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Hungry Hill: The Ghosts of Oniontown | Old Wethersfield Village Cemetery, CT · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristin.
0:18
Kristin: Today we unlatch the gate of Old Weathersfield Village Cemetery, located in Weathersfield, Connecticut.
0:24
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the damp October air.
0:28
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:30
Kristin: Step carefully.
0:31
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: As I write and research this episode, New England has finally surrendered to a gray, rain-drenched day, with crisp nights creeping close behind.
0:44
Kristin: The weather feels like it was conjured for the grim, a perfect shroud for darker stories.
0:50
Kristin: As a recent transplant from the Midwest, I still find myself bewitched by New England's fall.
0:55
Kristin: Many flock northward in search of autumn's fire, but Connecticut, without the crushing crowds, holds its own spectral beauty.
1:03
Kristin: Weathersfield, in particular, is beginning to shine in that golden October light.
1:08
Kristin: It has the charm of a star's hollow-like town, but with deeper colonial roots shadowing its streets.
1:14
Kristin: When I first arrived in New England, I carried the common misconception that Salem was the only true destination for Halloween, and wish I'd known sooner that this was far from the truth, because towns like Weathersfield, quietly waiting, hold just as much enchantment and far more mystery.
1:32
Kristin: But before this was Weathersfield, it was Pyquag, home to the Wangukks.
1:37
Kristin: For centuries they fished the Connecticut River, farmed its fertile meadows, and lived in a rhythm with the land.
1:43
Kristin: Then came plague.
1:45
Kristin: Smallpox decimated their numbers, rival tribes pressed in.
1:49
Kristin: And then when the English arrived in the 1630s, the Wangukks, already weakened, offered land in exchange for protection.
1:57
Kristin: It was a bargain that would unravel.
1:59
Kristin: By the late 1700s, their name had disappeared from maps, their people scattered or confined to reservations.
2:07
Kristin: In 1634, ten Puritan souls, remembered as the Ten Men, claimed this patch of earth for their own.
2:14
Kristin: By 1638, their thoughts had already turned toward the grave.
2:17
Kristin: They chose Hungry Hill, a rise by the river whose name is wrapped in rumor and silence.
2:23
Kristin: Some whisper the Wanggux once fled there when the floods came.
2:27
Kristin: Others believed the hill had long been sacred, touched by older spirits.
2:32
Kristin: Whatever the truth, here the ground was first broken for burial, and here the dead found their gathering place, as if summoned by the hill itself.
2:39
Kristin: The peace proved fragile.
2:41
Kristin: In 1637, as the Pequa War raged, Wethersfield felt the weight of violence.
2:46
Kristin: Chief Sigwin of the Wangoks, who had once walked Wethersfield as an ally, his presence accepted, if not entirely trusted, was eventually exiled from the town.
2:57
Kristin: But his exile bred bitterness, and when he returned, it was not in friendship.
3:01
Kristin: At his side came Pequa warriors, and together they fell upon the town.
3:06
Kristin: Six men and three women were slain, livestock strewn to ruin, and two young girls torn from their families, their cries carried into the wilderness.
3:15
Kristin: Though Silverwood one day ransomed them home, the cost had already been paid in sorrow.
3:20
Kristin: Grief seeped into the ground like blood.
3:22
Kristin: But then came witchcraft.
3:24
Kristin: Though Salem dominates our imagination, Connecticut's earth bore its own trials long before.
3:30
Kristin: Mary Johnson was hung in 1648, the first woman executed for witchcraft in New England.
3:36
Kristin: In 1651, Joan and John Carrington met the same fate.
3:42
Kristin: In 1669, Catherine Harrison, a wealthy widow, was accused and convicted.
3:48
Kristin: Though spared execution, she was banished and stripped of her land.
3:52
Kristin: Wetersfield, like Salem, carried its own dark frenzy with witch hysteria.
3:57
Kristin: Still, not all was in the shadow.
3:59
Kristin: In 1701, the college school that would become Yale briefly took root here.
4:04
Kristin: During the Revolution, Patriot Silas Dean called Weathersfield home, and in 1781, George Washington met Rochambeau at the Webb House to plan York, the final act that won American independence.
4:18
Kristin: For a time, Wethersfield became not known for war or witchcraft, but for onions.
4:23
Kristin: Known to many as Onion Town, its pungent-rent onions filled the fields, shipped up and down the coast.
4:29
Kristin: Their sharp sense said to cling to the very air.
4:32
Kristin: From the soil also grew Comstock, Fear and Company, the nation's oldest seed house.
4:38
Kristin: And as if blood and earth weren't enough, the heavens left their mark too.
4:42
Kristin: In 1971, a meteorite tore through a Weathersfield roof, landing in the living room.
4:47
Kristin: Eleven years later, another meteorite struck another house.
4:51
Kristin: No one was hurt either time, as though the cosmos only wished to remind Weathersfield it wasn't forgotten.
4:57
Kristin: At the heart of this all stands Hungry Hill.
5:00
Kristin: For Piritans, the rituals of death were stripped of comfort in their time.
5:04
Kristin: No hymns, no prayers, no rites.
5:07
Kristin: Funerals were stark, burials swift.
5:10
Kristin: The earliest markers only bore initials, most are now lost to time.
5:14
Kristin: At the foot of the hill in the cemetery, the oldest stones wait.
5:18
Kristin: Slate and sandstone markers from the late 1600s, their surfaces etched with stark images, skulls and crossbones, winged souls, hourglasses, each carving a sermon in stone.
5:31
Kristin: Their skull and crossbones remind every passerby that the grave was certain.
5:36
Kristin: The hourglass warns that time was slipping away green by green, and winged souls at first grim skulls sprouting wings, later soften into cherubs, offering the faint promise of ascension, that perhaps death wasn't the final word.
5:50
Kristin: Severe at first glance, but linger a moment longer, and they become strangely beautiful, even enchanting, symbols of faith both fearful and unyielding.
6:01
Kristin: When you climb a little higher, the stones then begin to shift.
6:04
Kristin: By the 1700s and into the 1800s, the Puritan harshness gives way to sediment.
6:10
Kristin: Here urn and willow dominate.
6:13
Kristin: They earn a vessel for the soul, the willow, forever drooping in sorrow.
6:17
Kristin: These stones don't mourn as much as they mourn.
6:19
Kristin: They reflected culture beginning to see death not as a threat but as a grief to be shared.
6:24
Kristin: One stone worth pausing beside is carved with two clasped hands.
6:28
Kristin: One sleeve is plain, the other laced.
6:31
Kristin: Husband and wife locked in their final farewell, or look to another where hand points heavyward, assuring those left behind that their loved one had gone to their eternal home.
6:42
Kristin: The scripture was softened here.
6:44
Kristin: Evitats once stern now read, Gone Home, at rest, asleep in Jesus.
6:50
Kristin: Atop the Hungry Hill, the Victorian age takes hold.
6:53
Kristin: Stones bloom with cherubs, flowers, long epithets that stretch into verse.
6:58
Kristin: Death is no longer a sermon of fear.
7:01
Kristin: It becomes a story of love, memory, and hope.
7:04
Kristin: And when you pause to take in Hungry Hill as a whole, it reveals itself as a problem cest of belief.
7:11
Kristin: At the base, the Puritans preach with grim symbols.
7:14
Kristin: Higher up the revolution's generations soften their grief into willow and urn, and at the crest the Victorians turn mourning into poetry.
7:23
Kristin: Among these voices is one of the cemetery's oldest names, Leonard Chester.
7:28
Kristin: He was one of Weathersfield's original ten men, a small band of settlers who braved the unknown and carved a community from the Connecticut Wilderness.
7:37
Kristin: Chestern had left England behind in its turmoil and rigid faith, only to confront a new and harsher trial across the ocean.
7:45
Kristin: He lived here just fourteen years before his death planed him, a reminder of how short life was on the edge of survival.
7:52
Kristin: His monument, carved decades after his burial, was not simply a marker, but a deliberate act of remembrance by those who came after him.
8:01
Kristin: They etched his name into slates so that the colony's first sacrifice would not be swallowed by time.
8:07
Kristin: The stone itself is plain and severe, unmistakably Puritan, no flowing verse, no ornament, beyond the shape of its slab.
8:15
Kristin: Yet in its ostrich it speaks volumes.
8:18
Kristin: It tells of a fragile colony where each death was a wound, where every memory had to be chiseled into stone lest it be lost.
8:26
Kristin: To stand before Chester's grave is to feel the weight of beginnings.
8:30
Kristin: The colony itself was just as fragile as the man beneath the soil, both vulnerable, both clinging to survival.
8:37
Kristin: His stone reminds us that even founders can be forgotten without the stubborn work of remembrance.
8:43
Kristin: And here on Hungry Hill, where sermons are preached in slate and sandstone, Leonard Chester's name still endures, carried forward by the chisel of memory.
8:53
Kristin: Not far away rests Reverend Gersham Bulkley.
8:57
Kristin: He was no ordinary clergyman.
8:58
Kristin: His reach stretched beyond the pulpit.
9:00
Kristin: Bulkelay practiced medicine and served as a military chaplain during King Philip's war.
9:05
Kristin: Yet what shadows him most is his ties to the witch trials.
9:09
Kristin: He authored Will and Doom, a manuscript that thundered with Puritan judgment, warning that evil was always close, lurking in neighbors, in whispers, in anything unexplained.
9:20
Kristin: His grave is plain but commanding, and even now the soil seems to radiate that severity, as if it remembers the weight of his warnings.
9:28
Kristin: Step further in the Revolution rises up.
9:31
Kristin: Visitors can find the grave of Colonel John Chester, born here in Weathersfield, who answered the call of liberty.
9:38
Kristin: He led troops at Bunker Hill, where his regiment held fast against British fire in one of the revolution's fiercest battles.
9:46
Kristin: He later endured the smoke of the White Plains, marched with Washington, and weathered the brutal winter at Valley Forge.
9:53
Kristin: Returning home, he turned to politics until his death in 1809.
9:58
Kristin: His grave ties this quiet hill to the roar of cannonfire and the birth of a nation.
10:03
Kristin: Not far from Chester stands a cenotaph for Sylas Dean, perhaps Weatherfield's most tragic son.
10:11
Kristin: Born to a blacksmith, he rose through ambition and intellect to become one of Connecticut's wealthiest merchants, and one of the revolution's first diplomats.
10:20
Kristin: It was Dean who crossed the Atlantic in secret, persuading France to arm the ragged Continental Army, securing muskets, ships, and soldiers who would help turn the tide at Yorktown.
10:31
Kristin: Dean should have been remembered beside Washington, Franklin, and Adams.
10:36
Kristin: Instead, though, suspicion consumed him.
10:39
Kristin: Branded a traitor by his own countrymen, accused of profiteering, stripped of honor and fortune, Dean fled abroad.
10:46
Kristin: In exile, his only companion was his former colleague and physician, Dr.
10:51
Kristin: Edward Bancroft, who was later to be revealed as a British double agent.
10:56
Kristin: When Dean prepared to sail home declare his name, Bancroft supplied him with medicines for the journey.
11:02
Kristin: Aboard the ship, Dean collapsed suddenly upon the deck and was dead within hours.
11:07
Kristin: Whether by illness, suicide, or perhaps a poison vial from Bancroft's hand, no one could say.
11:14
Kristin: His body lies somewhere in foreign soil, far from the riverbank he once called home.
11:19
Kristin: Only this stone remains, a cenotaph for a patriot betrayed by a nation he helped create.
11:26
Kristin: And in Wethersfield, his name lingers like unfinished business, a ghost of loyalty and loss that history has yet to set free.
11:35
Kristin: Beyond the carved names and weathered slate-like graves you can't see.
11:39
Kristin: The earliest burials on Hungry Hill were marked only by wooden crosses or initials scratched into soft stone that have long since vanished.
11:48
Kristin: Some may have even belonged to the Wangux, the native people who first named this place Piquag, their presence now buried under centuries of colonial stone.
11:58
Kristin: Others were children lost to epidemics, servants whose names were never recorded, or paupers buried without ceremony.
12:05
Kristin: Their absence is its own kind of monument, reminding us that cemeteries always hold more than we know.
12:12
Kristin: And then there's the ghost of Catherine Harrison.
12:15
Kristin: Though she's not buried here, her presence clings to Hunger Hill like a chill that never lifts.
12:21
Kristin: Once a servant, she rose in fortune after her husband, John Harrison, died in 1666, leaving her one of the wealthiest women in Weathersfield.
12:31
Kristin: She chose not to remarry, and that more than any spell unsettled her neighbors.
12:36
Kristin: A widow with land, influence, and no man to govern her was a dangerous one, especially in her time.
12:42
Kristin: Soon came whispers of fortune telling, spectral visitations, and secret dealings with the devil himself.
12:49
Kristin: In 1668, the accusations became a flood, but notably two years after her husband's death, but none prior.
12:57
Kristin: Neighbors claimed she bewitched cattle, red palms by the firelight, and summoned bees with an unholy power.
13:04
Kristin: Others swore she had cursed them, poisoned them, and stolen their strength.
13:09
Kristin: Her trial in 1669 became a spectacle of fear and envy.
13:14
Kristin: Testimony stacked upon testimony until a jury found her guilty.
13:18
Kristin: Yet even in that dark moment, the court hesitated to spill her blood.
13:22
Kristin: Her death sentence was overturned, but her punishment was exile, banishment from Mothersfield, her property seized, her name blackened beyond repair.
13:32
Kristin: She fled to Westchester, New York, where there even her reputation followed, her new neighbors trying to drive her out once more.
13:39
Kristin: For years she fought to reclaim her dignity, her land, her life.
13:44
Kristin: But then the silence.
13:46
Kristin: Records fade after 1672, though some say she died a decade later, alone and unremembered.
13:53
Kristin: But here among the stones of Wethersfield, her absence is louder than any grave.
13:58
Kristin: It's a haunting without a tomb, a silence that hums with injustice, like exile itself carved into the air.
14:06
Kristin: Yet Old Weathersfield is not only layered with history, it's steeped in ghost stories, whispered legends, and accounts the uncanny.
14:15
Kristin: The supernatural seems to cling to Hungry Hill and its burying grounds as stubbornly as the moss on its stones.
14:21
Kristin: The Webdean Stevens Museum hosts the Witches and Tombstone tours, nightwalks through Weathersfield's colonial core that lean into its spectral reputation.
14:31
Kristin: Guides speak of apparitions drifting through the ancient burying ground, shadows that linger among the headstones long after dusk, and ghostly figures tied to the town's witch trial legacy.
14:43
Kristin: Wethersfield's trials predated Salem by nearly 30 years.
14:47
Kristin: And though Salem may hold the fame, these grounds carry their own darker truths.
14:53
Kristin: Visitors report a wait in the air, a sense that judgment and fear have seeped into the soil itself.
14:59
Kristin: Beyond that tour is a book titled The Beckoning, true accounts of the hauntings in Old Weathersfield, gathers alleged experiences of the paranormal activity in the town.
15:09
Kristin: The stories are anecdotal, unverified, but haunting nonetheless.
15:14
Kristin: Accounts of households disturbed, figures glimpsed, and presences felt.
15:20
Kristin: They're told as truths by those who lived them, passed along as part of the town's ghostly fabric.
15:26
Kristin: Even in casual spaces, Wethersfield's haunted name endures.
15:30
Kristin: Tourism and ghost hunting websites alike ring Weathersfield among Connecticut's haunted towns, citing its early witch trials, its colonial cemeteries, and its spectral reputation.
15:42
Kristin: Whether through museum tours, online chatter, or word of mouth, the consensus is the same.
15:48
Kristin: Old Weathersfield is a place where the past still walks.
15:52
Kristin: And then there are the stories that people carry away with them.
15:56
Kristin: Accounts that blur the line between imagination and haunting, yet persist all the same.
16:01
Kristin: Visitors whisper voices drifting through the burying ground.
16:05
Kristin: Not conversations you can follow, but murmurs, low, fractured, and ancient.
16:10
Kristin: Threads of speech that seem to belong to another century.
16:14
Kristin: They rise and fall with the wind impossible to pin down, but undeniable when the night grows still.
16:20
Kristin: Others speak of sudden cold spots, drops in temperature sharp enough to make the skin prickle, often near the oldest stones, or along the cemetery wall.
16:30
Kristin: The feeling is uncanny, as though someone stands just behind you, unseen, but close enough to breathe.
16:37
Kristin: At twilight, shapes are said to move between the graves.
16:40
Kristin: Some dissolve when approached, others linger just long enough to send a chill racing down the spine.
16:46
Kristin: Their outlines are faint, but the dread they leave behind is sharp and immediate.
16:51
Kristin: And then there's the footsteps, heavy, deliberate, the sound of boots on gravel or dry leaves along a path no one else is walking.
17:00
Kristin: To hear them is to know you're not alone, though your eyes insist otherwise.
17:04
Kristin: In photographs 2, the cemetery betrays itself.
17:08
Kristin: Orbs of light float above certain stones, growing pale and faint, like lanterns bobbing in the dark, or will-o-wisps conjured from the colonial dead.
17:18
Kristin: Hungry Hill is a place where history lingers.
17:22
Kristin: But these stories suggest something more: that here memory has grown restless and refuses to remain silent.
17:29
Kristin: I should also say for those compelled to make the trip that Weathersfield is a wonderful day visit, but it leans far more into history than Halloween.
17:37
Kristin: You won't find streets lined with shops of Halloween trinkets or stage scares here.
17:42
Kristin: What you will find is something quieter, older, and to us at the grim something far richer.
17:48
Kristin: For others, that might not be ideal, so plan your visit with that in mind.
17:53
Kristin: As for us, we'll keep walking these colonial streets and lingering in this burying ground on Hungry Hill, savoring every shadow, every whisper of the past, lovering every moment this quaint, haunted corner of New England history has.
18:08
Kristin: For now the stories of Old Weathersfield slip back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest, yet they're never silent for long.
18:17
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into Old Weathersfield Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
18:25
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn.
18:28
Kristin: Yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.