Stones by the River
Across Mechanic Street from the gardens of Prescott Park, behind a low wall, the gravestones of Point of Graves crowd together on a little rise near the water. Many of them are dark slate, thin and tilted, their carved skulls and wings worn soft by three centuries of salt air.
By day it is a peaceful place, a quiet corner of Portsmouth's busiest neighborhood. At night it is something else. Visitors on evening walks say they feel it before they understand it: a presence at the shoulder, a sudden heaviness, a sense that the graveyard is far more crowded than it looks.
Portsmouth's First Burying Ground
Pickering's Gift
The land was given by Captain John Pickering, who set aside about half an acre on the condition that it "shall be impropriated forever unto the use of a burying place." Local historians date the first burials to the late 1600s; one account gives the first as 1669 and the formal establishment as 1671, and the earliest legible gravestone is dated 1682. It is often described as the oldest burial ground in New Hampshire.
Pickering's family kept grazing cattle on the land, and the animals damaged or destroyed many of the earliest stones. Around 125 gravestones remain today.
Who Lies Here
Members of some of Portsmouth's leading colonial families are buried here, including the Wentworths, Vaughans, Rogerses, and Lears. Their stones were cut by some of the best carvers of the era, including Nathaniel Emmes, James Foster, and John Homer.
One of the quieter stories in the ground belongs to Elizabeth Elatson, who was badly burned in a house fire after helping to rescue someone and died of her injuries two months later, in the winter of 1704 to 1705. The newspaper account of that fire is said to be the first published report of a house fire in America.
The burying ground is owned and maintained by the City of Portsmouth as one of its historic cemeteries.
The Vaughan Tomb
The most famous feature of Point of Graves is the above-ground Vaughan family tomb. When descendants of the Vaughan family built the monument in the nineteenth century, they found a staircase hidden beneath the original headstone.
The stairs led down to the door of a crypt. Inside, according to local historian and ghost tour guide Roxie Zwicker, were twenty-eight skeletons resting on shelves. No one knows who they were. They are there still, under the monument, unnamed.
The Ghost Stories of Point of Graves
Someone Standing Beside You
Roxie Zwicker has led ghost tours through Point of Graves for years, and in a 2018 interview with New Hampshire Public Radio she described what visitors experience there. "They truly feel like there's someone standing next to them," she said. "We've had people break out into tears at certain gravestones and they don't know why."
Figures from the Tomb
Since the discovery of the hidden crypt, people have reported seeing ghosts emerge from the Vaughan tomb and walk through the graveyard at night. The burial ground's haunted reputation has become part of its appeal, and evening ghost tours there have been recognized among the best cemetery tours in New England.
Light or Shadow?
Zwicker is careful about what she claims. Standing among the stones, she put the question to her listeners plainly: do you want to believe there are people climbing out of the ground, or that there are just shadows from the light? At Point of Graves, plenty of visitors leave without a confident answer.
A Crowded Half Acre
Point of Graves holds far more than it shows. Lost stones, broken stones, and a crypt of nameless dead lie beneath a patch of grass most visitors cross in a minute.
If you go, go respectfully. Read the old names, look at the carvings, and listen to the river. And if you feel someone standing beside you when no one is there, you will be in good company. Many visitors before you have felt the same thing.
