Est. 1729 · Colonial New England Funerary Art · African American Burial Ground · Newburyport Heritage
Old Hill Burying Ground was established in 1729 on a steep hillside in what would become downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts, just above the present Bartlet Mall and across from the city's eighteenth-century Olde Gaol. The cemetery holds graves of the city's earliest settlers, the leading families of colonial Newburyport's shipping fortune, and a documented historic African American burial section dating to the cemetery's earliest decades.
The site is widely recognized in New England funerary studies for the quality and density of its early tombstone carving — winged death's heads, soul effigies, and elaborate calligraphic inscriptions that represent the height of pre-Revolutionary American gravestone art. The family mausoleums of Newburyport's elite line the upper terraces of the burying ground.
The historic African American section, established alongside the broader cemetery in 1729, has been the focus of recent preservation work. In 2023, ground-penetrating radar surveys commissioned by the City of Newburyport identified at least 18 unmarked graves in the section. In May 2024, a ceremony was held to install 'Once Known' plaques over the newly identified graves, honoring eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black residents of Newburyport whose markers had been lost. A historical marker now interprets the section.
The Museum of Old Newbury maintains active programming at the cemetery, including a regular Tiptoe Through the Tombstones daytime tour and a Twilight Amongst the Tombstones night walk. The cemetery itself is publicly accessible.
Sources
- https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2154686/old-hill-burying-ground
- https://www.newburyhistory.org/calendar/2022/7/17/tiptoe-through-the-tombstones-old-hill-burying-ground
- https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=260631
- https://www.cityofnewburyport.com/sites/g/files/vyhlif12211/f/uploads/black_section_of_old_hill_burying_ground_-_gis_map_of_unmarked_graves_-_located_by_gpr_2023.pdf
- https://www.newburyhistory.org/calendar/2024/10/12/twilight-amongst-the-tombstones-night-walk-in-old-hill-burying-ground
ApparitionsResidual haunting
Old Hill Burying Ground's folklore record combines documented social-history incidents with anonymous oral tradition. The 2000s-era Shadowlands account describes reports of visitors experiencing what the submitter framed as temporary personality changes while in the cemetery. These accounts are not corroborated in Museum of Old Newbury programming and Hauntbound presents them as anonymous folklore.
A documented 1984 incident involved a group of intoxicated teenagers who forced entry into the Pierce family tomb and disturbed the burials inside. The case was reported in the regional press and resulted in arrests and renewed attention to cemetery security. A separate documented social-history detail concerns the famous local epitaph of a Newburyport woman whose marker records her cause of death as choking on a pea, a piece of folkloric epitaph that has been included in regional cemetery guides for over a century.
The cemetery's reputation for unusual stories is supported by its dense colonial-era stonecarving and family-vault density. The Museum of Old Newbury's evening tours treat the site as a documented historic place with attention to iconography, biography, and the recent African American section work, rather than as a paranormal-investigation venue.
Media Appearances
- Museum of Old Newbury Twilight Amongst the Tombstones tour
