These Are The Scariest Graveyards In New Hampshire, Survey Says

HOLLIS, NH — Residents may shudder at the thought of being alone after dark at three cemeteries shrouded in lore and legend, according to a survey conducted in time for Halloween.

Choice Mutual, a life insurance company that specializes in funeral and burial policies, asked 3,004 Americans a single question: “Which graveyard would you be least prepared to visit alone at night?”

The survey found 150 graveyards across the country that people refuse to enter or even detour around at night, whether they believe the stories of ghostly figures, whispers between crypts, and other unexplained occurrences or dismiss them as myth.

The 10 scariest graveyards are:

1. Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York
2. Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Los Angeles
3. Boothill Graveyard, Tombstone, Arizona
4. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, New Orleans
5. Salem Cemetery, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
6. Gettysburg National Cemetery, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
7. Pine Hill Cemetery, also known as Blood Cemetery, Hollis, New Hampshire
8. Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum Cemetery, Weston, West Virginia
9. Old City Cemetery, also known as Historic City Cemetery, Sacramento, California
10. Old Hill Burying Ground, Concord, Massachusetts

Other scary graveyards in the Granite State include:

• Valley Cemetery in Manchester
• Point of Graves Burial Ground in Portsmouth

The survey authors said the most-dreaded cemeteries tended to be Colonial-era and church graveyards in the Northeast, with New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania appearing multiple times in the top 30.

Among other observations by the authors of the survey:

– Mass burial grounds at crucial and exceptionally bloody Civil War battlefields such as Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, Shiloh in Tennessee, and Vicksburg in Mississippi also ranked high.

– There are a couple of graveyards in the Old West with a particularly desolate feel, according to the survey: Tombstone’s Boothill Graveyard in Arizona, where outlaws who died in the O.K. Corral gunfight are buried, and Tonopah Cemetery in Nevada, a monument to the resilience and tenacity of the pioneers and miners who settled in the harsh desert.

Choice Mutual said the survey sample was designed to reflect balance across age, gender and geography. National population benchmarks were established using internal data and a two-step process: stratified sampling and post-stratification weighting.

Editor's note: This post was scripted by another Patch staffer, not New Hampshire's editor, for publication on New Hampshire sites.