 2012 the Keene Paranormal Society went looking, walking the grounds with voice recorders and electromagnetic-field detectors. "They say if you swear near the chapel, you'll get the taste of soap in your mouth," investigator Aaron Potter told the Keene Sentinel. "We've tried it, but we haven't experienced that." The chapel gave them nothing.

The building itself is real and well documented. It came from a $50,000 bequest in the will of Marcus W. Knight, a memorial to his father Sumner Knight and the family, accepted by the city in December 1930. It seats 150 and still hosts concerts and weddings.

In a much-retold 2002 Keene Sentinel piece, written as a narrative by a local high school student, the chapel has a kinder resident. The ghost has a name, Robert, said to have lived in the cemetery since the land was bought in 1854, walking the paths each morning to greet the dead. On his rounds he points out the old graves, including the 193 from a single year. "Influenza," he says of them in the story. "It was not a good year."

That number is the one thing here you can check. The 193 graves from 1918 are really in the ground, the year the flu came through Keene. The ghost who washes your mouth out for swearing has no name, no date, and no record at all. The graves do.