Latest / The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales / Horror Within Mount Hope | Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor Maine

Transcript

Horror Within Mount Hope | Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor Maine · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Mount Hope Cemetery, located in Bangor, Maine.
0:24
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:27
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:29
Kristin: So grab your favorite mug and cozy up.
0:31
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: It's the week of Halloween, my favorite time of year.
0:38
Kristin: The leaves have turned to flame and rust, and they fall in slow spirals onto every path.
0:43
Kristin: The air has grown crisp and cold, carrying the scent of wood smoke and damp earth.
0:47
Kristin: And as the nights stretch longer, there's a hunger that only a good horror story can feed.
0:53
Kristin: No one can feed that hunger, though, quite like the king of horror himself, Stephen King.
0:58
Kristin: His books and films are so many that choosing just one can feel impossible: killer clowns, haunted hotels, and a burial ground that refuses to keep its dead.
1:08
Kristin: But it's worth wondering where those nightmares come from.
1:11
Kristin: Is this a real place where the dead rest and the ideas take root?
1:15
Kristin: Is there a cemetery at the heart of it all?
1:18
Kristin: In Bangor, Maine, many believe there is.
1:21
Kristin: Its name is Mount Hope.
1:22
Kristin: It's America's second gardened cemetery, founded just three years after Mount Auburn.
1:27
Kristin: More than 30,000 people rest on its rolling hills above the Penobscot River.
1:32
Kristin: Among them are a vice president, a lumber baron, and a man the FBI once called Public Enemy No.
1:39
Kristin: And on a cold autumn night in 1988, it was here among these very stones that Pet Cemetery came to dig up its dead.
1:47
Kristin: In 1834, Bangor was a city on the rise.
1:51
Kristin: That year it was officially incorporated a booming lumber town on the banks of the Penobscot.
1:56
Kristin: Each spring, as the snow melted in the great northern forests, logs were driven down the river to the sawmills, and the lumber was shipped out to the world.
2:04
Kristin: Within a few decades, Bangor would become the largest port on earth.
2:08
Kristin: By 1860, some 150 sawmills aligned the river, and in that year alone, 3,300 lumber ships passed through its docks.
2:17
Kristin: Fortunes were made almost overnight.
2:19
Kristin: But a growing city brings a growing number of dead, and Bangor needed somewhere to lay them to rest.
2:25
Kristin: Just three years earlier, something new had taken root outside of Boston.
2:29
Kristin: In 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it changed how Americans thought about death.
2:36
Kristin: Gone were the cramped churchyards crowded against city streets.
2:40
Kristin: In their place came the rural or garden cemetery, a landscape of rolling hills, winding past and sheltering trees, where the living could walk among the dead in peace.
2:49
Kristin: Banger wasn't far behind.
2:51
Kristin: In 1834, the Bangor Horticultural Society formed to purchase half of Joseph Treat's 100-acre lot on the outskirts of the city.
2:59
Kristin: By September of that same year, the Mount Hope Cemetery Corporation had taken its place, and the work of shaping a city of the dead began.
3:07
Kristin: To design it, they turned to Charles G.
3:09
Kristin: Brandt, the first manner known to call himself an architect.
3:12
Kristin: Brain divided the land in two.
3:14
Kristin: One half would hold the dead, the other was set aside for horticulture, for gardens and growings.
3:20
Kristin: The first 200 family plots were placed on the highest ground, looking out over the river below.
3:26
Kristin: A family lot cost$30.
3:28
Kristin: On July 21, 1836, Mount Hope was consecrated.
3:32
Kristin: Ministers from Bangor's Unitarian and Congregational Churches presided, and Mayor Edward Kent, who would one day become the governor of Maine, rose to speak.
3:40
Kristin: He told the gathering that a place like this was with the beauties of nature scattered on every hand, was meant to give the chastened and holy calm to the mind.
3:49
Kristin: But the cemetery had already received its first resident.
3:52
Kristin: Twelve days earlier, on July 9th, Samuel Callbin laid to rest on top of Cemetery Hill, overlooking the Penobscot.
3:59
Kristin: A ten-foot oblast still marked his grave, the first of many thousands to follow, and Mount Hope kept growing.
4:05
Kristin: In 1871, engineer Charles Green reshaped the grounds, lining the paths with avenues of trees, carving out carriage roads, and damming the streams on the western edge to form quiet, glassy ponds.
4:17
Kristin: In 1889, the cemetery spread beyond the VZ town line.
4:21
Kristin: The town of Visi allowed Bangor to claim the land as its own.
4:24
Kristin: Today, Mount Hope stretches nearly 300 acres.
4:27
Kristin: Three ponds lie beneath the still trees.
4:30
Kristin: Cemetery Hill rises above the river.
4:32
Kristin: A Tudor-style superintendent's lodge built in 1909 keeps watch near the entrance.
4:38
Kristin: And in December of 1974, Mount Hope was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
4:44
Kristin: But Mount Hope holds a secret in its very layout.
4:47
Kristin: It isn't one cemetery, but two.
4:49
Kristin: Part of the grounds belong to Mount Hope Cemetery Corporation.
4:53
Kristin: The rest is a city section set aside for the people of Bangor.
4:57
Kristin: It's an easy detail to overlook, but it will matter later when we come to the story of a man no one wanted to claim.
5:04
Kristin: Walk through Mount Hope's gates, and one of the first things to greet you is a tall granite obelisk, rising 20 feet into the air.
5:11
Kristin: This is the Soldier's Monument.
5:13
Kristin: It was dedicated on June 17, 1864, while the Civil War was still raging and the outcome was far from certain.
5:20
Kristin: That makes it one of the oldest Civil War monuments in the country.
5:23
Kristin: Bangor didn't want to wait for the war to end to begin to mourn.
5:27
Kristin: The story begins with one death.
5:29
Kristin: On the last day of 1862, at the Battle of Stones near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Major Stefan DeCanter Carpenter of the 19th U.S.
5:37
Kristin: Infantry was killed in the saddle and pitched dead from his horse.
5:40
Kristin: He had been born in Vauxcroft, Maine, but Bangor claimed him as one of their own.
5:44
Kristin: And when word of his death reached home, the city realized just how many of its young men were dying in this war.
5:50
Kristin: Carpenter's family had no burial lot in Bangor, so in February of 1863, the city council resolved to find him one.
5:58
Kristin: Citizens bought subscriptions, raising nearly 3,500 to build a monument not just for him, but for all of Bangor's fallen.
6:06
Kristin: On June 17, 1864, a procession formed on Main Street led by the Bangor Cornet Band and companies of the Main State Guard, and wound its way to Mount Hope.
6:16
Kristin: People packed the grounds around the New Oblast as ministers and politicians spoke.
6:21
Kristin: Among them was the sitting vice president of the United States, Bangor's own Hannibal Hamlin.
6:26
Kristin: The monument's inscription reads, In memory of our citizen soldiers who died for their country, fifty-five names were carved on its sides, and at the top of the list was Carpenters.
6:37
Kristin: His remains were laid within the monument's enclosure, and beside him his infant son John, just nine and a half months old.
6:43
Kristin: Here they stayed until 1881, when at the family's request, a father and son were moved once more and laid to rest side by side.
6:51
Kristin: The war's shadow, though, stretches across these grounds.
6:54
Kristin: By the early 1900s, the soldiers' monument lot had filled, so on October 7, 1907, the Grand Army of the Republic, the Brotherhood of the Union Veterans, dedicated a miniature fort here, along with a new burial ground for the men who had survived the war and come home to grow old.
7:11
Kristin: Even in death, they chose to stand together.
7:14
Kristin: Not far away stands a memorial to the 2nd Main Regiment, mustered in Bangor on May 28, 1861.
7:21
Kristin: The 2nd Main was the first Civil War regiment to march out of state.
7:25
Kristin: Its men fought in 11 battles, from the first battle of Bull Run to Fredericksburg, where they suffered their heaviest losses.
7:32
Kristin: When their two years were up in 1863, the regiment came home to Bangor and mustered out.
7:37
Kristin: But not every man was free to go.
7:39
Kristin: Those who had signed on for three years were transferred against their will to the 20th Maine, and 66 men who insisted their time was up refused to fight on.
7:48
Kristin: They were sentenced to a Ronne Island prison on the Dry Tortugas before the sentence was communed.
7:53
Kristin: The memorial was raised in the 1960s for the bequest of a man named Luther Hill Spears.
7:59
Kristin: It shows an angel with no face, carrying a wounded soldier in her arms.
8:03
Kristin: Beneath them are the words, Not painlessly doth God recast and mold a new the nation, meaning the nation was remade and it was paid for in blood.
8:12
Kristin: The memorials don't end with a civil war, though.
8:15
Kristin: In 1995, the main Korean War Memorial was dedicated here, carved with the names of 233 mainers who were killed or never came home.
8:23
Kristin: Some of Mount Hope's structures were built for the living.
8:26
Kristin: The Weber Waiting Room, a smaller deco shelter of granite and bronze, when sheltered mourners who came by trolley to visit their dead.
8:34
Kristin: Others were built to hold the dead forever.
8:36
Kristin: The cemetery's east end stands the Hill Mausoleum, built in 1918, around Granite Tomb where Frederick Hill rests with his wife Marianne and her mother.
8:45
Kristin: The soldiers are only the beginning.
8:47
Kristin: Statesmen and lumber barons rest on these hills too, and so does an outlaw whose final mourning would one day make its way into the pages of a horror novel.
8:56
Kristin: Once you look at who lies beneath these hills, you begin to see the history of Maine itself.
9:02
Kristin: Hannibal Hamlin rests in his family plot in the Riverview Lawn section and began his political life as a Democrat, but in 1854 he fought against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened a new territory to slavery.
9:15
Kristin: And when the Democratic Party endorsed it two years later, Hamlin walked away.
9:19
Kristin: On June 12, in 1856, he left the party and joined the newly formed Republicans, causing a national sensation.
9:27
Kristin: He went on to serve as governor of Maine as a United States Senator, and from 1861 to 1865 as Abraham Lincoln's first vice president.
9:36
Kristin: But in 1864, when Lincoln ran for a second term, Hammond was left off the ticket and replaced by Andrew Johnson.
9:43
Kristin: What he did next, though, tells you something about this man.
9:46
Kristin: That summer, his company of the Maine State Guard was called up for duty.
9:49
Kristin: Hammond was told that as vice president, he didn't have to serve, but he went anyway.
9:55
Kristin: The sitting vice president of the United States reported to Fort McClary in Kittering, Maine, and spent his service there as the company cook.
10:02
Kristin: They went home a little more than a month before history turned, yet Hamlin's family was still in Washington when it did.
10:08
Kristin: On the night of April 14th, in 1865, his two children, his son Charles and his daughter Sarah, sat in the audience at Ford's Theater.
10:17
Kristin: They were there when the shot rang out and the president fell.
10:19
Kristin: Hamelin returned to the Senate and served as minister to Spain, and lived long enough to outlive six of the men who followed him as vice president.
10:26
Kristin: On the 4th of July in 1891, he was playing cards at the Tarentine Club, the Bangor Club he had founded when he collapsed.
10:34
Kristin: He died a few hours later at 81.
10:36
Kristin: He was laid to rest here, and his son Charles lies beside him.
10:40
Kristin: Then there's Rufus Duinel, a lumber baron and one-time mayor of Bangor, who died in 1869.
10:46
Kristin: His monument is a massive grand sarcophagus, raised above the ground on four granite pillars, and most people who pass it on State Street believe his body lies within, but it doesn't.
10:57
Kristin: The sarcophagus is solid stone.
10:59
Kristin: The grandest tomb on the hill holds no one at all.
11:02
Kristin: Samuel Veezy made his fortune in Lumber 2 and on one of the nation's first railroads, running from Bangor to Old Town.
11:09
Kristin: When he grew tired of paying Bangor's taxes, he convinced the residents of his corner the city to break away and form a town of their own.
11:16
Kristin: They called it VZ.
11:17
Kristin: Today he arrests in his family tomb set on the western side of Cemetery Hill.
11:21
Kristin: It's as if the earth itself is closed around him.
11:25
Kristin: And the roll call continues.
11:27
Kristin: Four governors of Maine, ten congressmen, a United States Senator, two ambassadors, and eight Civil War generals.
11:34
Kristin: Mono pulls the people who built Bangor, and many who helped shape the nation.
11:39
Kristin: But there's one grave here, unlike all the others.
11:42
Kristin: It belongs to a man who built nothing, who left nothing behind, and who came to Bangor for one thing only: guns.
11:49
Kristin: His name is Al Brady.
11:50
Kristin: He was born in Indiana in October of 1910, and he nearly lost everyone early.
11:56
Kristin: His father died when he was a small child, his mother died when he was 16, and his stepfather two years later.
12:02
Kristin: By the mid-1930s, Brady was drifting through Indiana, picking up arrests for vagrancy and stolen property.
12:09
Kristin: But then in October of 1935, he found his gang.
12:13
Kristin: With Clarence Lee Schaefer Jr.
12:14
Kristin: and Royal James Dell Hoover, Brady began a spree that, by the FBI's account, ran to some 151 holdups and robberies, hitting stores, theaters, and jewelry shops across Indiana and Ohio.
12:26
Kristin: Then in 1936, the three were finally caught and locked in a county jail in Greenfield, Indiana.
12:32
Kristin: But on October 11th at breakfast, they attacked the sheriff, took his revolver, stole the car, and vanished.
12:38
Kristin: The following May, they robbed the bank at Goodland, Indiana.
12:41
Kristin: As police closed in, the gang lay in wait.
12:43
Kristin: Indiana State trooper Paul Miniman opened his car door and leaned out to study the tracks on the road, and the gang opened fire.
12:50
Kristin: Miniman was killed.
12:52
Kristin: A deputy sheriff was badly wounded.
12:54
Kristin: And according to the FBI, one of the gang asked, Shall I finish this guy too?
12:59
Kristin: And another answered, No, come on, let's just get out of here.
13:02
Kristin: Brady became the most wanted man in America.
13:04
Kristin: The FBI named him Public Enemy No.
13:07
Kristin: By the fall of 1937, the gang was building an arsenal, and Brady had Zion Maine.
13:12
Kristin: Hunting season was about to begin, and he believed guns would be easy to buy there.
13:17
Kristin: On September 21st, two of his men walked into Dawkins Sporting Goods on Central Street in Bangor.
13:23
Kristin: They bought pistols, ammunition, and a rifle, and they paid for him a thick roll of bills.
13:27
Kristin: The owner, Everett Shepherd, didn't like what he saw.
13:31
Kristin: The next day, two men turned up at another sporting goods store, Rice and Miller on Broad Street, and bought three more pistols.
13:37
Kristin: The clerk there didn't like it either.
13:39
Kristin: Then the gang came back to Dawkins, and this time they went too far.
13:43
Kristin: They asked if he could get them a Tommy gun, a Thomson machine gun.
13:47
Kristin: He told them he could if they came back to pick it up.
13:49
Kristin: He then called the authorities.
13:51
Kristin: What followed was a trap.
13:53
Kristin: BI agents and state troopers moved into the city unseen.
13:56
Kristin: Agent Walter Wash took up a post within Dawkins, posing as a clerk.
14:01
Kristin: Others hid on the inside of the store, and sharpshooters waited behind the second floor windows across the street, and they waited for the gang to come back.
14:09
Kristin: On the morning of October 12, 1937, on Columbus Day, they did.
14:14
Kristin: Downtown was already crowded with people out the holiday.
14:17
Kristin: A black Buick pulled up on Central Street.
14:19
Kristin: Brady stayed in the backseat while the others went inside, and Dal Hoover asked about the Tommy gun.
14:25
Kristin: He never got an answer though.
14:26
Kristin: Walsh came up behind him with a pistol in each hand, wrestled into the floor, and took him alive.
14:32
Kristin: Out on the street, the gunfire began.
14:34
Kristin: An agent was hit in the shoulder.
14:36
Kristin: Schaefer went down on the street.
14:38
Kristin: Brady then came out of the Buick firing.
14:40
Kristin: The agents answered.
14:41
Kristin: In about four minutes of gunfire that shook downtown Banker, both men were cut down where they stood.
14:47
Kristin: Al Brady was 26 years old.
14:49
Kristin: Dalhoover was sent back to Indiana, where he was executed on November 18, 1938.
14:54
Kristin: Walter Walsh, the agent who took him, became one of the FBI's finest marksmen.
14:59
Kristin: He lived to be 106.
15:01
Kristin: Banker firemen host the blood from Central Street.
15:04
Kristin: One of them, a man named John Beaton, was 26 years old that morning, the same age as Al Brady.
15:10
Kristin: And for years afterward, photographs of the bodies hung behind the counter at Dahlkin's.
15:15
Kristin: Then came the question of what to do with the dead.
15:18
Kristin: Schaefer's body was claimed and sent home, but no one came for Al Brady.
15:22
Kristin: The man who had been the most wanted in America was now wanted by no one at all.
15:27
Kristin: He was buried as a pauper in an unmarked grave in Mount Hope City section, the part of the cemetery set aside for the people of Bangor.
15:34
Kristin: The New York Times put it plainly.
15:36
Kristin: Brady buried as a pauper.
15:38
Kristin: For decades his grave had no name, and that was no accident.
15:41
Kristin: In 1987, 50 years after the shootout, a local newspaper editor named Richard Shaw raised money to mark the spot where it happened.
15:49
Kristin: At first, the paper had wanted to put a stone on Brady's grave.
15:52
Kristin: City officials talked them out of it.
15:54
Kristin: People didn't want to spend money on a headstone for a killer, and no one wanted to draw curiosity seekers to his grave.
16:01
Kristin: Among those who sent money, though, for the street marker was John Beaton, the fireman then 76 years old.
16:07
Kristin: They had sent$10.
16:09
Kristin: It took 20 more years though.
16:11
Kristin: In 2007, Brady's grave was finally marked with a headstone, and a short funeral service was held, along with a reenactment of the shootout that had ended his life.
16:20
Kristin: The marks of that morning are still in Bangor today.
16:24
Kristin: On Central Street on the block that's now home to the Briar Patcher Bookstore, two small granite blocks with initials sit in the street, marking the spots where Brady and Schaefer fell.
16:33
Kristin: And the story didn't end there.
16:35
Kristin: In 1980, Stephen King moved into a Grand Victorian house on West Broadway in Bangor, and within months he began writing a novel called It.
16:43
Kristin: Among its horrors is the gunning down of a gangster named Al Bradley in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, a story drawn from that bloody morning on Central Street.
16:52
Kristin: King himself once said he chose Bangor because it was a tougher, harder place, and he pointed to the Brady Gang shootout.
16:59
Kristin: Stephen King's connection to Mount Hope, though, runs deeper than one chapter in one book.
17:03
Kristin: He studied at the University of Maine in nearby Orano, graduating in 1970, and for decades Bangor was his home.
17:11
Kristin: His house on West Broadway is now said to become an archive for his work and a retreat for writers.
17:16
Kristin: The city's streets, its history, and its shadows found their way into his stories, but one of the darkest stories began just across the river.
17:24
Kristin: In 1979, King was serving as a writer in residence at the University of Maine and renting a house in the nearby town of Orrington.
17:32
Kristin: The house sat beside a busy truck route, and the road claimed the lives of local dogs and cats so often that the neighborhood children had made a small pet cemetery in the woods behind it.
17:43
Kristin: Then one day his daughter's cat was killed by a passing truck.
17:46
Kristin: King had to bury it in that little cemetery and then explained to his daughter what had happened.
17:51
Kristin: Not long after, his young son Owen ran toward the road, and King caught him and pulled him back just in time.
17:57
Kristin: Three days after burying the cat, the idea came to him.
18:00
Kristin: I knew immediately that it was a novel, he later said.
18:03
Kristin: He finished a first draft by that May, but he said that of all of his novels, Pet Cemetery is the one that frightened him the most, and it wasn't published until November of 1983.
18:14
Kristin: In the book, the children sign over their little graveyard is spelled the way a child was spelling.
18:18
Kristin: S-E-M-A-T-A-R-Y.
18:22
Kristin: When the rights were sold for the film, King had one condition.
18:25
Kristin: It had to be shot in Maine, where the story was set.
18:28
Kristin: He wrote the screenplay himself, and he even appears in the film, as the minister at the funeral.
18:33
Kristin: In late September of 1988, the cemetery found its way onto the screen.
18:38
Kristin: Over three nights from September 27th to 30th, the film crew came to Mount Hope to shoot two scenes.
18:44
Kristin: They filmed on the State Street side of Cemetery Hill.
18:46
Kristin: After one shot, they waited until 2 in the morning.
18:49
Kristin: The moonlight to fall just right.
18:51
Kristin: As the grieving father Lewis Creed dug up the body of his young son.
18:55
Kristin: The film was released in April of 1989.
18:58
Kristin: Local tour guides also tell another story.
19:00
Kristin: They say King borrowed the names of some of his best-known characters, like Carrie and Georgie from the headstones of Mount Hope.
19:07
Kristin: It's never been proven.
19:08
Kristin: But walk among these headstones on an October night, and it's hard not to believe.
19:13
Kristin: A cemetery this old, tied to the master of horror, was always going to gather stories.
19:18
Kristin: Mount Hope has a reputation.
19:20
Kristin: Visitors have described shadowy figures moving among the larger monuments, and some say the voices of small children can be heard calling out after dark.
19:29
Kristin: In 2021, a member of the Maine Paranormal Society brought his equipment to the cemetery, hoping to make contact, though nothing came of it.
19:37
Kristin: And of course, some say Al Brady never left.
19:40
Kristin: None of it has ever been documented.
19:42
Kristin: I'm not going to pretend it has.
19:44
Kristin: But maybe the real mysteries of Mount Hope don't need ghosts.
19:47
Kristin: A grand sarcophagus that holds no body, a man the whole nation feared, buried with no name because no one came to claim him.
19:54
Kristin: A quiet garden cemetery that became the stage for one of the most famous horror films ever made.
20:00
Kristin: And every October, the Banker Historical Society leads visitors through the grounds after nightfall, telling the stories of the people who rest here.
20:08
Kristin: Perhaps that's what truly haunts Mount Hope, not the dead who walk.
20:12
Kristin: But the memories that refuse to stay buried.
20:15
Kristin: For now, the stories of Mount Hope slip back into the stones, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
20:21
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil of Mount Hope Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
20:28
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.