1855 garden cemetery adjacent to UGA's Sanford Stadium with a 1972 Red & Black-documented legend of a drunken farmer who still drives his phantom carriage off the cemetery bridge under the full moon.
297 Cemetery Street, Athens, GA 30605
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public access during daytime hours.
Access
Limited Access
Rolling hilltop cemetery with paved drives and a historic iron-truss bridge over the North Oconee River.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1855 · 1855 Garden Cemetery · Iron-Truss River Bridge · Sexton's House of Architectural Significance · National Register of Historic Places (2013)
Oconee Hill Cemetery occupies a hilltop east of downtown Athens, immediately adjacent to the University of Georgia's Sanford Stadium. The land was purchased by the city of Athens in 1855 after further burials were prohibited in the older Jackson Street Cemetery on UGA land. The city formed a self-perpetuating Board of Trustees in 1856 to hold and manage the original 17 acres in trust as a public cemetery for the benefit of the town.
The cemetery later expanded across the North Oconee River; the two sections are connected by an iron-truss bridge that is a contributing element of the National Register listing. Oconee Hill is significant for its landscape architecture, decorative funerary markers, distinctive cast-iron fencing, the through-truss river bridge, and a Sexton's House of architectural significance. The cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.
Notable interments include numerous UGA faculty and administrators, Athens civic leaders, and the reburied remains of the African Americans whose graves were disturbed at the Jackson Street Cemetery during the 2015 Baldwin Hall renovations.
Sources
According to the Red & Black student newspaper's 2014 piece on the ghostly folklore of Athens's two oldest cemeteries, which traces the legend back to a 1972 Red & Black article, the most enduring story at Oconee Hill Cemetery is the phantom carriage. The legend describes a 19th-century farmer who, intoxicated, drove his horse and carriage off of the cemetery bridge and into the river below, dying in the fall. He is said to return on nights of the full moon and continue his ride, sometimes seen and sometimes only heard, on the iron-truss bridge connecting the old and new sections of the cemetery.
UGA Libraries' ghost-stories research guide and the Visit Athens GA tourism office cite the same tradition. Variant accounts described in the Southern Spirit Guide describe sounds of horses' hooves, the creak of carriage wheels, and the occasional silhouette of a buggy driver on the bridge near dusk.
The legend is single-narrative — there is only one published origin source from 1972 — and is unverified at the level of an identified historical individual. It is best treated as cemetery folklore rather than as biographical history.
Notable Entities
Walk the older 1855 section and cross the historic iron-truss bridge to the newer section. The cemetery is a designated National Register garden cemetery with significant landscape architecture, decorative funerary markers, distinctive cast-iron fencing, and a Sexton's House of architectural note.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Athens, GA
Established around 1810, the Old Athens Cemetery — also called the Jackson Street Cemetery — was Athens's official burial ground from about 1810 to 1856, when Oconee Hill Cemetery opened. Approximately 800 graves remain, including two UGA presidents. The cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Savannah, GA
Bonaventure Cemetery is a Victorian-era burial ground in Savannah, Georgia, established as part of the city's 19th-century cemetery expansion. Its most famous burial is that of Gracie Watson, a young girl who died of pneumonia on April 7, 1889, two days before Easter. Her father, W.J. Watson, manager of the Pulaski Hotel in Savannah, commissioned sculptor John Walz to create a life-sized marble statue as a memorial—a monument that has become one of the most visited graves in Georgia.
New Orleans, LA
Metairie Cemetery was founded in 1872 on the grounds of the bankrupt Metairie Race Course in New Orleans. The 150-acre cemetery preserves the oval racetrack as its perimeter road and contains some of the most elaborate funerary monuments in the United States, including burial places of nine Louisiana governors, three Confederate generals, and Storyville madam Josie Arlington.