hauntingaroundmaine

[hauntingaroundmaine]

Haunted Location #1: Riverside Cemetery

Located in Lewiston, Maine, I visited Riverside Cemetery on the afternoon of September 15, 2018. It’s a large, forty-acre cemetery, with six hundred and ninety-five graves to date, located on the bank of the Androscoggin River, and from what I could tell, dating back to the early 1800s.

I spent a while roaming the grounds, seeing the names of those lost to the past. I stayed in the older section, where the earliest birth date I came across was 1799; once people began living and dying in the twentieth century, I doubled back around to the old part.

My mom and I tried to decipher the life stories of families based on their birth and death years--for example, if a woman died young and her widow lived another fifty years, if one of the other women around him was his second wife, and which children were born to which mother, and how long they all lived.

Or in the case of John Benner here, he was killed at the Battle of Chancellorsville, a Civil War battle that lasted from April 30 to May 6, 1863, near the village of Chancellorsville, Virginia, and was the major battle of the Chancellorsville Campaign, one of the biggest Confederate victories of the war.

The haunting part is interesting. Like any given cemetery, there have been reports of supernatural occurrences; how could there not be, with all those people around to incite ideas of ghosts? Here, specifically, three friends were on their way to the Libby Mausoleum, which sits near the entrance to the cemetery and is one of the first things seen by visitors, even saying “RIVERSIDE CEMETERY” across the top (see first picture). A forceful wind tried to keep them from getting close, but they pushed on anyway, only to be forced to retreat when a birch tree suddenly and without warning fell exactly where they were standing. They reported feeling an unusual presence around them for several days, even after leaving the cemetery.