Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domain1744 Windham Burying Ground and the Anderson Family Crypt
Smith Cemetery Road, off River Road, Windham, ME 04062
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free; the cemetery is publicly accessible during daylight hours.
Access
Limited Access
Grass with uneven historic stones; the Anderson crypt is built into a hillside
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1744 · First Public Cemetery in Windham · Earliest Surviving Stones in Maine
Smith Anderson Cemetery occupies a quiet lot off River Road in southeastern Windham, roughly a dozen miles north-northwest of Portland. It served as the first public cemetery in the town of Windham, and the oldest marker — a small stone for Elijah Wight, son of a local minister, who died in 1744 at age two — is among the earliest surviving gravestones in the state.
The cemetery's two-part name reflects two prominent local families. The Reverend Peter Thatcher Smith family holds a section of the burying ground. The Anderson family — including John Anderson, a former U.S. District Attorney for Maine who served as mayor of Portland in the 1830s — built a substantial crypt into the hillside on the cemetery's south side. The Anderson Crypt is roughly twelve feet tall, faced with dressed stone, and entered through an arched door.
The Windham Eagle's local-history features have documented the cemetery's role in early Windham civic life. The town's historical society maintains the records of burials and supports preservation of the older stones, several of which are illegible from weather exposure.
The cemetery remains active for occasional family-plot burials but is primarily managed as a historic site.
Sources
The Anderson Crypt is the focal point of Smith Anderson Cemetery's paranormal reputation. Visitors over decades have reported that knocking once on the heavy door of the hillside vault occasionally produces a single, soft answering knock from within. The folklore acknowledges that the stone-and-mortar structure could produce echo or resonance under the right conditions, but the persistence of the report has kept the knock-and-response tradition alive.
A second commonly reported phenomenon involves visitors' parked cars. Returning to the small pull-off after walking the cemetery, multiple witnesses have described finding their vehicles moved five to ten feet from where they were parked, or finding all four doors standing open with nothing stolen and no sign of forced entry. The Maine Ghost Hunters paranormal investigation team has documented several of these accounts.
Figures glimpsed among the older stones — described as a woman in 18th-century clothing, sometimes as a child — are reported less consistently. The cemetery's small size and tree cover produce reliable atmospheric quality at twilight, particularly in autumn, which has reinforced its inclusion in regional listings of Maine's most-investigated burying grounds.
Notable Entities
Walk a small colonial-era cemetery containing the 1744 stone of two-year-old Elijah Wight (one of the oldest grave markers in Maine), the family tombs of Reverend Peter Thatcher Smith's family, and the prominent hillside crypt of former Portland mayor John Anderson. The crypt door has long been the subject of knock-and-response folklore.
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