A rural cemetery near De Queen in Sevier County, Arkansas, tied to a single circulating legend about a drowned baby, a crying mother, and a now-sealed well at the center of the grounds.
Avon community, near De Queen, De Queen, AR 71832
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free; small rural public cemetery. Respect graves and any posted hours.
Access
Limited Access
Uneven rural ground; grass and gravel; no developed paths.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1900 · Rural burial ground in the De Queen / Sevier County farming communities
Avon Cemetery lies in the small Avon community near De Queen, the seat of Sevier County in southwest Arkansas. De Queen developed as a railroad town around the turn of the 20th century, and the surrounding rural communities, including Avon, supported small farming populations whose dead were interred in modest neighborhood cemeteries such as this one.
Formal published history of Avon Cemetery itself is sparse. Available references are limited to paranormal-interest sources and general cemetery listings rather than to historical-society or newspaper documentation, which is common for small rural burial grounds. As a result, the founding date, the full list of interments, and the documented origin of the legend's central well cannot be independently confirmed from the available public record.
What is consistently reported is the physical anchor of the legend: a well that once stood near the center of the cemetery grounds, which local accounts say has since been sealed or cemented over. Whether the well predates the cemetery, as the legend claims, is not independently documented.
Sources
According to the circulating legend, the central well at Avon Cemetery predates the burial ground. The story tells of a woman drawing water who set her infant on the rim of the well; the baby fell in and drowned. Ever after, the lore says, dropping a stone into the well at night will summon the sound of the baby crying from below, and the apparition of the grieving mother is said to be seen and heard running through the graveyard near an old, burned-down church. The well is reported to have been sealed or cemented over in the mid-to-late 1990s.
The legend is independently documented in AY Magazine's 'Natural State of Fear: 17 Haunted Places in Arkansas' (October 2021, written by Emily Beirne), Arkansas's statewide lifestyle publication, which describes the mother and baby story and reports that 'the spirit of the mourning mother is said to roam the grounds looking for her child.' KKYR (Kicker 102.5, a Townsquare Media country station serving the Texarkana/Southwest Arkansas region) has also covered the cemetery in multiple posts, interviewing locals who recount the legend and noting community familiarity with the story. These constitute independent regional media documentation of the haunting tradition beyond the original Shadowlands submission.
No historical archive corroborates the drowning incident as a factual event. The drowning of an infant is handled here as somber local folklore rather than documented history.
Notable Entities
A quiet rural burial ground in the Avon community near De Queen, Sevier County. The center of the cemetery is the focus of a local well legend; the well itself is reported to have been sealed.
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